Page 41 of Warrior Queen
“How are we going to get in there?” I hissed at Arthur, as he hurried me along a narrow side street. “It looked pretty well guarded to me, last time we were here.”
He glanced down at me, eyes still brimming with boyish excitement. “Don’t forget. I was a boy here. I know every secret way in and out of the palace.”
Good thing one of us was enjoying this mad escapade.
He’d lived here until he was fifteen, and Cadwy had engineered a fall from grace that had seen him dispatched to govern Din Cadan. A move that had turned out to be fortuitous. Merlin had once told me that if it hadn’t happened, Cadwy would have found a way to poison Arthur before he’d got much older.
We arrived at the outer palace wall via a series of increasingly narrow and dirty back streets, where a few bedraggled beggars sat dejectedly in corners, and the detritus of daily town life filled the gutters. Glad I’d not had to see this side of Viroconium before, I trotted along behind the two men, holding my cloak tight about myself for fear of catching anything. Lice. Fleas. Scabies. The sight of rats scurrying across the dirty cobbles and through a hole at the foot of a wall made my skin crawl.
“This way,” Arthur said, ignoring the rats and diving into a passageway only just wide enough for us to walk along, pressed up against the palace wall on the left and what smelled as though it could be stables on the right. The stables’ blackened, thatched roof overhung the passageway enough to shelter us from the rain, and Arthur threw back his hood, so I did as well.
The end of the passage loomed ahead. A dead end. But it wasn’t. In the stable wall, a small wooden door had been jammed in at an angle, only about four feet high and two feet wide, and made of hefty, silvered boards.
I glanced at Merlin, and he raised a single, eloquent eyebrow as though this was as much a surprise to him as it was to me.
Arthur bent, put his shoulder against the door and shoved. “It’ll be bolted on the inside. But I can do this.” He shoulder-barged it again, and it gave a little with the sound of splintering wood. A third blow, and the door slid open a crack. He pushed it a few inches wider, the bottom edge scraping all too loudly over the ground. It didn’t look to me as though anyone had used this particular door since he was a boy.
It jammed. No matter how hard he shoved, panting a little now, it refused to open further. The dark gap revealed was very narrow. Although tall, Arthur wasn’t a big man, but no way would he fit through there.
“I can get through,” Merlin said, pushing Arthur aside. “I’m thinner than you. Let me try.”
“Wait a minute,” I whispered, very conscious of the fact we were breaking and entering into a king’s royal palace, even if he was Arthur’s brother. Well, on the whole, that made it worse. “What if there are people on the other side? Where does it lead to?” I paused. “Things have probably changed a lot in ten years.”
Arthur frowned, but his eyes still shone with anticipation. “Into an old shed in the stable courtyard, used for junk. That’s all. I doubt anything like that’s changed. There’s probably something big in front of it. Let Merlin wriggle in and move it.”
Without waiting to be told, Merlin bent and jammed his head and shoulders into the gap, pushing with his feet. Arthur gave him a helping shove, and he disappeared completely. An interference fit. I couldn’t help but wonder what we’d do if he got stuck, like Winnie the Pooh in Rabbit’s burrow. The thought, and nerves, made me giggle.
Arthur gave me an inquiring look, so I controlled myself and shook my head. He’d never have understood that particular cultural reference.
For a moment or two, Arthur and I stood in expectant silence, then the scraping of something large moving carried to us, and Merlin’s face reappeared as he pushed the door a little wider. “Come on in. It’s still the old store shed.”
I crawled through first. Merlin was right. It was a very old store shed indeed, the thick, swathing cobwebs and generous layer of dust proving that. Bits of old furniture leaned against the walls near a cart’s broken-spoked wheel, beside odd items of discarded horse harness, a pile of wood gone gouty with age, some broken pots, and an old rug in which a family of mice– or rats– appeared to have taken up residence.
Arthur appeared, brushing cobwebs out of his hair, and straightened up.
“Why would there be a secret door hidden at the back of an old store shed?” I whispered.
Arthur tapped his dusty nose. “I had it put here when I was a boy. One of my friends was the son of the palace carpenter. It’s only a cob wall– easy for boys to dig a hole in. We installed it together so we could get out of the palace without anyone knowing and have some fun.” He grinned. “As boys do.”
I could imagine. “Good thing no one ever found it then.”
Merlin crossed to the main door, a contraption made of some very ill-fitting boards that allowed plenty of the remaining evening light to filter into our hiding place. He put his eye to one of the ample cracks. “Corner of the stable yard,” he whispered. “Nothing much going on. A few servants out there sweeping.”
Arthur sat down on a large wooden box. “Now all we have to do is wait for it to get fully dark.”
It was a long, boring wait. And uncomfortable. And dirty. I perched next to Arthur on the box, wishing I could have snatched forty winks. Before long, my bottom protested at the hardness of my seat. I kept a wary eye on the old rug and the mouse habitation as darkness fell, but nothing came sneaking out while I was looking, and then I couldn’t even see it. If Merlin hadn’t been there playing gooseberry, I could have thought of a few ways to help pass the time. But he remained over by the door, watching what went on in the stable yard. I contented myself with threading my fingers through Arthur’s and leaning against his solid shoulder.
At last, Merlin turned toward Arthur and me with a nod. “No one out there. They’ve all gone off to eat. And it’s full darkness now. We should make a move.”
Arthur got to his feet, and he and Merlin pushed the shed door open a crack and peered through. Waiting behind them, I couldn’t see anything, but presumably it was safe, because they stepped out into the now torchlit stable yard with confidence.
Arthur glanced back over his shoulder. “You should wait here while we go in and find the baby.”
I bristled with indignation. “No way are you leaving me here on my own. Waiting and worrying. I’m coming too.” I stepped out of the shed and pushed the door shut behind me. At least the rain had stopped.
Arthur led the way on silent feet across the yard, not to the main doors into the palace that we’d used when we’d been here before, but to a smaller, insignificant looking one in a corner, that must be the route the servants used. It opened onto a narrow, dingy corridor, lit only by sparsely scattered, and smelly, clay oil lamps in wall recesses.
Unerringly, he led us through a maze of corridors, across several small courtyards and through a few unused rooms stacked with old furniture. With caution, we passed rooms where busy servants worked, until at last we emerged in the corner of a much more splendid, torchlit courtyard.
