The Night Dance (6 page)

The music drew the sisters through dark passages. Time lost meaning as they traveled farther into the earth. In places, the air became moist, then dry again, then damp once more.

As they went Rowena had the feeling that they were on a quest of some kind, searching for something. Were they looking for the woman in the bowl?

They came to a dark, stony ledge running along a stone wall. The tunnel’s music became faint and the urge to dance faded along with it. They had to feel their way along in the dark. Rowena was aware that the rock wall at her side was becoming wet. Soon drops of cold water fell on her nose and cheeks from the rock ceiling overhead.

In another several yards they came out to a cavern many stories high. Luminous stalagmites jutted up from the earth bathing the cavern in gentle light. Gazing upward, the sisters marveled at the spectacular stalactites, some reaching nearly to the floor. They, too, gave off a phosphorescent light.

In the center of this cavern was a wide, sparkling
lake. Tiny but sharp lights danced just below its crystal clear surface. “What are those lights?” Rowena questioned, her voice echoing off the stony walls.

She walked with her sisters to the edge of the underground lake. All twelve of them were reflected back to her in its surface. The lights appeared to dance across their hair and clothing, transforming them into magical creatures. “The lights make us look like fairies,” Mathilde observed with a delighted giggle.

“Or princesses covered in diamonds,” added Ashlynn.

After they had gazed at their reflections awhile longer, the girls began to settle on the many rocks in the cavern to rest. Looking around, Rowena saw that there were many entrances into the cavern. It made her wonder how extensive the network of tunnels around this cavern actually was.

Rowena sat beside Eleanore. So much had happened in these few hours just past and Rowena hardly understood any of it.

“I think the woman whom you saw in the bowl is our mother,” Eleanore said after a few moments of silence.

Her words caught Rowena’s breath. What Eleanore had said was so unexpected. Then she recalled how she’d noticed the resemblance. “Why do you say that?” she questioned.

“You were a baby, but I remember her gazing searchingly into a gold-lined bowl such as the one we now have,” Eleanore told her.

“Why am I the only one who can see her?” Rowena asked.

Eleanore shook her head. “I don’t know. I always had the feeling, though, that our mother had some kind of power, some gift for seeing beyond regular sight. Perhaps you have it too.”

“Do you think our mother still lives?”

Eleanore snorted disdainfully. “What does it matter? If she’s alive she’s proved she doesn’t care about us.” As she spoke, tears welled in Eleanore’s eyes, but she brushed them away brusquely. “Dead or alive, she can’t do us much good so I try not to think about her.”

Rowena didn’t think much about her mother either because she barely remembered her. Yet the idea that she might have caught a glimpse of her in the bowl was too intriguing to dismiss. “Why would I have seen her in the bowl?” she wondered aloud.

“Perhaps the bowl holds memories,” Eleanore suggested.

“I have no memory of our mother, not any clear ones,” Rowena pointed out. “Sometimes I think I recall the smell of her, though. I think she smelled like lake water, although I have never seen, much less smelled, a lake. At least not until right now, and I’m not sure this is a normal lake.”

“You’ve seen a lake before,” Eleanore corrected her. “There was once a lake next to our home. Our mother let us swim in it with her all the time.”

Although they couldn’t see over the wall, the girls
could peer down past it from the top windows of the manor. Even if she had not gone out, Rowena would have known there was no lake in the forest. “What happened to it?” she asked.

“It disappeared at the same time our mother left. Father never mentioned it to anyone—as if it had never been there,” Eleanore replied.

“Don’t you think it’s odd that he didn’t question it?” Rowena pressed.

“The whole thing is strange,” Eleanore agreed. “But isn’t it strange that we are sitting in a huge cavern right now?”

Rowena smiled at Eleanore’s words. “Incredibly odd, yes.”

Eleanore stood abruptly as a new worry seized her. “I’m not sure we know the way back,” she said glancing around at the many pathways leading into the cavern.

“We came in that way,” Rowena said, pointing at the passage directly behind them.

“I think it was over there,” Gwendolyn called to them.

The sisters came back together as the seriousness of their situation dawned on them. “Where’s the music?” Rowena asked. “Perhaps we can follow that back.”

They listened intently until they detected the faintest strains of lute music. The sisters gazed at one another hopefully before realizing that the music was coming from every opening in the cavernous rock wall.

Sir Bedivere began walking along the shore, heedless of the effects of the surf on his chain mail armor. He had secured Excalibur in his own scabbard and tucked his sword into his belt. With no thought to a destination, he moved like a sleepwalker. When hunger gripped his stomach, he barely noticed it.

So deep and complete was his despair that he remained nearly oblivious to the pounding surf or the calling seabirds overhead. He was the walking dead, the last man standing in a battle that had taken every last soul.

He would have walked into the ocean, confident that his heavy armor would weigh him down beneath its waves, if it had not been for his promise to the dying Arthur. Now he was obliged to stay alive long enough to fulfill his mission—and not a moment longer.

Would any lake do for completing the task? Did he have to throw the sword into a special lake? How would he ever know if he’d done it right? Why do it at all? Arthur was dead—what difference could this make to him now?

Still, he had sworn. He’d given his word as a knight of the Round Table. The importance of that might be fast becoming a memory, disappearing from the world altogether, but it was still crucial to him.

Arthur had taken him on as a groom and valet when he was but twelve and Arthur was a young king. Bedivere had carried Arthur’s armor, readied his clothing, made sure his horse was watered and brushed down properly. The servant had grown to be a companion, confidant, and—in his early teen years, when Arthur felt he’d earned it—knight.

In the five years he’d been a knight he had seen and done unimaginable things. He’d helped Arthur do battle with a village of mountain people, all closely related to one another, who were so big—both tall and wide—that they were considered giants by their neighbors.

When these giants began kidnapping young women from neighboring towns, desiring to bring new bloodlines into their gigantic genes, the townspeople prevailed on Arthur and Bedivere to save their captured wives and daughters. They’d returned every last woman, though the giants had left the warriors battered and in need of new armor.

He had been beside Arthur when they slew a fierce cave-dwelling creature with breath so hot people claimed it breathed fire. Merlin had looked it up in his volume of ancient wisdom and identified it as a pterosaur, though the terrified local villagers had named it a dragon.

When Arthur wed his queen, Guinevere, and began staying closer to Camelot, Bedivere had still believed that their days of adventure, merriment, and chivalry would go on forever. Even after he’d lost the use of his left hand while fighting beside Arthur against the Saxon invaders, he’d remained hopeful. He never would have believed that such a defeat as they had just suffered would ever come to them. But now he was certain that a new age of darkness had befallen.

He stopped only to sleep on the sand. That night he woke up with the high tide nearly over his mouth and scrambled up to higher ground to resume his slumber. At dawn he awoke again to find sand and pebbles covering him. It scratched him so badly that he shed his armor until he was down to his tunic, leggings, and boots. The only piece he retained was his belt with its scabbard containing Excalibur and his own sword.

By the time Bedivere staggered off the shoreline and into Glastonbury he looked every bit the wild madman he felt himself to be.

“Hey, you, one hand!” a richly dressed man called to him as he withdrew a fat purse from beneath his cape. “How much will you take for the sword?”

Bedivere’s eyes darted to his lame hand. When he was in full armor he could conceal its condition under a sleeve of chain mail, but now it was exposed for the useless appendage it had become. Stung by the humiliating insult, he glowered at the man.

“Oh come now,” the man cajoled. “You must have
stolen it from some very grand fallen knight. There are quite a few of them these days I hear tell. It can be of no use to you, but my gold coins might buy you a meal—or a bath!” Chuckling at his own words, the man poured out several coins and advanced to Bedivere, his hand offering the coins.

Slowly Bedivere withdrew Excalibur from his scabbard.

“There’s a bright fellow,” the man said, misunderstanding Bedivere’s intention.

Bedivere slashed the sword over the man’s head with the lightning movement he was known for. Dropping his coins, the man fled, horrified.

Giggles and applause made Bedivere turn. Two dirty, ragged children sat on a stone curb, pleased by the display. Bedivere scooped up the dropped coins and tossed them gently in their direction. “We know where there’s a spare straw mat in beggar’s alley, but you have to be fast to get it,” one of the children, a girl of about six told Bedivere as she stuck one of the coins into the pocket of her skirt.

“Yeah, the old man who had it died last night,” added a boy of about seven. “If you hurry I think the mat is still there.”

With a nod of consent, Bedivere followed the excited children into the poorest part of the town. He learned that the boy was named Amren and the girl was Evanola. They led him down a narrow alley where beggars were living. “You’re in luck,” said Evanola. “Here’s the mat!”

“We can come back with a piece of potato for you later,” Amren offered. “Mum used to have me bring it to the old man, and I don’t think she knows he’s dead yet. I’ll give it to you.”

“How’d you hurt your hand?” Evanola asked staring at the coarse scar running across his palm.

“In a fight,” Bedivere replied as he settled onto the moldy mat.

“We’ll be back with that piece of potato, don’t you worry,” Amren assured him as he and his sister ran off.

Bedivere waved to them languidly as he turned on his side and took his place among the beggars in the alleyway.

If Eleanore did not get out of this darkness soon, she would go mad! She was sure of it. How long had they been wandering in these twisting, turning tunnels?

It would be the fault of her parents if she did lose her mind. Her mother, going off and abandoning them, then suddenly appearing, years later, in some sort of a bowl—of all things!

It
was
their mother that Rowena had seen; she had no doubt of it. She and Mathilde were the ones who remembered her best, being the oldest. They all looked like her in one way or another.

Their father was to blame too. Locking them inside like prisoners! Making them so desperate to escape that they’d scramble into a tunnel with no heed for where they were going or where they might end up! And now they were lost—hopelessly lost in the dark.

Something scrambled by her foot and Eleanore jumped back. “Careful!” cried Isolde who was right behind her. “You nearly knocked me down.”

“I’ve caught a mouse,” said Ione, who was never squeamish about such things. “It ran across my slipper and I grabbed it.”

“Hold on to it,” Eleanore said to her. Groping her way forward past her other sisters, she came to Ione. Her eyes had adjusted to the darkness well enough to let her see Ione and the mouse a little. Bending, she pulled the ribbon from the lavender silk slippers she wore. She removed her earring and fastened it to the ribbon, and then she tied the ribbon around the end of the mouse’s tail. “Now let it go,” she instructed her sister.

Just as she’d hoped, the earring clattered as the mouse scurried away ahead of them. “Come on, hurry, while we can still hear it,” she told her sisters. They followed the sound, as quickly as they could go, and it wasn’t long before they saw a dim light in the distance—it was the trapdoor opening.

They climbed back into their bedchamber just as there came an urgent pounding on the door. “Yes,” cried Eleanore, reaching to pull Bronwyn through the opening.

Bronwyn, in turn, helped pull the next sister, Isolde, through while Eleanore opened the door a crack. On the other side was short, plump Mary, the head housekeeper. “Thank goodness,” she cried when she saw Eleanore.

She was about to come in but Eleanore blocked her way. She needed to give her sisters time to shove the bed back over the trapdoor. “Is there something you need?” she asked Mary.

“Something I need?” Mary cried incredulously. “I’ve been pounding on that locked door since
supper. Where have you girls been?” Red splotches formed on her cheeks as she pushed past Eleanore.

The sisters had managed to get the bed back into place and had piled onto it as if to further cover the opening with their long dresses. “We’ve been right here,” Eleanore told her.

“You have not been!” Mary scolded. “When I called you to eat there was no one in here. I heard not a sound! You may thank me for I told your father that you were all feeling ill being that it was your time of month.”

“All of us at once?” Cecily questioned, raising a skeptical brow.

“It happens among females who live in close quarters: Their cycles become attuned to one another,” Mary maintained. “Besides, I had to say
something
. I didn’t want to worry the poor man. Now I must know the truth! Where have you been?”

“We’ve been right here,” Eleanore insisted once again.

Mary pointed an accusing finger at the eleven pairs of dirty, tattered silk slippers dangling from the bed just above the floor. “And your slippers got into that sorry state because you have been here in your room all the while, I suppose!”

“We were dancing,” Eleanore said.

“What? In a dust bin?” Mary demanded.

The sisters glanced at one another. How could they explain the disastrous state of their slippers?

They couldn’t. So they stared at Mary, dumb
founded but unwilling to reveal their secret. After a long, uncomfortable moment Mary breathed a sigh of resignation. “It’s very late and I have not gotten any sleep. Give me those slippers. In the morning I’ll discard them and bring you new ones from the storage chest.”

The sisters removed their slippers and handed them to her. “Look at these expensive slippers—ruined! Your father would get into a state if he saw these,” Mary muttered crossly as she collected them in her outstretched skirt.

“What are you going to do with them?” Rowena asked as she bent to pull off her slippers.

“I don’t know—burn them before your father sees them I imagine,” Mary replied as Rowena dropped them into her apron. “There are replacements in the storage cabinet, but I know he would not be pleased. These shoes are not a month old.” Mary scowled at the sisters, encompassing them all in a sweeping glare of disapproval, before leaving with the slippers.

When the door closed behind Mary, Eleanore was suddenly extremely tired. Rowena had wandered to the window and was gazing dreamily out into the night. The other ten had fallen asleep where they lay, bundled in a heap on her bed.

Stretching wearily, Eleanore laid down on an empty bed and her eyes began to close. Just as she was about to fall asleep, a familiar noise brought her back to waking.

The mouse that had guided them out of the passage scurried along a floor board, her earring still attached to the ribbon tied to its tail. The mouse stopped and regarded her, its pink nose twitching.

She rose off her pillow and considered attempting to get her earring back. But she’d need Ione’s help for that and it appeared that she was already sleeping. Just then Eleanore desperately needed to sleep, as well. She lay her head back on the pillow and allowed the mouse to continue on its way, still bouncing the earring off the floorboards as it departed the room.