'But he sounded just like—'
'I'm going to get Vitoller,' said Hwel, and dropped off the tailboard and ran through the frozen puddles to the front of die convoy, where the actor-manager was whistling tunelessly and, yes, strolling.
'What ho, b'zugda-hiara[8],' he said cheerfully.
'You've got to come at once! He's talking!'
Talking?'
Hwel jumped up and down. 'He's quoting!' he shouted. 'You've got to come! He sounds just like—'
'Me?' said Vitoller, a few minutes later, after they had pulled the lattys into a grove of leafless trees by the roadside. 'Do I sound like that?'
'Yes,' chorused the company.
Young Willikins, who specialised in female roles, prodded Tomjon gently as he stood on an upturned barrel in the middle of the clearing.
'Here, boy, do you know my speech from Please Yourself!' he said.
Tomjon nodded. ' “He is not dead, I say, who lies beneath the stone. For if Death could but hear—” '
They listened in awed silence as the endless mists rolled across the dripping fields and the red ball of the sun floated down the sky. When the boy had finished hot tears were streaming down Hwel's face.
'By all the gods,' he said, when Tomjon had finished, 'I must have been on damn good form when I wrote that.' He blew his nose noisily.
'Do I sound like that?' said Willikins, his face pale.
Vitoller patted him gently on the shoulder.
'If you sounded like that, my bonny,' he said, 'you wouldn't be standing arse-deep in slush in the middle of these forsaken fields, with nothing but liberated cabbage for thy tea.'
He clapped his hands.
'No more, no more,' he said, his breath making puffs of steam in the freezing air. 'Backs to it, everybody. We must be outside the walls of Sto Lat by sunset.'
As the grumbling actors awoke from the spell and wandered back to the shafts of the lattys Vitoller beckoned to the dwarf and put his arm around his shoulders, or rather around the top of his head.
'Well?' he said. 'You people know all about magic, or so it is said. What do you make of it?'
'He spends all his time around the stage, master. It's only natural that he should pick things up,' said Hwel vaguely.
Vitoller leaned down.
'Do you believe that?'
'I believe I heard a voice that took my doggerel and shaped it and fired it back through my ears and straight into my heart,' said Hwel simply. 'I believe I heard a voice that got behind the crude shape of the words and said the things I had meant them to say, but had not the skill to achieve. Who knows where such things come from?'
He stared impassively into Vitoller's red face. 'He may have inherited it from his father,' he said.
'But-'
'And who knows what witches may achieve?' said the dwarf.
Vitoller felt his wife's hand pushed into his. As he stood up, bewildered and angry, she kissed him on the back of the neck.
'Don't torture yourself,' she said. 'Isn't it all for the best? Your son has declaimed his first word.'
Spring came, and ex-King Verence still wasn't taking being dead lying down. He prowled the castle relentlessly, seeking for a way in which its ancient stones would release their grip on him.