'Not as much as I'm going to hurt you,' the Captain said, and pulled him across the wide courtyard Jack had seen from the cart-track.
At the other end of the court the soldier pulled him up wooden steps and into the great palace itself. 'Now your acting had better be good,' the man whispered, and immediately set off down a long corridor, squeezing Jack's arm hard enough to leave bruises.
'I promise I'll be good!' Jack shouted.
The man hauled him into another, narrower corridor. The interior of the palace did not at all resemble the inside of a tent, Jack saw. It was a mazelike warren of passages and little rooms, and it smelled of smoke and grease.
'Promise!' the Captain bawled out.
'I promise! I do!'
Ahead of them as they emerged from yet another corridor, a group of elaborately clothed men either leaning against a wall or draped over couches turned their heads to look at this noisy duo. One of them, who had been amusing himself by giving orders to a pair of women carrying stacks of sheets folded flat across their arms, glanced suspiciously at Jack and the Captain.
'And I promise to beat the sin out of you,' the Captain said loudly.
A couple of the men laughed. They wore soft wide-brimmed hats trimmed with fur and their boots were of velvet. They had greedy, thoughtless faces. The man talking to the maids, the one who seemed to be in charge, was skeletally tall and thin. His tense, ambitious face tracked the boy and the soldier as they hurried by.
'Please don't!' Jack wailed. 'Please!'
'Each please is another strapping,' the soldier growled, and the men laughed again. The thin one permitted himself to display a smile as cold as a knife-blade before he turned back to the maids.
The Captain yanked the boy into an empty room filled with dusty wooden furniture. Then at last he released Jack's aching arm. 'Those were his men,' he whispered. 'What life will be like when - ' He shook his head, and for a moment seemed to forget his haste. 'It says in The Book of Good Farming that the meek shall inherit the earth, but those fellows don't have a teaspoonful of meekness among them. Taking's all they're good for. They want wealth, they want - ' He glanced upward, unwilling or unable to say what else the men outside wanted. Then he looked back at the boy. 'We'll have to be quick about this, but there are still a few secrets his men haven't learned about the palace.' He nodded sideways, indicating a faded wooden wall.
Jack followed him, and understood when the Captain pushed two of the flat brown nailheads left exposed at the end of a dusty board. A panel in the faded wall swung inward, exposing a narrow black passageway no taller than an upended coffin. 'You'll only get a glimpse of her, but I suppose that's all you need. It's all you can have, anyhow.'
The boy followed the silent instruction to slip into the passageway. 'Just go straight ahead until I tell you,' the Captain whispered. When he closed the panel behind them, Jack began to move slowly forward through perfect blackness.
The passage wound this way and that, occasionally illuminated by faint light spilling in through a crack in a concealed door or through a window set above the boy's head. Jack soon lost all sense of direction, and blindly followed the whispered directions of his companion. At one point he caught the delicious odor of roasting meat, at another the unmistakable stink of sewage.
'Stop,' the Captain finally said. 'Now I'll have to lift you up. Raise your arms.'
'Will I be able to see?'
'You'll know in a second,' the Captain said, and put a hand just beneath each of Jack's armpits and lifted him cleanly off the floor. 'There is a panel in front of you now,' he whispered. 'Slide it to the left.'
Jack blindly reached out before him and touched smooth wood. It slid easily aside, and enough light fell into the passage for him to see a kitten-sized spider scrambling toward the ceiling. He was looking down into a room the size of a hotel lobby, filled with women in white and furniture so ornate that it brought back to the boy all the museums he and his parents had visited. In the center of the room a woman lay sleeping or unconscious on an immense bed, only her head and shoulders visible above the sheet.
And then Jack nearly shouted with shock and terror, because the woman on the bed was his mother. That was his mother, and she was dying.
'You saw her,' the Captain whispered, and braced his arms more firmly.