The Rise and Fall of Mount Majestic

by Jennifer Trafton

  “But how can you tell where the center is?” asked Lucas. “What’s the center of forever?”

  “Simple,” answered Professor Quibble. “Wherever we are is the center.”

  “And the castle is in the center of the island.”

  “Well, more or less, since it is roughly in the middle of the mountain, which of course lies a little farther to the west than it does to the east, the Willow Woods stretching out quite far beyond its eastern side, so if we are going to be precise—”

  “And my throne is in the center of the castle,” continued Lucas.

  “Er . . . of course, Your Highness.”

  “Aha! Then I am the center of the whole world! I knew it!” Lucas leaped to his feet.

  Guafnoggle cried, “Don’t get off the throne, Your Highness! You just threw the world off balance!”

  Lucas sat down again quickly, but he had hardly spoken the words “proceed with the lesson” to Professor Quibble when there was a banging on the north door of the throne room.

  “Most likely it is someone from the digging team,” said the professor.

  “Oh, yes, I’d forgotten. HAROLD!” Lucas bellowed, and the south door opened with a groan, revealing a hunchbacked man holding a silver trumpet. “Harold! Visitors at the north door. Go announce them.”

  Harold hobbled across the throne room and disappeared behind the smaller north door. Five seconds later the door opened again, and there was a flourish of notes from the trumpet interrupted by a loud fit of coughing. “Dustin Dexterhoof, the royal (cough) archaeologist (cough, cough).”

  Lucas strained his neck to see, but his visitor soon saved him the trouble. Dustin Dexterhoof emerged in front of the throne from a cloud of dirt and dropped on one muddy knee to kiss the king’s hand.

  “Long live the king,” said the archaeologist. “I am your humble servant, unworthy of licking the dust from your shoes.”

  “They were clean until you came in,” replied Lucas sourly, wiping his hand on his robes. “I hope this is important. You interrupted a very interesting geography lesson.”

  “I would not dream of bothering Your Highness with anything except the most urgent business. This is nothing short of a dire emergency requiring your immediate attention.”

  “Well then, what is it?”

  “While obeying the king’s command to search for the gold about which our beloved Lyre has prophesied, we have stumbled upon a most unexpected, perplexing, and in fact quite disturbing discovery. To come to the point—”

  “Yes, why don’t you?”

  “—we have discovered gold—”

  “Well, why didn’t you say so in the first place? I knew the Lyre was telling the truth! Remember what it said?

  A greater treasure lies below

  Where rust and robbers cannot go,

  And buried underneath your frown

  A gold outshining any crown.

  “So there is gold buried below! I’m rich!”

  “You already were rich,” said Guafnoggle. “Rich as a king, rich as the sea, rich as a coffee cake, which I love, especially with seaweed piled on top.”

  Dustin Dexterhoof shifted his feet uncomfortably. “If Your Highness will allow me to finish—we did find gold. However, the gold unfortunately takes the form of, I mean to say, it has the shape of—to come to the point—a belt buckle.”

  The throne room was silent for a whole minute. King Lucas stared at Dustin Dexterhoof as if he were a moldy piece of cheese. “Do you mean to say,” he said quietly, “that I have had all my dungeons dug up for the sake of a golden belt buckle?”

  “If it makes you feel any better, Your Highness, it is quite a large belt buckle.”

  “How large?”

  “Very large.”

  “HOW LARGE?”

  “As big as the entire castle.”

  This time the throne room was silent for two minutes. Then Professor Quibble began to laugh hysterically. He laughed until his sides shook and the tears poured down and fogged up his eyeglasses. His laughter set Guafnoggle laughing, which set King Lucas laughing.

  “Why, that is the most perpendicular thing I’ve ever heard!” gasped Lucas.

  “Preposterous,” corrected the professor in between gulps.

  “That too!”

  Dustin Dexterhoof turned very red. “If you will follow me to the dungeon, Your Highness, you can see for yourself.”

  Lucas stopped laughing. “I’m the king! Kings don’t go into their own dungeons. Get back to your digging.”

  Dustin Dexterhoof bowed and turned even redder. “I was afraid you would say that, Your Highness, and so please forgive me, for I have no choice—” He suddenly reached up, grabbed the crown from the king’s head, and took off running toward the north door.

  It took several seconds for Lucas to recover from the shock enough to yell, “How dare you!” and take off running after his crown, followed closely by the professor and Guafnoggle.

  They ran out the north door, through the court-yard, down a staircase, through several long corridors, down another staircase, and over several sleeping diggers, until they finally bumped into Dustin Dexterhoof at the very bottom. Lucas angrily yanked his crown out of the archaeologist’s hands, rammed it back on his forehead, and then looked out over a river of gold.

  He pushed aside the sweaty men with shovels and dove onto the smooth surface. But though he tried to brush away the dirt and pry the gold up with his fingers, he could find no edge.

  The archaeologist pulled a large piece of parchment from his pocket and spread it out in front of Lucas. “This is a diagram of the digging site in the dungeon,” he explained. “This”—he drew his finger around a dark square taking up the entire digging site and a thinner line running through the middle of the square—“is the golden object, and within the outer square we have discovered not gold, not dirt, but leather.”

  “A belt?” sputtered the professor, choking on his own laughter.

  “An enormous belt?” giggled Lucas.

  “A giant’s belt,” said the archaeologist, raising one eyebrow significantly and rolling up the parchment again.

  Lucas looked at him blankly, for he had never read any fairy tales. “Giant? What is a giant?”

  “A very, very, very, very, very big person. Bigger than this castle. As big as a mountain, in fact.”

  “Are you actually suggesting that, hundreds of years ago, before this castle was built, a very big person passed by our island and accidentally left his belt?”

  “No,” replied Dustin Dexterhoof. “I am suggesting that he is still here.”

  “There is a giant on this mountain?”

  “Under this mountain,” said Dustin Dexterhoof. “In fact, the giant is the mountain—or, in other words, the mountain is the giant—covered by a layer of dirt, of course. To come to the point, Your Highness, you are at this very moment standing on a giant’s stomach.”

  Lucas looked down uneasily and stood on his tiptoes.

  “All right, this joke has gone far enough,” said Professor Quibble impatiently. “Stop wasting the king’s time and get back to your digging. There is no such thing as a giant.”

  “What makes the mountain rise and fall, if not the breathing in and out of a giant buried beneath it?” asked the archaeologist.

  “That is what mountains do,” snapped the professor. “They are tied to the sun by an invisible string and therefore they rise and fall. It is an observable fact.”

  “This mountain rises and falls. But have you ever observed any other mountains?”

  “Don’t be silly. There are no other mountains. And besides, do you mean to tell me that a big person has been sleeping underground all this time without eating anything?”

  “Perhaps he’s hibernating, like a bat or a squirrel. Their breathing becomes very slow and they sleep for a long time without food.”

  “But this ‘giant’ would have been hibernating for hundreds and hundreds of years, long before the castle was built!”<
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  “Which is why the dirt and grass gradually covered him up.”

  “And the mountain only rises and falls once a day. One breath a day? That’s scientifically suspicious.”

  “Stop! Stop!” Lucas said. “You are both giving me a headache. There is to be no more talk of belt buckles or giants that don’t exist. If there were a giant on this island, don’t you think someone would have seen it?”

  “I don’t know. I’m only an archaeologist,” said the archaeologist. “May I suggest that the king ask the historian?”

  “The what?”

  “The historian. He keeps all of the records of anything that has been done in the kingdom. He lives in the library.”

  Lucas was curious to meet this strange castle resident whom he had never seen. And so they climbed back over the sleeping diggers, went up the staircase, around the corner, down many more corridors and up many more staircases until they finally reached the library.

  Chapter 6

  IN WHICH PERSIMMONY BUILDS CASTLES AND THE POTTER MAKES PLANS

  Worvil and Persimmony both jumped at the sound of the voice behind them in the Willow Woods. Persimmony looked up and saw a halo of white hair and long fingers gripping a wooden cane. “Oh, Theodore! I was coming to find you, but I got lost and was almost eaten by a tortoise. This is Worvil. He was going to help me find my way home, but a tree ran away with his house.”

  Theodore smiled knowingly. “Ah, those restless mangroves. They’re young still. Someday they’ll find their way back to the shore and settle down in the water among the old ones, but for now they prowl around playing tricks on the tortoises and making life more difficult for everyone else. Come, my cottage is only a short distance to the west. I’ll make you some breakfast.”

  This was not the first time the old potter had gotten Persimmony out of trouble. Years ago when she had decided to run away from home and become a fisherwoman on the Northern Shore, he had found her halfway through the woods, fed her a warm meal of lentil soup and cocoa, and convinced her gently that she would hate the smell of dead fish. From then on, Persimmony had gone often to the potter’s cottage while her mother was in town, to read his books and listen to him tell stories of the old days when he had lived in the castle and dined with kings.

  It was Theodore who had somehow known, without being told, that business was bad for Persimmony’s mother. When other basket makers on the island began to dye their creations in bright colors and weave ribbons and flowers into them, suddenly Mrs. Smudge found herself left with a disturbing lack of customers. “We make plain, simple baskets,” she had said to her daughters one evening after explaining why there was no food on the table. “No frills. I have a moral objection to frills.” Prunella nodded sadly. Persimmony’s stomach growled.

  The next morning a clay pot had appeared on their doorstep. A plain, simple pot, with no frills—except that every day when they reached into it they pulled out a fresh, warm loaf of bread. This was the pot Persimmony accidentally broke with the broom.

  The potter had built his cottage around the trunk of a willow tree after freeing it from the tortoise that lived there. (Theodore had lived in the forest for a great many years, and he was one of the few human beings for whom poison-tongued jumping tortoises had any respect.) A few feet away from the tree, in a clearing, stood a brick oven used for firing pottery. Around it on the grass were finished pots of all shapes and sizes.

  One caught Persimmony’s eye as she passed by with Theodore and Worvil. It had a cluster of clay leaves around its base and a wide, elegant neck. Oh, to have such a pot! What beautiful gift would come out of that?

  She cast one longing glance at it before following the potter past the long willow branches tied back like curtains and through the door of the cottage. Inside the tiny dwelling, surrounded by the shelves of books, the mounds of clay, the potter’s wheel, and a basket full of dirty smocks, Theodore served his guests a simple, comforting breakfast of warm oatmeal and cinnamon.

  Theodore and Worvil ate at the table. Persimmony paced up and down the length of the cottage, holding the bowl of oatmeal in her hand and munching while she paced. She told her friend about the broken Giving Pot, her misadventures in the woods, and the Leafeaters’ plans to dig through Mount Majestic and find the gold.

  If she had been paying attention, she would have noticed a change come over the potter as she described the Leafeaters’ conversation. He slowly stopped eating and sat hunched over, staring hard at the table, as if he were trying to decipher a message there. His lips moved silently.

  “Well?” she finally concluded, placing her bowl on the table. She sat down on the floor and picked up a lump of the potter’s clay. “What do you think?”

  “I think that you should no longer throw brooms or go to the woods during a thunderstorm,” replied Theodore.

  “But what do you think about the Leafeaters?”

  “Ah,” sighed Theodore, standing up. He began absentmindedly clearing the dishes off the table, whisking away Worvil’s half-eaten oatmeal while Worvil was scooping out another steaming hot spoonful. “I think we must go to the king and tell him immediately about the digging.”

  Persimmony frowned and punched a giant dimple in the handful of clay she was molding. “I was afraid you were going to say that.”

  “But then the Leafeaters would be angry at us!” mumbled Worvil, his mouth full of oatmeal. “What if they found us and took revenge?” He had already grown quite comfortable in the potter’s cozy cottage.

  But Persimmony’s mind was racing. The three of them could find the gold first, give a third to the Leafeaters as a ransom for her father, give another third to the king as a show of undying loyalty to the crown, and keep a third to spread around the kingdom secretly. They would become heroes—and no one need know that the gold was ever divided up. Of course, she considered, they’d keep a third for themselves as well. She wondered how much that would leave them.

  “And how, my child, do you propose that we find this gold?” asked Theodore when Persimmony had told him her scheme.

  “Oh, I’ve already thought of that. We’ll go to the castle at night, drug the gatekeeper, steal the keys, sneak down to the king’s dungeons while the diggers are all fast asleep, and find the gold first.”

  “Daring, but it won’t work. There are guards inside the castle. They have swords, and we have . . . pots.” Theodore cocked one eyebrow at her in amusement, but his hands were busy stuffing cloaks and various items from his cottage into a small sack.

  “Okay, okay, I have another idea.”

  “And what is that? Let me guess. I’ll make a pot that will produce three huge shovels and we’ll pick a spot on the side of the mountain and start digging ourselves.”

  “Well, it could work,” she insisted, dropping another lump of clay on her knees.

  “Persimmony!”

  “But then the king would be angry at us!” Worvil moaned. “He’ll find out, and he’ll have us all hung upside down by our toenails!”

  “We must tell the king,” Theodore repeated.

  “What would be the point of warning him? It isn’t his gold. The Leafeaters aren’t exactly doing anything wrong.”

  “One way or the other,” said Worvil, “someone is going to get angry at us, and I want to live with as few people angry at me as possible.” He paused for a moment. “When you come right down to it, I just want to live.”

  “Trust me, Persimmony,” said Theodore. “My dear, what have you done with all of my clay?”

  Persimmony looked down. From the tips of her toes to her waist, she had covered herself with a mountain of clay. On top was a lumpy sort of castle, with clay towers standing crookedly out of the roof. Her legs felt cool and moist and safe underneath. She wriggled her toes and lifted up her knees slowly until the castle crumbled and the mountain cracked and fell apart in chunks. Her dress was now quite grimy.

  She was secretly pleased with the fact that Theodore’s plan meant that she, Persimmony Smud
ge, was going to go to the castle and meet the king face-to-face. No one she knew had ever actually seen the king. She had expected the potter to send her home.

  “If your mother didn’t have such a moral objection to reading,” he sighed, “we could send her a note telling her where you are. As it is, we’ll have to ask the king to send a messenger to her once we get to the castle. We can’t waste time going all the way back to your cottage. We need to get started immediately. Come along, Worvil. Both of you heard the Leafeaters’ plans, and it might take two witnesses to convince the king. He must believe us.”

  Worvil, horrified at the idea of facing the king, was hiding under the potter’s bed. No amount of pleading or reasoning would convince him to come out, though Persimmony spent nearly half an hour on her hands and knees trying. “Okay,” she said finally, hearing the potter’s cane tapping impatiently at the door. “I understand. You can stay right here in the potter’s cottage. Go ahead. It’s much nicer than all your other houses. Of course, we might be gone for a very long time—days, weeks even. You never know with kings. And this is a willow tree. I bet the poison-tongued jumping tortoise who used to live here misses its home a lot. I certainly hope it doesn’t think the potter has moved out for good, and come back to reclaim its tree one night. But don’t worry— you’ll be asleep anyway, and you’ll never feel its tongue. You won’t even know you’re dead.”

  Worvil’s wide eyes suddenly appeared at the edge of the bed. “All right, all right! I’ll come!” Persimmony clapped her hands, though she felt a little guilty at the same time. She dragged Worvil out, still shaking in fear, and the three set off.

  As she followed the potter through the woods, Persimmony tried to remember the voices she had heard last night. “The Leafeaters seemed pretty angry at the king,” she said out loud, “not to mention the Sunspitters, whoever they are.”

  “The Sunspitters are you and me,” said Theodore, smiling. “All of us who live aboveground. All who are not Leafeaters. In their minds, we dishonor all that is beautiful and dignified—we spit at the sun.” He paused, looking carefully at the trees and sniffing the air. “It has been so many years since I made this trip to this castle. Yes, due west. This way.”