But angry pepper mill workers have a knack for thrusting themselves into one’s mind, and into one’s bathroom. The door came off its hinges and clattered to the ground, and fifty pairs of feet stomped in. Lucas stared at the intruders and quickly sank low beneath the bubbles, but a bathtub was no escape. The rebels brought forward several huge sacks and emptied each one into the bathwater with a loud “hurrah!” until Lucas was buried up to his ears in soggy pepper and sneezing uncontrollably.
“H-h-how da-ha-ha-haaaaaaaaCHOOOO! dare you!! I hereby arrest all of you for treason and condemn you to-to-horrible pu-hu-hu-ACHOOO-OOOOOOO punishments forever!”
Flack reached up and took the clothespin off his nose, and the rest of the crowd did the same as ceremoniously as if they were lowering their weapons on command. Lucas glanced toward a chair in the corner where his clothes were lying. Mrs. Smudge, following his eyes, grabbed the king’s clothes and triumphantly hung them on a peg far away from the bathtub. The rebels broke into laughter. Prunella turned bright red. “Mother,” she whispered, “if you put them over there, the king can’t get dressed!”
“That’s the point,” hissed Mrs. Smudge.
Prunella shook her head miserably. She supposed this was the sort of thing Persimmony would call an “adventure,” and that made her even more certain that she would never understand it.
Flack continued, “You see, Your Highness, you have no choice but to listen to us. We are your loyal servants of the pepper mill, who have been slaving away in order to give you all the pepper you want. We have now done that. You have all the pepper you want right in front of you. I hope you enjoy it.”
“What do you want?”
“Our freedom!” shouted Ned.
“No! You’ve got to keep making pepper! I need pepper! Except that I need it on my food, not in my bathtub.”
“Then fire Mr. Fulcrumb,” demanded Flack.
“Done,” said Lucas.
“And apologize for how selfish you’ve been.”
Lucas fumed and squirmed and writhed in his bathtub. But with fifty angry (and clothed) subjects surrounding him with more sacks of pepper held in waiting, and no one around to protect him, there was very little he could do. “Mmssrry,” he mumbled.
“What?”
“I’m sorry!” Lucas snapped.
“And now give us your gold in return for all the pain and suffering you’ve caused us.”
Lucas paused. “What gold?”
“The gold you have been digging for underneath the castle.”
“How do you know about that?”
“The whole kingdom knows about that. No one can keep a secret for long on an island.”
Now this was a dilemma indeed. He obviously could not give them that gold, since so far there was no gold to give—except for the belt buckle, if it was a belt buckle, and that certainly wasn’t going anywhere. “There isn’t any gold,” Lucas said finally.
“Your Highness, do you actually think we are stupid enough to believe that?” said Flack impatiently. “Now tell us what you have done with the gold, and we’ll give you your clothes back and leave you alone.”
“I’m telling you, there isn’t any gold I can give you.” Lucas struggled to stifle a sneeze and pounced on the best story to get this rabble out of his bathroom. “What I thought was gold was really the belt buckle of a giant asleep under Mount Majestic. So you see there is really nothing I can do for you.”
Flack turned to Ned. “Empty another sack of pepper over his head.”
“No, no!” cried Lucas. “You’ll see! There is a search party going to the caves on the Western Shore right now to search for the giant’s head and see if he is really there.”
Mrs. Smudge’s eyes widened and her face turned as purple as the handkerchief on her head. Caves? Giant? “Is this a joke? Is this a joke, you deceiving, swindling, pepper-hogging, shoe-wearing . . . bigeared ...” (she was so astonished she nearly ran out of adjectives) “. . . short monarch? Did your father, the late king, put you up to this? Do you mean to mock a poor, honest, heartbroken woman?”
“Well, if it is a joke, it’s somebody else’s joke, and a dirty girl with a name like Persnickety has gone to find out. But until she comes back, there’s no gold to give you!”
And now all the color drained out of Mrs. Smudge’s face completely. “You sent Persimmony—my Persimmony—to the Snoring Cave?”
“Yes, but—what do you mean your Persimmony? Who are you? And how did you know it was called the Snoring Cave?”
“What cave, Mother?” whispered Prunella. “Why is Persimmony in a cave?”
Mrs. Smudge did not answer but stood gaping at the king in horror.
“So that’s it!” yelled Flack. “You’ve hidden the gold in the caves and made up a silly story about a giant to scare people away from it. Well, you won’t scare us away. Come, comrades! We’ll camp out on the mountain tonight, and tomorrow we’ll find the gold!” With a deafening cheer, the pepper mill workers swarmed out of the room.
“Not that we’re after the treasure for ourselves, of course,” added Flack, hanging back. “We’re going to give it to the poor. And speaking of the poor, we also need to talk about—”
“Hurry up, you goody-two-boots.” Mrs. Smudge seemed to snap out of the spell she was in and come back to herself. She yanked Flack by the arm.
“You haven’t heard the last from me!” yelled Flack as he was pulled out of the room.
Prunella stared at the king. She curtsied politely and said, “Pleased to meet you, Your Highness.” She was about to take the king’s clothes down from the hook to give back to him, when Mrs. Smudge swept back into the room, grabbed her hand, and swept them both out again.
As soon as the coast was clear, the trembling steward stepped into the bathroom. Tucked away behind the wrinkles on his face was the faintest shadow of a smile. “I am so sorry, Your Highness. They overtook us so suddenly, there was nothing anyone could do—between sneezing—to stop them ...”
“Nubbins,” said Lucas, “does Badly still have a cold?”
“What? Oh, er, yes, I do believe he does, Your Highness. We have been giving him every available remedy but—”
“Good! Then he’s the only one in the castle who can’t smell the pepper if they throw it at him. Send him at once to find the search party on the Western Shore and warn them not to tell the pepper mill workers which cave is the Snoring Cave. Searching every cave for gold should keep those traitors out of my bathroom for a while.”
“Yes, sir, I certainly will, Your Highness.” The steward turned to go.
“And Nubbins, will you hand me my clothes?”
When Persimmony awoke, the woods were quiet, and the moon was shining brightly in the night sky. Captain Gidding was bending over her, gently bathing her forehead with a wet cloth. Her head lay on something soft. “What happened?” she said.
“We were fighting the poison-tongued jumping tortoises—” he began.
“I remember that part,” she said.
“And you leaped bravely into the battle—”
“Yes, I definitely remember that part!”
“And then you ran into a tree.”
Persimmony closed her eyes and groaned with shame. Her first real battle, her first chance to show valor, and what did she do? Ran into a tree. If she had been hit on the head with a coconut, at least she could have said she was wounded in the line of duty. She was humiliated. So like a Smudge.
“As soon as the tortoises realized we had found a way of hitting them where they were weak, they sucked themselves into their shells and will not be coming out again for many hours, I daresay,” Captain Gidding told her.
Persimmony lifted herself up on one elbow. In the dim light of the candle that Captain Gidding had set in the dirt beside them, she could just make out the huge, black, motionless lumps huddled together in the middle of the grove. A few feet away from her on a blanket of moss lay eight soldiers, softly snoring.
The captain read her
mind. “Only those eight are left with us. Three returned to the castle. They were badly wounded, but they will live. Oh, they are a brave and loyal lot, they are.”
Persimmony did not share his esteem for the king’s guard. “But we’re lost. How will they find their way back?”
Captain Gidding pointed above the trees. It was a clear night, and against the dark blue of the sky the black outline of Mount Majestic and the faint glimmering lights of the distant castle pointed the way home. Of course. The mountain. The one thing that would always be there. Except that it wouldn’t.
Persimmony stretched her arms and legs to make sure everything still worked. She had managed to make it through with only scratches on her chest and shoulders, but they were deep and throbbed painfully. Her dress was torn in two places. The soft pillow she’d been lying on, she now realized, was the thick hair of the giant. She tied it around her waist again. “I didn’t expect you to be so good with a sword. Or a coconut, for that matter.”
“That’s okay. Neither did I.” But there was no pride in his voice. Instead, he let out a deep sigh, and Persimmony thought his eyes looked strange, as if he’d been weeping. He sat with his knees pulled up close to his chest and stared out into the night.
“What are you doing?” Persimmony asked.
“I am contemplating the willows,” answered the captain. “Why do you think the willows hang their heads and weep?”
“I thought it was the weight of those heavy tortoises sitting on top.”
“Weight, yes! They carry the weight of the world on their shoulders. They are the most compassionate of all the trees—so beautiful and so sad.”
Persimmony stared at the absentminded, bumbling, courageous man. “I never thought of it that way,” she said.
Captain Gidding wiped his eyes and cleared his throat. “I’ve been sitting here trying to make up a poem about it while you’ve been unconscious, but I just can’t find the right words: I climbed a hill as high as hope . . . What should go next? Do you know?”
“No, I don’t,” said Persimmony, wishing she did because his face was so earnest and pleading.
“Oh well, I will have to keep thinking, then. I suppose you should go to sleep now. You’ve had quite a bump on the head.”
Her head did hurt. Persimmony lay down again and closed her eyes. As she listened to the lullaby of the wind and the snoring of the soldiers, she thought, Are the willows weeping for me?
It was many minutes later, or many hours, when a rustling in the leaves woke her again and she opened her eyes halfway. A tall shadow moved in the glade. It was a mangrove tree, crawling slowly across the forest floor until it reached the tortoise shells. It spread its roots out wide so that they became a cage around the tortoises, and there it stood like a guard over its unsuspecting prisoners.
One restless mangrove, at least, had found its place.
Chapter 18
IN WHICH PERSIMMONY REMEMBERS HER MANNERS
“My hat!” Persimmony sat up straight, awake in the quiet woods, with the morning streaming through the branches. Captain Gidding and the soldiers were asleep on the grass.
The hat was still lying on the ground where the buttermilk-blue-dappled butterfly had found it. It had the dirty footprint of a tortoise right in the middle of it, but otherwise it was unharmed. She put it back on her head to help her think. She found her basket in a bush nearby and munched on an apple.
They were lost, that was certain. The butterfly chase had taken so many twists and turns that she had no idea where in the forest they were or how far it was back to the potter’s cottage. The only obvious landmark was Mount Majestic, but that wouldn’t help them find Willowroot.
The tortoises were awake inside the mangrove’s prison of roots, and they were angry. Persimmony couldn’t resist: She stuck out her tongue and wiggled her fingers. A spiky shell threw itself toward her against the thick roots and bounced back. She danced around and around the tree. Come after me now! she silently mouthed to the captive snouts. Then she noticed that one of the tortoises had not come out of its shell yet, and she guessed that it was the one whose tongue had been cut out. Now it was too ashamed to show its face to the world.
And then she felt a little sorry for teasing them. But she couldn’t sit still, and she didn’t want to wake up the soldiers, so she decided to walk in a wide circle around the grove, slowly making her way farther and farther out. She carefully inspected each willow tree, pushing every knot or bump she could see, pulling on roots, kicking the trunks. Nothing. Then one tree standing at a distance from the others caught her eye. It was very large, and its branches fell so thickly that they seemed to form a wall of green stretching upward as far as her eyes could see. She parted them gently with her hands and stepped underneath the canopy of leaves into a still and silent place. The trunk was twice as wide as she was tall, and on its side was one knotty lump. She grasped it, but it would not move.
Remember your manners, Rheuben had told her. What did that mean? Should she curtsy? She did so, not very well, and felt very silly with only a tree in front of her. But nothing happened. Frustration welled up inside of her, but she pressed it down again and tried to remember what she had heard that night after the storm.
Yes, please, Rheuben had replied, and then they had gone.
No—that wasn’t quite right. There had been a pause between his words. Yes, he had said to Rhedgrave , then—
“Please!” Persimmony said. Still nothing happened. But just to make sure, she grasped the knot again and twisted it. It turned, and the side of the tree opened outward to reveal a narrow dirt staircase spiraling down into darkness.
“I found it,” she whispered. Then she shouted joyfully, “I’ve found the entrance to Willowroot!”
In a moment, the wall of branches parted again and Captain Gidding was beside her, followed by eight groggy, bleary-eyed soldiers. “Marvelous!” the captain cheered. “Brilliant! You are the bravest and cleverest girl I have ever had the pleasure of meeting. You are destined for great things, Miss Smudge.”
Persimmony’s heart began to feel lighter. Even “Smudge” sounded noble when he said it like that. If only Captain Gidding had been there when the people of Candlenut had made fun of her.
“Ugh!” grumbled one of the soldiers, peering down the hole. “Who knows what worms and termites and muddy goo might be waiting for us.”
“You don’t have to follow me, then,” said Persimmony curtly. “I’ll go by myself.”
“Send a young lady alone into unknown underground perils?” said the soldier. “Never. Leave all the danger to us.”
“Not likely,” muttered Persimmony as she descended into the darkness.
The staircase was steep, damp, and smelled like rotting leaves. It also curved, as Persimmony found out the hard way when her foot hit the wall and she slipped downward several steps. She could hear the soldiers behind her struggling to squeeze their clumsy arms and legs into the cramped space and complaining loudly of the dampness. Finally the steps ended, and she moved forward into the open space beyond, blinking while her eyes adjusted to the dim light of candles.
The stairs had led her down into some kind of underground storeroom where there were piles of leaves, neatly sorted and stacked according to kind, shape, and size. On the opposite side of the storeroom from the stairs was a wooden door, which Persimmony opened eagerly. She caught her breath in awe.
She was in what appeared to be a large meeting hall. The roof was curved like an upside-down bowl. There were many other doorways as well, some small like the one she had just come through, while others were larger and nestled under high arches of painted vines woven together.
Persimmony barely noticed these things, however, for what made her catch her breath was the feeling that she was back aboveground again. The walls were elaborately painted with glorious pictures of trees. There were coconut palms bent sideways from the wind. There were clusters of mangrove trees as they grew at the forest’s edge along the shore. A
nd there were stately willows with boughs drooping to the ground like green waterfalls.
The dome above was painted to look like the sky, with the sun and moon and stars. Farther down were hundreds of pictures stretching in a circle around the room—pictures of Mount Majestic, of fields ripe for harvest and orchards ripe for picking, of fishing boats on the sea and brown seals on the rocks, of goats and squirrels and pelicans.
And most of all, there were pictures of Leafeaters, with arms and legs growing like crooked branches out of their green robes. One such figure on the wall nearest to her was so lifelike and looked so stern that Persimmony had to touch it to make sure it was only a picture.
She felt as if she were seeing the island for the very first time. But what would it look like if the giant awoke? Would the mangrove trees run into the ocean? Would the green orchards lie smashed in a mess of leaves and spoiled fruit? Would the giant be so tall he would block the sun?
“There must be something here,” mused Captain Gidding, gazing at the walls in wonder, “some clue to where we should go. In the best works of art, you can’t always figure out the meaning immediately. Sometimes your heart knows first, even while your mind is still lost.”
“We’ve been around the whole room,” said Persimmony, “and there is no picture of the Leafeaters digging a tunnel through the mountain, and no map of the city.”
The captain looked around a bit nervously. “I . . . I think we should go through one of the biggest doorways, with the arches of vines above them.”
“Why?”
“Because they’re so beautiful.”
The vines painted along the bottom of the walls and over the arches were indeed very beautiful, but Persimmony didn’t see what that had to do with finding a way through the city. “Well, that still leaves four doors to choose from.”
“I think we should take one as far as it goes, and hopefully along the way we’ll meet someone who can give us directions,” said one soldier.
“I think we should bang our swords together until they hear us and come running, and then we’ll attack them,” said another.
The Rise and Fall of Mount Majestic Page 12