The Whispering Mountain

by Joan Aiken

  Having now made sure that both men had really gone, she slipped down from her oak tree and gathered an apronful of ferns. Then, stooping to pick more as she went, taking care not to let her course appear too particular, she began to move towards the spot where Bilk had finally stowed the mysterious bundle.

  Much to her annoyance, just as she judged she must have reached the point where Bilk had been standing when he made his remark about a gold waistcoat and frumenty, she heard a loud hail from below her, on the floor of the quarry:

  “Aha, there, good morning, good morning to you, my dear young person, maiden, female! Can you inform me, I pray, whether the cavern containing the famous Devil’s Leap is in this region, area, location, vicinity?”

  This new voice, deep and fruity, was certainly neither of the two she had heard before. Looking down the bushy slope Arabis perceived a strange figure: a tall, fat man, rather dark-skinned, and most oddly dressed in tight-fitting pantaloons and a sort of tunic, over which he wore a dazzlingly striped satin sash and a fur coat. He had a fur cap on his head and a pair of moustachios which curved upwards like terriers’ tails.

  Fixing his large earnest brown eyes on Arabis he scrambled up towards her, puffing heavily.

  “Can you give me this information, my esteemed young damsel? I shall be most greatly obliged.”

  “The Devil’s Leap cave is nowhere near here, sir, indeed,” Arabis said quickly. “Down in the middle of the town you will find the way to it, right by the Town Hall, if you do know where that is?”

  “I recall, I remember, yes, yes, I bear in mind. A large most hideous building, the colour of camel’s liver, is it not?”

  Arabis gave him directions how to find it, but he did not seem to be paying very close attention; all the while she spoke, his eyes were roaming up and down the side of the quarry.

  “These holes, now, these gaps, these apertures? The ancient goldmines, yes? There is no gold-mining now, I believe?”

  “No sir, not for many a year,” Arabis replied, wishing he would go away.

  At this moment the sun popped into view over a shoulder of the mountain, making all the dewdrops in the ferny quarry sparkle like diamonds. Immediately the stranger flung back his head and let out an amazingly piercing yell—“Aie, walla, wella, willa, aie, walla wo!” until the echoes, dashing across the quarry and bumping into each other, sounded like the shouts of an advancing army. Birds flew squawking from bushes. Heads were poked in sleepy, startled inquiry from caravans and tents.

  “A religious observance, my dear young lady,” the stranger explained urbanely, panting a little.

  Arabis, seeing that for the moment she had lost her chance of investigating the men’s bundle, tried to memorize the spot where she stood and began to move casually downhill.

  The stranger accompanied her, making polite remarks about the beauty of the countryside, all the while keeping up a sharp scrutiny of their surroundings and of Arabis herself.

  “You are a native, resident, denizen of this charming spot, my dear person?” he was inquiring, when there came another interruption. A large black-and-white bird, which had been hovering in an undecided way high above the quarry, now sighted Arabis and dropped like a plummet on to her head, cushioning his landing with a skilful last-minute brake action of the wings.

  “Hey-day! Lackadaisy! My stars!” exclaimed the foreign gentleman. “Madam, I fear you have been assaulted by a songster, one of the feathered tribe! Allow me to assist you!”

  “No danger, sir, I thank you,” Arabis answered, laughing. “This is my tame falcon, Hawc.”

  “Aha, indeed, verily? For sure,” the man said, his muddy brown eyes studying Hawc with their usual keenness, “how foolish I am. I now observe that he brings you a letter, missive, epistle.”

  “I—I beg your parson, sir?” Arabis said, very much surprised. What could he mean? But when she pulled on a glove, which she always carried hanging at her belt, and gently dislodged Hawc on to her wrist, she saw that the stranger seemed to be right: impaled on one of the falcon’s long, talons was a small piece of paper.

  “A well-trained fowl, bless me!” the man remarked, trying very hard to see what was written on the paper. Arabis slipped it quickly into her glove but not before she had had time to read the printed words:

  The Infatiable gluttony of the Peacock tends to alienate our attachment from it, while the harfh fcream of its voice diminifhes the pleafure received from its Brilliancy.

  A page from Owen’s precious little book! But how curious! How had Hawc come by it? And where could Owen be?

  “Er—excuse me, sir,” she murmured hastily. “Leave you I must, now, I am afraid. No trouble at all to find the Devil’s Leap you will have; anyone in the town will be telling you. My dada is wanting his breakfast now, just, see.”

  In fact, as she well knew, this last was hardly true. She reached the caravan to find Tom Dando wreathed in paper and streaked with ink, scribbling away at his poem; verses poured out of him like water from a spring. One or two people were waiting to buy medicine or have their hair cut; luckily they seemed in no hurry and kept respectfully silent, sitting in the sun on the steps outside the van as the sheets of paper piled up higher and higher inside. Arabis glanced in, to make sure Owen was not there—which he was not—and then whispered,

  “Down the town I am going, Dada. Back home in time to make your dinner!”

  Her father nodded abstractedly; his right hand with the quill never for a moment stopped its gallop across the paper. Arabis left him and threaded her way through the fair; a number of people were stirring now, fetching water, blowing on the ashes of last night’s fire, grilling bacon. Before entering the town she made sure that the foreign gentleman was not following her.

  Just before she reached the first houses, Arabis loosened a long tress of her fine black hair and held it up for the falcon to take in his beak.

  “Easy now with the pulling, Hawc, my little one,” she said. “Remember hair will come clean out if you will be tugging too hard.”

  Keeping his beak firmly clenched on the strand, Hawc flew slowly off, with long easy flaps of his wings, and Arabis followed him at her swiftest walking pace, sometimes breaking into a run.

  Right down the cobbled street and through the little town of Nant Agerddau they went—bakers, butchers, and grocers were still shuttered, and the whisper of Fig-hat Ben, up above the rooftops, was the only sound to be heard. Midway along stood the new town hall, backed against the cliff, and by it, with pillars and a portico, very grand, was the entrance to the big cave, a long, high tunnel leading into the mountain. Arabis thought, as she sped past, that she caught a glimpse of a fat, fur-coated figure standing a short way inside the tunnel. He had his back turned and did not seem to notice her.

  Hawc, eager to reach his objective, flapped along faster and faster, giving Arabis some terrible tweaks; she could run like a deer but there was no possible hope of keeping pace with him when he flew at top speed.

  “Wait you now, you old mule of a bird, os gwelwch yn dda!” she panted. “Will you be having the scalp off me?”

  He gave an apologetic croak, “Hek, hek, hek!” and slowed down a little, but soon forgot and began going faster again.

  “Wchw!” Arabis gasped. “I have a stitch on me that could have been made by Cleopatra’s Needle, indeed!”

  But catching Hawc’s anxiety she ran as fast as she could; in little more than ten minutes they had left the town behind them and entered the stretch of narrower gorge below.

  “Taking me to those empty houses, are you?” Arabis said, much puzzled. “Are you sure the sense is not clean gone from you, you old gwalch?”

  But the falcon drew her on steadily, though now more slowly; it was plain he disliked the neighbourhood, and Arabis could see why, for the whole overhang of cliff above seemed likely to topple down and bury them at any time.

  “Hai how!” Arabis muttered. “Men will be fools, I am thinking, to build houses in such a place.”

/>   Tiptoeing near, she looked up and down the deserted row and softly called,

  “Owen! Owen! Are you by here, boy, or is my old hebog making a fool of me?”

  She wondered if Owen could have run away from his grandfather and be sheltering in one of the houses, though she would have expected him to choose a less dangerous refuge. But there was no answer to her call.

  Then, as she went slowly down the row, a slight movement attracted her attention; she peered through one of the glassless window-holes. For a moment she thought she had been mistaken; she was looking into an empty front room with a door leading to an inner room beyond. The door stood half open. Then she saw what had caught her eye: a foot extended from behind the doorpost and was moving up and down, as if somebody in the back room were lying on the floor doing keep-fit exercises.

  Greatly startled, anxious, but unhesitating, Arabis pushed open the front door and went quietly in. Hawc, with a harsh croak of disapproval, let go of her hair and went to sit on a little spindly ash tree a hundred yards off.

  “Owen?” Arabis said in a low voice, and then, a little louder, “Is anyone by here?”

  No answer, but a faint muffled grunt from the next room. Arabis ran through, and what she saw there made her eyes go round as saucers.

  “Owen!” she whispered on an indrawn breath. “Achos dybryd, who have done this to you, boy?”

  Owen’s right hand had been tied to his left foot, and his right foot to his left hand. The ropes fastening them together had been passed over the hen-roost beam that crossed the room at knee-height, so that he hung suspended from it. He could have rested, if he chose, on the straw-heap which was piled under the beam at one point, but he had preferred to work his way along to the door so that, by dragging the upper part of his body painfully half over the beam, he might be able to make that faint, desperate signal with one foot. A thick cloth was tied over his mouth, which was stuffed with hay.

  “Wait, you, a little half-minute and I will have those things off you,” said Arabis through her teeth, and with shaking hands she pulled out the small knife that she carried always for cutting witch hazel and wild liquorice. In a moment she had the cords cut and lowered Owen gently to the floor. He made an inarticulate sound behind his gag, and rolled his eyes towards the roof warningly.

  “Easy, then, boy!” She sawed through the cloth and flung it in a corner; Owen spat out the dusty hay that had been half choking him.

  “Danger!” he croaked. “Mustn’t stay here, Arabis—house may be buried—any minute!”

  “Hwt, boy, will I be leaving without you? Stir your old stumps and come along with you, then!”

  It took Owen three tries before he could stand upright, so numb from lack of blood were his hands and feet; but at last he managed it, leaning on Arabis, and staggered out of the house.

  “Best leave me now, Arabis,” he muttered. “If those men came back—if they caught you—’

  “What men? No, never mind for now! Leave you? Ffiloreg! As if I should do such a thing! But where can I take you that is not too far?” she muttered, her brows creased. She could see that he was feverish; plainly it was out of the question that he should walk a mile uphill, right through the town, and back to the Dandos’ caravan.

  Besides, whoever it was that had tied him up so brutally—could that strange man with the moustaches have had something to do with it?—might come back, or be in the town and see them go by.

  “I have it!” she exclaimed at length. “I will take you to Brother Ianto! Do you think you can walk a quarter of a mile, Owen bach?”

  He nodded faintly. She tucked her arm through his and led him up the gorge, away from the dangerous overhang to a point where the cliffs on either side of the track were sheer vertical rock.

  “Only a few more steps now, cariad! There’s brave you have been. Wait you now, by here, while I call the good brother.”

  Owen, dizzy and only half conscious, was not particularly surprised when she disappeared into a cleft in the rock. Hawc, who had been flapping along uneasily behind them, planed down and settled with a croak on Owen’s shoulder.

  In a moment Arabis was back with a small, brown, wizened man in a monk’s habit who took one look at Owen and remarked,

  “Bed, him! Bit of fever there is on him, nothing much. Come you this way, my man.”

  And when Owen, taking a faltering step, began to slip towards the ground, Brother Ianto, with arms thin and wiry as steel cables, picked him up bodily and carried him into a warm, steamy cave at the end of a short passage. There he was laid on a bed of moss and obliged to swallow a mug of hot water. It had a strong and disagreeable taste of rotten eggs, but went gratefully down his dusty and aching throat.

  “He will do,” Brother Ianto said. “A long sleep, that is all he needs.”

  “I will be gone from you, now, then,” Arabis said, “and I will be bringing back some of my good broth and herb tea by and by. And I am grateful to you, indeed, Brother Ianto!”

  “No matter for that, child! I have had a fine pot of ointment from you for my rheumatic old leg-bones, that have made me lively as a young colt. And your worthy father have cut my beard with not a penny to pay, and loosed a noble gale of poetry on me while he did it. No thanks needed among such friends!”

  Arabis left the cave, and the sound of her footsteps echoing in the rock passage was the last thing Owen heard before he sank into a heavy, dreamless sleep.

  When he woke up again he lay gazing about him in bewilderment. The little cave was dim, lit only by two tapers that stood in front of a rude statue of St. Ennodawg, and misty from the steam of a little hot spring that ceaselessly bubbled and sank in one corner. Brother Ianto sat working away at something in another corner; presently he took his work, whatever it was, outside into the daylight to have a look at it. Owen, roused a little more by the movement, now began to remember where he was and what had happened to him; involuntarily, he let out a groan of anguish.

  Brother Ianto came back quickly.

  “Are you in pain, with you, boy?” he said.

  “The harp!” Owen muttered. “They took the harp, I couldn’t stop them. But that’s not the worst—’

  He was unable to go on just then. At the thought of the letters he had been made to write, a great lump of despair and misery came up into his throat and nearly suffocated him. His grandfather would think—everybody would think—

  “Oh, what shall I do?” he muttered hopelessly.

  “Humph,” said Brother Ianto. “When did you last have to eat, boy?”

  Owen tried to remember. He had eaten a little with the thieves, Prigman putting morsels into his mouth. Was that one day ago, or two? How long had he been in the empty house? He shook his head.

  “As I thought,” Brother Ianto said. “Weak from lack of food. But in a good hour here comes someone to put that right. Split peas I have by here, but I am thinking they would be a bit hard for you.”

  Arabis came into the cave. Her hair and the red cloak she wore shone with raindrops. She carried a covered basket in one hand, and a covered can in the other.

  “Herb tea first,” she said, pulling a little flask from the basket, “then broth.”

  Owen would have preferred the broth first; the herb tea tasted even nastier than the mineral water from the cave spring, but both Arabis and Brother Ianto assured him that it would do him good, and when it was drunk he did feel strong enough to sit up and swallow two mugfuls of delicious broth.

  “And I brought you some picws, and a loaf of bara brith for your supper, Brother Ianto,” Arabis said, taking them out and putting them on a ledge of rock. The spicy scent of plums and cloves and cinnamon filled the cave.

  “Too good for me, they are,” Brother Ianto objected, busy at his work, whatever it was. “Dried peas are enough.”

  “Oh, pooh, pooh,” Arabis said. She surveyed Owen anxiously and asked him, “The sleep have done you good, is it?”

  He nodded. He did feel better, almost well in body, but
his mind was so sore and wretched that he hardly knew how to bear it.

  “Right, then,” Arabis said. “If I don’t have your story out of you this minute, I am afraid my ears will grow tongues on them and be grumbling away at you like a pair of old ravens.”

  So Owen told his story.

  “And then they left me in the cottage,” he concluded. “Bilk tied me up the way you saw, and put the gag on me; I thought I was done for.”

  “How did old Hawc come to find you?” Arabis demanded.

  “I heard him outside; at least I heard the whistling sound of a hawk’s dive and I thought there was just a chance, as you were staying in Nant Agerddau, that it might be Hawc.”

  “But how could you call him?”

  “Do you remember when I was travelling with you in the wagon, how I trained Hawc to come if I whistled ‘The Ash Grove’?”

  “No danger I’d forget,” Arabis said laughing, “when Dada made us walk a hundred yards behind the wagon because he said that if he heard that tune one more time he would go wild mad and take the shovel to us. But, Owen bach, you had that great gag stuffed in your mouth. How to make the old hebog hear you?”

  “Oh,” said Owen, rather embarrassed, “I whistled through my nose.”

  “Through your nose, boy? What kind of a tale is that? Tell to the crows!”

  “True, though,” Owen said, and produced a strange droning tune through his nose that might just be recognized as “The Ash Grove.” Hawc, who was perched near by on a knob of rock, turned his head alertly and was across the cave with one flip of his wings to sit on Owen’s shoulder. “I learned it on the boat coming home from China; the bo’sun taught me,” he added awkwardly.