The Whispering Mountain

by Joan Aiken

  “Well! There is useful!” Brother Ianto said in his quiet way. “Otherwise there would not have been too much chance for you, I am thinking.

  “Just let me get my hands on that pair,” Arabis muttered vengefully. “Hard put to it their own wives will be to recognize them! And taking your granda’s precious harp—oh!”

  Her hand flew to her mouth. She stared at Owen and Brother Ianto.

  “What did you say their names were?”

  “Bilk,” Owen said. “Bilk and Prigman.”

  “That was it, then! Where are the wits in me? That was what those two men were stowing away so tidy! And each of the wretches meaning to rob the other!”

  “What are you talking about, girl?” But there was a little more colour in Owen’s pale cheeks.

  Arabis told of her morning’s watch and the two men hiding their booty.

  “Keeping an eye on the quarry all day, I have been,” she said. “But no chance to go back and take a peep—always someone about down below. Hurry back now, though, I must, or maybe that one called Bilk may go and shift it again.”

  “I’ll come with you,” Owen said, struggling to his feet, wonderfully restored by the news. “Those men are dangerous. If they caught you, gracious knows what they mightn’t do—really you shouldn’t go near at all.”

  “There’s silly! Go I must, boy, if the place is to be found.”

  Owen realized the truth of this. “Let us hurry, then,” he said. “If I can only get the harp back to grandfather, then the letters will not matter so much—perhaps I can explain—’

  He was nearly dragging Arabis from the cave.

  “Wait, you, my young hotheads,” Brother Ianto said. He rummaged in a crevice, and produced another monk’s robe. “Put this on you, boy, it will fit you well enough. It was poor Brother Twm’s, who was so glad to get home to his native land that he died and went to heavenly rest the very next day. Pull the cowl over your head, see, and if those two men should be roaming the town they will not know you from Merlin the Magician.”

  He then put on a pair of spectacles, at which Owen gazed enviously, pulled his own cowl over his head, and added, “Go with you, I will. No harm to have another along, and eager I am, indeed, to see this Harp of Teirtu.”

  Outside the rainy, misty afternoon was rapidly turning to evening.

  “Wbwb!” shivered Brother Ianto. “Homely it is to be back in this curs—this curiously damp climate. Doubled up like an old man I’d be with the rheumatics if it were not for your wintergreen ointment, Arabis my child.”

  They set off, Arabis in the lead, Brother Ianto hobbling as fast as he could with a stick, Owen bringing up the rear. Even after the rest and hot food, he was still stiff from his long painful hours of captivity, and purblind without his glasses; however he gritted his teeth and stumbled along, just managing to keep up. The thought of recovering the harp was a powerful spur.

  The fair, when they reached it, was in full activity: stalls, brightly lit, offered everything from gingerbread men to the Water of Perpetual Youth; hawkers called their wares, children screamed and laughed and raced about on painted hobby-horses, clog-dancers stamped on wooden platforms, and the music of harps, flutes, and dulcimers tinkled and lilted in the rainy air. But beyond the circumference of the fair, up in the back of the quarry, all was dark and silent.

  “Light, we need,” Arabis muttered, and she slipped off to her own caravan and returned with a horn lantern which threw a small golden flickering shine on to the wet brambles and oak leaves and ferns. Then she led the way, slow but sure, in among the bushes, following in reverse the course she had taken that morning.

  At last she whispered, “This was the place. Marked it careful, I did, by that old stump like a mother hen with chickens. Up there, not twelve feet above, should be the hole where he laid the bundle.”

  They moved carefully up the hillside, noting traces where Bilk had passed; here a footprint in a tussock of moss, there a broken sapling. The slope they were climbing ended in a short vertical cliff and soon, among the bushes at its base, they found the cave, a gaping black hole about the size of a chair-seat.

  “That’s it, that must be it!” Arabis breathed. “Look, you can see the marks in the mould and leaves where he pushed the bundle into the hole.”

  Forgetting his weariness Owen hurled himself up the hill to the opening and thrust his arm inside. He could feel nothing except earth and sand, which had silted up on the floor.

  “I’ll go in,” he whispered. “Then you pass me the lantern and I’ll look round.”

  Ducking his head and compressing his shoulders he crawled through the small opening and then reached back with an arm for the light. His two companions waited anxiously in the dark.

  Once right inside the little cave he found the ceiling was higher, and he was able to hold up the lantern and survey the whole place. His hopes, which had been feverishly high, came down with a sickening rush. For the harp was not there. A depression in the soft sand, just inside the entrance on one side, showed where something had lain, but marks also showed where it had been dragged out again.

  The blow was crushing. To have come so near where it had been hidden, and to miss it by so short a time!

  “Bilk must have come back for it while Arabis was rescuing me,” Owen thought wretchedly. For a moment he almost wished that she had not found him; that he had been left in the cottage until the cliff came down and buried him. Turning to edge his way out of the cave—for it led nowhere, merely ending in a blank wall—he hit his head a violent crack against the low roof; two red-hot tears of pain spurted out of his eyes. Angrily rubbing them away with an earthy fist he passed the lantern out to Arabis.

  “It’s not here. Bilk must have come back for it,” he whispered, trying to keep his voice from wavering.

  “Diafol fly away with that Bilk,” said Arabis, very cross. “Are you sure?”

  He wriggled out before answering, then merely nodded to her anxious, questioning look. She saw that he was speechless from disappointment, and gave him a hug.

  “There’s sorry I am to have brought you all this way for nothing, Owen dear,” she said quietly. Brother Ianto took the lantern from her, and observed,

  “Let us hope the men can still be caught.”

  “Come back to our caravan, now, is it?” Arabis said. “Maybe Dada will have finished with his poetry for the day. Good sense he do often have, when the poetry’s not too thick in him for the sense to find a way out.”

  But when they reached the wagon they heard the sound of voices coming from inside. Arabis stood on tip toe and peered through the window.

  “That strange man I met this morning, it is!” she whispered, rather astonished. “Talking away to Dada as if his tongue ran on wheels! Better, maybe, if he do not lay eyes on Owen—not sure I am if I trust that fat stranger.”

  “Right,” Brother Ianto agreed. “Back to the cave, us, and a bit more sleep for this young man. On the way I will inquire a bit as to the whereabouts of those two wicked crwydadiau. Then in the morning we will see what is to be done.”

  He turned towards the town.

  Owen had a desperate longing to creep into the warm, cosy wagon—no matter who was inside—curl up on his old bunk, and fall asleep. But another part of him forbade this idea. What right, after all, had he to expect a welcome there? His grandfather had snubbed and insulted Arabis and her father; besides he, Owen, had lost the harp, behaved like a coward, and disgraced himself; if Arabis had know all that before, she would probably have thought him not worth rescuing.

  Without a word, without even saying goodnight, he turned and stumbled shortsightedly after Brother Ianto.

  Arabis, puzzled and a little hurt, was on the point of calling after him when the door of the caravan opened and Tom Dando appeared, seeing the stranger out.

  “Goodnight, a thousand goodnights, my dear sir, esquire, mister! It has been a most respectable pleasure to chat, natter, chew the rag with you! We shall meet again soon
for another instructive palaver, I trust. Aha! Here comes the helpful young person who set me on my way this ack emma!”

  The foreign gentleman made such a low bow to Arabis that his moustaches brushed the steps. She curtseyed in return, first glancing back warily to make sure that the stranger had not been able to catch a glimpse of Owen and Brother Ianto. But they were both safely out of sight in the darkness.

  5

  Another disappointment awaited Owen in the town: Thomas, landlord of the Boar’s Head Inn, told Brother Ianto that the two English peddlers Bilk and Prigman had sold their ponies, bought provisions enough for several days, and left the town well before noon.

  “Miles off they’ll be, by now,” he said, “and not sorry to see the backs of such a pair!”

  Back at the cave, Owen and Brother Ianto ate the picws that Arabis had left—it was oatcake crumbled in warm buttermilk, but the buttermilk had grown cold—then Brother Ianto said evening prayers and they went to bed. Brother Ianto, lying on the rock floor, was peacefully asleep within two minutes. But Owen could not sleep; for what seemed hours on end he tossed unhappily on his mossy couch, staring with hot unseeing eyes into the dark.

  At last Brother Ianto’s quiet voice said,

  “Try to get some sleep, boy, is it? Worrying will do no good with you.”

  All Owen’s misery burst out.

  “I’m nothing but a useless coward! I couldn’t even guard the harp—any of the other boys in Pennygaff would probably have been able to fight the thieves or raise the alarm, but what did I do? Get myself captured like a fool—like a baby! Arabis had to rescue me—and that’s the second time she’s done it! I daresay if those men had captured her, she would have found some way of escaping with the harp. And I’m sure she would never have let herself be forced to write those shameful letters—she would have died sooner.”

  “No use to grieve over what is done,” Brother Ianto said calmly. “All you must think of now is how to right the harm. You are free, and that is good—after all it was not the action of a fool to summon the hawk and send a message—nor that of a coward to fight with the thieves when you knew you were bound to lose.”

  “All it did was get my glasses smashed,” Owen said bitterly. “Now I couldn’t recognise the men if I met them in the street! And heaven knows how I’ll ever get another pair of glasses. And without them I’m even more useless—I couldn’t even get w-work …”

  He broke off, biting his lip, but Brother Ianto exclaimed,

  “Glasses, are you needing glasses, with you, boy?”

  “They got broken—’

  “Fool I was, not to have noticed for myself the short-sighted way you were peering about,” Brother Ianto went on, ignoring Owen. “Bit of a concussion, I thought you had. But glasses, now! I can have you fixed right before you can say haihwchw.”

  “You m-mean”—Owen was stammering with excitement—“you know someone who can make them?”

  “Make them myself, boy—maybe I even have a lens to suit you now, just.” He struck flint and steel, lit a rush dip, and showed Owen his working materials in a velvet-lined wooden case—flat glass discs waiting to be ground into lenses, some lenses already shaped, wires for making spectacle frames, and a variety of fine little tools and polishing materials.

  “Came to the right place you did, indeed,” he said cheerfully. “Always interested in the optics, I was, but in China I learnt a whole lot more. Wonderful clever spectacle makers those old Chinese boys—seems they have had the trick of it for thousands of years. Taught me a thing or two, they did. Now the old sun is not far off poking his head up. Say my morning prayer I will, then we’ll get some breakfast down us, and then I’ll fit you up with a pair of glasses you’d be proud to nod to his majesty King James in.”

  The instant breakfast was done (they ate the bara brith that Arabis had brought; it was delicious: a juicy, spicy raisin loaf), Brother Ianto set to work. First he tested Owen’s sight by making him hold his little Book Knowledge at different distances and say when he could see to read. But since Owen, who knew the book almost by heart, found it hard not to cheat unconsciously, Brother Ianto wrote letters of varying sizes on the cliff with a bit of chalk, and made Owen read those. Then he brought out different lenses from his collection and looked at Owen’s eyes through them. Finally he fell to reshaping two which he said would need only slight alterations to suit Owen perfectly.

  “See like an eryr, like an old eagle, you will.”

  “But how shall I ever pay you for them?” Owen worried.

  “One thing at a time, is it?” Brother Ianto said. “The Harp of Teirtu is more important than paying for a pair of glasses, I am thinking.”

  But the prospect of being able to see again seemed to Owen worth almost anything he could offer. Feeling so blind and helpless had been half his trouble. A new hope filled him now and he sat deep in plans, while Brother Ianto carefully ground the lenses and polished them to a fine brilliance. Then he twisted wires into a frame and adjusted it to fit Owen’s face.

  “Brother Ianto,” said Owen, while the monk was inserting the lenses into the frames.

  “Well, boy?”

  “You said you had been in China?”

  “Lived there fifty years,” Brother Ianto said. “Fine and hot for my rheumatism, see. And then Brother Twm and I began to pine for a sight of the old country, so we made up our minds to walk home. Came right across Asia, and very hard going, but interesting, mind you, and the people most obliging.

  “Didn’t it take quite a long time?”

  “Ten years we were at it. Eh dear. There was a walk. But we had a lift at the finish. Saved the life of a gentleman whose coach had fallen in a crevasse in the Caucasus mountains, we did, Brother Twm being a handy man with a rope. Very grateful and civil, the gentleman, and asked a friend of his, captain of a ship at the port of Smyrna, to bring us as far as Cardiff. So that saved us to walk up through Europe, besides a couple of swims across the Bosphorus and the English channel. Bit troublesome those might have proved, Brother Twm being no swimmer.”

  “I suppose you didn’t happen to meet with my father while you were in China?” Owen said wistfully. “Captain Hughes, of his majesty’s sloop Thrush?”

  “Indeed we did, and a fine man!” Brother Ianto said warmly. Owen’s face lit up. “Met him at the port of Yngling, we did, when he was bringing supplies to relieve the pink-eye epidemic ten years ago.” Owen’s face fell again.

  “You haven’t seen him since then?”

  “No, my boy,” the monk said kindly. “But doing his duty I am sure he is, wherever in the world, so take comfort you have a worthy man for a father.”

  “Yes,” Owen said in a small voice.

  “Come now to try these glasses, is it?”

  Brother Ianto fitted the hooks over Owen’s ears and the bridge across his nose, setting the lenses straight. Instantly the candlelit walls leapt into focus so sharply that they seemed pressing on Owen’s face and he took a step back.

  “Why,” he said in a dazed voice, “it’s all so clear! Far better than with my other glasses!”

  “How long had you worn them?”

  “Five years,” Owen said, joyfully turning his head about to see the cave from all angles.

  “Grown out of them, most likely. Now, boy, if you should have the bad luck to break those, not to worry, is it? but come you back to Brother Ianto. Couple of weeks more I shall stay here, for half the folk in Nant Agerddau seem to be needing glasses with them. And the steam in this cave have helped my stiff bones, indeed.”

  “Where will you go then?”

  “Back to the old monastery at Pennygaff, where else?”

  “Not much left of it now,” Owen said doubtfully. “Nothing but a ruin, it is.”

  “All the more reason to start building again, then, and quick too.”

  Owen took a step forward, and the walls of the cave rushed to meet him, and the floor seemed ready to come up and bump his chin. He walked outside, and f
elt as if he could put up a hand to touch the highest crags of the black cliff frowning above.

  “Not so fast, boy!” Brother Ianto called, hobbling out. “Where are you off to now, then?”

  “I must go back to my grandfather,” Owen said, for this was the resolve that he had reached while Brother Ianto had been at work. “I must go back right away and tell him how the harp came to be stolen.”

  “Good,” Brother Ianto said, nodding, “Straight thinking, that is. Up to my friend Davy Thomas at the Boar’s Head we will go again, to find out is anyone travelling to Pennygaff this day. Quicker if you can get a ride than to walk over Fig-hat Ben on your two legs, or maybe get eaten by wolves in the forest.”

  Owen saw the sense of this, though he was longing to start that instant. But at the Boar’s Head he had a piece of luck. An Englishman on a lathered horse had just stopped in the middle of the street and was shouting out a public announcement.

  “Oyez! Oyez! Oyez! If any of the loyal citizens of this town do know of the whereabouts of His Royal Highness Prince David James Charles Edward George Henry Richard Tudor-Stuart, Prince of Wales, ye are instantly to declare it!”

  Nobody spoke at all; the crowd remained hushed in wonder while the man (who was dressed in the uniform of a king’s messenger, with a short staff, a three-cornered hat, and gold lace, very mud-splashed) repeated his proclamation. Then whispers broke out.

  “Gracious to goodness, now! O dear, dear. Lost, can he be? Only fancy if his royal highness do be fallen down a pot-hole! They do say the old king is ill, with him, on his deathbed, and calling for his son! There’s pitiful, poor old James Three! Terrible, it is, and not a soul can say where by Prince Deio is at! Shocking, shocking!”

  When the Englishman had called out his message three times, he rode across to the inn, to exchange his tired horse for a fresh one, and inquire the shortest way to Pennygaff. At this moment a chaise and pair which had been pausing outside the inn, evidently for its passenger to listen to the announcement, started up, and rolled briskly on its way towards Caer Malyn.