The Ragwitch

by Garth Nix

  I must have gone the wrong way! thought Paul, angry at all his wasted climbing. He thought of all that effort, and considered going on. But it was obviously the wrong path…

  “Down it is,” said Paul aloud, turning back down the path. But even as he took the first, easy downhill steps, the path seemed to fade away, melting into the yellow heather, or the green-grey mottled stone.

  He took a few more steps, but the path disappeared, leaving no sign of its prior existence. He quickly looked around, and the path uphill was going too—though it was contracting, racing up the hill, rather than fading.

  With a strangled yelp, Paul jumped after it, taking great bounding steps up the slope. The heather brushed against his legs as he crashed through it, chasing the path that retreated just a little faster than he could run.

  Then, without warning, both the path and the boy burst out of the mist, into yellow sunlight. The path suddenly stopped, and Paul jumped on it, taking great satisfaction in seeing his boot-prints on the open dirt. He took a few steps along it, to give himself a head start, in case it started to race away again, and looked around.

  Downhill, a thick wall of mist obscured any view, but uphill, the sun was shining, its warmth already touching Paul’s mist-wet clothes and face. A little farther along, the heather started to fall back, and above this border of heather loomed the grey shale peak that was the top of Rhysamarn.

  But it was what lay in between that attracted Paul’s attention. Just above the heather, but before the grey stone, lay a field of dark brown earth. It was larger than a suburban garden, but not really a decent market garden size. And in the middle of it, an old man was planting something that looked very like cabbages.

  Hesitantly, Paul walked over to the field. Aleyne had told him that the Wise appeared in different guises, but he hadn’t expected an old man planting (or transplanting) baby cabbages.

  “Hello,” said Paul, upon reaching the edge of the field. “I’m Paul. I’m looking for the Wise.”

  The old man looked up from the cabbages, revealing a lined face, rosy cheeks and a reddish nose. His white hair and mustache threatened to weave a mask around his face, but he parted the long locks with a dirty hand. The bright eyes that looked at Paul were in no way obscured or dimmed by his bushy, walrus-like eyebrows, which quivered as he spoke.

  “The Wise, eh? Well, you’ve come to the right place. Rhysamarn—the Mountain of the Wise. Or literally, Place of Wisdom, Mountain.”

  “Yes,” said Paul, doubtfully. This wasn’t the reception he’d been expecting, particularly since the old man hadn’t stopped transplanting cabbages. He had hundreds of them, it seemed, in a wooden box that he dragged along between the rows.

  “Well, come and help, boy,” snapped the old man. “Part of being wise is knowing the value of things. And advice got for nothing is often worthless. In your case, I would say you need counseling to the value of…about eighty transplanted cabbages.”

  “Uh,” said Paul, who’d avoided even doing the weeding in his father’s garden. But he knelt down next to the box of cabbages, and asked, “What do I do?”

  The old man told him, demonstrating how to make a suitable hole, with a clenched fist pushed into the soil, and twisted several times. Paul soon learnt the knack of it, but even so, he lagged behind the old man. Closer to, this potential sage looked even more unsuitable for the role of one of the Wise. He was dressed in a simple robe of what looked like sackcloth, and wore wooden sandals that clattered as he crawled forward on his knees. And having been in the cabbage field all day, he was covered in dirt.

  The sun rose higher above the cabbage planters, and then began its slow decline into the west. As the shadows lengthened, Paul kept looking at the old man, hoping that he was about to call it quits. The cabbage planting business had seemed easy enough at first, but it soon became tiring, and his back was stiff from being bent over all day.

  Failing the signal to stop work, Paul would have welcomed some conversation, or at least some questions regarding why he was there. But the old man was silent as he planted the cabbages with a monotonous regularity; left fist in to make the hole, right hand to pick up the cabbage and place it carefully, left hand to smooth the dirt around it. Over and over again.

  Eventually, the sun sank low enough to send the distant clouds red, and Paul had had enough. He stuffed his current cabbage in a hole, smoothed it over, and stood up, his back creaking.

  “I’ve had enough,” he said, a trace of self-righteousness creeping into his voice. “I’ve been planting cabbages nearly all day—a lot more than eighty cabbages!”

  “One hundred and thirty-two, by my count,” said the old man cheerfully. “I was wondering when you’d realize.” He got up, straightening his back with the help of both hands thrust against his backbone. “Well, I suppose for that number of cabbages, I can give you supper as well.”

  The old man bent down again, and pulled a thick, oil-cloth covering over the box with the remaining cabbages.

  “What do I call you then?” he asked Paul. “Boy? Cabbage-Planter?”

  “My name is Paul,” said Paul. “What shall I call you?”

  “Old Man?” suggested the sage, rolling it off his tongue as if to see how it sounded. “Cabbage-Planter? Tanboule? Tanboule is the name of my house—so you may call me that. Tanboule the house and Tanboule the old man. And one shall go to the other for a supper of cabbage and bacon, bread and tea. Eh, Paul?”

  “Err…that sounds very nice,” said Paul, who was thinking Tanboule didn’t seem so much wise as mad. Still, he did seem to be on Rhysamarn mountain…

  Obviously encouraged by the mention of supper, Tanboule took off up the slope at once, easily outpacing Paul with his long strides. Unlike Aleyne, he didn’t stop for Paul to catch up with him, and was soon a dark speck against the grey shale. Paul struggled on angrily, slipping on the wet slabs of stone and wishing he’d never even seen the stupid old man and his cabbages.

  Then he looked up, and even the dark speck had gone. Tanboule was nowhere to be seen, and there was no sign of a house up on the rocky peak, or even a cave mouth. Paul hesitated and looked back down the mountain, but the mist was as thick as ever. And he could clearly see the cabbage-field—a little square of dirt on which he’d spent considerable labor.

  “At least I deserve to eat some cabbage,” muttered Paul. “And I’m going to get some, like it or not!” And with that promise, he started back up the shale, using his hands when the rockface became too steep or broken.

  Twenty minutes later, he reached the approximate spot where Tanboule had vanished—and the mystery of his sudden disappearance was explained. Paul had been climbing a peak that he thought was the very pinnacle of Rhysamarn, but it was only a lesser projection from the high mountain that lay before him. Down below Paul, there lay a saddle between the two peaks: a tiny valley of yellow heather, nestled between the greater and lesser peaks of grey shale.

  In the center of this valley, halfway between each peak, there was a house. Or at least, Paul thought it was a house. It was obviously wooden, but each end was curved up, to touch the red-tiled roof and its iron chimneys (of which there were three). Even stranger, it didn’t appear to have a door, and the only windows were high up on the sides, and round like portholes. In fact, it looked like a particularly fat houseboat, stranded in the heather at least six hundred meters above sea-level, and over two hundred kilometers from the nearest coast. A bird flew from its roof, a black shape silhouetted against the orange sky, triggering memories of old pictures showing an ark atop a mountain, and an old man sending out a dove.

  But it was still a long way down, and the air was chilling as the sun set, so Paul steeled himself, and carefully began to make his way down the treacherous slate.

  When Paul at last arrived at Tanboule’s peculiar house, the sun had finally given in to the night. But the house was lit up inside, with cheerful yellow light flickering through the porthole-windows, and smoke billowing from at least two chi
mneys, carrying with it the smell of frying bacon and cabbage.

  But Paul couldn’t find a door. He walked around the whole building twice, and even felt the wooden planks, but there was definitely no doorknob, handle or bell.

  “Hello in there!” shouted Paul, after his third circumnavigation. “Mister Tanboule! It’s me, Paul! Can I come in?”

  “Of course, lad,” came the reply, in Tanboule’s voice—but Paul couldn’t see him till a rattling sound attracted him to the other end of the house. There, a rope ladder was dangling down the side, leading up to what looked like the tiled roof. However, by shielding his eyes from the lantern light, Paul saw that there was a space between the eaves of the roof and the top of the wall—and that was the door.

  Tanboule was waiting at the top as Paul climbed in through the hatch. “Welcome aboard, Paul,” he said, standing aside to let Paul drop down from the roof-door.

  But Paul was staring at the interior of the house through the hatch, and wasn’t moving.

  Immediately below him, Tanboule was standing on a raised platform next to a shining binnacle, complete with a huge bronze compass. Next to that stood a ship’s wheel, with a note tacked to it, which read Rudder temporarily disconnected, T.

  A ladder led down from the first platform to another which extended for most of the length of the house, ending in another ladder going to a forward platform and down through an open hatch. In between the two higher platforms were casks and bags, chests and rugs, all piled haphazardly around some old wooden furniture, and three cast iron stoves, one of which had a frying pan hissing away on it. On the floor next to the cooking stove, a cat was playing with what looked like a piece of dried haddock.

  “So it is a boat!” exclaimed Paul, jumping down to admire the binnacle. “I suppose you ended up here when the floods went down?”

  Tanboule shook his head sadly. “I built it here. Forty years I studied with the stars, calculating the advent and time of a Great Flood. Then ten years building this craft, high up on the mountain.”

  “To save all the animals?” asked Paul, looking around. It didn’t really look big enough for two of everything, not with all the junk.

  “To save myself!” declared Tanboule. “I never did like animals much. But it was all a mistake. The Flood never came!”

  “Why?” asked Paul. “Were the stars wrong?”

  “They weren’t wrong,” snapped Tanboule. “The stars don’t lie—but they can be mischievous. There’s nothing they like better than a joke, particularly if it’s a long one, played on someone who deserves it.”

  “Why did you deserve it?” asked Paul, as they descended to the long platform, which Paul already thought of as the “main deck.”

  “I deserved it because I was wise and selfish,” sighed Tanboule, flicking a tear from a white-browed eye. “Now, I am wiser (I hope), and less selfish. Which reminds me—why are you here?”

  “Well…” began Paul, but Tanboule interrupted him, crying out: “Cabbage! The cabbage is burning! Come on, lad—save the cabbage. You can tell me your story over dinner!”

  Over a dinner of slightly burnt cabbage, bacon, tea, and thick, crusty bread, Paul explained his troubles to Tanboule. At first, the old man hadn’t seemed terribly interested, but he soon became more serious, and asked Paul many questions, particularly about Julia, and the pyramid of flaming sticks that had transported Paul from his world to that of Tanboule (as he put it).

  “So,” said Paul, when he had told all he could remember. “Will you help me?”

  Tanboule sighed, and rubbed his great white eyebrows with the back of a gnarled hand. “We will help you, Paul—but I fear that more than good advice is needed here. For your story is but a little part of a bigger story, one in which many people have played their parts, for better or for worse or for no effect at all.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Paul, who thought his troubles were complicated enough already. The fact that they might be like one tiny part of a huge puzzle was both terrifying and hard to understand.

  “It is partly your story,” said Tanboule, taking a great swig of his tea, “because it is the story of the Ragwitch. A long, and sadly true tale which has yet to find a happy ending. Since it will undoubtedly have some bearing on your troubles, I suppose I’d better tell it to you—though this particular tale is worth far more than the planting of one hundred and thirty-two cabbages. Fetch me another cup of tea, Paul, while I compose my voice.”

  Composing his voice seemed to entail Tanboule eating more bread, so Paul poured himself some more tea as well, while he was waiting. Not that the drink was exactly what he’d call tea—it was sweeter, and scented with lemon and raspberry, but it was made from similar leaves and boiling water.

  At last Tanboule finished eating and, stretching himself back, began, without introduction, his rambling tale—part history, part legend, but mostly a true account of an ancient evil.

  “Quite a few centuries ago, this Kingdom was a less settled place than it is now,” began Tanboule. “There were no northern towns or castles, and fell creatures held sway over the lands north of the river Twyn and regularly came south to raid the smaller towns and villages.

  “These raids, by such creatures as the Gwarulch, were an accepted part of life, albeit an unsavory part. But, as such acceptance is wont to do, it merely prolonged the crisis that was to arrive.

  “In this case, the raids became worse, and after a few years, the creatures were no longer merely raiding, but actually conquering the northern marches of the Kingdom.

  “The King in those times was a lazy fellow, addicted to the quiet contemplation of dragonflies on mirror-smooth lakes. In fact, he even had a mechanical dragonfly that flew over a pool of the stillest mercury. Without his active control, the Canton Lords each tried to deal with the problem individually—but they failed to check the hordes of North-Creatures that were pouring over the Twyn. At last, the creatures came to the inner cantons of Salace and Thrisk—and the King was forced to do something.

  “Fortunately, he did the right thing, which was to abdicate in favor of his son, who became King Mirran the Ninth. He was the total opposite of the old, dragonfly-watching King, and he gathered his army and attacked the North-Creatures, driving them back across the Twyn and into the far North.

  “This took several years, of course, and during that time, the nature of the war changed. And sadly, it was King Mirran who was responsible for the changes, and the destruction that was to come of them.

  “You see, all through this long war, magic had played no part. There were more Sorcerers, Wizards, Witches and even mere dabblers about in those days, but the Patchwork King would not allow them the use of Magic for war.”

  “The Patchwork King?” asked Paul. “Who was he?”

  “He ruled, and as far as I know still rules, in the land of Dreams and Shadows, where everything that could be is and isn’t at the same time—and if you can understand that, you’re Wiser than all of us here at Rhysamarn. But it is from this land that all Magic stems, and it is to this land that all Magic-Workers must go, though now I doubt if any more than a handful know the way.

  “This was not always so, for there were tales and legends of an Age of Magic, when wars were fought with all manner of Magic. Yet no true records survived from this Age, and it became no more than a legend known only to a few who sought after ancient lore.

  “One such person was a young Witch, who worked as a healer with the King’s Army, for the Patchwork King allowed Magic for this purpose…”

  “A Witch?” interrupted Paul. “I thought they were always evil?”

  “Whatever gave you that idea?” asked Tanboule. “They’re like everybody else—good, bad, or middling. Anyway, she sought greater powers, and when not actively working, she researched ancient lore, talked among the stars, and learnt spells that had been lost for many centuries.

  “It was this learning that she took to the King. For somewhere she had learnt of the Angarling: ancient warrior
s turned to stone, and submerged beneath the sea in the shallow waters off the Sleye peninsula. These warriors, she told the King, had sworn to serve against Evil, but had been taken unawares by an enemy Sorcerer, and turned to stone. The existence of these Angarling proved that the ancient wars of Magic had occurred, and that there had been a time when the Patchwork King did not rule all Magic.

  “Obviously, these Angarling knights were from this time, before the Patchwork King, so he would not be able to forbid their use. Furthermore, the spells required to wake them and make them serve were also from a time outside the reign of the Patchwork King—and the Magic the spells contained did not come from his land of Dreams and Shadows.

  “Anxious for any help, the King agreed to let the Witch do her work. Foolishly, he did not consider one obvious fact: that if this waking Magic did not come from the Patchwork King, it could only belong to that other, Nameless Realm, so long closed to mankind—a place of death and witless violence, nightmares and fear, ruled by no one and composed only of a raw, ungovernable power…a power wishing the destruction of all life that did not worship it.

  “Indeed, the Witch had already gone too far in her researches, and had been tainted by the lure of this power. With the King’s permission, she continued, and opened one forgotten door too many. She walked within the dark void beyond, and exchanged her heart for power, and her love became a lust for slaughter and dominion over every living thing.

  “She danced the steps of Seven Wakenings, and the Angarling made their heavy way out of the sea at Sleye. But not to join the King. She cast another spell, and the once-noble Knights were perverted to her cause. With the Stone Knights’ help, she joined the North-Creatures, and became their Queen.”

  Tanboule paused to move the cat from where it had started to play with his empty plate, and took it up to lie in his lap. The cat purred happily, as Tanboule stroked it, and resumed telling the story.