by Joan Aiken
At last Dido became bored with her own company—for Noah Gusset was curled up asleep, Mr. Multiple and the lieutenant were playing chess, and Plum, a silent man at all times, was knitting himself a sock, while Captain Hughes, having written up his log, was deep, as usual, in aerostatics.
Seizing the chance when the train stopped at a wayside halt to take on more wood and water and allow a customs official to inspect the foreigners' credentials, Dido slipped out of the first-class car onto the rock platform beside the track.
"Hey, young 'un! Where are you off to?" demanded Lieutenant Windward, sticking his fair head out.
"I'm a-going in the boxcar for a bit," said Dido. "I'll be all rug; don't you fret your fur."
She was startled at the bitter cold of the mountain air, high up here between Ambage and Arryke; she made haste to scramble into the second-class car, where the atmosphere was as warm as a nesting box. There were no seats at all in here, and the passengers—who were mostly sunburned peasants, bringing their goods to the city—all squatted on the floor. They wore sandals, ponchos, goatskin trousers, and a dozen hats apiece, and the floor was littered with melon seeds, pineapple tassels, and plantain rinds. However, the human climate was a great deal more cordial than in the first-class accommodation; Dido was greeted cheerfully enough, and offered cherries from a basket, a bite of a delicious fruit called chirimoya, and a mugful of chicha, a drink not unlike cider. She learned, partly by sign language, since the peasants mostly spoke Latin, that they came not from Tenby, but from small clearings in the forest, and that they were coming to sell their hats in Bath. She herself was bombarded with questions.
"Why is the gringo captain coming to Bath? Why is he permitted to do so? Why does he leave his ship?"
"He is coming to visit your queen," Dido said.
"Wants to see Her Mercy, do he? Why, in the name of Grandmother Sul?"
"No," said Dido, "she wants to see him. She wants him to do summat for her."
This was received with puzzlement and wonder.
"What could the gringo captain do for Her Mercy that her couldn't do for herself? A powerful wise woman she be!"
"Pick up the Cheesewring with her bare hands and sling it into the middle of Dozmary Pool, her could!" Dido gathered that these were local names for Mount Catelonde and Lake Arianrod. "Make old Damyake Hill blow sparks into King Mabon's beard. She's a powerful one, she be. Could turn Severn Water back'ards through Pulteney Bridge. Ar, she'm a rare 'un, old Queen Ginnyvere."
"Why doesn't she have a king?" Dido asked. "In England we have both."
They were all amazed at her ignorance.
"Course there be a king! Didn't you know that? Lives in his own place, top o' Beechen Hill—in the Wen Pendragon. But he don't come out. Wounded, he were, in the wars."
"What wars?"
"Long-ago wars. Old, old wars. He won't get no better till the red rain do fall. Then the great gates'll open, and he'll go home again."
"What red rain?"
Nobody was certain about that. "He'll get better in his own time, maidy. Simmingly."
"Maybe that's what the queen wants," said Dido. "Maybe she wants Cap'n Hughes to recommend a doctor from England."
This precipitated a great discussion among the peasants, some saying that the queen could do anything, and consequently needed no help from outsiders, others pointing out that she must have had some reason for summoning the gringo captain.
In the middle of this, Dido was greatly startled to see the tall, thin, black-clad figure of Bran the storyteller unfold himself from a corner where he had been dozing unnoticed and move into the middle of the car. He had his white bird on his shoulder, and greeted Dido with a friendly nod.
"Oh!" cried Dido, delighted, "now you can finish the story about the man and the stick."
But the word story instantly aroused a commotion among the other passengers.
"A story—a story! Your Excellency—Your Venerable—Your Squireship—Your Knowingness—do'ee now, kindly, tell us a story!"
"Very well," said the man called Bran. "If you will all be so good as to keep quiet, so that I can make myself heard." Instantly a dead silence prevailed, apart from the spitting of melon seeds.
Bran thought for a moment, cleared his throat, and began.
"Once a man called Juan applied for a post as night-watchman at a warehouse. He had been promised the job. But when he got there, the overseer said to him, 'That job has been given to someone else.' 'To whom?' furiously demanded Juan. 'To that man who just left.' Looking out of the door, Juan was amazed to see that the other man exactly resembled himself. 'Stop, you impostor!' shouted Juan, chasing him along the street. 'You have stolen my job.' But the other man turned a corner, and Juan could not find him.
"Then Juan fell in love with a beautiful girl. But when he asked her to marry him, she said, 'I am already promised to that man on the other side of the marketplace.' And he looked across, and there was his double again. 'Now I shall catch you, you wretch!' he bawled, and he rushed across the square. But when he reached the other side, his rival had gone. And many times this happened; if it was the last loaf on a baker's counter, or the last place on the ferry, it was always the double who got there first.
"Then, one day, as Juan was going down the hill toward the river, he saw his double not far ahead. Now I shall catch him, thought Juan, and he began to run. But as the other man walked out on the bridge, a great flood came roaring down the riverbed and washed the bridge away. And Juan wept and raged and would not be comforted. 'For,' he said, 'now I have lost my enemy forever.'"
"Is that the end?" asked Dido.
"That you must decide for yourself," said Bran.
Dido reflected.
"Well, I think he was a looby, to carry on so," she said. "If I'd been him, I'd never—"
But Bran was briskly going round among the peasants, collecting small copper coins in a wooden cup. Then he sang a song, accompanying himself on his harp:
"I can hardly bear it
Waiting for tomorrow to come
Joy I want to share it
Waiting for tomorrow to come
Love I must declare it
Waiting for tomorrow to come
For that's the day
When she, when she, when she, when she, when she
Will come
My way.
Time seems to creep
Waiting for tomorrow to come
Clock has gone to sleep,
Waiting for tomorrow to come
Patiently I keep..."
His voice was drowned by a tremendous shuddering, creaking, and clanking as the train drew to a standstill.
"Are we taking on more wood and water?" asked Dido, as Bran stopped singing.
"No," he said. "We have reached our destination. We are in Bath."
The peasants began leaping out of the boxcar. In two minutes they were all gone. Dido skipped out after them, and found herself on an icy, windswept stone pavement, inadequately sheltered by a thatched canopy. The air was bitter.
"Make haste, if you please, Miss Twite!" came the captain's voice. "No time to loiter about—and much too cold. We must get poor Holystone into shelter. Come along!"
"But Bran," said Dido, looking round. "Won't you please tell me—"
Bran's tall figure, however, had vanished among the peasants in their flowing ruanas and high-piled stacks of panama hats. Reluctantly Dido followed the captain's impatiently beckoning arm and walked, shivering, through a kind of open-fronted station hall to a paved courtyard beyond. Here there were hackney carriages waiting, and a number of sedan chairs with their poles resting on the ground, and the blue-coated chairmen standing by them.
"Sydney Hotel!" Captain Hughes ordered one of the hackney drivers in a loud, authoritative voice. "Gusset—Multiple—take Mr. Holystone up carefully and lay him on the carriage seat."
Mr. Holystone was still asleep, it seemed.
"Sydney Hotel?" one of the chairmen said to Dido. "Hop
in, missie, and we'll have you there in the flick of a pig's tail."
Dido would have liked to ride in a chair—they had gone out of fashion in London and she had never seen one—but Captain Hughes called irritably, "Into the carriage, Miss Twite—look sharp now! We don't want to keep poor Holystone hanging about in this bitter cold!"
"Sorry, mister," Dido apologized to the hopeful chairman, and she clambered into the carriage. Glancing through the window next moment, she nearly dropped her cloak bag—for an instant she could have sworn that the rear chairman was Silver Taffy. But then he moved into the shadows and disappeared. It can't have been him anyway, Dido thought; what would he be doing here? We left him behind at Bewdley.
Dusk was falling as they clattered out of the station yard, over bumpy cobbles. Dido looked down to see if they were silver, but the light was too poor to be sure. It was freezing cold inside the carriage; and the steam from the horses' nostrils looked like dragons' breath. Dido shivered on the slippery leather seat and huddled against the comfortable warmth of Mr. Midshipman Multiple. He, Noah, Dido, and Plum rode in this carriage; Captain Hughes, Mr. Holystone, and Lieutenant Windward were in the other, which had already started.
Despite the cold, Dido would not have minded a long drive if it had been possible to see anything of the town, but there were hardly any streetlights; the only illumination came from dim gleams, here and there, behind lacecurtained windows. Bath Regis, for a capital city, seemed very quiet and glum.
Luckily it proved no more than a ten-minute trot from the station to the Sydney Hotel, over a covered bridge with closed market stalls on either side, and along an extremely wide street; then the travelers had reached their destination and were being solicitously helped to alight by half a dozen porters and footmen.
By the time Dido entered the vestibule, she heard Captain Hughes giving orders that a dressmaker be fetched immediately to fit his young companion with a court dress.
Oh no, thought Dido in despair, not again!
"Madame Ettarde is Her Majesty's court dressmaker and mantua maker, sir," the landlord was respectfully informing the captain. "Her establishment is in Orange Grove, no more than a step from here. But it will be all shut up at this time of night. My counsel to you, sir, if the matter is urgent, would be for the young lady to call round there first thing in the morning, with her abigail, and see what Madame has on the premises; that way, no time will be wasted."
Captain Hughes thought well of this advice. "If Holystone is feeling more the thing, he can take you there tomorrow as soon as this Ettarde female opens shop," he told Dido briskly. "I wish to spend no more time than need be in Bath, which seems a devilish dismal place, and is cold as a coffin. If Madam can rig you out in time, perhaps we can go to see Her Majesty tomorrow afternoon."
Ettarde, thought Dido. Where have I heard that name before?
She packed the name away in the corner of her mind which held unanswered questions. Such as the name Elen—where had that been mentioned, apart from on the cats' collars? And who had worn a gold ring? And what did Bran's stories mean?
"Meanwhile," went on the captain, "we had best dine, and then you, child, may retire to your chamber. I have instructed Mr. Multiple to keep watch outside your door, as Holystone is ailing; we want no repetition of what occurred in Tenby."
Dinner, in the large, bare, and ice-cold dining room, was a horrible meal of hot water with bits of egg and potato floating about in it, succeeded by what Lieutenant Windward unhesitatingly identified as boiled llama and beans, followed by hard green bananas. Dido, who, like the rest, found herself breathless, aching, and limp, affected, as Mr. Holystone had prophesied, by height sickness, was glad to go off to bed, exchanging a rueful grin with Midshipman Multiple, who took up his station outside her door on a cane cot. A doctor had been summoned for Mr. Holystone, who had been carried to his chamber long before, but no doctor would come out at night in Bath, it seemed.
Dido tumbled into her damp and freezing bed—which consisted of a heap of quilts on a wooden frame—and was soon asleep.
She woke before dawn, hearing the cry of the watch: "Six o'clock and a fine, frosty morning!" and was thereafter kept awake by other street cries—milk girls, porter boys, straw-hat vendors, needle and powder sellers—and by the mewing of cats and the clatter of ironbound wheels over cobbles.
Recalled to wide wakefulness and curiosity, Dido scrambled out of bed (she observed now that the bedclothes were simply a pile of hides with the shaggy wool attached), pulled on such clothes as she had taken off the night before, and went to the window. Drawing back lace curtains adorned with blobs of red and blue wool, she discovered a stone balcony outside, so she opened the window and stepped out into the blistering cold. Sucking in her breath with shock, she retreated, wrapped herself in one of the shaggy hides, and returned to study the scene before her.
The city of Bath Regis lay in a kind of natural hollow. The biggest and most impressive buildings were grouped at the bottom, and streets of smaller dwelling-houses, elegantly laid out in circles, squares, and crescents, rose in tiers up the sides of the hilly basin. Cactuses, among the buildings, and spiky trees (which Dido later learned were called sigse thorn and capuli cherry) here and there indicated the location of a park or public garden. The houses were square, handsome, and clean, built of cream-colored stone; they looked brand-new, though most of them were many hundreds of years old, being preserved in excellent condition by the dry mountain air. The Sydney Hotel stood at the end of a large oval circus, and faced down a wide street.
At the far end of this street was the covered bridge which the travelers had crossed last night. Already morning traffic was plying busily up and down—carriages, carts, and a kind of streetcar which consisted simply of a roofed platform on wheels, drawn by mules. Burros were plentiful; also to be seen were numbers of the large fawn-colored llamas, ambling along at their leisurely gait, and gazing about them with absentminded expressions; these did not pull carts, but carried bundles on their backs, and were led by drovers, sometimes in processions of twenty or more. Leaning farther over her stone parapet, Dido discovered with amazement that the story had been true—the cobbles were made of silver, or some similar metal; though littered over with a layer of dry, pale dust, they gleamed where a hoof or wheel had scraped off the dirt.
"This must be a rich town!" thought Dido. "After all, I'm glad I came. Wonder which of them buildings is the palace?"
Away to her left rose a high wooded hill, on top of which she noticed a tall slender tower—but that seemed too small for a palace. Dido craned about inquisitively, wishing that she could see farther—a thin mountain mist concealed the more distant buildings.
And then, suddenly, as the sun climbed higher, the mist was drawn into the upper air and disappeared. Dido fairly gasped at the prospect which then lay revealed. Now she could see that Bath nestled in the scooped-out summit of a low hill in the middle of a high, flat plateau encircled by a ring of thirteen volcanoes—Ambage and Arrabe, Ertayne and Elamye, Arryke, Damask, Damyake, Pounce, Pampoyle, Garesse, Galey, Calabe, and Catelonde. All around the city their great symmetrical cones reared up like ninepins: some quite near at hand, some farther off, some snow-covered, or laced over by glaciers, some reddish, some llama-colored, some blue with distance, some flashing in the sun, some rising out of dazzling ice fields, some shrouded by forests on their lower slopes. From half a dozen ascended gray-white or black columns of smoke, showing that these great chimneys of the inner world still contained fires in their hearts and might erupt. One, Catelonde, had an enormous rock, big as a cathedral, balanced on its summit.
"Wow!" muttered Dido. "I wouldn't fancy being here if they all sneezed together. Guess it wouldn't be quite so chilly in Bath Regis then!"
However, the larger of the smoking peaks appeared to be some thirty or forty miles away; it was to be hoped that there was no great danger from them.
Becoming too cold to remain on the balcony, Dido made her way down to the bre
akfast parlor. Here she found Noah Gusset, Mr. Windward, and Mr. Multiple, partaking of gravelly barley bread and cups of hot chocolate that seemed to consist principally of brown sugar and boiling water.
"How's Mr. Holy?" was Dido's first question.
"He's still sleeping," the lieutenant told her. "Captain Hughes is waiting for the physician. The sleep is so heavy that it hardly seems natural. Meanwhile I have instructions to escort you to the dressmaker, Miss Dido."
Dido pulled a face at the prospect, but still she was longing to go out, and bolted down her unappetizing breakfast with dispatch. In ten minutes they were out in the street, accompanied by Mr. Multiple.
There were no shops in Pulteney Street, the wide thoroughfare which led to the hotel. But on the covered bridge over the rushing Severn they found many little booths; Dido was interested to see that these advertised their wares by means of flags: red for meat, white for milk, green for vegetables, fruit, or flowers, yellow for bread. The stall holders were in the process of unlocking their premises, using enormous heavy keys, shaped like swans or lions or fishes. Many of the people walking about seemed to have wooden legs. Why? Dido wondered. Had they been bitten by aurocs? Rich people, who rode in sedan chairs, wore elaborately piled and powdered hair. The market women had black mantos, or shawls, wrapped tightly round the upper part of their bodies, above long black skirts, and often a kind of blanket, folded in three, on their heads. The men wore ruanas, black jackets and trousers, wooden clogs on their feet, and straw hats. As in Bewdley and Tenby, there were no children to be seen, and Dido was a target for many stares of astonishment, and some hostility.
Mr. Windward pulled his watch from his pocket and consulted it; then he tapped it, with some annoyance. "It's stopped; it never did that before. Still, we must be in good time if the lady opens up shop at nine. It was half past eight when we left the inn."