Gaal the Conqueror

by John White

  The raven opened and closed its wings, stared at them intently. Then to their surprise it said:

  The children stared and for a few moments said nothing. Cautiously Eleanor said, "Whatever can you be talking about? If we're not supposed to look at you, why do you stand in front of us like this?"

  "It is the message you must pay attention to," the raven replied.

  "And what is it supposed to mean?" John asked.

  "It means you must not go near the tower-mustn't stare at it."

  "What tower?"

  "The tower you are walking toward."

  "I don't see any tower," Eleanor said. "Where is it?"

  "Farther along this path."

  "Then we'll have to go near it!"

  "You could always turn back."

  "Not on your life!" John said. "Forget it-but could you repeat the words again?"

  The raven made a croaking sound. "Not very bright, are you?" it said. "Very well." And the raven repeated the warning as requested. Then without another word it flew ahead of them and disappeared.

  "What do you make of that?" John asked, a worried frown creasing his forehead.

  "I've no idea what the poem means. It sounds scary."

  "Looks as though we're to pass a tower, and we're not to look at it."

  "Not to stare at it."

  "Is there a difference?"

  "I guess we won't be able to help seeing it. We just mustn't stop and stare at it just walk past quickly, I guess."

  John chuckled. "We had to learn a poem at school-'Oh, what is life if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare?' "

  "Well, we'd best be careful. This is an enchanted area. Shagah is out to get us. I suppose there's something magic about the tower. Don't forget, the sooner we can get through the forest, the sooner-oh dear-we get to tackle Shagah. And once we've done that we get to go home."

  As they rounded the next turn they saw the path led to a bridge over a stream. As they came to the bridge they caught sight of the tower beyond the stream. It lay to the left of the pathway they were to follow. It was tall and circular, built of smooth pinkish-brown stones and crowned with a domed and leaded roof. They could see no door and only one windowjust below the roof.

  "There's a rope coming from the window!" John said.

  "It's not rope-it's hair, long, long braided hair," Eleanor cried breathlessly. "But we shouldn't be looking."

  They turned their heads to one side. "Do you think it could be..."

  "Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down thy hair!" John laughed. He glanced once again at the tower and stared at the rope of golden hair. "You know, anything could happen here. I bet it is Rapunzel's tower."

  They crossed the bridge and stared once again at the tower. ." Slowly they walked toward it. "Just so long as we don't go in. . Eleanor said.

  "There isn't really a Rapunzel. It's just a fairy tale. But I wonder what the tower is all about," John mused.

  "I ... I don't know." Eleanor sounded guilty, and for a few moments they remained standing and staring.

  "You know there's something strong about the way it goes straight up. The tower, I mean. It's sort of powerful and commanding." His voice shook with excitement, and Eleanor turned to look at him, wondering at the change in him. His face was flushed.

  He began to hurry toward the tower, and Eleanor followed. In fact there seemed to be a bit of competition between them to see who could get there first. Eleanor's cautious words were contradicted by her haste. "Power isn't always good," Eleanor said, still hurrying forward. "Remember the Kaiser and the Great War."

  They arrived at the tower neck and neck, and found themselves standing close to the wall, staring at the golden hair. John longed to touch it. Eleanor was uneasy. "We'd better go. We've really spent enough time here. Let's go."

  "I just want to give a tug at the hair to see what happens."

  "Don't, John. Please don't. Remember what nearly happened at the pool of Taavath-Basar!"

  A strange and reckless excitement had gripped John. His heart was pounding and he was trembling a little. But his eyes were shining. "We broke the power of the spell at TaavathBasar. We can break it here too." He extended his hands.

  "John, please. I'm scared. We shouldn't even have looked."

  "Just one tug!"

  "No, John-no!" Eleanor flung her arms round his waist and began to pull. But she was too late. John had seized the rope in both hands firmly, and as he did so it seemed as though his hands became glued to it. It rose swiftly, pulling them both upward and toward the window above, John attached to the rope, and Eleanor whose grip on John's waist had slipped, clinging grimly with both hands to his sword-belt. They caught a terrifying glimpse of the ground falling away beneath their feet and felt that their arms were being torn out of their sockets. A moment later they had been dragged roughly over the window ledge from which the hair had descended, and had fallen in a tangled heap on a wooden floor. They disentangled and picked themselves up, appalled at what they had done.

  They struggled to their feet. Instantly they were aware of someone beside themselves in the circular room. Lying on a bed, apparently fast asleep, was a beautiful young girl. The plaited hair was hers. It was hooked around the head of the bed. Above the girl's bed were the words: "By gazelles and by does I charge you, daughters of Jerusalem, do not awaken love before her time!"

  "Gosh-isn't she beautiful!" John breathed.

  "Oh, I don't know-not really," Eleanor replied. But the face was changing. Slowly it was becoming more familiar. For nearly two minutes they watched the slow transformation, too gripped to move. "It's-it's you! It's you!" John breathed in wonder.

  Eleanor seized John's arm. Her voice was shaky and uneven. "Let's get out of here. I'm scared. Let's get away before anything awful happens!" Even as she spoke the bed with her image of it slowly faded from view and was gone.

  John strode to the window and stared down. The rope of braided hair had disappeared with its owner. He glanced round the room. "There's no door," he said. "We'll have to get down from here somehow."

  "I feel like someone ... I feel like Shagah is right here watching us," Eleanor quivered.

  "Eleanor, listen. We've got to get out of here-"

  "It was Shagah, you know. He's laughing."

  John went again to the window. He looked round the roomwhich was bare of furniture. People in books used sheets to climb out of windows. They knotted them together and tied the sheets to a bed rail. John thought of his cloak and his shirt, but the drop below the window was at least a hundred feet. Frustrated and helpless, he rummaged through his pockets, and his fingers encountered the Mashal Stone. His face flushed. How could he have forgotten the precious thing? What wonderful feelings it gave him! In his haste he dropped it, indeed so hard did he tug to get it out of his pocket, that it landed some dis tance away on the floor. But as they turned to look for it, they saw an old man standing at the foot of the bed. He was wearing a velvet skull cap and had a long black robe lined with crimson, a robe that hid everything except his face and hands. There was an expression of delight on his wrinkled face but his eyes were cold.

  "Shagah! I knew it!" Eleanor said in a barely audible, strangled voice. The chain bearing the Mashal Stone lay at his feet. Before John could do anything to stop him he reached down casually, picked it up, and hid it in the folds of his robe. "This tower is powerful," he said. "We, the tower and I, have dedicated ourselves to the Great Red Goat."

  Eleanor could say nothing. Her whole body was shaking.

  "That stone belongs to me. Give it back!" John cried fiercely.

  "I told him you had challenged us. You have not sufficient power to control the tower or to overcome the Great Red Goat. The tower can only be controlled when there comes one whose potency is greater than either of us. And I doubt that we will allow him to come."

  "You stole my stone! Give it back at once!" John was struggling to pull his sword out, but it seemed to be jammed in its scabbard. He remembered an awful e
xperience in a cave, and his face flushed with angry determination.

  The sorcerer did not seem to notice what he was doing. "The tower will now discharge you, and you will be imprisoned. Be thankful that the goat did not choose to kill you both," he said.

  John took a step toward him, still struggling to extricate the sword. But the sorcerer turned his back on them, and before they knew what was happening he had disappeared. The floor had began to tremble and the trembling grew in power.

  "It's the earthquake again," John said, releasing his grasp of the sword hilt and growing pale.

  "Oh, no! What if-?" Eleanor left the sentence unfinished. The floor began to sway beneath their feet, and a roaring sound grew around them. Suddenly they were flung down. The earth seemed to turn upside-down and they felt themselves dropping through space. There followed a terrible jolt, a resounding crash, and it seemed as though every bone in their bodies had been broken.

  Badly winded, John lay struggling to breathe. When he opened his eyes he could not at first make out where they were or what had happened. But moments later he gasped with astonishment. The earth's tremors had ceased. The tower had fallen. It lay in a long pile of stones and rubble, as though it had toppled like a tall tree felled by a woodcutter. But it must have been done by magic, for John and Eleanor were lying on the grass inside the iron bars of a cage beside the ruins. The treasures they had carried were no where to be seen. As for Eleanor, she lay in a rumpled heap, her eyes closed.

  Eleanor was not dead. She was not even injured, though like John she was bruised and sore. She stirred, tried to sit up, and cried, "Oh! Oh! It hurts! I'm sure I must've broken something!"

  Slowly they got to their feet, testing their limbs, feeling themselves here and there to check for lumps and bumps. John fingered his right eye which was swelling. "It'll probably be worse tomorrow," he said. But neither of them suffered any broken bones.

  Eleanor seemed dazed. "What are we doing in this cage?" she asked. Gingerly they sat down and stared around them. "What happened?"

  "The tower fell down."

  "Yeah-I can see that. But why?"

  "The earthquake, I guess. It's a wonder we weren't killed. It's magic, all right."

  They were too shaken to grasp all that had happened. Only as the afternoon wore on did the extent of their difficulties become clear.

  "I was so scared of him."

  "Of Shagah? I know. There's something about his eyes."

  "He reminds me of my dad."

  "You're kidding! He doesn't look like him at all to me."

  "I know, but I get the same scared, sick feeling-oh, John! I wish you hadn't done it."

  "Done what?"

  "Grabbed the braided hair."

  John said nothing. He himself had been wishing the same thing, but he resented Eleanor saying so. His eye had swollen shut, so he used the other to stare at her balefully.

  "How will we get out?" she continued.

  John shrugged his shoulders but still made no reply. His anxiety was rising. He was thinking (as he tended to in moments of guilt or tension) of his father. Was he still waiting on the frozen lake? As Mab, the powerful seer, his father could raise his staff and melt the bars of their prison! But then he remembered that his father had been on the point of death before they had left Anthropos on their previous visit. If he came back, he would certainly die.

  The afternoon wore into evening. There was nothing to eat or drink. They spoke little. John paced up and down the cage, and Eleanor spent most of the time crying quietly, staring vacantly through the bars. The hope and sparkle had disappeared from her eyes. It distressed John to see her. He experienced a sudden impulse to put his arm around her to comfort her, but it was something in those days that boys would be embarrassed to do. More importantly, the thought that his own folly had brought them into their predicament also stopped him. "She blames me for it," he said to himself. "She'll think I'm just trying to get her to forget what I did."

  At that a feeling of resentment awoke within him again, and with it a rage at his own folly. Repeatedly he asked himself, "What in the world made me do it? It was so stupid." Yet he hardened his heart, glaring resentfully at Eleanor from time to time.

  As darkness began to fall, Eleanor sighed and said, "Do you think he'll come back?"

  John was surly. "Who?"

  "Shagah."

  "I've no idea. Why?"

  "They usually give you stale bread and water in prisons. At least that's what it says in stories. Aren't you hungry?"

  John's voice became hard and bitter. "Sure, I'm hungry. But I suppose you're blaming me for the hunger too. I'm sorrybut as far as I'm concerned, what we both did is water under the bridge. It's no use crying over spilt milk."

  "I'm not crying."

  "You were. You've done nothing else all day."

  Eleanor's shoulders straightened and she glared at John. "I didn't get us into this mess. You did. What are you doing about it?"

  "Oh, don't be such a smart aleck. Sure, you chickened out at the last minute. But you were willing enough to leave the path and come to the tower. You were the first to reach it."

  "I was not!"

  "Oh, yes, you were. I distinctly remember. I couldn't keep up with you. Don't make me out to be a liar too."

  "Well, that's exactly what you are. What's more, you think you know everything about Anthropos, don't you? Just because you came here first, you think you know it all. Well, you don't. You haven't met Gaal yet-"

  I won't bore you with all the details. Their quarrel got a little uglier (they were saying things to try and hurt each other, without really stopping to ask themselves how true they were). But after a while they had nothing new or original left to say, so they repeated themselves endlessly, saying the same things over and over, only more hatefully and with long sulks in between.

  Perhaps the enchantment around had something to do with it. Both were a little shocked at what came out of their mouths. It reminded Eleanor of the sort of things she had heard her father and mother say at home in the trapper's cabin. As for John, though he was shocked, he found he wanted to go on saying ugly things.

  Darkness found them sitting and sulking at opposite ends of the cage, a couple of dim silhouettes wrapped in resentment and self-pity. They must have sat for a couple of hours before John's feelings began to change. He began to realize that he was being both stupid and unfeeling. He was ravenously hungry, as he knew Eleanor must be, and since he had been taught to believe that physical difficulties were tougher on delicate girls than on boys, he decided that he ought to say something. But at that moment Eleanor's silhouette curled into a ball and lay down, and his better feelings took flight. "I guess she doesn't want to make up. Well, if she doesn't then that's O.K with me. Saying I'm sorry wouldn't help anyway. It's not as if I could feed her."

  By and by he grew drowsy, forgot the empty feeling in his stomach and curled into a ball himself. The night was warm and there was no breeze. Slowly an unpleasant half-dreaming, half-waking state came over him. He tried to break out of it several times, and eventually he succeeded. Drowsily he sat up, stretched and then got to his feet. At first he couldn't tell what had happened. Something was wrong-profoundly wrong. When he realized what it was, he cried out in fear. The tower was no longer in ruins on the ground. It stood tall and proud in the thin light of a new crescent moon.

  Over his body, and in spite of his fear, the same feelings gripped him that had assailed him when he had first seen it. He began to tremble with an excitement he struggled vainly to suppress. The blood rushed to his face, and he began to breathe hard. At times he would stare at the tower, gripping the bars of the cage until his hands grew weary. Then he would pace from one side of the cage to the other, before taking up his position again. His skin was dry, and although the night was warm, he began to shiver as if in a fever.

  Sometimes he would talk to himself, trying to solve an urgent problem. But the problem would never define itself properly. He knew his word
s made no sense. "If I could just say the right words it would ... oh, dear, I'm getting it wrong again. Will it never come right?"

  Then the tower started disappearing and reappearing. But sometimes it showed up in the wrong place or had the wrong shape. And sometimes he was sure it was snowing. He broke out in perspiration, felt a little better and lay down again. But then the cycle would begin again, and once more he would shake off the half-dreaming state and stare, puzzled at the tower and at the moon. In one moment of near lucidity he muttered, "It's not a full moon, so I'm not crazy."

  "Of course, you're not!" The words, like the laughter that followed them, startled him into full wakefulness. Shagah stood outside the cage smiling at him. "I've been having second thoughts," he said. "Perhaps we could get on together after A. Would you like me to put the tower inside your cage? It might convince you of my good intentions."

  John said nothing. Shagah's words made no sense. He glanced at the tower, now rising serene and solid against the night sky. Suddenly it disappeared, reappearing immediately, but in miniature before him. And Rapunzel's hair, also in miniature, hung from the tiny window. He heard Shagah say, "I'll have to change your size too."

  And suddenly there he was-at the foot of the tower in the moonlight, hungrily seizing Rapunzel's hair. The only differ ence was that this time the owner of the hair did not seem to be Rapunzel but Eleanor, who was smiling at him from the bed and singing melodiously.

  John trembled. A tumult of feeling swept over him-but his predominant feeling was one of terror. "I don't trust you!" he cried, hoping the sorcerer would hear him. "You're trying to fool me!" The building shook angrily at his cry, and once again it began to sway before collapsing about him in ruins. For a long time he lay shaken and trembling, still inside the cage, sobbing from time to time. Light filtered across the sky and the sun was about to rise when he eventually fell into a real sleep, and for a couple of hours he knew nothing more.

  When he woke the sun was shining brightly. He turned his head to look for the tower, but it lay in ruins, the stones scattered as they had been when it first fell. He shook his head. "It must have all been a dream," he muttered and looked over at Eleanor. She was sitting and watching him, and he could see that she was pale and had been crying. Her hands trembled, and she seemed to have shriveled inside herself. It reminded him of the Eleanor he had seen in Canada.