The Land of the Silver Apples

by Nancy Farmer

  “It was the Midgard Serpent,” said Thorgil. Everyone turned to her. “He’s one of the children of Loki,” she explained. “He was so evil and dangerous, Odin had him cast into the sea. He forms a belt around Middle Earth, holding his tail in his mouth, and when he thrashes, the earth quakes.”

  “That’s what happened here. An earthquake,” said the Bugaboo, pointing at the rocks filling the cave.

  “Rank superstition,” scoffed Father Severus. “Everyone knows earthquakes are caused by Lucifer stamping his foot on the floor of Hell.”

  “The Midgard Serpent and Thor are enemies,” Thorgil went on, ignoring the monk. “Thor likes to fish for him. He cuts the head off an ox to bait his hook, tosses it into the sea, and waits for the stupid beast to bite. The same trick works again and again. Thor pulls up the serpent, but he isn’t strong enough to get him all the way out. That’s what we just saw—the tail end of the Midgard Serpent being pulled along.”

  “Sheer fantasy,” jeered Father Severus.

  “Rune saw it happen in the warm seas to the south, and Rune is not a man who lies,” the shield maiden said with a hint of menace.

  “No one would ever think that,” Jack said quickly. He didn’t bring up his own belief, that the waterspout had been caused by the wind. “Now that the sun’s out, we can look for the ship.”

  They all shaded their eyes and looked out to sea, but even Pega, whose eyes were sharpest, saw nothing except a vast, gray-green expanse. Any evidence of a camp had been destroyed by the waterspout. Jack worked to free his staff, which had been wedged between boulders too large for him to shift.

  “Let me try,” said the Nemesis.

  “Don’t break it,” cried Jack as the burly hobgoblin shoved him to one side.

  “Keep your tunic on. I know what I’m doing.” The Nemesis rolled a boulder out of the heap.

  “Look out!” shouted Jack. He barely had time to yank the staff out of the way before an avalanche of rocks came down. The Nemesis bounced to one side as nimbly as a bullfrog avoiding a crane.

  “See? It worked,” crowed the hobgoblin.

  “What’s that?” said Pega, pointing at the mountain above the cave. High up Jack saw figures carved into rock. They were too far away to make out clearly.

  “I’ll have a look,” said the Bugaboo. He climbed easily, having sticky pads on his fingers and toes. “There’re three sets of pictures,” he announced when he was perched on a high crag. “On one side is a hammer and a branching tree—fairly crude compared with hobgoblin work, but recognizable. On the other are a ship and—I think—a horse, except it has too many legs. In the middle are three triangles bound together.”

  Thorgil screamed. Jack almost jumped out of his skin. “What’s wrong? Are you hurt?” he cried.

  “They’ve gone!” she moaned. “They have gone out over the trackless sea, thinking I am dead.” She curled up on the ground as she had after the demon burned her hand.

  “You know this?” said Jack, wanting, but not quite daring, to hold her.

  “Those are grave-markers,” Thorgil said. “The sign in the middle is the valknut, the mind-fetter that means someone has fallen in battle. The hammer is for Thor and the tree is Yggdrassil. My symbols. The other pictures stand for Heinrich the Heinous. The horse is Sleipnir, Odin’s horse. Heinrich always said he wanted to ride him, but of course you can’t do that unless you’re dead. Oh, curse Heinrich! He really is dead. He’s probably riding Sleipnir right now. And I’m stuck here with a useless hand and no ship.”

  “You can join me at the nunnery,” Ethne said brightly. “We’ll have such fun doing penances together.”

  Thorgil threw a handful of sand at her.

  Father Severus knelt down beside the shield maiden, and Jack feared she would attack him as well. But she had an odd respect for the monk, considering that she’d helped sell him as a slave. “There is a purpose to everything under Heaven,” he began.

  “We call it fate,” said Thorgil.

  “And it is not given to us to understand its workings. You were meant to be left on this beach. I don’t know why. I don’t know why I’m here either, but we have work to do in this world. Wallowing in self-pity does no good.”

  Jack held his breath. If ever there were words calculated to drive Thorgil wild, those were the ones. He saw her face turn pale, then red. Her body tensed.

  Suddenly, surprisingly, she laughed. “You use words as Olaf used to use his fists, thrall-worshipper. I can use word weapons too.”

  “Then I welcome you as an enemy,” Father Severus said.

  They stayed on the beach for several weeks, to allow Father Severus time to recover. Every morning Thorgil climbed to a high rock and sat looking out to sea. She occasionally helped with chores, but every task reminded her of her useless hand. She would throw down whatever she was working on and return to her perch. Jack didn’t have the heart to scold her.

  Father Severus lay under a tree. He seemed quietly happy, but Jack worried about his cough and the feverish patches on his cheeks. “Sometimes I think I did not sleep the whole time I was in Elfland,” Father Severus murmured. “Perhaps that’s why I’m so tired now.”

  Jack understood what he meant. Glamour seeped everywhere there, so that you didn’t know whether you were awake or dreaming. Even Jack’s memories of Lucy were confused. Had he actually seen her? Did she really turn against him, or was it only a bad dream? He found it difficult to remember her face.

  “Some call Elfland the Hollow Land,” Father Severus said when Jack confided these thoughts to him. “It is formed by our desires, but ultimately, it is only a reflection of something else. Do you remember their music?”

  That was the one thing Jack did recall. The music seemed to hang in the air like the last thread of sunlight before total darkness came on.

  “I listened to their voices night after night, trying to despise them,” said Father Severus. “I couldn’t.” He sighed.

  On the beach Pega made an ingenious cairn of rocks that was hollow inside to hold a fire. On top she placed a flat piece of slate for roasting. Jack gathered whelks, sea kale, leeks, and garlic. But the hobgoblins were the champions where fishing was concerned.

  They had a unique method. The Bugaboo perched on a rock out beyond the surf line and dangled his foot in the water. The Nemesis waited behind him with a club. Hobgoblin toes were long and wiggly—the Bugaboo could move all five in different directions at the same time. He demonstrated this to Pega, who told him to go away.

  From below, the toes must have looked like a clutch of fat earthworms. They were certainly attractive to fish, although it was soon clear that it was important to attract the right size of fish. Once, a giant cod swallowed the Bugaboo’s leg and the Nemesis had to knock it senseless before the rest of the Bugaboo followed the leg inside.

  “You won’t find better than that,” proclaimed the king, throwing the fish down before Pega’s horrified eyes. It was large enough to feed everyone.

  “You’re bleeding! That is blood, isn’t it?” She gasped. Yellow-green drops oozed from a row of holes on the Bugaboo’s leg.

  “You’re worried about me,” cried the delighted hobgoblin, turning cartwheels around her and spraying her with sand.

  “Worrying doesn’t mean I care,” retorted Pega, wiping sand off her face.

  “Oh, it does! It does! I’m so happy, I’m going to gleep!”

  “Don’t!” begged the girl, but the hobgoblin was too overjoyed to stop.

  Gleeping, Jack thought, moving out of earshot, had to be the nastiest sound in the world. Hobgoblins did it when they were ecstatic, which was far too often in Jack’s opinion. It was infectious, too. Once one individual began, others took it up, just as a yawn could spread through a crowd. The Nemesis, never a cheerful creature, gleeped softly as he gutted the fish.

  Ethne was hopeless at all chores. Pega tried to teach her to weave baskets, but the baskets fell apart. She let the fire go out and allowed seagulls to steal fish.
When Pega sent her to pick fennel, she returned with henbane. “That’s poison!” shrieked the girl, throwing the plants into the fire. “Don’t you know any better?”

  “We ate henbane salad all the time in Elfland,” Ethne said huffily. “It never did us the slightest bit of harm.” In the end she sat beside Father Severus and memorized Latin prayers. Jack was certain she didn’t understand Latin, but it kept her out of trouble and entertained Father Severus.

  Finally, one afternoon after a meal of roast goose (hobgoblin toes were irresistible to geese, too) the Bugaboo called a meeting. “It is time for us all to go home,” he said.

  “What home?” Thorgil said. “My shipmates have gone, thinking I am dead. Often when the day breaks, lonely and wretched, I bewail my fate. There is no comrade to whom I can unburden my heart.

  “The joys of hall are lost to me

  And a shadow darkens my spirit.

  I awaken from slumber,

  Hearing the tossing, foam-flecked sea.

  My kinsmen appear—how glad my heart!

  But they fade with no word of greeting.”

  Jack, always fond of poetry, admired her fine words, but Father Severus cried, “Good heavens, shield maiden! You make a meal out of misery.”

  “I do not!”

  “A true warrior shows gratitude for the bounty God sends him. You could be drowning in the midst of the sea. You could be trapped in a burning building. A thousand devils might be contending for your soul—not that they won’t someday—but in fact you’re sitting on a pleasant beach surrounded by friends. Fie on this self-pity.”

  “I’ve lost my home, and I don’t have one scrap of self-pity,” Ethne announced.

  “We really must have that discussion about pride, Ethne,” said Father Severus.

  “To return to the immediate problem,” said the Bugaboo, “when fall comes, this beach will be uninhabitable.”

  “Can we build a boat?” said Thorgil with a glimmer of hope.

  “No!” said the Nemesis. “Hobgoblins never, ever go on boats.”

  “Is that because of kelpies?” inquired the shield maiden.

  “They swim for hours if they smell something tasty,” the Nemesis said with a haunted look in his eyes. “They follow you day and night, never sleeping, never giving up. They are tireless.”

  “Now look what you’ve done,” scolded the Bugaboo. “You’ve said the K-word.” He took his friend for a short walk, and when they returned, the Nemesis was a healthy green again.

  “As I was about to say before I was interrupted, it’s time to go home. Fortunately, there’s more than one cave on this coast,” said the Bugaboo.

  Chapter Forty-one

  THE VISION

  Of course. It was so simple, Jack didn’t know why he hadn’t thought of it before. When he, Brutus, and Pega started on their quest, they had camped in a huge underground chamber full of bats. Eight tunnels branched out from that chamber, like the eight legs of a spider. Crumbs. I don’t like that image, thought Jack.

  The earthquake had collapsed one of them, but perhaps the others were still intact. The Bugaboo assured everyone that there were dozens of branches to the Hollow Road and that hobgoblins knew every part of it. “We know a shortcut to St. Filian’s Well,” he said.

  “Won’t it be fall of water now that the Lady of the Lake has returned?” said Pega.

  “The earthquake opened up the well to the Hollow Road itself. It would take the sea to fill it.”

  Sunset was coming on swiftly, and the swallows dipped and circled over the little camp on the beach. Pega and Jack had built a bonfire, and they all enjoyed its lively warmth against the cool of the evening. “I keep putting out fish for them, but they won’t feed,” said Pega, gazing up at the swallows.

  “They don’t eat fish,” Jack said. “I wonder why they’re so interested in us.”

  “Mumsie told them to keep an eye on us. What?” The Bugaboo looked up at Jack’s surprise. “Didn’t I tell you?”

  “You didn’t tell them,” said the Nemesis. “You meant to, but the thought blew straight through that drafty cavern you call a brain.”

  “Then there’s no time like the present,” the king said cheerfully. “Mumsie learned to speak to swallows from the Man in the Moon. Not only that, she learned how to cast her spirit into one. When you went missing, Pega, I was devastated. I thought you were dead until the Nemesis confessed to what he’d done.”

  “I should have kept my mouth shut,” grumbled the Nemesis.

  “Ah, but you felt sorry for me,” the king said. “Underneath that crusty exterior beats a heart of pure frog spawn. Mumsie sped straight off in the body of a swallow to ask Dragon Tongue’s advice.”

  “You know Dragon Tongue?” cried Jack.

  “Well, of course. He’s the Wisest of the Wise,” said the Bugaboo. “He told us Pega’s candle contained the life force of the earth itself. But he warned us that lighting it would move the wheel of the year. Never again would time stand entirely still in the Land of the Silver Apples. We would age—slowly, to be sure, but certainly.”

  “We held a council. Everyone had to agree,” said the Nemesis.

  “And they did, Pega, my love.” The Bugaboo held her hands in his long, sticky fingers. “They said it was worth it to have such a beautiful, kind queen with such a beautiful voice.”

  “Oh, Lord,” said Pega. “I’m responsible for death coming to your people. I feel so guilty.”

  “Nonsense, darling. You merely made us step back into the stream of life. We’d been cut off too long, listening to elf music.”

  Wisps of cloud had turned gold and red. The sea darkened, and the foam caps of the waves stood out more clearly. A breeze quickened the air. The swallows shot away to the mountain, to find roosting places in the hollows of the rock. There was only the sound of the sea and the squabbling gulls.

  “What are they saying?” asked Pega.

  “They’re accusing each other of nest-robbing,” answered Thorgil. “Most of them are proud of it.”

  “You also speak to birds, shield maiden?” the Bugaboo said.

  “I tasted dragon blood by accident. Don’t ever do that. It almost burned my throat out.”

  That night they went to bed early, for they would leave at first light. Pega packed the food. The Nemesis, under Thorgil’s direction, carved her runes into a tree trunk. “They may return. They may see this and know that I am alive,” she said.

  Jack waited until all were asleep before rising and facing the fire. He thought about the swallow he’d seen with the Bard when he was in the dungeons of Elfland.

  Are you a bard? he had asked Mumsie that last night with the hobgoblins.

  Nothing so grand, she had replied. I’ve learned a few things from the Wise, but I’m far too lazy to commit my life to such study. It seemed she was far wiser than she let on.

  Jack cleared his mind and walked sunwise around the fire.

  I seek beyond

  The folds of the mountains

  The nine waves of the sea

  The bird-crying winds.

  It was this beach he had seen when Thorgil, Skakki, and Rune were planning a raid into Elfland. What an insane scheme that was. But if Thorgil hadn’t done it, he’d never have seen her again. Perhaps Father Severus was right. There was a purpose to everything under Heaven.

  Jack put the thought from his mind. It was interfering with his magic. He walked round and round, chanting softly. Sooner than he expected, the night-dark sea beyond his hands brightened and became a hall lit by firelight. It wasn’t King Yffi’s. It wasn’t any place Jack knew … until he recognized a few details: a stained-glass window, an ivory box with the carving of a man being devoured by leaves.

  It was the treasure-house of St. Filian’s. Torches burned on the walls. Most of the chests of gold and jewels had been moved aside to make room for a feast. Monks were drinking and bellowing songs as sullen slaves moved among the tables with food. Jack remembered the monks as being crud
e, but he’d never seen them this bad.

  Some were collapsed on the floor, soaked with wine or worse. Others reeled drunkenly. Two of them traded flabby punches over some insult. They had given up their homespun robes in favor of fine linen and wool. The gifts to the monastery had been looted.

  At the head of the table was a small man almost hidden by his roistering companions. He alone wore the simple garb of a monk, and only he had a humble meal of bread and water. It was Brother Aiden.

  “Please listen,” he said in his gentle voice. “We really must go to the chapel.” No one paid the slightest attention to him. After a moment he rose, and Jack followed him from the overheated hall down long corridors to the chapel. Brother Aiden lit a candle, revealing the ruinous state of the room. Benches were overturned, dust covered everything, and the cross leaned at an angle.

  The little man knelt down to pray. Jack tried to call him, but his magic wasn’t strong enough. Finally, discouraged, the boy left the chapel and wandered through the monastery grounds. He didn’t know where he was going. He wished he could reach the fortress of Din Guardi and see the Bard, but that wasn’t how the vision worked. It showed you what you needed.

  A gibbous moon cast a ghostly presence over the ruin of walls and collapsed buildings. Why hadn’t these been cleared away? But when Jack stepped through the rubble to St. Filian’s Well, he saw that the monks had not been entirely idle.

  The opening of the well had been covered. Somehow, with enormous effort, a huge slab of stone had been dragged over the hole. More stones had been wedged into gaps and cemented there with plaster. There was no hope of anyone ever getting out of that well.

  King Yffi had never intended to let anyone return. Even when the water was restored, the stone had been left in place. He had no honor, as Thorgil would say. Jack was consumed by a rage so complete, he could have called up another earthquake. But the anger snuffed out the vision, and he found himself on the beach with the waves muttering along the shore.