The second thing that struck her was that her eyelids were no longer working. Or at least, that seemed to be the case, as, though she thought she had lifted them, she could discern not the faintest chink of light. She rubbed her eyes, sitting up stiffly, and came to realize that they were indeed open, but clouds were obscuring the moon, and there was no light at all from the fire because it had gone out.
“Oh, dung heaps!” she whispered crossly to herself, annoyed at her own stupidity at letting the vital campfire die, as well as falling asleep when she should not have. In fact, judging by the complete out-ness of the fire, she had been asleep some time, and indeed someone else should have taken over the watch, so she was annoyed with them too. She groped inside the rucksack, searching for Hans’s lighter, for she was in no mood to attempt using a flint and bits of dry moss to restart the fire. She emptied the entire contents of the bag, but there was no lighter to be found. Deciding that Hans must have it in his pocket she crawled over to where she knew his hammock was strung. She noticed that this seemed to be in the opposite direction from the sound of his snore, which made little sense. But there was the trunk of one of the sturdy trees holding up his hammock, and there was the actual hammock with his actual self in it. Gretel fumbled in what pockets she could find. Hans snorted and gave a small shout of query, but otherwise remained undisturbed by having his person searched.
“Got it!” Gretel declared to the night. She stepped away from Hans and tried to get the thing to light. This required her to flick open the lid and then smartly strike the small wheel at the top with her thumb to produce a spark that in turn would light the oil inside. After a couple of false starts, a spark did appear, though it did not catch the fuel. She tried again, spinning the little wheel more rapidly. Several sparks were produced. As she was busy working the uncooperative device, Gretel became aware that Hans’s snore, which was not after all coming from Hans but from a few strides off to her left, was moving a little closer. She did not have time to become unsettled by this fact, because it was only as she noticed it that the fleeting light of the sparks appeared to illuminate an object, large and heavy, that must, in fact, be responsible for the snore. Before she had the chance to react to this revelation, her thumb at last struck a successful blow to the lighter, and the fuel caught. She stood clutching the device, her thumb holding down the lever that fed the flame, finding herself immobilized by the sight that was now shown to her. In the uneven glow, there, not more than a stride from her, stood a large, gray, shaggy wolf, emitting a steady, sonorous, guttural growl.
The combination of shock and terror can bring about a variety of responses. The person who is shocked and terrified might turn and run, screaming all the while, heedless of the wisdom of their actions. Another might take their courage in both hands and fling themselves with a battle cry at the cause of their alarm. Yet another might freeze, as if spellbound, standing unable to so much as utter a cry or raise a hand to defend herself. If anyone had ever asked Gretel what her reaction might have been to finding herself face to face with a hungry-looking wolf in the middle of the forest in the middle of the night, she might have chosen the first of these options as her most likely response. But nobody had ever asked her, and she had never given any proper thought to the situation arising. Whether such a dinner table discussion would have helped prepare her for the event, she would never know. All she could do was allow her instinct for survival—which was large and well-developed—to spring to the fore.
“Wolf!!” she bellowed at the top of her not-inconsiderable voice. “Wolf! Wolf! Wolf!”
Her fellow campers, so abruptly roused from their sleep in their hammocks, leaped into action.
That is to say, Cornelius leapt, Ernst fell, and Hans did his best to sit up.
Gretel had to keep flicking the lighter to create a flame, so that the wolf was glimpsed in a series of terrifying, frozen, split-second images. This staccato illumination made Gretel feel as if she were witnessing some sort of traveling sideshow where all movements are jerky and sudden. As she continued her frantic flicking, she saw Cornelius caught mid-leap in the light; the wolf caught mid-snarl; Ernst caught mid-stumble; Cornelius again, arms low and wide, crouching; the wolf opening its terrible jaws; Ernst scrambling toward the nearest tree; Hans still trying to sit up; Cornelius circling the wolf; the wolf crouching and circling also.
“Ouch!” Gretel yelped as the lighter grew so hot it burned her fingers and she dropped it, removing the only light Cornelius had to help him battle the snarling beast. She dropped to her knees, searching frantically through the leaves and vines on the ground. Dreadful sounds came from the wolf as its growling grew ever more threatening.
“I have it!” Gretel cried as her hand found the lighter. Still on her knees she flicked it again and again. During her search she had moved close to Hans’s hammock, and in her haste to work the lighter she managed to set the flame to the fabric, which caught fire with startling ease.
Hans gave a yelp and pitched out, landing heavily, winded, and unable to run. The blazing hammock lit up the campsite. To her horror, Gretel saw that the wolf had Cornelius backed up to a tree and was advancing upon him. She looked around for a branch to set ablaze from the flaming hammock so that she could run at the wolf, but none came to hand.
“Herr Arnold!” she yelled, “for pity’s sake do something!”
From his perch on a low branch of a chestnut tree Ernst gave a wavering reply and then started muttering and stirring the air with one hand. Too late Gretel realized he was about to resort to using some of his magic to intervene. She opened her mouth to stop him, but even as she did so a flash of green light bounced past her and enveloped the wolf. The creature did at least pause in its pursuit of Cornelius, which gave him the chance to spring past it, back to the relative safety of the hammock fire. The wolf appeared to pulsate and wobble, and as they watched, both appalled and in awe, it began to shrink. It reduced from a large predator to a medium-sized hound and then a pocket-sized pooch before their very eyes. Alas, whatever magic Ernst had conjured was, true to his previous form, catastrophically flawed. For no sooner had the wolf shrunk to harmless dimensions than it pulsed some more and began to grow again. It grew, back past hound, beyond wolf, and into something nearer the weight and scale of a well-fed cart horse. Its teeth now doubled in size, its body all muscle and violent intentions, it turned to face the group and began to advance once more upon what it clearly regarded as supper.
“Whoops,” said the sorcerer quietly from the safety of his tree.
“Don’t run,” Cornelius warned them.
In truth, there was little danger of this happening. Ernst was in a tree, Hans was still nose-down on the forest floor, and Gretel was on her knees.
“Hold your ground,” Cornelius instructed.
This seemed a more realistic proposition.
“We need something to scare him off,” Cornelius went on. “Something to get the fire closer to him!”
“There aren’t any sticks,” Gretel said. “I’ve searched, there’s nothing.”
The wolf dropped its shoulders lower and continued to creep closer. It was then that Jynx reappeared. The doughty little bat dispensed with swooping and directly dive-bombed instead, scratching at the wolf’s nose. The wolf raised its head to snap at its assailant. Gretel seized the moment. She snatched Hans’s hat from his head, wiped it through the flames of the hammock so that it too caught fire, and then ran at the wolf with it, screaming like a banshee.
The wolf had evidently never been attacked by a fierce Bavarian detective with a flaming Bavarian hat and had not a notion of how to defend itself. Instinct kicked in, and the bewildered animal spun around on its great back paws and bounded away through the forest. Gretel was forced to drop the hat and set about stamping upon it in an effort to extinguish the flames. Cornelius dashed away and fetched an armful of kindling so that the fire could be relit with the remnants of the hammock. Ernst slowly descended from the tree.
“H
err Arnold,” Gretel spoke with a calmness she did not feel, as her heart, currently performing some version of a tarantella, was a long way from settling to its more usual waltzing rhythm, “should there be another occasion in which we come under attack, kindly refrain from employing your magic as a means of defense.”
“I was only trying to help,” he said.
“Well, don’t.”
Hans had at last rolled over and regained his breath and his voice.
“I say! What happened to my hat?” He asked, picking up the charred remains and forlornly turning them over in his hands.
They sat up until dawn, keeping close to the fire, none of them able to contemplate sleep. When day broke Cornelius kicked earth over the embers and the group packed up and moved on, Hans mumbling sadly all the while about the loss of his hat.
“That was very unusual,” Cornelius said to Gretel as they walked.
She shot him a glance to see if he was trying to be funny but his face seemed serious enough.
“I don’t mean the wolf … changing like that,” he explained upon seeing her expression. “I mean that it was on its own. It’s just not how wolves behave. Where was the rest of the pack? Why did it try to attack such a large group? And why was the fire so completely out?”
“Ah, yes, that ….” Gretel began.
“It didn’t just burn up all the wood and go out,” Cornelius went on. “Somebody put it out. And I suspect somebody put that wolf onto us too.”
“Like the three boars, you mean?” Gretel asked.
He nodded.
Ernst piped up. “I believe someone is practicing magic close by. I know you think I don’t know anything about being a sorcerer …” Here he paused in the expectation that someone might protest against this being the case. No one did, so he continued, “… but someone near us is casting spells. I’m certain of it.”
“All the more reason for us to keep moving,” Gretel said. “Another few hours of this and we should be free of this wretched forest and in sight of the Summer Schloss. A moment that cannot come soon enough for me.”
They rounded the next bend and came to a sudden stop.
“Oof!” said Hans, bumping into the back of Gretel. “What now?”
When he stepped to one side and looked up ahead he saw only too well what. The path they had been following, the one clearly marked on Ernst’s map, was no longer the simple, single, slightly twisting track it always had been. Now it split into six versions of itself. Each path looked equally firm, equally possible, equally sensible, but only one could be real.
“None of this matches the map,” Gretel said.
Cornelius shook his head slowly. “Something’s not right here. Those trees shouldn’t grow like that, all leaning up against each other and not reaching the daylight properly. It’s almost as if they’ve been reordered, somehow. Repositioned.”
“Huh!” said Hans. “You’d have to know how to do magic to shift that bunch around.”
Ernst puffed himself up a little and gave a knowing look. Gretel parried it with a glance of her own that warned him against any I-told-you-sos.
“There is deception afoot here, Herr Arnold,” she grudgingly admitted. “Your sorcerer’s antennae might not have been mistaken after all. Someone is playing tricks on us.”
“But who?” Hans asked.
“I suspect Otto Voigt,” said Gretel.
“But why?” Hans asked.
“He has not yet given up hope of preventing his rival’s return to Gesternstadt.”
“But how?” Hans asked.
“First the wolf, now this, who knows what he will try next.”
Ernst said, “He is trying to scare us.”
“He’s succeeding,” Hans said.
Cornelius added, “And now he’s trying to get us hopelessly lost.”
“Not doing badly with that either,” Hans said.
Gretel scowled at her brother. “If you have nothing helpful to add, for pity’s sake be quiet.” She took out the dog-eared map and consulted it once more.
Cornelius read it over her shoulder and put a reassuring hand on her arm. “When a map and a route fail to match up, it’s time to stop relying on it. We have to use something more dependable.”
“Such as?” Gretel wanted to know.
“That,” he said, pointing up at the sun. “It is very simple.”
There followed ten minutes where Cornelius talked a lot and the others listened. He hopped about collecting this twig and that stick, clearing a space on the ground, positioning stick 1 at a certain angle from stick 2, stepping out the optimum distance between the two, jabbering on about the trajectory of the sun from east to west, its point at midday, the shadows thereafter, along with the position of their destination, and how a reading of the line of shade, and its angle between the two special sticks would indicate the direction in which they should proceed.
By the time he had finished explaining his theory he was a little breathless, Ernst was shaking his head in astonishment, Gretel had a headache, and Hans had fallen asleep standing up.
“We need to go this way,” Cornelius said at last, and the weary group moved off once again.
They walked on and on, Gretel forbidding anyone to rest, ignoring Hans’s plaintive words, turning her mind from her own blisters and aching limbs. She refused to let anyone or anything stop them.
“We will continue until we are free of these woods once and for all,” she declared, marching forward. She led the way, though they had to stop for Cornelius’s specialist navigational skills more than once, and though her feet were screaming for respite. At last, just when she thought she could go no farther, the trees began to thin out. The path widened. Where before there had been ivy and brambles, now grass and wildflowers grew. Larch and spruce disappeared, replaced by oak and birch, and even these became fewer and farther between. Finally, stumbling and sore, Gretel led them from the forest and out into the gentle dusk as it fell upon the high meadows. And there, across the valley, set grandly upon its rocky outcrop, stood the undeniably splendid but faintly ridiculous Summer Schloss.
NINETEEN
When they came within a mile of the castle, Cornelius turned to Gretel. “Well, this is as far as I go with you. It’s been a pleasure to share your time in the forest …”
“Herr Staunch, your help has been invaluable.”
Hans looked almost tearful. “Are you leaving us? Not coming to the Schloss, then?”
“Not this time, Hans. I’ve promised to take a family gorge walking and whitewater rafting. They’re counting on me; can’t let them down.”
Hands were warmly shaken all around.
Gretel assured him the moment she received payment for the case she would send him his fee.
“We could not have managed without your assistance,” she told him.
Cornelius shrugged. “Once you learn the skills you need to survive, it’s simple really.”
“Your contribution went well beyond the practical,” she insisted, thinking again of his patience with Hans and his touching care for the welfare of the whole party.
Cornelius smiled, a bright-eyed, youthful smile full of the love of life and zest for adventure. “If you ever want to climb an Alp, or experience the wonders of the desert …”
“I promise you will be the first to know.”
They watched him stride away, all waving when he turned to raise his hand in farewell before the path twisted and he was lost from sight. Gretel heard a heavy sigh escape Hans.
“Come along,” she said. “There is much to be done to bring this case to a satisfactory conclusion.”
“I was rather afraid of that,” said Ernst.
“Me too,” said Hans.
“Do not be daunted,” Gretel said, trying for a bit of Cornelius’s morale-boosting, “we go to a place with comfortable chairs, hot water, excellent wine, and fine food. Let that draw us on.”
It was good to be free of the woods at last. Only Jynx found the daylight to
o strong, so that he sought refuge in the sorcerer’s capacious sleeve for the remainder of the journey. Everyone else, however, felt their spirits lift. The sun beating on their heads was a novelty rather than an irritation, and the brightness and blueness of the sky was cheerful. The white castle gleamed beneath the summer sun, its myriad turrets and spires, its numerous balconies, its countless windows, all sparkling and beautiful as the day itself. However much the Summer Schloss might stand as a monument to man’s vanity and foolishness, it could not help but impress and delight any who looked upon it, whether for the first time or the hundredth.
As they walked, Gretel allowed herself to entertain optimistic notions about how their time at the Summer Schloss might go. She had sent word to Ferdinand telling him of their imminent arrival and taking him in some small part into her confidence, though leaving much for them to discuss. She was confident she would be well received by him, but knew she had a task ahead of her if she was to convince King Julian—or more accurately, Queen Beatrice—of her idea.
She glanced sideways at Herr Arnold. He was still dressed in the robes and droopy-sleeved purple garments of a sorcerer, and he looked like a man worn down by the woes of the world. He had not bathed nor shaved for three nights now, and it showed. It was worrying, therefore, to think that so much of the success of Gretel’s plan rested on his fatigued shoulders. Looking at herself and Hans she was further depressed to realize how ragtag they all looked. Her indecorous garment was hardly suitable for an audience with royalty, and Hans was still dressed as a clergyman. There was little to be done about it, however. She would simply have to rise above these disadvantages and trust to her own ability to put forward a convincing argument. That and Ferdinand’s affection for her. On that matter, she was less confident than she might have been but a few weeks earlier. He was now affianced. Perhaps he might not wish to be reminded that there existed a frisson between the two of them. Certainly, one would think, his fiancée might not wish to learn of it.
The Sorcerer's Appendix Page 18