Spellbound

by Anna Dale

  No sooner had she spoken than the two guards burst out laughing, leaning upon each other weakly for support.

  The woman laughed too, but not unkindly.

  ‘Lodestar is my mistress,’ she explained. ‘I’m her servant, Dimpsy. Come in, won’t you, Athene? I’d be obliged if you’d wipe your feet.’

  Feeling rather foolish, Athene stepped over the threshold and found herself standing on a doormat. It was the first doormat that she had seen since arriving underground.

  As she wandered further into the home of the Low Gloam Chief, Athene noticed other things which made her eyes bulge even more. There were rugs on the floors and pictures on the walls and proper wooden tables, chairs, sideboards, wardrobes and chests of drawers. It was almost like the interior of a real house, except that there were earthen walls where wallpaper should have been and there were no television sets or cookers or refrigerators or gadgets of any kind. Despite its out of date appearance and the lack of any windows, Athene thought that Lodestar’s home was like a palace compared with the bare little hole she shared with Huffkin and Humdudgeon.

  ‘This way,’ said Dimpsy, leading Athene into a room which resembled a study. A ream of paper had been laid out on a desk alongside a quill and a bottle of dark ink. It occurred to Athene that they were the tools of a scribe.

  ‘Sit down, please,’ said Dimpsy, pointing to a chair behind the desk.

  Athene did as she was told.

  At the back of the room was a wooden trunk and, while Athene practised scratchy strokes with the quill feather pen, Dimpsy knelt beside the trunk and lifted out a book that was clearly in a shocking state of disrepair. The book was little more than an untidy bundle of torn and crumpled papers which had been tied up with string.

  ‘This is our most precious tome,’ said Dimpsy. Handling the book with the utmost care, she carried it over to the desk.

  Athene sat bolt upright and her heart seemed to gallop in her chest. Could the work of literature in Dimpsy’s hands be Lodestar’s fabled Book of Spells?

  ‘It’s the history of our tribe,’ said Dimpsy, dashing Athene’s hopes and causing her to slump listlessly in her chair. ‘Over the years it has been rebound,’ continued Dimpsy, ‘but, alas, we can do nothing more to prevent its pages from falling into tatters. The time has come for a copy to be made. Lodestar would like you to write out the words from this old book on to those fresh sheets of paper. You’ll make a good job of it, won’t you? Lodestar’s standards are very high.’

  ‘Of course I will,’ Athene assured her. For a moment she had thought that she might be able to discover how to break the Confining Spell, but having got over her disappointment, she found that she was quite looking forward to the task. Writing was one of her favourite activities and she felt that she was very fortunate to be given such a sedentary, undemanding job.

  ‘Do you have everything that you need?’ asked Dimpsy.

  Athene glanced at the paper, pen, pot of ink and cup of brew that Dimpsy had placed upon the desk. ‘I think so,’ she said.

  ‘Then I’ll leave you to it,’ said the Low Gloam woman, and walked out of the room.

  Athene dipped her quill in the bottle of ink and started quickly, convinced that the assignment would prove to be a doddle, but it wasn’t quite as easy as it sounded. It wasn’t like a piece of schoolwork. You couldn’t cross things out when you made a mistake and carry on writing. If she made any kind of slip-up or spilled ink on a particular page, Athene had to cast that sheet aside and start again.

  The first few pages were family trees, and without the aid of a ruler, Athene set about copying them. She was three-quarters of the way through writing out the sixteen children of Jibbinjak and Kristalina when a muffled explosion made Athene look up from her work.

  ‘Dimpsy!’ called a far-off voice. ‘Come quickly!’

  Athene laid down her quill feather pen and crossed the room. She stopped in the doorway of the study and looked this way and that. There was no sign of Dimpsy or the person who had yelled out her name. Wondering what could have caused the loud bang, Athene began to walk from room to room. Rather than finding the aftermath of an explosion, she discovered an acrid smell and decided to follow it. On entering what she supposed to be the drawing room, the smell became quite overpowering. It seemed at its strongest in the furthest corner where little squirls of smoke appeared to be seeping through the wall.

  ‘DIMPSY!’ hollered the voice again, only much louder and with greater insistence. ‘COME HERE THIS INSTANT!’

  The person was close by, of that Athene was sure. She hunted all round the room: under a chaise longue, inside a bureau, behind a dresser with a number of kitchen implements displayed on it. Finally, she gave up. There was no one there. Athene was just about to leave the room when she heard the voice again.

  ‘FETCH A BRUSH AND DUSTPAN, RIGHT AWAY!’ it said.

  There was a soft crackling noise, and when Athene turned round, she almost keeled over in shock.

  Where there had been a bare earth wall a moment ago, there was now a wooden door and peering round it, wreathed in coils of stinking smoke, was an old, sour-faced Low Gloam woman.

  Chapter Eleven

  An Audience with

  the Otter

  ‘Who the devil are you?’ demanded the old woman angrily, screwing up her almond-shaped eyes and giving Athene the sort of look that might well have caused her to run if she hadn’t been frozen with fear.

  ‘Nasty, pesky, prying girl!’ said the old woman, batting smoke away from her face as she made her way into the room. ‘Just you wait till I get my hands on you. I’ll teach you to snoop about in my parlour! How did you worm your way into my house? Where’s that wretched maidservant of mine? DIMPSY!’

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t know where Dimpsy is,’ said Athene, finding her voice. From the woman’s blunt manner and haughty stare, Athene felt sure that she had come face to face with Lodestar, the Chief of the Low Gloam. ‘I didn’t mean to be nosy,’ she said, ‘only I heard this loud bang and I thought I ought to investigate. I’m the scribe. My name is Athene. You asked me to write up your tribe’s history.’

  ‘Athene, eh?’ said Lodestar, coming closer. ‘And what type of Gloam are you? From your size I’d guess you were Gargantuan, but I’ve never seen one with such pathetically minuscule lugs. They barely protrude at all. Part Heedless, are you?’

  ‘I am,’ said Athene, shaking her head so that her hair fell more thickly over her ears. ‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘How clever you are!’

  Lodestar clapped her hands together and gave a delighted cackle. ‘I can’t disagree with you there, girl. I have a brilliant mind.’

  Buoyed up by the apparent ease with which she had passed herself off as a Gloam yet again, Athene looked boldly at the Chief. She was not in the first flush of youth and nor was she a great beauty, being plump and round-shouldered with her ash-white hair in a short, severe cut; but her eyes were mesmerising and Athene felt that they could only belong to someone with wit, intelligence and power.

  ‘Ma’am, I’m sorry – I got here as quickly as I could,’ came Dimpsy’s voice, and she hurried into the room, an apron tied around her waist and her long, fair hair held back from her face in two girlish pigtails. ‘I was doing the washing and then I heard you calling and I upset the bucket. There were suds all over the floor …’

  ‘Don’t bore me with your feeble excuses,’ said Lodestar scathingly. ‘There’s been a little incident and I need you to do some clearing up.’

  Athene wondered what the Chief had been doing in the secret room. She guessed that the mess, which Dimpsy had been told to deal with, must have had something to do with the explosion. Smoke continued to billow through the half open door. As the smoke thinned, Athene glimpsed shelves filled with rows of jars and pots and bottles. It seemed as if the room might be some sort of larder or perhaps a kind of laboratory.

  ‘I’ll go and get my brush and dustpan right this minute,’ Dimpsy said.

  �
�Wait!’ barked Lodestar. ‘I hope you’re not thinking of rushing off without taking this nosy parker with you. I caught her rifling through my things …’

  ‘That’s not true!’ Athene protested.

  ‘She was thinking of stealing my precious heirlooms, no doubt,’ said Lodestar slyly. ‘I don’t want strangers wandering through my house wherever they please. Don’t let it happen again, imbecile!’

  Dimpsy appeared to be too mortified to speak. She grabbed Athene’s hand and yanked her from the parlour, but not before Athene had glanced over her shoulder and seen the Chief re-enter the secret room. As soon as she had done so, the door vanished.

  The more Athene read about the history of the Low Gloam tribe, the more she wondered why they had bothered to write any of it down. From what she had learned at school, history was all about interesting things like daring voyages across uncharted waters and battles and uprisings and outbreaks of deadly diseases, but according to Ploidy (the author of their history), the Low Gloam had always lived contentedly and without a whiff of trouble on the same square mile of land. Originally called the Lofty Gloam because of their propensity to live high up, the furthest they had travelled was a few hundred metres when the oak tree that they were living in was felled and they were forced to up sticks and find a new home in the rafters of a nearby barn. They had never fought amongst themselves or with another tribe and the closest they had got to being struck down by pestilence was when a Gloam called Bingle had given his friends a nasty cold in 1862. Lodestar had been the name of their first leader and his name was traditionally given to every Low Gloam chief (the most charismatic of whom was undoubtedly Lodestar the Ninth whose beard reached to his navel and who danced in the altogether under every harvest moon).

  When Athene was told that she had done enough work and was dismissed, she heaved a sigh of relief. In her first stint as a scribe, she had copied out thirty-six pages detailing the first few hundred years of the Low Gloam’s largely uneventful history, and she was more than ready to put down her pen. Her task had been so boring that she’d almost fallen asleep several times. Hoping that the dreariest chapters were behind her, because, after all, she had yet to learn why the Low Gloam hated the Glare so much (a spot of tree felling didn’t really explain it) or why they had chosen to live underground, she passed through the front door of Lodestar’s house and out into the tunnel where the two guards were crouched on the ground playing a game of dice.

  ‘Mind your great clodhoppers!’ said one, but otherwise they ignored her.

  It took Athene a while to find her way back to the Squattings. The tunnels in the Low Gloam sector were easy enough to identify, but all the earthen tunnels looked very much alike and she lost her way several times. At long last she spotted the fingerpost which showed her the way to the Squattings and within minutes she came upon the clutch of half-a-dozen Low Gloam sentries who tended to linger by the tunnel entrance. Ignoring their snide remarks, she hurried into the Squattings, treading past holes of all shapes and sizes until she found the hole that she had come to think of as home.

  Athene was accosted as soon as she set foot inside.

  ‘What have you learned?’ said Huffkin, seizing Athene’s arm. The Humble Gloam’s face was tense and hopeful.

  ‘If you’re asking me if I’ve found out anything about the runaway girl, then I’m sorry, but I’ve learned nothing,’ said Athene. ‘Well, nothing of much use.’ She told Huffkin about what the guard had said; that, according to him, nobody had ever escaped or even been game enough to try.

  ‘Everyone that I asked said the same,’ Huffkin said dejectedly, letting go of Athene’s arm. They both sat down on their mats and faced each other. ‘It seems odd, doesn’t it,’ said Huffkin, ‘that someone could make it to the surface and be brought back again without the others knowing.’

  Athene agreed. ‘I would’ve thought that news like that would travel fast down here,’ she said. ‘At school, last year, a group of boys climbed over the wall and legged it down the road when everyone else was in lessons. We all heard about it. Everyone knew who’d done it and what punishments they got.’

  ‘Unless …’ Huffkin said, deep in thought. ‘Unless it was all kept a secret. I shouldn’t think the Low Gloam would’ve wanted all their captives to hear about the girl’s escape. It would have given them hope. They might have been tempted to try and find a way out for themselves.’

  ‘So, it was all hushed up, you think?’ Athene said.

  They talked in this vein for a while, pausing every so often to pop their heads out of the hole to see if Humdudgeon was coming. A Nimble Gloam called Picktooth delivered their meal (three dishes of centipede stew and a plate of crumbly biscuits). Too famished to wait for Humdudgeon, they both tucked in. Athene was past being squeamish about what she put in her mouth though she wasn’t best pleased when she found out that the little black bits in the biscuits were not raisins but ants. Still listening for the footfalls of Humdudgeon, the two friends told each other about their day.

  Huffkin already knew quite a lot about the Low Gloam’s history, having been working on the mosaics, which also told the story of the tribe’s progress. Of the two mosaics that she had been restoring, the first was of the oak tree in its summer splendour and the second showed it lying on the ground with a severed trunk and the Low Gloam fleeing in the distance. Huffkin was quite amused to hear about the antics of Lodestar the Ninth, but what grabbed her interest most of all was Athene’s account of her meeting with the present chief (whom they later discovered was Lodestar the Thirteenth).

  ‘Smoke, you say – and a smell?’ said Huffkin, rubbing her chin thoughtfully. ‘And the door wasn’t there and then it was …’

  ‘And then it wasn’t again,’ Athene said. ‘Do you think she was using magic?’

  Huffkin was just about to answer when the first Honk sounded. A few minutes after the second short blast had rent the air, Humdudgeon showed up in the hole.

  Athene and Huffkin looked at him with eager, shining eyes, but he did not even glance in their direction. He limped in without a word, went straight over to the bucket and dunked a cup in the water. He drank from it in noisy gulps; then sank down on to his mat, massaging his lame leg.

  ‘Hard day?’ asked Huffkin timidly, offering him his dish of stew.

  Humdudgeon grunted. He wolfed down his meal and handed his dish back to her. ‘I was late, wasn’t I?’ he said. ‘Blast their confounded Curfew! Those ghastly Low Gloam have given me a punishment. On top of my other chores, I’ve got to clean out the latrines tomorrow.’

  ‘How unfair,’ said Huffkin. ‘Er … I don’t suppose you found the girl?’ she asked him meekly.

  ‘No,’ Humdudgeon snapped.

  ‘But you must have found out something useful,’ said Athene earnestly.

  ‘No,’ he said again. ‘Now, leave me alone, can’t you?’ Humdudgeon pulled his blanket around his shoulders and turned his back on them.

  Athene had never seen Humdudgeon in a mood. She found it quite upsetting.

  ‘He’s probably tired,’ murmured Huffkin, ‘and his leg’s been troubling him. Those extra duties won’t have helped to cheer him either. He’ll be back to his old self in an hour or two, you wait and see.’

  Their spirits low, Athene and Huffkin played a halfhearted game of noughts and crosses by drawing with their fingers in the dirt. Neither of them cared if they won or lost. When they had tired of it, they played I-Spy, but as there were only a few things in the room, that game did not last long. They felt that they couldn’t really chat as it might make Humdudgeon even grumpier, and they couldn’t whisper either because they had both been well brought up and they knew that whispering was rude.

  A little later, when Shoveller the badger dropped by to see them, he was most surprised to find them sitting in total silence.

  ‘Hello there!’ he said, thrusting his stripy head through the entrance to their hole. ‘What’s with all the long faces? Didn’t you like the grub? Centipede stew
not to your taste, eh?’

  Athene and Huffkin were immensely glad to see the hale and hearty, rumbustious badger. He was just the creature to cheer them up. They told him that the stew was satisfactory and asked him if he’d like to come in and sit down.

  ‘Thank you kindly, ladies,’ said the badger, ‘but I can’t stop, I’m afraid. Me and my mate, Fleet, are going foraging for worms. Thought I’d look in on you, though, as I was passing. Been wondering how you’ve been getting on.’

  ‘We’ve been all right,’ Athene said, trying to sound stoical.

  ‘’Course you have,’ said Shoveller, nudging her with his nose. ‘That’s why you two looked so down in the dumps just now – and what’s wrong with old sulky drawers?’ Shoveller tossed his head in the direction of the blanketed lump in the corner which was Humdudgeon.

  ‘We don’t really know,’ Huffkin confided.

  ‘It’ll be the underground life,’ said the badger sagely. ‘Even us burrowers get sick to the back teeth of it. It’s tough to get used to feeling trapped all the time and some poor newcomers can’t cope with it at all. It sends them right round the twist.’

  Realising, perhaps, that he had been a little tactless, Shoveller tried to reassure them. ‘But there, now,’ he said, loudly enough for Humdudgeon to hear, ‘that kind of thing wouldn’t happen to level-headed folk like you.’

  From the depths of Humdudgeon’s blanket there came an angry sniff.

  ‘Well, I must be off,’ said Shoveller. ‘I’ve got business to attend to.’

  ‘Where are you going?’ Athene asked him.

  ‘Here, there and everywhere,’ answered the badger, exposing his teeth in a rather disconcerting grin.

  ‘You don’t mean that you’re going to leave the Squattings?’ said Athene, astounded by the badger’s nerve. ‘What about the Curfew?’

  ‘If you keep your nose clean, you get privileges,’ the badger said with a note of pride in his voice. ‘Has nobody told you that? Me and Fleet are allowed to leave the Squattings and go on a worm hunt once every fortnight. There are hundreds of worms hiding down here if you’ve got the wherewithal to sniff them out. That reminds me … did you find that boy you were looking for?’