Spellbound

by Anna Dale

  ‘What’s happening up there?’ said an anxious female voice.

  ‘Scabbler, you’re an awful brute!’ declared someone else. ‘We heard that poor maid screaming. What have you done to her?’

  ‘Throw us some food, whoever you are!’ said another voice plaintively.

  ‘My name is Athene,’ she called down to them. ‘I’m from the Gargantuan tribe.’ She was tempted to be honest and reveal that she was a Glare, but she needed the prisoners to climb out of the hole as quickly as they could and if they knew this, they might take fright and refuse to cooperate. ‘I’m a friend of Coney’s and Kit’s,’ she told them, ‘and I’ve come to rescue you.’

  This announcement prompted a great deal of murmuring.

  ‘Did you say that you were Athene?’ said an excited voice.

  ‘Yes!’ answered Athene. ‘Watch your heads, everyone. I’m going to lower a rope.’

  ‘It is her! It is!’ squeaked the voice at a pitch that was almost inaudible. ‘I told you it was! Didn’t I say that she wouldn’t forget us?’

  ‘Coney, is that you?’ Athene said, peering into the deep hole.

  ‘That’s right – and Kit’s here, too. We’re very glad you’ve come.’

  One by one, the prisoners emerged, starting with the smallest. A resourceful Gloam fashioned a sling from an item of his clothing and attached it to the rope. Three rabbits (including Coney and Kit), a mole and a rat were pulled out by this method. Then came the turn of the Gloam. The first to climb to freedom was a Nimble Gloam called Nibs who, despite his half-starved appearance, was able to help Athene heave the next Gloam from the hole. They continued in their efforts until the fifth Gloam to be rescued announced that he was the last. The prisoners were overjoyed to be out of the cramped, uncomfortable cell and when Athene told them about the flood, the news scarcely seemed to upset them at all.

  ‘If everything goes according to plan, you’ll be able to get above ground,’ she said, heartened by the thrilled looks she received when she shared this information. ‘You must leave here right away and run as fast as you can to the shaft. My friend, Humdudgeon, will be waiting there for you.’

  ‘Strikes me that some of us will need a helping hand,’ said Nibs and he bent down to pick up the rat who nipped his finger indignantly and scuttled out of reach.

  ‘I’ll get there using my own four paws, thank you very much,’ said the rat.

  Nibs ignored the beads of blood which were oozing from his finger and tried to coax the rat closer. ‘Ruffian, mate – you won’t stand a chance. Use your head, for goodness’ sake.’

  ‘This is no time to get high and mighty,’ Athene told the rat sternly. ‘The water will be far too deep for you. You might not like the idea of being carried, but you’ll have to swallow your pride, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Never!’ said the rat brazenly, sticking his nose in the air. ‘Water doesn’t worry me. I’m an excellent swimmer,’ – and with those words, he scampered through the open door.

  Nibs sucked the puncture marks on his finger and gazed at the empty doorway. ‘Stubborn old git,’ he said. ‘Well, I s’pose I’d better go after him.’ He broke into a run, giving the others a cheery wave before he vanished out of sight.

  The other animals were rather less wilful than the rat had been. They allowed themselves to be picked up with hardly a murmur of protest. By now, Coney and Kit were used to being handled and the other rabbit was far too afraid of being swept away in a maelstrom of water to make any fuss.

  The mole seemed the keenest to hitch a ride. He scurried over to Athene as fast as his stubby legs would carry him and clambered into her cupped hands. His body felt like a little velvet beanbag and his pointed snout kept touching her skin as if he were planting grateful kisses on her fingers.

  ‘Let’s get out of here,’ Athene said, herding everyone towards the door.

  An outraged screech made her stop in her tracks.

  ‘Go ahead and save yourselves, that’s right!’ said Scabbler savagely. With his hands still tied together, his attempt to shake his fist at them meant that both fists were raised at the same time. ‘Leave me to perish in a watery grave, you unfeeling upstarts! Well? What are you waiting for, you cowardly scoundrels? Get going!’

  Athene had forgotten about Scabbler. He had ranted and railed while she had been busy rescuing the prisoners from the Coop, but when she had started to explain about the flood he had suddenly gone quiet. She had glimpsed him out of the corner of her eye as he rolled into all sorts of positions, trying to stand up; but with his feet tightly bound, he had found it impossible to keep his balance for very long (his most recent vitriolic outburst had been delivered on his knees).

  ‘Take care of this little fellow, would you?’ said Athene, transferring the mole into the hands of the person standing next to her. She smiled at the four remaining Gloam and the furry creatures that they held in their arms. ‘Now, go quickly,’ she told them, ‘and make for the shaft.’

  ‘I hope you all drown,’ bawled Scabbler as they rushed towards the door, ‘or at the very least catch horrible colds and have to stay in bed for a year.’ He made a last-ditch attempt to get up, fell on to his side and groaned with frustration.

  ‘Aren’t you coming?’ said a voice from the doorway, and Athene looked up to see Coney’s anxious face peeping over the arm of the last Gloam prisoner to leave the room.

  ‘Yes,’ she promised. ‘I’ll be right behind you. Off you go.’

  As much as she despised the Low Gloam jailer, Athene could not leave him to drown. Neither could she bring herself to untie the ropes that bound his limbs. He had threatened to get even with her and, knowing what a nasty piece of work he was, she could easily believe that he would keep his word.

  ‘Have pity!’ said Scabbler when Athene approached him. He looked into her eyes so she knew straight away that his sight had returned. ‘Untie me!’ he pleaded pathetically as she seized his elbow and hauled him to his feet.

  ‘There’s no way I’m letting you go free,’ Athene told him. ‘I can’t trust you to behave. I suppose I could loosen the ropes around your ankles. You won’t be able to walk very well, but I’ll help you.’

  ‘Of all the petty-minded wretches! Do you really expect me to toddle all the way to the shaft in these shackles? I’ll do myself an injury!’ he said.

  ‘Oh, stop complaining and come on,’ said Athene, guiding Scabbler towards the door. With every second that they wasted she knew that their journey would be that bit more difficult.

  Dirty, foaming water was streaming down the steps when they came out of the chamber. Athene bent down to pick up her rucksack which was half-soaked with water and heavier than it had been before. She put her arm around the jailer’s waist and together they tackled the steps.

  The going was tough. At the top of the steps, they both agreed that they needed a rest, and they had not made much progress up the tunnel when Athene felt like stopping again. She was drenched from head to toe thanks to the great splashes that Scabbler made every time that he shuffled forward, and her shoulders ached with the double burden of the jailer and her heavy rucksack.

  ‘We mustn’t stop for long,’ she said as they both leaned against the tunnel wall. Athene was only too aware that the water was rising fast. It had been ankle-deep when they had started out, but in less than a quarter of an hour, it had risen so swiftly that it was now swirling around their knees. Another thing that she had noticed was her worsening eyesight, and this was the real reason why she had suggested that they should pause for a moment. As every second passed, the tunnel became darker and Scabbler’s face more indistinct. She knew that she would never make it to the shaft before her sight failed totally. She would need to replenish her eyes with Goggle Drops.

  Hastily, she shrugged off her rucksack and fumbled inside it. The bottle was in a side pocket. She eased the cork from its neck and held the bottle above her head. She was just about to tip its meagre contents into her eyes when the bottle was dashed from her
hands with such force that it smashed into the wall and broke.

  ‘My Goggle Drops!’ Athene shrieked.

  She was too appalled to do anything but stare open-mouthed at the jailer. Just visible in the deepening gloom, she saw his skinny arms groping in the water and watched as he retrieved a shard of glass. Using it like a knife, Scabbler rubbed it against the ropes which bound his hands and feet. Then, without a backward glance, he bolted up the tunnel.

  Athene was furious with herself. She had misjudged the jailer badly. She should have known that Scabbler would be far too concerned with saving his own skin to be bothered with wreaking revenge on her.

  As she splashed unsteadily after him, her surroundings grew darker and darker.

  In her disoriented state she turned one way and then another until she was not certain that she was facing in the right direction. It was the stupidest thing she could have done.

  ‘Which way to the shaft?’ she said. ‘Oh, which way should I go?’

  Confusion turned to despair as her sight failed completely and everything went black.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Above and Beyond

  In the darkness Athene’s hearing was sharper. No one answered her plea when she asked which way she should go, but if she listened carefully she could detect a sound that was different from the lapping, tinkling noises of the water as it pushed and swelled. The new noise was familiar to Athene. It was a whirring, whizzing sound and she found that she rather liked it if only because it took her mind off the terrible danger that she was in. She stayed where she was, while the water swilled around her knees, until she had located the source of the sound.

  It took her ten seconds to work out that the insistent noise was coming from the pocket of her trousers. ‘Of course!’ she said as she put her hand inside and drew out Dottle’s ball. The curious object vibrated in her palm. Holding it by its strap, she lifted the ball to her ear and heard an odd sort of buzzing sound. The harder she listened the more the sound seemed to separate and become a word that was being uttered repeatedly.

  ‘Prezz,’ said the voice inside the ball. ‘Prezz … prezz … prezz … me.’

  ‘Prezz me?’ said Athene to herself, utterly bemused. Saying the words out loud seemed to clarify their meaning and she realised shortly afterwards that the ball was telling her to do something. ‘Oh, I see,’ she said. ‘You’re asking me to press you.’

  She did as she had been instructed and finally she found an almost imperceptible button that she had never noticed before. When she pressed it with her thumb, the ball stopped vibrating and split rather neatly in two. The upper half slid beneath the lower half and the voice said something else, but this time it spoke more loudly and as clearly as a bell.

  ‘Turn around, numbskull,’ it said.

  Athene was mystified. ‘I … I beg your pardon?’

  ‘You asked for my assistance, did you not?’ said the voice. It sounded mildly irritated. ‘Please proceed in a north-westerly direction.’

  ‘What?’ said Athene, whipping her head from side to side. No matter which way she turned everything looked blacker than ever. ‘North-west, did you say? Wh … which way is that?’

  She sloshed around in the water until she thought that she might have turned one hundred and eighty degrees.

  The ball’s next remark was a positive one. ‘Your position is A OK. You may advance.’

  The voice’s tone was so domineering that she did not even think of disobeying it. It was a prim, haughty, no-nonsense sort of voice that reminded Athene strongly of Mrs Plant, her geography teacher.

  ‘Who are you?’ asked Athene, but the voice did not reply. It did however inform her that she was veering unwisely to the right (or in an easterly direction as the voice preferred to put it).

  Even though the ball was just a voice and not a real person, Athene was glad to have its company. The idea of wading blindly through the water by herself with no one to give her any guidance was far too hideous to contemplate. Not wishing to drop the precious ball and lose it in the water, Athene raised the strap and lowered it over her head so that the ball banged against her chest. As she struggled through the river water (which had almost reached to the top of her legs) she wondered how Dottle could have made a helpful talking device from a simple thing like a clock.

  ‘What time is it?’ Athene said, thinking that the ball should be more than qualified to answer this particular question.

  ‘Continue on this bearing,’ was all that the ball said.

  ‘You sound a bit like the satnav that my dad’s just bought for his car,’ said Athene. ‘Satnav is short for satellite navigation, just so you know.’

  The ball did not seem interested.

  ‘My geography teacher, Mrs Plant, disapproves of hitech gadgets,’ said Athene, unfazed by the ball’s unwillingness to interact. ‘She thinks they’re bad for the brain. She’s making us learn how to use a map and compass –’ Athene’s mouth snapped shut before she had finished her sentence. She remembered what Dottle had said about ‘the Glare thingy’ that she had found in a field. Apparently, it had had ‘pointy bits that twiddled round and round’. ‘Daft old woman,’ Athene said fondly. She cupped the ball in her hand. ‘You’re not a clock: you’re a compass, aren’t you? You were once an ordinary compass until a Gloam got hold of you and added a little magic.’

  She saw straight away why Dottle might have wished to own such a useful instrument. The old woman’s night vision was poor and it made sense to have a talking compass to help her find her way home if she ever exhausted her supply of Goggle Drops.

  ‘Do not divert from your given route,’ warned the compass coldly.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Athene, and altered her direction.

  When she rounded the next corner, a great swell of water rushed to meet her and almost knocked Athene off her feet. Now that the water level had reached waist height she was finding it much more difficult to press forward and the weight of her rucksack did not help. She knew that swimming would be necessary shortly and there was no way that she would be able to manage it with a heavy bag attached to her back – so, with a pang of regret, she decided to remove it. The water gave a gurgle as the rucksack dropped into its depths. Not long after she had ditched her baggage, Athene started to swim.

  The current was not strong and she made good headway, but her journey became more perilous. Every now and then, her arms struck floating debris, which had once been the Low Gloam’s possessions, and twice she had to claw her way through mounds of earth where the weakened walls had collapsed. With the compass underwater, Athene was obliged to submerge her head to hear its directions clearly. She tried not to panic, but she knew that her hopes of reaching the shaft were fading fast.

  ‘Are we nearly there?’ she asked desperately and, for once, the compass answered her.

  ‘That would be correct,’ it said.

  Cheered by this news, Athene kicked harder and quickened her stroke. Her heart lifted again when she heard the sound of voices up ahead.

  ‘Hi!’ she called, ploughing through the water. ‘Who’s that? Are you in trouble?’

  ‘Athene?’ said a tired voice. ‘Ouch! What was that slap for?’

  ‘Oh, Huffkin, is that you?’ said Athene, patting the air until she found the hand of her faithful Gloam friend. ‘I’m sorry, did I hurt you? I can’t see a thing.’

  Huffkin assured her that she was fine apart from being wet through and totally worn out. ‘I’ve got Lodestar with me, and Dimpsy. Could you give me a hand, do you think? Neither of them can swim.’

  With only the tiniest amount of resistance, Lodestar let Athene clasp her chin and pull her backwards through the water, and when Athene kicked off the floor and eased herself into her life-saving stroke, Lodestar barely struggled at all. She kept her mouth shut for a while apart from the odd grumble (mostly due to the fact that she did not want to swallow any water), but within a few minutes she seemed to get her confidence back and wasted no time in telling Athene
exactly what she thought of her.

  ‘I might’ve guessed that you’d have something to do with this,’ she growled. ‘You had “troublemaker” written all over your face. When I get out of here, I’m going to give you a dressing-down in front of everyone. I want them to know who it was that destroyed their homes and livelihoods. How a Gloam could do this to her own kind is beyond me …’

  In order to keep Lodestar’s face above the water, Athene had to swim on her back, which meant that her ears were submerged. The Chief’s irate ramblings sounded garbled and muffled, whereas the voice of the compass was crystal clear when it told her rather smugly, ‘You have reached your destination.’

  Athene let her feet sink to the floor. She was the tallest of their group and could just reach the ground with the tips of her toes. Even then, her head was the only part of her to poke above the surface. From the sound of panicky breathing and splashes to her right, she guessed that poor Huffkin was having to tread water and support Dimpsy at the same time. ‘Hold on to me,’ Athene said, and she felt hands grab on to her shoulders.

  The shaft was invisible in the dark, but Athene could sense the immense vastness of the space above her head and her nose was able to discern a freshness in the air. Athene could also hear the voices of Gloam giving orders and chanting ‘heave’ as they hauled their compatriots up the shaft. Athene hoped with all her heart that the deserted tunnels she had just made her way through were a good sign and that the evacuation had gone smoothly and without any loss of life.

  ‘The spell is broken, isn’t it?’ Athene said cautiously. She was almost too afraid to ask.

  ‘Yes,’ said Huffkin, and from her weary tone of voice, Athene guessed that persuading Lodestar to undo the enchantment had been anything but easy. ‘She wouldn’t listen to reason,’ said Huffkin. ‘Not until Dimpsy pulled the front door open and all Lodestar’s things began to float away.’