Dark Waters of Hagwood

by Robin Jarvis

  “No time to waste then,” Finnen called, but before they could continue, they heard a wretched yowling rise above the battle noise, and there was Tollychook, stumbling across the open ground toward them.

  The Tower Lubber stooped down, and the frightened boy came scampering over to be scooped up in his big gentle hand.

  “It were ’orrible!” he wept. “I was swallowed by a mountain of guck!”

  There was no time to comfort him, the well was close by. But when at last it was in plain view, Liffidia cried out and clutched the Tower Lubber’s arm.

  “What is it?” he demanded.

  “The well!” she spluttered. “How is that possible?”

  “Explain! What do you see?”

  “More scary magic!” Tollychook broke in.

  “The water!” Gamaliel said. “The well is brimming with water. It’s risen right to the top. How can that be?”

  “So,” the Tower Lubber murmured, his steps faltering to a halt, “she is coming. At last—at long last.”

  Liffidia stared at him. “Do you mean … ?” she began, but before she could continue, the water splashed over the sides of the well and the large head of Peg-tooth Meg came rearing from the cold depths.

  “Oh no,” Finnen whispered.

  CHAPTER 22 *

  THE DOOM OF HAGWOOD

  UP THROUGH THE FLOODED SHAFT she had swum, solemn and determined. No playful grin lifted the corners of her wide mouth, and her yellow eyes blazed bright with bitter intent.

  When her head finally broke the surface of the icy water and she lifted her face into the daylight for the first time in many hundreds of years, the only thought that burned in her mind was to find and destroy the escaped werlings who had betrayed her.

  Her long lank hair dripped with sparkling diamonds as the sun danced in every droplet. But she was oblivious to the beauty of the spring morning and gripped the stones of the well as she turned to where her forces were striving against the spriggans.

  “All must die!” she bellowed. “No word nor whisper of our life below must find its way to the Hollow Hill. Every tongue must be silenced, every spark of knowledge extinguished. Kill them, my slippery lovelies and return to the dark with Meg.”

  Liffidia and Tollychook felt a shiver travel through the Tower Lubber at the sound of that cracked and croaking voice, and they felt his heart thunder in his chest.

  “Little did I think,” he said thickly, “that when we met again, it would be at the brink of battle.”

  Meg tore her gaze from the fighting and glared at the Tower Lubber’s stunted form.

  “You too must die,” she snapped. “You and those deceitful beasts you bear in your arms and that trail at your heels. Foul, scornful wretches they are. Give them to Meg, give them!”

  She reached out her grasping hands, but, to Tollychook’s relief, the Tower Lubber did not surrender Liffidia and himself to her, and Gamaliel and Finnen took several steps back.

  “You do not know their evil ways!” she ranted. “If you will not throttle them now, then Meg will take them and she will drown them.”

  “Hear me,” the Tower Lubber said warmly. “Know me.”

  Meg sneered and flung a handful of water at him while, from his lofty position in the tree across the clearing, the barn owl turned its full attention upon them and strained to hear their words.

  “Who are you?” Meg was growling at the stranger. “What is a blind beggar of the over land to Meg?”

  “I am the one who has listened to your sad song every morning since you first crept into the darkness,” he answered.

  Meg caught her breath, and her face clouded with doubt.

  “You are the love in the sky?” she asked softly. “The giver of flowers?”

  “Yes, my love. Think back—to the time before you were changed. That night of terror when we fled the Hill and the Wandering Smith placed these guises upon us. Remember who you were, remember how we were together.”

  A haunted, almost frightened expression darkened her features, and the gray skin of her brows creased as she peered at him.

  “Meg must not think of such things!” she said. “Old lives are gone. To be safe in the deep, that is what matters, that is all that counts. Change and be forgot, that is the true path.”

  “The Smith did not intend for us to hide forever,” he told her. “Now we must stand and face what we fear. Even if we fail, we have to try.”

  “Meg must not!”

  “Meg is not your true name. That is not what your father, the King, called you.”

  “There is a tightness in Meg’s breast,” she whispered. “Meg is afraid.”

  “Clarisant,” he said lovingly. “Come back to me. Reclaim who you were.”

  Her eyes roved wildly like a cornered beast, and her head twitched aside as she struggled to remember.

  Too long those memories had been buried in the winding caves of her closed mind, but finally she found them and the sunlight vanished around her.

  Suddenly she was running through the dark forest on a midnight long, long ago. Jags of lightning lit up the rumbling sky, and she heard, carried on the howling wind, the baying shrieks of the Redcaps who hunted her.

  In one hand she clutched something of the greatest importance while the other was clasped in a strong grip that she knew must soon release her, and her heart rebeled at the thought of the dreadful parting that was nigh. A despairing doom was approaching, but it was the only way to escape the wrath of her sister. They must evade the hunt and conceal the golden treasure they had stolen.

  And then she was at the Crone’s Maw. The noise of the storm and the tumbling water filled her ears so she hardly heard those last loving words of farewell. As she embraced the one she loved for that final, desperate time, their friend, the only surviving Pucca, had uttered the enchanting words and it was done. She felt her bones dwindle and her back creak, and when the next flash of lightning dazzled the heavens, she saw that her blind beloved had become a bowlegged creature with long arms and a repellent face. But still she loved him.

  Then it was over: she descended into the caverns, and the dark, dank life of Peg-tooth Meg began.

  The warm sunshine beamed down on her once more, and she raised her tearful eyes.

  “Tammedor!” she cried. “Tammedor—is it you?”

  The Tower Lubber stumbled forward, and she threw her arms around his neck.

  “Is it here?” she wept. “Are these lonely years at an end? Has the Smith returned? Is it time? Is it time?”

  “Yes, my love,” he told her. “It is time.”

  “Has the moment really come? I dare not believe it.”

  The Tower Lubber held her tightly.

  “The battle!” Liffidia interrupted. “Stop the battle! Your people are killing each other. End it now!”

  Meg drew away from the Tower Lubber and stared at the conflict with fresh eyes.

  “My subjects,” she breathed in horror. “They are being slaughtered. Oh, what have I done?”

  “Call them back,” the Tower Lubber urged. “Call them back—there is no need for any more deaths. One murder more is all that is required, and I will gladly commit that.”

  And so Meg called out to her sluglungs to fall back to the well. Many of them obeyed and retreated to gather around her, but the rest could not escape the savagery of the spriggans and were forced to fight on.

  The soldiers chased and leaped at them, slashing with all their might, and more and more of the jellylike creatures perished.

  “This is my doing!” Meg cried. “I felt only hatred and terror at being discovered. I had become as terrible a tyrant as She.”

  She looked at Gamaliel and Finnen and shook her head sadly. “Forgive me,” she implored them. “The endless dark had entered my mind. I had forgotten too much, but now I remember it all and perhaps can atone for the wrongs I did you.”

  Then, in the strange, guttural speech of the under country, she spoke rapidly to one of the sluglungs who had manage
d to retreat from the battle. At once he hopped into the well and swam swiftly down into the murky depths.

  At that moment they all heard a sound that tore any last vestige of hope to shreds. Thudding hooves came pounding through the forest. As they stared across the clearing, a coal-black stallion galloped from the trees, reared up, and hammered its hooves on the earth.

  Sitting high in the saddle, dark eyes glittering in her pale, perfect face, was the High Lady.

  The fighting ceased immediately.

  Every spriggan raised his weapons in salute, and they sent up a rousing cheer in greeting.

  Straightaway the barn owl flew to her shoulder, while the remaining sluglungs fled the field of battle and scurried back to the well to defend their own Worshipful Lady.

  “Is it She?” the Tower Lubber growled. “Is it the Deathless One?”

  “Yes,” Tollychook answered meekly. “’Tis Her right enough. We’m all fer it now.”

  Peg-tooth Meg’s large, round eyes shone with recognition, but she shuddered and shrank against the side of the well.

  “Sister,” she uttered in a small and fearful breath.

  The Lady Rhiannon surveyed the clearing. Her pitiless eyes viewed the bodies of her fallen soldiers and the quivering pieces of the enemies they had slain. Then she lifted her gaze to the well in the distance.

  A deathly hush descended.

  Many long minutes passed as she looked on the Tower Lubber and Peg-tooth Meg. The frozen depths of the High Lady’s eyes sparkled like midwinter frost, and her sharp, piercing glance easily saw through those disguises and knew who they truly were.

  The air crackled with hostility and malice. Even the blind Tower Lubber could feel the intensity of her hatred as it flowed toward him in wave after malevolent wave.

  No one stirred or spoke. The spriggans bowed their heads. None of them could bear to look at that cold, cruel face.

  The sluglungs around the well trembled worse than ever and covered their bulbous eyes to escape the unyielding severity of that merciless stare.

  The werlings had no idea what would happen. It felt as if the fate of Hagwood was about to be pronounced, and they could only stand and watch.

  Even the birds in the air lost their voices, and the profound silence swelled.

  At this doom-laden instant, Kernella Tumpin finally managed to gnaw her way out of her captor’s satchel and tumbled to the grass at his feet.

  “You dirty, great, sour-bellied bluebottle’s breakfast!” she fumed, wergling back to her normal self and giving the spriggan an angry kick in the ankle before dashing away.

  She was so anxious to flee that she did not realize how quiet and still everything was. Through the motionless ranks of hillmen she hurried, feeling very clever and pleased with herself for managing to evade recapture.

  Only when she heard a stifled shout did she stop and look around her.

  A spriggan’s body was slumped close by, looking like a small armored hill, and Bufus Doolan’s irritated cries were issuing from beneath it.

  “What you doing under there?” she asked.

  “Playing kiss chase!” came the arch reply. “What do you think? Get me out of here before I suffocate! I’ve smelled badger poo sweeter than this big lump!”

  Kernella hastened over and put her shoulder to the dead spriggan’s side.

  Grunting and shoving, she managed to nudge the heavy soldier just enough for Bufus to heave himself out.

  “You took your time,” he said ungratefully.

  “There’s plenty who’d have left you under there!” she retorted.

  The boy was about to reply when he suddenly became aware of the unnatural silence.

  “Is the fighting over?” he asked.

  And then Kernella noticed it for the first time.

  Both of them turned around. They saw the spriggans standing by with bowed heads and then the sluglungs shielding the well. Kernella wondered where all the overweight rabbits had come from, and then she bit her lip when she saw Peg-tooth Meg. But there too were Gamaliel and Finnen. Why was her brother signaling for her to get away—and what were the others all staring at?

  Slowly she and Bufus looked across the clearing, and they drew sharp breaths.

  The eyes of the High Lady were upon them. The venomous glint of her gaze burned into their courageous souls, and they felt naked and petrified before her.

  And then, finally, Rhiannon spoke.

  “So,” her hard, malignant voice cut the awful silence, “wer-rats infest every quarter of my realm. That shall be remedied.”

  Redirecting her terrible glance at Meg and the Tower Lubber, she said, “And there you are, the false suitor and the faithless sister who stole the knave from me. From what dark and filthy holes have you crawled, I wonder? And why do you dare show your unsightly faces now? Have you never ceased conspiring against me?”

  “My Lady!” the barn owl blurted. “Is it really they?”

  “Oh, indeed yes, my provost,” she answered. “Finally I have them both, as I always knew I would. No one eludes me, not even those of my own family. You should know that, my dear Clarisant.”

  Peg-tooth Meg trembled and reached for the Tower Lubber’s hand.

  “But what repellent masks they wear,” the Lady Rhiannon continued. “The handsome Prince Tammedor, with a countenance that would scare a goblin, and, at his side, the ugliest fish that ever wallowed in a troll’s cesspool. If only Prince Tammedor could behold the radiant vision he chose over me. Ah, but I was forgetting—I fed his eyes to you, my trusted lieutenant.”

  “One so blind as to spurn thee, O Enduring Majesty, hadst no need of eyes,” the owl truckled.

  With his arm around Meg, the Tower Lubber called out in defiance, “Get you gone, foul tyrant! Your time is over.”

  “If that is so,” Rhiannon hissed, “then hands other than yours, blind fool, shall steer me to my death, for I see none here that I should fear. A handful of puny tree rats, a slimy gang of tadpole imps, and a pair of decrepit lovers. Did you really think you could assail me? I am the rock upon which all tempests break. It is your time that ends on this merry sunlit morning, not that of Rhiannon—She is everlasting.”

  “Not so, sister,” Peg-tooth Meg’s cracked voice rang out abruptly. “Not in vain have we waited these countless years. There was a high purpose to our lonely suffering. You know what we took with us when we fled, waiting for this very day to dawn so we could put an end to your cruel reign.”

  A shadow of suspicion flickered in the High Lady’s eyes. Could the shade of Black Howla have lied to her? Could it have been wrong? Then the doubt passed, and Rhiannon’s supreme arrogance returned.

  “No, sister,” she answered calmly. “You have wasted those years. You have grubbed about and floundered in the dirt and dark and all to no avail. Nothing can injure me now. I am Rhiannon Rigantona, and it is high time you paid the penalty for your treasonous crimes.”

  A vicious smile curled on to her ravishing face, and she directed her gaze at the five surviving captains of her spriggans.

  They snapped to attention and awaited her commands.

  “Seize those two,” she ordered in a voice devoid of emotion. “Drag the lovers here before me, bind their arms so they cannot embrace—then slay them. I wish to view their final agonies up close. As for the rest of the sorry rabble that crowd around them: shovel their remains into your helmets and take them back to the hill for the Redcaps—if even they can stomach such putrid, quivering flesh.”

  “Yes, My Lady!” Captain Ruffnap cried, and he spun around, brandishing his sword over his head. “You heard her, boys! One last stab an’ slash. Charge!”

  The spriggans gave a lusty yell and stormed forward, leaping over the bodies of their fallen comrades and dead sluglungs.

  Directly in their path, Kernella and Bufus raced toward the well.

  “They’ll never make it!” Gamaliel cried. “They’ll both be cut down before they reach us.”

  “So will we, onc
e the hillmen get here!” Finnen said grimly. “This is the end of us.”

  Tollychook sniveled into his sleeve, and Liffidia looked up at the Tower Lubber.

  “Is there nothing we can do?” she implored him.

  A curious expression was spreading over the Tower Lubber’s face, almost as if he were trying to surpress a grin.

  “My love,” he said to Meg. “Are they close enough yet?”

  To the werlings’ surprise, she answered with a gurgling laugh. “They are indeed.”

  “Then let it be done,” he told her.

  Meg dipped her hands into the well water and closed her eyes, whispering strange words under her breath.

  At once the liquid boiled and bubbled around her, then she raised her arms and called out at the top of her croaking voice.

  With that a column of water surged upward. Up and up it climbed, roaring toward the bright blue sky like a pillar of molten glass.

  The stones of the well shuddered, and jets of water came shooting sideways from the cracks. The werlings stared around them in disbelief, and the sluglungs gibbered in awe.

  “Megboo!” they cried. “Megboo—the great, the Big She all powerful.”

  And then they hopped from foot to foot as the ground began to quake and the surrounding turf rippled like the disturbed surface of a pond and a deep rumble reverberated beneath the rupturing earth.

  Suddenly a spout of water blasted up from the grass: then another and another until the clearing was punctured by fountains, and sprays of water were springing up everywhere.

  Liffidia could not understand what was happening. Rain lashed her face, and in moments she was soaked to the skin.

  Behind her, within the momentous column of water, Meg was laughing, and the Tower Lubber threw back his head to join in.

  Then the almighty pillar split apart.

  From the highest foaming pinnacle down to the gushing wellhead, it exploded with a cataclysmic, splashing crash.

  Water displaced the air.

  The werlings were thrown off their feet, the sluglungs were sent reeling, and the Tower Lubber’s hat went spinning into the trees.