“Mary has other fish to fry,” I comforted him. “As always. And she’s like Tempest, worse bark than bite.”
“Tempest has quite a bad bite when roused. Remember him hanging onto that pig? And I wager she does too.”
But she had vanished and we continued through the woods. The shadows cast by the tangled boughs grew long and sinister as we went deeper. I took care not to trip over tree roots that crept along the ground. They looked like long gnarled fingers. I wondered that Fence had ever ventured this far by himself.
“I got lost in the forest, and ended up going further while trying to get out,” he admitted. “But it turned out to be a lucky mistake. Here we are at the starting point. I think we already passed it twice.”
Hell’s Bells. Before us was the beginning of the path, narrower than I expected, winding through the trees like a long snake. It was empty of forest leaves, ferns, and bushes. Someone had spread pink sand upon it, and someone had stuck small pink stones into the ground all the way along its meanders as markers. They glimmered as if to say, “This is the way.” I gasped. This path did not make itself, and it wasn’t made by animals. Winters Island had at least one other mortal man upon it, or mortal woman, who hadn’t come into the Bermudas on the Valentine. A person who was there before. Thrilled, I said as much to Fence.
He trembled. “Methinks there is someone in front of us, as you say, someone that we’ve never met. And there is mayhap someone behind us also, someone we do know. Not Mary. Someone worse.” He couldn’t bring himself to mention Proule’s name, although it was easy enough to work out who he meant. “We are wedged between the unknown and the known.”
“Between Scylla and Charybdis?” I asked.
“I don’t rightly know who they are.”
“Two nasty rock monsters where ships wrecked. If one did not get them, then the other did.”
“Aye, like them.” He turned around fearfully, as if listening for footsteps, and I turned too, half expecting to see Proule.
We were, true it is, easy enough to dispose of if anyone took a fancy to that line of work. We were like a slab of cheese thrust between two heels of moldy bread. Sooner or later we’d get eaten — like the mariners who tried to scape Scylla — or at best, beaten. All I could see, however, was trees, and all I could hear was leafy whispers. Nothing moved. No one spoke. The place appeared deserted. It was empty of people, save for ourselves. Mary and her friendly sailor were long gone, attending to other business, and I was pretty sure Proule hadn’t followed us. I began to feel bolder, more daring. Without a moment of introduction, the old wickedness coursed through my veins.
“We are deep in the forest. No one is here except us. And perhaps a bear or two,” I couldn’t resist adding.
Fence made a faint sound like a mouse squeak.
“I was jesting, Fence, playing the buffoon. Who knows what we may discover? But not bears, for sure. There are none on either Winters or Boors Island, I’m certain of it, or we would have seen them long ago. Let’s go on.”
He nodded slowly, his dark hair falling across his face so his blue eyes were hidden. The day was waxing hot, even in the shade. The beginning of the path was lit by a shaft of golden sun. We stood in the centre of the light for the merest trace of time. Then we began to tread the dark forest with its huge boughs and branches that bent towards us. Fence, who hadn’t wanted to start, now couldn’t wait to finish. “Hurry up, Robin, hurry up. This is taking so long. I have to get there — wherever there is — and back before sundown, or the admiral will be worried.”
We followed the ribbon of pink sand down into a valley, around a tall straight tree and southward. At times I could hear the lapping of the waves, and guessed we were near the sea, though I never could see it. As the path was trodden, and the forest grew denser, we grew more excited, and my word pudding began slowly, slowly, to resolve itself back into an emblem cipher. I repeated and repeated it, so I would not forget this time. I didn’t tell Fence yet. I was awaiting the proper moment, the moment when we came to the end of the path. I would declaim the next clues in our search proudly. But the path stopped suddenly in a clearing just before a dense copse, and the landscape was immediately discouraging. There was no crown and nothing else that looked even faintly mysterious. Just trees and more trees.
“Fence,” I uttered at last, after having looked around, “This is very disheartening. I’d hoped we would find something more. Before us are palms, cedars, and the like, so thickly arrayed that it is almost impossible to traverse them. But there is no crown, as the first cipher promised. On the other hand, I have remembered something else. And my memory agrees with what stands before us.”
“Remembered what, Robin?” Fence was sitting on the ground rubbing his foot, the pail, half full of pignuts, beside him. He seemed exhausted and uncaring. “I have a blister,” he complained.
I ignored his discomfort, which was certainly no worse than my own, and carried on. “The emblem. That’s what I have remembered. I can almost see it in the air in front of me. You must remember it too, from the chest. A thicket, with moon and stars above.”
“I do, right well, now that you describe it.” He stopped rubbing his foot.
“And here we are, close to a huge tangle of trees, darker and thicker than what we’ve come through so far. I even remember part of the emblem’s verse:
A Shady wood, portraited to the sight
With uncouth paths and hidden ways
unknown
Resembling chaos, or the hideous night
Or those sad groves by banks Bermudian
With baneful palm and cedar overgrown
Whose thickest boughs and inmost entries
are
Unpierceable by powers from afar….
“What does ‘portraited’ mean, Robin? I don’t know.”
“I don’t know either. ‘Pictured,’ mayhap?” Yes, that had to be right. The emblem was like a picture of the place we were at.
“Aye. I wonder who the powers from afar could be?”
“I’m not sure, perchance Boors and Winters. Certainly not us. We have no power at all, pity ’tis, ’tis true. I’ve forgotten the rest of the verse, but my brain has mostly unfuddled itself and I do remember the cipher I made from the words: “Through the labyrinth to the cave.” I scratched the cipher text in the pink sand at the end of the path with a stick, in case my mind misplaced it again, and I kept staring at it. But it yielded no further secrets. Looking again at the scene before us, I was flummoxed. “Misfortunately I see neither maze nor cave.”
“I know why! I know why!” Fence had leapt to his feet and was dancing around.
Unable to dance myself, I instead bestowed on him a questioning gaze.
“Because it’s light and not dark. We have to come back by moon and starlight, so it looks like the emblem.”
And that’s exactly why Fence, untutored though he might be, was my good and clever boy. “Yes, of course you’re right. We’ll wait here. Come nightfall, perhaps grave secrets will be unlocked. We will pierce the inmost entries of the grove before us.” I sounded very pompous, even to myself. But the emblem seemed to demand flowery language.
“Not tonight, Robin. The sun is well past the midpoint, and I have to get this food back for the swine. And whatever else we can carry. Some of those little prune things, mayhap. Tree berries. So no one will notice aught amiss.”
I was fed up. We had come so far and were perchance so close that I was desperate to go on. I could hardly bear to hobble all the way back to our smelly lean-to full of dog and then come forth again. I said as much.
“I’m sorry, but we shall do better anyways in two nights’ time when the moon is full and the night is bright with stars, Robin, shan’t we?”
“I am determined to go on, even by myself. You go back if you have to.”
“I see the clouds beginning to roll in.” Fence sounded desperate. “And I thought I felt a drop of rain just then. The wind is beginning to blow. Tonight won
’t be the right night for finding out. And I must not disappoint the pigs or the admiral won’t let me out again.”
Mayhap this had nothing to do with getting back to feed the pigs. Mayhap he was just too frighted to continue, but in any case, I was too tired to argue with him. It would be a long and painful argument. He usually deferred to me, but now his lips were set in a determined line; however, not arguing was not the same as accepting. “You go back if you must,” I said again. “I will go on by myself, having come this far.”
“What shall I say to the admiral if he asks where you are?”
I shrugged. “Hell’s Bells, Fence, I don’t give a twig what you tell him. Tell him you lost me.”
“You’re not well enough to go forward on your own.”
“I am not sick enough to go back. I will go forward if I can find a way. Do what you want. You needn’t worry about me.” I didn’t want my words to sound harsh and bitter, but they did. They stung him, I could see, but I did nothing to heal his hurt.
“Very well then.” Fence picked a handful of small berry-like fruits. Chewing one and throwing the rest into the pail, he began to walk slowly back along the path. He turned his head to glance at me twice, but did not return. As soon as he’d gone, I felt my meanness in my bones, and was sorry for it. How stupid I was! I’d come to Winters Island to find my only friend, yet here I was without him. And all because I was too impatient to wait two days. He had lived through enough unkindness. He didn’t need more. The memory of the long S on his hand haunted me.
I erased the sand cipher with my foot. I felt foolish and lonely, and would even have welcomed the company of the damned dog. But I would strip off and bathe in the sea, which must be close by as I could hear it still. Not deep would I go, though. The sea was too treacherous, and I had already learned all the evil lessons it cared to teach. I would wash my clothes in the waves and put them back on, wet and stiff with salt though they might be. At the moment they stank as badly as I did, and I wished to go into the future clean, not surrounded by my own stench. Finally I would sit down to wait for the sun to fall behind the clouds and into the depths of the ocean. I was greatly afeard, and wanted my good friend Fence. But I wanted even more to see what night would reveal.
The sun went down, the moon came up. It was orange, huge, and almost round, near the horizon. It had just a small section bitten off the edge. Moon mice, I thought. I couldn’t see any stars, and true it is, soon the moon itself, as it rose, was partly hidden by cloud, through which it glimmered, revealing a message carved into a tree trunk:
As you journey through this wood
Rest when needed, as you should.
Take the mazed path for a while
Hasten from the villains vile.
Unless you visit you’ll be found,
Roughly treated, brought to ground.
Don’t stop here but come inside.
Underground you must abide.
Doubt not you will solve the clue,
Labyrinth will guide you through.
End your journey at the cave,
You will find the wealth you crave.
Someone is here besides me, I thought. Someone who knows who I am and what I’m doing. But who were the villains? Proule and Mary? Or someone else? And how would they bring us to ground? There was word of the labyrinth again in the message, and the cave. It was exciting and frightening together. I shivered. The moon was now totally obscured, and it was black as a graveyard at midnight. Perchance corpses would rise up and dance. I could almost feel their feathery fingers. I looked to the stand of trees, or at least, towards where I believed them to be. I could see nothing at first, but soon they, or rather a host of spiders’ webs hanging from them, began to glow eerily, a green gleaming against the darkness. And I could hear a constant low chattering, which scared me stupid, cowardly, whey-faced moldwarp that I am.
Nevertheless, I went closer. I couldn’t resist. The webs grew brighter. The spiders in their centres were big as plates, winking gold and silver and pearl, like jewelled escutcheons. These were the chatterers. They made the noise by rubbing their legs together, though I had never heard spiders make any kind of sound before. The bright webs were surrounding what I could now see to be a dark circular area. It looked like an entrance, although a very strange and sinister one. I blinked twice, but the round opening — if opening it was — remained. It must be the beginning of the labyrinth.
I suddenly remembered both the Latin inscription on our first cipher and what it meant: Mente Videbor — “By the mind I shall be seen.” Somehow I was seeing the opening to the labyrinth with my mind rather than with my eyes. But before I had a chance to go through it, or even contemplate doing so, I glimpsed a weird and terrifying flickering. An old man I’d never seen before was standing very close to me, close enough to touch, light reflecting onto him from the webs and streaming away in all directions.
I was too amazed to move. Indeed, my legs had turned to jelly, so I couldn’t go anywhere. There was a distant grumbling of thunder. It sounded like a belly that needed food.
“Come with me,” the old man said, his voice raspy as a rusty key in a lock, “I will lead you through.” Just then a brilliant shaft of lightning, forking down from the heavens, struck the ground around him. It was followed immediately by a deafening thunderstroke. Rain began to pour down in torrents. The man spoke again, but I could not hear what he said. Nor did I want to. He might be one of the villains. Terrified, I turned and fled.
CHAPTER 24
RAISING A STORM
The storm was dreadful, as bad as anything on the Valentine, and for all I knew the rusty-voiced old man might have come after me. I had no idea whether he meant me good or evil, nor did I care to hang around and find out. I went as fast as I could, running, limping, banging into cedars, tripping over bushes, over the long fronds of ferns, and making my injuries worse. Occasionally lightning illumined the path and I could see my way better for a moment, but I was soon pitched into darkness again as the thunder crashed, the waves nearby roared, and the rain beat down.
“No one in their right mind would be out in this,” I comforted myself. “Except me. So the old man won’t be either.” But I couldn’t convince myself. Perchance he was a wizard who had caused the thunderstorm himself. He certainly looked like one with his long hair, white beard, and loose robe. He might catch and imprison me in the message tree, or do worse, and no one would ever see me again. I wished a hundred times that I’d listened to Fence.
Finally, after what seemed like hours of limping and worrying, I reached our lean-to, gasping for air. I was scratched and sore and wet through, but more than relieved to be back with no one behind me. I dived headlong into our shelter, falling on top of both Fence and Tempest in my haste. True it is, it was a very small, stinky space.
Tempest yelped. I yelped back.
“Get off. You’re soaked. I warned you it was going to rain,” said Fence nastily. He gave me a shove. “And I told the admiral you were lost, as you said I should. But it’s too late to tell him you’re found, though now, at least, I can sleep without worrying.”
“Don’t sleep yet,” I said, rubbing a particularly damp and painful part of myself. “I was wet even before the storm hit. Not that that matters. But I have so much to say to you.”
“In the morning. Not before.” He yawned and was asleep in a minute, his nose making a faint bubbly sound as he breathed. Tempest was soon snoring too. He was lying on his back with his paws in the air, silly beast that he was. I pushed him into Fence, squelched down in as small a space as possible so as not to lie on his tail, and shivered.
CHAPTER 25
EARLY RISING
I couldn’t wait to tell Fence, but come morning there was much else to think about. The rain had stopped, and it was already waxing hot. I crawled forward and poked my head out to get the moldy stink of damp clothing and dog out of my nostrils. But there, right in front of me, stood Proule, a vicious expression on his face. I tried t
o duck my head back in, but he’d already seen me, and pulled on my hair to prevent me from disappearing. He placed his boot on my hand.
“Here yer are, cockroach, and God blind me if I ain’t been searching for yer all the livelong night.” He let go of my hair and stood straight. But he kept his foot on my hand and pressed.
“I’m very sorry, Master Proule, but I found my way home very late indeed, after bumping into a great number of trees,” I said apologetically, staring up at him from my lowly position. I had learned to be very, very polite to Proule, and didn’t mean to change my usual behaviour while he was treading on my fingers.
“Winters sent me and some others out after yer, damn him. Like I ain’t needing my sleep. That man has ideas above his station.”
“Well, thank you for looking.” As it happened, I was very glad he hadn’t found me, or I might not be here now, very uncomfortably half in and half out of the lean-to. I felt at rather a disadvantage, with him standing there so tall and sweaty, and me trapped on my hands and knees, unable to either go all the way out or all the way back in.
“I’ll be watching yer, cockroach. Don’t disappear again. I want yer where I can see yer.” He took his boot off my fingers and placed it on my neck.
“No, sir. Yes, sir,” I muttered, unable to move.
There was a long pause. Finally, he removed his foot. “Get along with yer,” he hissed, and I took this as a cue to withdraw my hand and duck my head back into the lean-to.
After a few minutes I poked it out again, just to make sure he’d gone. He had. Or at least, he wasn’t within punching or kicking or smelling distance. I was beginning to understand better why tortoises vanished into their shells. True it is, I was feeling a bit like one myself, my head coming and going as it did. I wondered if tortoises ever got dizzy.
CHAPTER 26
A STOLEN HOARD
Fence and I were standing a little way off from the camp, hidden by trees. I was explaining what I’d seen the night before in the way of verses, cobwebs, old men, and lightning, trembling at the memory of it all, when we heard a clamour nearby.
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