by Dave Butler
It was so beautiful he reached a finger out to touch it—
“Stop!” Aunt Big Money hissed. She had an egg in one hand, and she waved Charlie back. “You’ll only burn yourself, and you’ll wreck the scrying to boot.”
Charlie sat back.
The rabbit held the egg up to her mouth and whispered to it. “Mammy Bammy, song and sooth, about this boy tell me the truth.”
“That’s a rhyme,” Ollie muttered.
“It’s a song,” Lloyd added.
Aunt Big Money spun her arm in a single vertical circle and slammed the egg down on the stone. Yolk and white splattered in all directions, sizzling as the egg cooked on the hot stone, and she stooped to look at it closely. Then she stood and looked Charlie in the eye. “You are a wanderer,” she told him. “Your path will take you far from home, but if you are true to it, it will always bring you back again.”
Charlie had nothing to say, but the rabbit didn’t seem to expect anything. She was already grabbing a second egg and whispering to it. “Mammy Bammy, first and last, tell me about this child’s past.”
Again she slammed the egg onto the hot stone and stooped to read it.
“Good thing I already ate.” Ollie elbowed Bob in the ribs. “Or my mouth would be watering.” Bob ignored him and focused on the rabbit.
Aunt Big Money addressed Charlie again. “You have a deeper past than you know. You must understand that every person has a spark of heaven in him, and right next to that spark of heaven and tied up with it is a terrible, terrible knot of hell. You are no different.”
Charlie expected another wisecrack from Ollie but heard nothing. He looked at the chimney sweep and was surprised to see a tear glistening on each cheek.
Aunt Big Money grabbed a third egg. “Mammy Bammy, stitch and suture, has this boy a golden future?”
She slapped the third egg onto her scrying stone, then grabbed Charlie by the back of his neck and dragged him forward, forcing his face toward the hot stone and the cooking trails of egg.
“Your turn,” she barked. “Look!”
Charlie sank into the stone.
He felt the spirals rise more than he saw them. The scratches in the stone received the meat of the cracked eggs and swelled, gaining dimension and substance and spinning around him in a cyclone.
He cried out wordlessly.
Then he felt a soft, slightly furry hand on the back of his neck.
“There is no vision without danger, boy. Look while you can. Look and live!”
Charlie looked. He saw a pit, with great ribs of stone arcing up to a pinprick of light far over his head. He saw the mound of a grave, marked by a white stone with no words on it. A boy stood beside the tomb with his head down and his hands folded, as if he were weeping.
Then the boy looked up, and Charlie knew the boy was keeping a secret.
“That’s me,” Charlie said.
“No vision is so simple!” the rabbit barked. “Look!”
A city burned. The great river winding through the city’s heart smoked and bubbled, and the reek of charred flesh filled Charlie’s nostrils. Folk with strange masks that made their faces look like those of birds ran back and forth in the flames.
People ran from the bird faces, but the bird-faced folk carried weapons. Charlie didn’t recognize the weapons; they looked like simple tubes, but when the bird folk pointed them, fire spouted from the tips.
“Know death!” the rabbit whispered in Charlie’s ear. He could no longer feel her hand or see her. “Death waits for everyone! Know death and fear it not!”
The sky tilted. Stars sank on the wrong horizon, and strange stars rose. Charlie stood on a high place, on the peak of a great rounded rock. Before him raged a giant. Roaring and grabbing with enormous hands, the giant charged at Charlie. Charlie ducked under the first attack and dodged the second.
On his third lunge, the giant wrapped his arms around Charlie, and they both fell from the stone. Charlie wailed as he plummeted through the air.
“I don’t want to! I don’t want to!” he howled in his vision.
“Don’t want to hurt him!” Charlie cried, and the orange glow of embers told him the vision had ended. He crashed to the ground.
“Done!” Aunt Big Money shouted.
Charlie opened his eyes, feeling suddenly cold. The pit, the fire, the dome-shaped rock were all gone. He lay on the packed-earth floor of Aunt Big Money’s burrow, staring at the ceiling.
Bob knelt by Charlie’s right side, and Ollie by his left. “Charlie,” Bob said, shaking Charlie’s hand. “Are you all right, mate?”
Charlie shook. His head was full of fire, and darkness, and his own death.
“I’m fine,” he lied.
Aunt Big Money bent down, scooped up her scrying stone with both hands wrapped in her apron, and slid it back into the embers. Lloyd Shankin leaned back on a stool and stared.
“Well, I ain’t doing that for love or money,” Ollie said.
“No,” Aunt Big Money agreed. “You’re going to bed.”
Charlie looked at the stairs. The light was out, and it was dark outside. He didn’t want to stay, but he was afraid that if he left, the Hound would find him on the mountain and tear him to pieces.
“She’s right, Ollie,” he said. “Get some sleep.”
Aunt Big Money lent them each a blanket. No one said much while they sat sipping hot tea, and then the rabbit showed them to a room with beds of soft moss to lie on and piles of dry leaves to heap over their blankets.
“What about the Hound?” Gnat asked.
“The Hound will not get into this burrow,” Aunt Big Money assured her. “Not tonight.”
Gnat and the sweeps tunneled into the leaves to rest. Lloyd did the same, but he took three books with him from Aunt Big Money’s stacks.
“I’m not a sleeper,” Charlie said.
“Neither am I,” Aunt Big Money said.
Charlie and Aunt Big Money sat at her table. She refreshed a pot of black tea, then a pot of red tea. He sipped and read and stared into the fire, shuddering at the occasional sound of a beast howling.
In the middle of the night, when his friends’ breathing was regular and the embers had burned low, Charlie spoke. “This is not the first vision you’ve sent me.”
Aunt Big Money smiled. “Clever boy.”
“Who are you?”
“I’m your auntie,” she said.
“Isn’t that just your name? Aren’t you just called Aunt?”
“In your case, Charlie, there’s more literal truth to it. You’ll understand that soon enough. And you’re asking good questions, because I’ve shown you troubling things, and you want them explained.”
“Of course I do.”
Aunt Big Money nodded. “But understand this: just because I have the power to show you a vision doesn’t mean I can see the vision myself, much less explain the vision to you. Call me a witch, call me a seer, but my power is to give vision to others. Most of all to you, Charlie.”
“I didn’t come here looking for visions.”
“No?” The rabbit smiled. “Well, then I’m glad I was here to point you in the right direction.”
Aunt Big Money closed her eyes as if in sleep. Since that seemed to end the conversation, Charlie returned to his book.
* * *
While it was still dark, Lloyd Shankin crawled out of the leaf pile, replaced the books he’d borrowed, and put on his hat.
“Where are you going?” Charlie asked the dewin, but he knew the answer.
“I never did spend the night on the Cader, boyo.” Lloyd smiled. “And now that I have done it, I’ve not done it alone.”
“Be careful,” Charlie said.
Lloyd patted the chalk wall thoughtfully. “Yes,” he agreed. “Most of the time. But I don’t think you get to be a dewin, a real dewin, by always playing it safe.”
He doffed his hat, and Aunt Big Money rocked once in her chair in salute, and then the Welshman disappeared up the stairs and
was gone.
* * *
Aunt Big Money woke Charlie’s friends at first light by cooking thick strips of bacon on a flat black griddle on the coals. Charlie, having watched the meat sizzle and grow crisp only inches from the spiral-engraved slate in which he had seen dark portents of his own future, waved away the offer of food and had a last cup of honeyed red tea instead.
“And the whiny dog?” Ollie asked around a mouthful of bacon.
“He’s taken his own road,” Charlie said.
“I ’ope ’e finds the poetry ’e’s after, an’ not the madness,” Bob said.
Then Aunt Big Money led them out of her warren by a different tunnel. They emerged next to a small pasture containing half a dozen very large goats.
“You won’t want to walk.” From a deep pocket in her apron the rabbit produced leather bridles. “These goats are sure-footed. They won’t complain. And they know the way.”
“You want me to ride a goat.” Ollie stared at the animals. They were shaggy and white and the size of ponies. Their horns were bigger than their heads and curled back from their foreheads in brownish-gray spirals. They munched mouthfuls of grass and stared back at him.
“Your choice,” the rabbit said. “Everything in this life, in the end, comes down to your choice.” She looked Ollie in the eye, and her face grew stern. Not unkind, but very sober. “Even when facts and events are beyond your control, you always have the choice of how to react to them.”
Ollie backed away from Aunt Big Money, looking at his feet. But when she held out the bridles again, he was the first to take one.
“No saddles?” Bob asked. “No stand-ups?”
“Stirrups,” Charlie said.
“You won’t need them. These goats are used to bearing riders.”
Charlie looked to Ollie, expecting to hear a harrumph of some sort. Ollie was still inspecting his own shoes.
Charlie almost fell over the goat and off the other side trying to mount, but Aunt Big Money showed him how to sit, and what to do with his knees, and how to not let the goat have too much slack in its bridle so it wouldn’t run away with him. When he finally got confident that he could ride the animal, he found that the others were ready, too.
Gnat led out. The goat seemed quite large under her; she had to scoot forward and sit with her legs around its neck, more like a mahout astride an elephant than an equestrian atop a horse.
Charlie leaned over to whisper to Ollie.
“Are you all right?” he asked the shape-changer. “You seem a little…not-Ollie.”
Ollie snorted. “Can’t a man think a little without everybody wanting to launder his socks?”
It wasn’t a simple yes, but even though Charlie guessed something about Aunt Big Money or her den was bothering his friend, Charlie decided to leave him alone. Ollie had shared secrets before; he would talk when he was ready.
Charlie followed Gnat, and the sweeps came after.
At the next crest above the forest, just before losing sight of the rabbit and her remaining goats, Charlie stopped his goat to wave at her. She waved back and then disappeared down her burrow.
Was she the emissary from the Old Man who was supposed to test him? He was troubled by the visions he’d seen in the grooves and egg patterns of her hot scrying stone. He was more troubled by the fact that days earlier she had sent him a vision from hundreds of miles away and wouldn’t—or maybe couldn’t—explain it herself. But she had gone out of her way to help Charlie, and that was a lot.
The goats climbed with little guidance. They were calm, leaping from rock to rock with casual grace, and the party wound its way up a wide valley past empty sheep pastures and past the foot of high cliffs. Along the way, Charlie shared a few things he’d learned in his travels and in his reading the night before.
“Cader means ‘chair’ in Welsh,” he told his friends. “So Cader Idris is the seat of Idris, and Idris was a giant in ancient days.”
He explained this as they were coming up into the highest valley of the mountain. It was horseshoe-shaped and ringed on three sides by high gray cliffs, so it did look something like a seat. In the middle of the valley floor lay two lakes. Small islands dotted both lakes; Charlie squinted, but none of the islands were moving.
“A backside to fill that chair would be very large indeed,” Ollie said. Charlie was glad his friend’s sense of humor was coming back. “A giant with a bottom that size could destroy St. Paul’s just by sitting on it.”
“Or the ’Ouses of Parliament,” Bob agreed. “An’ Westminster Abbey at the same time.”
“Or all of Machine-Town,” Gnat said.
“His rival was another giant in the same neighborhood. One day they fought, and Idris killed the other giant.”
“Most likely with his enormous rump,” Ollie suggested.
“The place where Idris buried the other giant is called Yr Wyddfa.” Charlie was pretty sure he was pronouncing the Welsh name wrong, but he tried: uhr WITH-vuh. “In Welsh, that means ‘the burial mound.’ It’s another mountain, north of here. If we get to the top of Cader Idris, I guess we’ll see it. They’re the two biggest mountains in Wales.”
Charlie’s goat turned at the edge of the lake and headed for a narrow slit of rock that climbed steeply up the cliffs. The crack was choked with boulders and didn’t look passable, but the goat took the passage without slowing down. It scrambled to the top of the first boulder, then jumped to the second, then bypassed the third entirely by springing up sideways onto a tiny shelf. The ledge was so small that Charlie could barely see it, but his goat wedged its feet into the gap and balanced there.
Charlie just held tight and let the goat have its way.
Looking down, he saw his friends doing the same.
Charlie gripped the reins and let his goat continue.
Halfway up the crevasse, a particularly massive piece of fallen rock jammed the canyon, creating a space large enough for ten or twelve people to stand on. Or even pitch a few tents.
This was no dead end—Charlie saw how he could clamber on all fours and get farther up the chasm—but the goat just stopped. And waited.
Charlie climbed off.
The view from this height was spectacular. He saw the horseshoe-shaped valley below with its two lakes, and the trails he and his friends had followed to get there. He saw the patches of snow at eye level now, and realized that they weren’t so small after all. He saw black birds perched in the rocks along with gray-and-white gulls. How far were they from the sea?
He saw the upper reaches of the wood farther down the slope. He couldn’t see Machine-Town, but he saw the rising plumes of smoke and steam that told him where it was. He saw miles and miles of forest and pasture stretching off into indistinctness in the south.
One by one, his friends reached the top and stepped down from their goats. There was no grass to eat, but the goats were content to stand.
Ollie arrived last. “Dead end?”
A voice came from behind Charlie. “What do you want?”
Charlie turned.
Standing with them on the shelf was the boy with the thick scarf and the low-pulled hat.
Charlie froze.
The boy was pale. Wisps of dark hair poked from under his hat, and a black coat covered his entire body.
“We want to speak with Caradog Pritchard. The Old Man.”
“Caradog is a crazy old fellow who used to herd sheep on this mountain. The Old Man is just a legend. I can’t help you with either one.”
“Who are you, then?” Ollie demanded.
“What do you mean, following us?” Bob added.
“Maybe you’d better go back down the mountain.” The boy stared at them. His eyes were a very pale blue.
Charlie knew.
“The Old Man is your father,” he said to the boy.
“Why do you say that?” the boy asked.
“I don’t know whether you have a mother,” Charlie said, “but the rabbit seer Big Money is your auntie, isn’t s
he?” So what had she meant when she hinted she was Charlie’s auntie, too?
“You’re guessing.”
Charlie was hesitant about his final guess, though. If he was wrong, he’d drive the boy away.
“Were you there when your father made her? Or was it the other way around? Did she care for you? Like a nurse? Like a…nanny?”
As Charlie asked each question, the boy fidgeted more. By the end of the questions, he was grinding his heels into the stone of the shelf and shaking his head.
“Charlie,” Ollie muttered, “what are you getting at?”
“You don’t know anything,” the boy said.
Charlie took a step forward, and the boy stepped back.
Charlie stopped. “I’m Charlie. I’m like you.”
Ollie and Gnat stared. Bob nodded, as if she’d known all along.
“Nobody’s like me.” The boy stepped back again.
“You could tell me your name,” Charlie suggested. “That wouldn’t hurt, would it? And maybe after we talked, you would decide we could go meet your father. Together.”
The boy cocked his head to one side. “Did Aunt Big Money show you this road?”
Charlie nodded. “She gave us the goats, and the goats brought us here.”
“You should go now. Aunt Big Money was wrong. This is not my father’s house; it’s just a place where I come to see the view. The goats know the way here because they’re my beasts. But I’ve been watching you, and I don’t think you’re friends.”
“We’re friends.”
“You’re criminals. Thieves and gaol-breakers.”
Charlie frowned. He jabbed his finger at the boy. “Look, we’ve come a long way to bring your father a message. I want to see him now!”
The boy looked down. “He’s not here.”
Charlie stamped his foot. “Where is he?”
The pale boy pointed his finger past Charlie, into the horseshoe-shaped valley. Charlie turned around to look.
The boy pushed Charlie.
Charlie fell. It wasn’t a single straight drop, which might have left him shattered, but a series of short falls. Charlie bounced from one boulder to the next, rattling and tumbling one direction and then the other until he came to a rest on a patch of earth and grass on the valley floor.