“Soup first,” said Pitshaft. “Some for the boy too.” Thwart went out through one of the arched doors and returned with a bubbling pot and four stone bowls. They sat all together at one of the carved tables and drank a strange but savory soup of tender roots in a salty broth. Then the three ate their apples, slowly and lovingly, stems, cores, and all.
Afterward, Pitshaft went around the room and put out most of the torches and then he disappeared through another of the arched doors. In a moment he came back carrying a sort of flute. He sat down on a bench across the now shadowed room and began to play. The voice of the flute was rich and woody and the tune was solemn. Bevel rose after a moment and began to dance, swaying and turning slowly and seriously. Thwart took out a pipe and tobacco and smoked peacefully in the dimness.
Gaylen sat wide-eyed. The carvings on the walls merged and trembled in the flickering light. From the quivering leaves of a tall tree he saw the wrinkled face of the woldweller peeping out at him, while above the basin the stone Ardis blinked happily and her scales sparkled. He looked from scene to scene and a question occurred to him.
“Why are there no people in the carvings?” he whispered to Thwart, who still sat smoking at the table.
When the dwarf answered, his voice was low and dreamy. “The waters belong to Ardis, the trees to the woldwellers, the skies to the wind. And the mountains belong to us.”
“But what belongs to the people?” asked Gaylen.
Smoke curled around the dwarf’s quiet face. “Nothing,” he answered.
Gaylen tried to think about this but he was beginning to feel very fuzzy and peculiar. The fumes from Thwart’s pipe filled his head like incense. The husky music of the flute, Bevel’s weaving, sober figure, and the dappled, pulsing pictures on the walls seemed to blend and blur into a cone of sound and shadow. They began to revolve slowly before his eyes, to whirl and ebb and dim into blackness. His head dropped down on the table and he was asleep.
Gaylen half woke now and then, only to sleep again. The drip of the water into the basin measured his dreams and sometimes he thought he heard the bong of the hammer on the anvil, but these would dissolve into visions of dripping forests and the hollow clop of distant hoofbeats, and these, in turn, into the sobbing of the mermaid on a faraway bank.
When at last he woke completely, he felt new and fresh. The chamber was brightly lit with fresh torches, but it was empty except for Marrow, who munched dry grasses someone had piled for him near the carved basin. Gaylen ran to the horse and hugged him round the neck. He stooped to examine the lame leg. It seemed quite strong again and on the hoof was the bright new shoe. It was time to go.
Gaylen looked around and wondered where the dwarfs had gone. He decided that he needn’t wait to say goodbye. They had had their apples and Marrow had his shoe. He gathered up the horse’s reins and started for the tunnel. Then he turned for a last look at the stone mermaid. Suddenly, as he gazed, he saw what it was that had eluded him before. Behind the mermaid’s arching body was another, larger shape on which she seemed to hang, her finny tail and one graceful arm curving around it. The other shape was all at once piercingly familiar. It was exactly like the one that hung inside Gaylen’s tunic: a gray stone key. And there was a hole down through the middle, exactly—he now saw for the first time—like a whistle’s. Above the mermaid, nearly hidden in the twisting branches of a spindle tree, sat a family of crows. And as he stared in amazement, a rasping voice scratched across his memory, a voice that had called after him in the morning sun of another day, “Whistles and keys! Whistles and keys! Goodbye!”
Gaylen rode marrow up through the tunnel and out into the brilliance of a golden morning. His eyes squinted painfully after the dimness underground, but he was too stifled with excitement to notice. Here, then, hanging under his jerkin, was perhaps the very whistle Hemlock had wanted Pitshaft to replace, the very whistle lost for hundreds of years. How in the world the minstrel’s family had come to possess it he could not even guess. He pulled it up out of his tunic and looked at it. Yes, there might once have been a hole down through the middle, but now it was clogged with centuries of grit.
Gaylen slid down from Marrow’s back and broke a long, sharp thorn from a hawthorn tree. He sat on a rock and poked at the top of the key. A bit of the grit loosened. He shook it out and began to work in earnest, poking and scraping. After a time the hole was cleaned out and he sat looking at his treasure in wonder. The minstrel had said it didn’t open any doors and yet somehow it must. Perhaps when it was blown, something magical happened. He put it to his lips and blew through the hole, but he could hear nothing—only the whoosh of his own breath rushing out through the other end. He looked about, but the rocky landscape remained unchanged. No puffs of green smoke, no boulders turning by themselves in their ancient hollows. Still, if Hemlock was so anxious to find it and if Ardis wept for it, it had to be very valuable. He would hurry through the polling of the last two towns, he told himself, and then he would go to Ardis and give it back to her. He climbed into the saddle and nudged Marrow into a canter, his thoughts full of the woldweller, the dwarfs, and the mermaid he had yet to find.
The country through which he jogged was slowly softening. Rocks on the hillsides began to give way to patchy grass and the trees were fuller and more frequent. Gaylen heard birds nesting noisily in the branches and once a fearful rabbit scalloped across his path. Then, as they rounded a shrubby hillock, Gaylen reined in hastily. A flock of lumpy sheep filled the way just ahead, baaing hugely as they crowded across and on up the hillside. A boy of about Gaylen’s age strolled beside them. When he saw Gaylen, he stopped and stared rudely.
“Hey there,” called Gaylen, “what’s today?”
“Well, now,” said the boy, furrowing his brow in mock concentration. “Riddles so early in the morning? I know the answer, though. Today is the day tomorrow becomes and yesterday used to be.” He grinned wickedly.
“No, I meant what weekday is it,” said Gaylen, frowning a little.
“But it’s not a weak day at all,” said the boy, raising his eyebrows in a good imitation of surprise. “I’d have called it a strong day with a sun like this.”
“Look here,” said Gaylen. “I only meant, is it Sunday or Monday or what?”
“Why didn’t you say so, then?” said the boy. “I could have told you right away. It’s Tuesday.”
Tuesday! Gaylen forgot his annoyance for a moment. Then he had slept three nights in Pitshaft’s cave. Hemlock would be far ahead by now. “Hey there,” he said to the boy anxiously. “Have you seen any strangers on horseback along here?”
“Yes,” said the boy. “You.”
Gaylen swallowed his anger and tried again. “Have you seen a man ride by on a big gray horse? He would have been wearing a cape.”
The boy scratched his head. “No,” he said at last. “I’d have remembered a thing like that. You don’t often see a horse wearing a cape.”
“Now look here!” cried Gaylen. “I’m the King’s messenger and I’m here on the King’s business!”
“You’re here on the King’s horse, too,” said the boy and his eyes narrowed. “I know who you are and I know what you’re doing. You can list my favorite food as mutton. I’m thirteen years old and I live a mile from here. My name is Decry and some day I shall be Prime Minister.” He threw back his head and laughed loudly. “Tell that to the King if he’s still king when the war is over.”
“The war?” asked Gaylen quickly. “What do you know about the war?”
“My father and all his friends have gone to fight,” answered the boy. “All of his enemies, too. We’re Squashies. They’re Crisps.”
Gaylen took out the notebook and wrote while the boy watched him. Then he asked, “How long will it take me to get to the third town?”
“A very long time,” said the boy.
“A very long time?” echoed Gaylen, discouraged.
“Well, yes, of course!” said the boy gleefully. “Your horse is standing
still!”
Gaylen gave a shout of rage and dug his heels into Marrow’s sides. The horse sprang forward, vaulted neatly over the last few straggling sheep, and bounded down the road. Gaylen looked back over his shoulder and saw the shepherd boy grinning after him. He turned around again hastily, his cheeks flaming, and pressed Marrow hard till, after an hour, the rooftops of the third town shone in the distance.
When gaylen rode up to the third town, he found the gate shut tight. He climbed down from the saddle and banged till his knuckles were sore. At last a head appeared above the gate. It was a woman with her hair tied up in a kerchief.
“Squashie or Crisp?” she barked down at him fiercely.
“Neither one,” Gaylen answered. “I’m the King’s messenger and I’m here on the King’s business.”
“It’s him!” shrieked the woman, and instantly a great many other heads appeared above the gate, all women and all yelling at once: “He’s the one!” “Warmonger!” “Husband killer!” “Food stealer!” “It’s all your fault our men have gone away!” “Hit him! Hit him!” And they began pelting him with cabbages, tomatoes, and every other vegetable large enough to be thrown effectively.
Gaylen scrambled up on Marrow’s back as fast as he could and galloped away from the walls of the town, the screams of the women fading behind him. He was rigid with anger. First the shepherd boy and now these women and their vegetables! His cheek smarted where an onion had banged into it. “I’ll go away forever!” he cried to Marrow. “People are unbearable! They won’t listen, except to lies, and they fight all the time and I have had enough!”
He turned the horse toward the hills and was soon riding up a steep grassy slope. He kept going, up and up past trees and rocks and shallow caves, till Marrow, exhausted, spotted a clear little stream and refused to go beyond it. Gaylen slid out of the saddle and, leaving the horse to drink, went and sat on a smooth rock and scowled down at the land rolling away below like a map of itself.
“Unbearable!” His pride throbbed like a new bruise. “Why don’t they send for me to come home?” he wondered. “They know how bad things are.” He thought about the Prime Minister and his hurt deepened. “He knows I’m all alone out here and yet there he sits, safe in the castle, tinkering with that silly dictionary. He’s probably forgotten all about me.” A picture formed in his mind, in which the Prime Minister, basket in hand, tripped gaily as a girl about the palace garden, humming and picking flowers. He studied this picture with grim and bitter satisfaction. Then he stood up and thrust out his chin. “I’ll take the whistle back to the mermaid,” he said with decision, “and then I’ll go and live with the dwarfs or the woldweller. They never quarrel or fight and they don’t care about people any more than I do. To the devil with the poll! Hemlock can do what he likes. Why should I try to stop him?”
He turned away from the scene below and went to the stream to drink. With his face in the water, he found himself nose to nose with a plump trout. Much to his own surprise, he caught it with a sudden grab and flung it out onto the grass. Later he built a small fire and roasted the fish and ate it hungrily. Then he drank from the stream and stretched out in the sun to nap. He was extremely pleased with himself.
Gaylen woke from his nap to an afternoon stillness so strange that for a moment he imagined the stream had stopped running, and sprang up to go and look. No, it spilled over its pebbles as eagerly as before—and here came another lazy fish. He made a trap with his fingers and caught it easily. But when he tossed it out onto the bank, its gasps were so loud in the new silence that he threw it back in horror. “Perhaps there’s a storm coming,” he said to himself. “It’s often quiet just before a storm.” But the sky was very blue, with only a few clouds, and those few hung motionless. “Well, it feels like a storm, or something,” he said aloud to Marrow, who was browsing about in the grass. “I think we’d better find some kind of shelter before nightfall.” And he stared up uneasily at the hard blue sky.
There seemed no reason to go back down toward trouble. He headed Marrow up instead. They climbed for a long time and arrived at last at the very top of the mountain ridge. It was just as strangely silent here as below, and the few birches seemed less alive than the trees on the walls of Pitshaft’s cave. Gaylen looked down on the kingdom, which lay streaked with shadows now as the sun dropped to the west. From this height it looked calm and peaceful. “It isn’t, though,” he said to Marrow, “except maybe in the woldweller’s oak or down in the mines with the dwarfs.” He turned and peered over the other edge of the ridge, but the land on that side was lost in mist and offered nothing. Then he looked about him at the mountain top and shivered. There was a curious hollow in the stony ground at his feet, like a huge, shallow nest worn smooth from the whirl and settle of some gigantic, ancient bird. But there was no shelter anywhere beyond the motionless birches, nothing but the vast bowl of air above him and on either side the dropping away of rough slopes, which arched off ahead and behind into the blue smudge of distance. He felt as if he were perching on an enormous, narrow wall and had a sudden strong desire to hold on.
He went to sit against the trunk of a tree and tried to divert himself with his earlier anger, but the scowls and aches would not come. In their place was only a great wash of loneliness and isolation. “Where in the world do I belong?” he wondered. A solitary bird crossed high above and he looked up and watched it disappear. The silence was beginning to alarm him. He could hear the beat of his heart too plainly.
After a few moments he thought he heard something else, a faint, steady, rushing sound. He strained forward to listen. The rushing sound was very far away but clearly it was coming directly toward him through the air, with precise and frightening swiftness, as the ground comes toward you when you fall in a dream. It sped nearer and nearer and grew louder and louder. Gaylen could almost hear the smooth and terrible lift and fall of wings huge enough to rock the world. The leaves on the trees began to tremble. And still there was nothing to see but the purpling light of dusk. He pressed himself back against the tree trunk and waited with his eyes squeezed tight shut. The noise grew deliberately, relentlessly, and then, with a frightful shriek, it burst out of the sky and engulfed him. His hair was whipped about his head and the tree thrashed crazily. Then, just when he was sure he could bear it no longer, the shriek and rush dropped to a gentle murmur.
Gaylen opened his eyes warily, for his hair was still flying about a little and the leaves rustled. He could see nothing at all. Nevertheless, he was sure there was something there, just in front of him, hovering in the stony hollow. He could not have said what it was, for he seemed unable to do anything but look right through it.
“Who are you?” he cried, his heart pounding.
“Who are we?” a number of voices seemed to sing all together. “We are the wind, boy! We are the breeze and the blow, passing by, passing by. Sometimes we blow …” The voices rose to a shriek and the trees creaked while torn leaves whirled high into the air. “And sometimes we only breeze.” They dropped to a low singsong. The leaves hung for an instant and then drifted gently down to settle on the ground at Gaylen’s feet. “We flew away to race around the mountains,” breathed the voices in the wind. “We swept the trees and rippled the lake. She’s weeping still, poor child; we dashed away her tears. And down below we puffed the foolish hats off foolish people’s heads. They’re fighting again, but not for long, for the streams are running dry. Soon there will be nothing but dust down below, just as it was in the oldest days.”
“The streams are running dry?” echoed Gaylen stupidly. “But how?”
“He’s doing it,” sighed the voices, sifting the leaves at Gaylen’s feet. “He’s doing it at the lake, where all the waters begin. He wanted us to keep away the rains. Keep away the rains! We laughed at him. It’s nothing to us, for the air is ours alone forever. Here in our nest we hatch our little zephyrs…” The voices crooned wordlessly for a moment and the grass swayed. “And then, if we like, we whirl up…” Th
e voices rose again, and Gaylen covered his ears, turning his face away while his hair slapped against his cheeks and the birches groaned and dipped. “We whirl up,” shrieked the voices, “and rush away!”
“Wait! Wait!” cried Gaylen suddenly. He struggled to stand up, his heart booming in his throat. “Take me with you! I want to go with you forever around the mountains!”
The voices screeched and spun with laughter. “You? You? You’re only a man! Stay where you belong. You’re nothing to us. We are wonderful, marvelous! We are the wind!” They rose higher still, to an ear-splitting scream, and with a great explosion of air which knocked Gaylen head over heels they were off across the tops of the mountains and gone.
Gaylen swayed dizzily to his feet as the voices of the wind shrieked away into the distance and faded. He stood for a long time gazing after them sadly. Then he remembered Marrow and looked about. The horse was nowhere to be seen. He ran up and down the narrow ridge, calling, but there was no answering whinny, no gentle thud of hoofs coming to meet him. The sun was rapidly disappearing behind the arc of mountains to his left and he felt a twinge of alarm. “Poor horse—he must have been frightened away when the wind came,” he said to himself. “Maybe he went back to the stream.” He started down the steep slope in the waning pink of sunset and after a long stumbling descent came at last, breathless and spent, to the spot where he and Marrow had rested in the afternoon. There, to be sure, was the horse, munching calmly in the shadows. Gaylen ran to him in relief and hugged him, and Marrow nuzzled gently into his shoulder. His warm, wet breath was as reassuring as an old friend’s smile.
The Search for Delicious Page 6