The Bellringer

by William Timothy Murray

  By now it was nearly noon, and Robby was grateful for the spots of shade he passed through since there were fewer trees along this stretch. The road itself narrowed and grew rougher and grassier as it was used less and less the farther he went. It dipped down here and there where little brooks trickled across, and then the path rose back up across low rises, curving away to the left and then to the right, but ever keeping a eastward heading.

  The farther he went the fewer people he saw, and the fields were less tended, some with saplings growing up in them. The road, now only a wide path, showed few signs of maintenance. In many places, tall grass grew thick and straight, unbent by traffic, and blackberry bushes edged inward, their thorns sometimes snagging Robby as he passed through. In other places, the encroaching brambles were so high that he could not see right or left for more than a few feet.

  This was not the same way to the Line Road that he and his friends Billy and Ibin had come. That day, they started out going north from Billy's home in Boskland, near the south end of the county. Today's walk was farther than he had ever been along this way, farther even than he and his father had come when they walked out on business. The closeness of the weeds and brush, the clinging blackberry limbs, and his limited field of view made him uneasy. Yet the birds still sang, the thrashers with their songs and the redbirds chipping about, and the sun still beamed warmly, so he marched on. After another hour, the thickets cleared somewhat and the path rose upward on a gentle grade. Entering a grassy hillside meadow, he was strangely reassured by the sight of several cows munching nearby. They raised their heads and chewed steadily as they eyed Robby. Still moving upward, the path followed along a low ridge, and the land slowly opened up.

  He topped the hill, just as the sun passed noon, and another ridge appeared a little more than a furlong ahead, covered in oak and pine. The path led Robby downward through an unused pasture where it met and crossed a small willow-lined stream at the base of the far ridge. The path bent away south to a plank bridge, after which it rose sharply up the wooded ridge. The bridge was barely wide enough for the narrowest of carts, and, Robby noted, far too rickety to trust with much weight. He stopped and gazed over the thin handrail at the shallow water gurgling over rocks and around roots.

  "This looks like a good place for some lunch," he said aloud as he sat down on the bridge. He let his legs dangle over the side, the soles of his shoes just touching the water, and he put his shoulder bag beside him. The breeze had abated somewhat, and the drooping branches of the willow trees wafted gently while they whispered to one another. The stream gurgled quietly below as Robby drank from his water flask and opened the bundle of food his mother had prepared for him. Taking a bite of bread, he unwrapped the sausage and took out his knife to cut a slice of it to put with a piece of cheese. He was trying to remember the name of this place; his father had pointed it out to him on the map. He seemed to remember that it was an odd one, but for the life of him he could not recall it. Looking around, he thought maybe some feature would remind him of the name. On the east bank was a line of large gray stones, many covered with thick moss, jutting out of the base of the ridge. On across the bridge, the path bent northward, rising steeply uphill and disappearing into the trees. Behind him, on the upstream side, the stream was pretty much the same, a few more of the odd stones huddled together, several leaning over the water that swirled around their feet. Robby still could not remember the name of the stream.

  As he cut another piece of sausage and raised it to his mouth, he realized that all sound had ceased, and he sat still, listening. The breeze died, the willows drooped stiffly, and even the stream stopped gurgling. No birds could be heard, and, looking up, he could see no movement of them in the trees. Slipping his knife back into the sheath beside his pack, he stood up to have a better look around, but as he did so, the breeze resumed, several wrens tittered past, and the stream raised its murmuring with the willows. All was as it was before, but the silence had been so uncanny that Robby wondered if he had merely imagined it.

  Shrugging it off, he sat back down and took another swallow of water. He figured he had better drink his fill here and replenish his flask; no telling how far until the next stream. After quaffing the last Passdale drops, he stretched out on his stomach to reach down and put the flask into the stream. Holding the spout under the clear water, the flask bubbled as it filled, the stopper on its chain swirling about. Gently raising it, he reached down with his other hand to catch the stopper and put it on, and he could see his reflection in the pool. Just as he had the stopper on, something caught his eye. There on the water was his reflection rippling in the current, but another one had joined his, a vague dark shape leaning over him. The hair on his neck stood on end.

  "Whoa!" he let out a yell and rolled over on his back, recoiling from whoever it was. His fear turned to relief and bewilderment; no one was there.

  "Hello? What's this?" he said, sitting up and looking around. "Am I such a child that I am imagining things?"

  He took a deep breath, and shook his head. "Oh, well, still time for another bite or two."

  Laughing at himself, he drew his knife and cut another slice of sausage. He ate it with a swig of the fresh cool water, and it was then that he noticed that the breeze had stopped again. Again, the willows hung stiff, the birds disappeared, and the stream's noise ebbed. Putting the last morsel in his mouth and packing his leftovers away, he thought he heard a different sort of sound. He put his knife down and picked up the water flask, packing it away as he listened. It seemed that the odd sound was coming from upstream. Standing up, and slinging the pack over his shoulder, he peered in that direction but could see no sign of activity, though the sound, an odd hum, seemed very nearby. The gray rocks that leaned over the water seemed sullen, and for the first time he noticed that no moss grew on them while all others, the flatter, lower stones, were covered with the stuff. Wondering why, he stared at the large stones, also wondering what kept them from falling over, and as he did so, he thought he saw some shape in them that he had not noticed before. It was as if they were old, life size statues, time- and weather-worn, of a small group of people kneeling before the stream. As the idea took hold, he discerned more features and saw that some of them held their arms out over the water while others had their hands over their faces. More and more details seem to emerge as he stared, the strange sound increased, and his entire body broke out in goose flesh as he realized they were the wails and moans of weeping, as if coming from inside the stones themselves. He tried to dismiss the entire vision, to force what he saw back into rocks and what he heard back into the movement of the wind, but his effort was in vain. He felt heavy and growing heavier, the bridge underneath his feet groaned and creaked, and his arms and legs felt cold and stiff and thick. Suddenly fear shot through him like a kind of madness, and he broke his feet loose from their anchors and fled, slowly at first, with great lumbering steps that pounded across the bridge, sending up splinters and cracking the timbers. As he left the bridge and stomped up the far bank, he seemed able to move more lightly, as if a great weight was lifted from him. He kept going, quickly moving uphill, then the uncanny sensations completely evaporated, the breeze blew again, and the air was filled with the sound of leaves shushing and birds singing. He stopped and looked back to the bridge just a few yards away but saw nothing unusual or alarming in the least. The stones were just stones, and the stream was just a stream.

  Again, he laughed nervously and shook his head.

  "What on earth has come over you!" he chided. With a paradoxical lightness of heart, he trudged on up the way through the woods as the path ascended the ridge. He walked on, not seeing the brown-clad figure scurry out from the heather on the far side of the stream and dart onto the bridge, pausing only momentarily to pick up something, before scrambling on across and disappearing off the path and into the trees.

  As Robby continued upward, he almost forgot about his destination, being so confused and bewildered. He kept going ov
er in his head the sensations that had overcome him, the heaviness and the growing paralysis, and he now realized what a profound sadness he had felt just a few moments ago. He could find nothing in his youthful experience with which to compare it, nothing so strange and uncanny, except perhaps something that happened when he was a very little boy and sick with fever. His memory of it was somewhat nonsensical, but he did remember clearly the worried looks of his parents. And he especially remembered two strangers who came and went. Both were gentlewomen, and together they came, finely attired, one in a black and red gown with red rubies and a similar cloak, and the other lady dressed in silver-white and emeralds. Like sisters, they were, so closely they resembled each other. Each in turn leaned over him and looked deep into his face and spoke to him softly. They spoke to each other in the same tone and in a language like the chiming of glass in the wind. Together they questioned him, and he answered them each in the same tongue and with his own voice. He thought they were the most beautiful things he could ever see, yet he feared them deeply, and he feared the decision they grappled with, though he knew nothing of the substance of their debate. After a long while, they came to him together and laid their hands on him and sang a delicate little song that was for him alone to hear, and he feared them no more. It was only then that he perceived his parents nearby, his mother's head on his father's shoulder, his arm around her, both looking on. The two strangers turned to them and spoke more words that he could not make out. As his parents bowed, the two ladies faded away and the room became dim with only the flickering candlelight. His mother came to him and smiled and wiped his brow while his father knelt by his bed and took his hand, great pools forming in his eyes. Robby remembered sleeping a deep, peaceful sleep and the memory faded. Soon he had recovered from the illness and was his own playful and laughing self, tottering about gaily. The words spoken he soon forgot, the faces of the strangers faded and grew vague, and now all that remained was this bit of memory and the melody of that song, which he now found himself humming as he walked up the path. Once, many years later, he had asked his parents about it. His father looked up silently from his book. His mother stopped her sewing.

  "Sh-h," she said. "Do not ask, and speak not of it to any person. Only give thanks for your recovery, for you were gravely ill and your father and I had little hope for your life. The two strangers, as you call them, were from far away, and but for them you surely would have died that night."

  "Now," she said reaching out and giving him a hug, "do not trouble yourself any more about it."

  But Robby did think about it. Maybe not all the time, but often enough. Perhaps it was that memory that sparked in his early days an interest in other lands. Now, as he trudged along, he realized that he was finally fulfilling, in a very small way, his longing to see new places. As he topped the ridge and started downward, he thought that, in spite of his father's admonition, there might indeed be more dangers than man or beast. He threw a glance back the way he had come, but the stream and the bridge were long lost from view. The fear he remembered when the ladies were at his bedside was a different sort than had gripped him on the bridge. The ladies were good, he concluded, turning away to resume his way. What he felt at the bridge was terror. This only made Robby feel more childlike, for there was nothing at all to be afraid of, he was certain.

  As he descended, the way became rocky and the undergrowth grew sparse. The trees thinned, and there was open country ahead. When he emerged from the wooded ridge, he could see, stretching from right to left as far as his eyes could reach, a low rock wall that marked the North Line, with the Line Road running just to this side of the wall. Directly ahead, just over a furlong, was Oldgate, its two stone pillars marking a gap in the wall. The strip of land between the ridge and the Line was grassy and flat but lumpy with rocks, their gray-green backs jutting up here and there like mossy turtles. The breeze stiffened as he came into the openness of the strip, and Robby saw that the clouds covered the whole of the south and eastern skies and would soon be overhead. When he came to the intersection of the Line Road running along beside the wall, and stood before Oldgate, he saw horse tracks. They went along the road that ran south from here toward Boskland on the other side of Barley. They were probably tracks left by one of Billy Bosk's kin riding line patrol as was their traditional duty in this country, ever since the year that the Eastlands Realm was forfeited to Glareth. Since then, it was left to each of the old counties to make for their own defense. The Line Ride was not much more than a token effort since there was never any need for defense in the peaceful Eastlands. But the Boskmen took their duty seriously, as their House was one of the ancient ones of the realm. Robby could see where the rider had paused, a shuffle of hoof prints, before continuing on northward. Robby looked south somewhat furtively, down the road that led to Boskland, wishing his friends were with him now.

  Turning back to his own way, Robby could plainly see, framed between the stone posts of Oldgate, the sullen outline of a distant hill on the horizon about two leagues away. The road appeared to run straight for it, through a brown and rocky plain where only a few trees struggled. He took a deep breath and strode onward, and he could now see that the pillars of Oldgate, standing some three times his own height, had strange symbols carved into them. The curved runes and letters of some ancient language, he thought, for he could read none of them.

  "Good that I cannot," he thought as he passed hurriedly between them. "For I might not like what they say."

  The road rose and fell and was less straight than it first appeared, but it was more or less flat and fairly direct, and it held toward the Hill. The breeze increased, hissing along the stunted grass, more brown than green, and in the southeast Robby saw flashes of lightning in the clouds, which froze him in his tracks. He did not like lightning, no one did, but he had always been fascinated by it. The power of those bolts to set fire to trees and houses, accompanied by their terrible cracking booms, was fearsome, to say nothing of the danger of being struck dead by one. More than one Barley farmer had been killed by them, and distant flashes were enough to send most people scurrying indoors or to their cellars, while those caught too far from shelter most usually responded by covering their eyes and falling to the ground. As a child, he was warned to stay away from the window during such storms, yet, on several occasions, Robby had slipped out of bed to kneel beside his window to watch the jagged fingers claw across the night sky. His friend Billy loved to tell gruesome stories about how one of their field workers was blown to bits by a bolt, with parts of his body, so Billy claimed, landing all over the place, and his clothes floating down from the sky, burning as they fell. Billy's mother, who was a wise country woman, once said that lightning was attracted to liars and cheats, wagging her finger at her son as a warning. Although Robby had serious doubts about the tale, and about what Billy's mother had said, he later realized that Billy never told yarns when there were dark clouds in the sky.

  But once, while camping with Billy and Ibin, the three of them stood out in a night storm to watch it pass, braving the terrible noise and ground-shaking booms until, shivering with wet and fright, they could bear the storm no longer and retreated into their tent. There they huddled together, their eyes closed to the blinding flashes that penetrated their flimsy, wind-buffeted canvas, and pushed their hands hard against their ears to thwart the hammers of thunder. It was all very foolish, they knew, and they made a pact not to tell anyone, not only because they feared their parents would ban any future outings, but also because it was commonly considered bad luck to look upon lightning.

  "What should I do?" he asked aloud as a jagged finger flashed across the southeastern clouds. He looked back the way he had come. Oldgate was still in sight, less than a mile back, and the green line of trees rising behind it. The low roll of thunder reached him, and he made up his mind.

  "Ashlord's house has to be closer than any shelter I'd find by turning back," he thought as he looked around the strange landscape around him. The land
was patchy with quick-moving shadows as the clouds blew in, covering and uncovering the sun. Stunted brush and grass rattled and hissed in the breeze, and just a few feet away was the crumbled remains of an old stone column, broken and mossy. Momentarily distracted, he realized as he continued to look around that many of the rocks jutting up through weed-choked mounds were likely the ruins of the town that was once here.

  Shaking himself, he resumed with quickened step toward Tulith Attis just as the line dark clouds touched the sun. Soon Oldgate was out of sight and the way turned broadly northward; Robby saw that it turned again to the east up ahead where it ran between two high and long grassy barrows.

  There was something eerie about how the mounds rose up, smooth and green with grass, rising out of the stunted and rocky fields all around. They were nearly rectangular in shape, their sides sloped with unnatural steepness for a height of ten or fifteen yards, running parallel for nearly a hundred yards with only some twenty yards between them. And there were seven standing stones arranged in a semicircular fashion where the way passed between the two mounds. Here the path widened, paved with huge flat stones so tightly joined that very little grass grew between them. As he continued along, Robby looked from side to side cautiously, feeling as if he were walking down a long, open hallway. These barrows were the burial places, it was said, of those who had died here in days almost forgotten, in the great battle his father had spoken of. And it was right here where his horse had suddenly panicked that day, some three years ago, bucking and twisting so that Robby flew from the saddle. Fortunately, Robby had landed against the grassy slope and not on one of the paving stones.