Bell Mountain (The Bell Mountain Series) (3 page)

Jack went out to the riverbank, but he did not play. With the mountain peering over his shoulder everywhere he went, he tried to remember what Ashrof had taught him about the Old Books and the ancient times.

“Your mother charged me to teach you the Scriptures,” Ashrof often said. “Someday, we hope, you’ll read well enough to read the Old Books for yourself. There aren’t many who do nowadays.”

Of course, Jack was too young to learn a lot of history and doctrine. He was much too young to be told that the Temple didn’t like people reading the Scriptures, much less teaching them to boys, and that Ashrof would have gotten into a great deal of trouble for doing so.

This was why Ashrof had been so careful in his teaching, playing it out in little dribs and drabs. Because of that, Jack was in a muddle about it. He knew that there were good kings in Obann once, in the beginning, who were faithful to God and defended the people from their enemies; and that the kings, and then the people themselves, over time went bad; and that when the last kings tried to turn back to God again, it was too late. Jack knew the Old Books were full of battles and prophecies and miracles and holy wisdom, but he didn’t know enough to make sense of any of it. He pondered it until his head hurt.

He went home still in a muddle, made his supper, and went to bed. And as he lay down in the dark and his pallet rustled and crumpled under him, an extraordinary thought took hold of him, and he sat up in bed.

“What would happen if someone climbed to the top of the mountain and rang that bell?” he said to himself. “He could scare the living daylights out of everyone in the valley!”

He pictured the people of Ninneburky scurrying through the streets like ants when you turn over a log and uncover their nest. They wouldn’t know what to do! Jack couldn’t imagine what they would do. And there were other towns around the valley, more ants’ nests to stir up.

He could not have told you why, but to ring that bell was now the one thing he wanted to do more than anything in all the world.

Jack woke up early, not sure he’d really slept at all—but not a bit tired either. He meant to do his chores after breakfast, but it was no use. His head was too full of the mountain to bother with chores.

He arrived at the chamber house so early that the sexton had to go down the street and call Ashrof away from his breakfast. The old man came huffing and puffing, huddled in his cloak against the chill. You could see his breath.

“Jack! What’s the matter? Why are you here so early? Is something wrong?”

“I didn’t know you started your day so late, nuncle.” That was a word used in Obann to address an older man whom one was fond of. “Listen—I’m going to climb the mountain.”

“Oh, what are you talking about? Let’s go inside. It’s too cold out here for these old bones. Cusset unseasonable weather!”

In addition to its great hall for worship ceremonies and the like, the chamber house contained many smaller rooms for all sorts of purposes. Ashrof had a classroom, which would someday be filled with stools and given to a younger man who could teach many children at once. It had one bare wall, painted black, upon which the teacher could write in chalk. It was dark, and Ashrof had to light a lamp. It was also cold, but there was little he could do about that.

“Now sit down and make some sense,” he said, pushing Jack toward a stool. “What’s this about climbing a mountain?”

Jack’s mind was racing. He’d have to slow down and help Ashrof catch up.

“Bell Mountain,” he said. “You told me about it yesterday, remember?”

“Well, yes, of course. But why should anybody climb it?”

“To ring the bell.The bell that God can hear. I’m going to ring the bell on Bell Mountain.”

“Ho-ho-ho!” Ashrof jiggled on his stool. “You had me called away from my oatmeal for that?”

If Jack had had more adults to talk to—Van never listened—he might’ve become angry with Ashrof for refusing to take him seriously. But he only thought the old man hadn’t caught up with him yet.

“I’m going to ring the bell that King Ozias put on top of the mountain,” Jack said. “I want you to tell me how to get up there and what’ll happen when God hears the bell.”

Ashrof stared hard at him for a long time. Jack waited for his answer.

“My boy, you mustn’t think of such things,” Ashrof said at last.

“Why not?”

“Well—well, for one thing, no one’s ever climbed that mountain.”

“You said King Ozias did!”

“Bucket, nobody climbs those mountains! It’s hard enough just getting over the passes, as the raiders and the traders do. Nobody climbs to the top. It may not even be possible.”

“But you said King Ozias—”

Ashrof held up his hand. “No! The Scripture says Ozias intended to climb the mountain. That’s where he said he was going, before he and the last of his men disappeared forever. We are not told whether he got there.”

But Jack had already thought of that.

“You said he was talking to a prophet. The prophet would’ve told him if he wasn’t going to make it. But all the prophet said was that God would hear the bell if someone rang it. He wouldn’t have said that if there wasn’t going to be a bell.”

Ashrof winced. He shivered in his cloak. Jack couldn’t imagine what was wrong with him, aside from being cold.

“Jack, listen to me. You can’t go to the top of Bell Mountain and ring Ozias’ bell any more than you could walk across the tops of the waves from Caha to the mainland like the Children of Geb.”

“Who?”

“They were faithful to God, so He saved them when He sank Caha into the depths of the sea. He made them able to walk on the water. But don’t you see? The Old Books are full of miracles, but nobody walks on water anymore. The Books tell us about times long ago. The Empire was a thousand years ago, but King Ozias was a thousand years before that. There are no Books of Scripture since Ozias’ time. We have no record of any miracles since then.”

Jack had not expected this. What was wrong with Ashrof? “Nuncle, don’t you believe the things you teach me? You sound like you don’t believe there is a bell.”

“No, no, that’s not it! Of course I believe—I must believe!” Ashrof took a deep breath. “But it’s not so simple as you think, Bucket.

“If you tried to climb that mountain, you would surely die. Either you’d fall, or some wild beast would get you, or you’d freeze to death when you got to the snows. Besides which, how could Ozias have dragged a great bell up there in the first place?”

“So the Scriptures aren’t true?” Jack cried.

“No, no, no! I’m not saying that. I would never say that. It’s just that God often speaks to us in riddles. That’s why no one ever believed any of the prophecies when they were made. No one understands a prophecy until after it has come true. Only then can they see what the prophet meant.

“Jack, there are truths that can’t be told by plain speaking. They can only be told in a roundabout way, by telling stories that point to a higher truth. These are called symbols. Ozias’ bell is a symbol—a way of talking about something else in a way that people can remember it. The truth of the story is that God will hear the people when they cry out to Him.”

“You just said it with plain speaking,” Jack said. “You never said anything about symbols or whatnot.”

Ashrof gave him a pained look. “I was saving that for when you were older,” he said. “It takes a long time to understand such things as the symbols found in Scripture. You haven’t lived long enough for that.”

If Jack had been able to read the Scriptures on his own, he might have known of a verse spoken by King Ozias when he was trying to lead the people back to God:
Babes and children see what is hidden from you in your foolish wisdom.
But he didn’t know the verse, and it seemed to him that Ashrof was talking a lot of mush and wasn’t going to help.

“So you see, it would be foolish to climb the mountain and expect to find a bell up there,” Ashrof said. “That’s not what the Scripture really means. If it were, don’t you think I’d want to climb the mountain with you?”

Jack didn’t think so. For the first time in his life, he had a glimmer of what it might mean to grow old. A young Ashrof, he thought, would already be packing a kit for the climb.

“I’ll climb it alone, nuncle,” he said. “I’ll climb to the top and ring King Ozias’ bell, and God will hear it. I want to see what He does.”

“Haven’t you understood a word I’ve said?” Ashrof cried.

“You don’t believe the story you taught me from the Scripture,” Jack said. “Well, I’m going to find out if it’s true. When you hear the bell, you’ll find out, too.”

Jack got up and left, although Ashrof tried to keep him. There was nothing to be gained by listening to any more of his symbols.

One thing Jack knew for sure, and there was nothing that Ashrof could say against it. He’d dreamed about the bell for months before Ashrof told him the story from the Scriptures. The mountain had called, and he would come. He wouldn’t let anyone stop him.

Van came home that evening in such a state that he forgot to chide Jack about his chores. Jack didn’t mind getting his supper for him, and for once Van seemed grateful for it.

“I don’t think I’ve ever been so happy to see a mug of ale in all my life,” he said when Jack placed one before him. He took a long drink and then slumped in his chair with his hat still on the table. Jack hung it up for him.

“I don’t know what people think who never go farther than the end of the valley,” he said, “but I’ll tell you one thing. If you go as far as Caristun, you’ll see a few things that’ll make you wonder. And hear a few, too!”

He’d made an early start for Caristun, and the ox pulled with a steady pace. “And it was all day warming up,” he said.

But he’d had to make a stop where Oziah’s Wood came closest to the opposite bank of the river.

“There were some fishermen, and one of ’em sang out to me to stop. So I did. ‘Carter!’ he says. ‘If you’ve got room in your cart, have we got a haul for you! Come and see.’

“So I come up to where they were gathered round, and what do you think they had? A fish, so help me, burn’d near as big as the cart! ‘Well, that’s some fishing you boys have done,’ I says. ‘What the blessing kind of fish d’you call that? I swear I never saw the like of it.’

“‘Nor have we, my lad,’ says the eldest of ’em—a real greybeard. ‘He’s made a mess of our net, too. I’ve been fishing this stretch of the river all my days, and I have never seen a fish like this. Never!’

“So I asked him, ‘Is it good or bad?’ And he says it depends on if they can sell it for enough to make up for the net. He don’t know who’ll buy a fish you might not be able to eat. ‘Been a few strange things in the water lately,’ he says. ‘About a mile from here in a little creek where I go to catch crawfish for bait, I almost caught something that might’ve caught me.’ And he told me about it. ‘You ever see any of them little sally-manders what lives under rocks and logs? Well, try to imagine one as big as your forearm with a head as big as your fist; and nasty, pale, flabby skin; and jaws a-snappin’, looking to bite the fingers off your hand. I was so surprised, I fell right on my keister. When I got up again, it was gone.’”

They wanted Van to haul the great fish into town for them and paid him a penny to do it. It took all five fishermen to wrestle it into the cart. They knew people would have to see it or they wouldn’t believe them. And to be sure, there was no one else in Caristun who’d ever seen a fish like that. The men were trying to sell it when Van left them to pick up the chief’s furniture.

Jack served Van bread and sausages and an onion from their store. As he wolfed it down, he continued the story of his trip.

At the inn where he spent the night in Caristun, the talk around the fireplace was all about unsettling news from near and far.

“Up north, toward the River Winter, farmers have been pulling up stakes and heading south, and there aren’t many farmers up there to begin with,” Van said. “They’ve been telling all kinds of wild stories about monsters in the woods.

“Out west, where the river gets lost in the North and South Mires before it finds the sea, people have seen lights moving around the mires by night. No one dares to traipse around there by day—too easy to get sucked down. There’s otter and muskrat trappers who go there, but they say they wouldn’t dare go out at night. They’ve been having good hauls of furs, but they don’t like some of the noises they’ve been hearing lately.”

The general opinion of all the travelers was that the world was getting strange and scary, never mind what the presters from the Temple said.

The worst news came from the east, from the hills and forests that lapped up against the mountains, where miners and loggers worked.

“There’s going to be a war, that’s certain,” Van said. “A regular, all-out war with armies. The Heathen are fixing to come over the mountains by the thousands. That’s why there hasn’t been much raiding this year. They’re busy building up their strength for an invasion, so they can hit us hard. Won’t be long before the Big Bosses in Obann start making ready for it.”

He shook his head and sighed, and drained the rest of his ale.

“I didn’t see anything funny on the way home,” he said. “But just before I come within hailing distance of the stockade, as I was passing by that little patch of woods, I heard something. A lot of whistling, like—only it didn’t sound like birds. I’ll swear it wasn’t birds. Pour me another mug of ale, Jack. I reckon I’m lucky to be back—with the furniture I fetched for the chief, much good may it do him!”

On days when he didn’t have to travel out of town, Van would report to the council stables for whatever work they had for him. Any of the councilors could call on him to transport this or that, either on the cart or on his back.

Having caught up on his chores, Jack would ordinarily have gone off to amuse himself—by the riverbank, in the meadows, with other boys or alone. It was usually alone. The other boys had fathers and mothers. They weren’t waiting for a stepfather to find a new wife, have children of his own, and get rid of an unwanted stepson. Van’s own son, once he had one, would get his cart and his job. Jack would be lucky if Van didn’t hire him out to a caravan or as a servant to a logging gang.