Bell Mountain (The Bell Mountain Series) (7 page)

They were standing in the middle of a broad, flat, tussocky area, with a few bare spots that showed that there was a stone floor underneath it all, when they heard a chirp and a chatter. As if by magic the Omah appeared in front of them, popping out from behind a bush. He might have been following them all along, and they never knowing he was near.

“Hello, there!” Ellayne said. “I wish you could tell us your name. You wouldn’t happen to know where we might find water, would you?”

The Omah turned and took a few steps, stopped and looked over its shoulder at them, and chirped.

“He wants us to follow him,” Ellayne said. “I think he understood me.”

“Maybe that’s the magic,” Jack said. “Come on.”

It was just like following a dog or a cat that wanted to be fed and was showing you the way to its dish. Every few steps, the creature stopped to chirp at them.

It led them to a big evergreen shrub, behind which was a high pile of compacted dirt and a black hole in the ground. There were stone steps leading down into the hole. Ellayne stopped short.

“He wants to take us underground. That’s in the stories!” she said.

“I’ll go. You stay up here,” Jack said. “But I’ll bet there’s water down there.”

“What—stay up here alone?”

“I’m going. Maybe there’s treasure down there, too.”

The Omah hopped down one step and paused to chatter loudly at them. Jack followed. “You’ll never come back!” Ellayne said. But he’d never heard the stories that her father used to read to her from books, and saw no harm in following the Omah down the stairs.

It was cool and dark in the stairwell, and who could say how many centuries it had been since anyone had ventured down that way? But almost as soon as he started, Jack smelled water. And it wasn’t such a long way. From the bottom of the stairs, and the hard stone floor that waited there, he could look up and see the top, and Ellayne’s anxious face framed in the opening.

“It’s all right,” he called up to her.

“Be careful!”

The Omah whistled. Jack turned, and a few steps away, he saw a regular lake of dark, cold water stretching into the shadows as far as his eye could see. The stone ceiling above it rested on huge stone columns.

But this was a lake with a perfectly straight stone shore: as if men with unimaginable powers had carved it out of the bedrock of the earth.

“Ellayne! Water!” Jack’s call set off an avalanche of echoes. Had he known a little more about caverns and other such places under the earth, he might not have been so loud.

He knelt by the stone shoreline, wetted his fingertips, and tasted the water. He cupped his hands and tried a mouthful. It was cold and sweet, nothing wrong with it at all—not like rain water that had sat in a barrel for some time.

Jack drank until he was full, then filled the water bag and went back up the stairs. The Omah darted ahead of him and came up first.

“See?” Jack said. “Nothing bad happened. And I’ve got water, plenty of it. Here, have some. It’s good.”

Ellayne drank her fill from the waterskin. By and by, they walked to the edge of the hilltop and looked out on the plain. The Omah accompanied them, not bothering anymore to hide.

Jack had hoped to see some sign of Lintum Forest in the south, but even from the top of the hill, you couldn’t see that far. They could see nothing but an endless, dreary expanse of grey plain with a few isolated hills in the distance—hills that were probably ruins like this one.

“It doesn’t seem right that such a big country should be so empty,” Ellayne said.

“You said something like that yesterday,” Jack said. “Well, yes, it does look like something’s wrong with it. There ought to be life on it, but it looks dead.”

“I wonder if it always was,” Ellayne said.

They decided to spend another night on the hilltop, resting. Once they came down, they’d have a long, hard way to go. Maybe Jack could shoot a rabbit or two to take with them.

“And I’d like for you to cut off my hair, before the knife gets dull, so I can pass as a boy,” Ellayne said. “Someday we’re bound to meet people, and some of them might be bad. Better if they think I’m a boy. Besides, if my father sends out the militia, they’ll be looking for a boy and a girl, not two boys.”

They returned to their campsite. Jack gave the Omah another piece of bread while Ellayne let down her hair and combed it free of snarls. The Omah watched with interest.

“Ready?” Jack asked.

“Go ahead.”

Jack cut Van’s hair and Van cut his; but they used scissors and Van’s razor. Cutting a girl’s hair with a knife was a different story altogether. He took his time and did his best to make it look not too horrible.

As he cut off lengths of her hair and tossed them aside, the Omah scampered back and forth excitedly, gathering up the hair as it fell. Ellayne laughed at his antics.

“He really likes my hair,” she said. “I wonder what he’s going to do with it.”

“It’d make a nice lining for his nest, I guess,” Jack said.

When he’d finished, he was glad they hadn’t brought along a mirror. A barber needed scissors, not a knife.

The Omah collected all the hair and ran off.

“I look terrible now, don’t I?” Ellayne said.

“Hair grows back,” Jack said. “I’m sorry it looks so bad. I should’ve thought to bring scissors.”

“At least I don’t have to look at it.”

They settled down to have an apple, basking in the noonday sun. Now that he knew it had a plentiful supply of water, Jack wondered why people didn’t live on the hilltop. With a stockade and a watchtower, it’d be safe from enemies. They could run herds on the plain and probably grow crops.

But God gave the ruins to the hairy ones, the Old Books said. People avoided ruins. He wished he could ask Ashrof about it. He wished he could read the Scriptures for himself.

An outburst of loud whistling and screeching shattered the peace.

“Now what!” Ellayne cried.

Jack got up, but couldn’t see anything. The racket was deafening.

“It’s the Omahs—sounds like a hundred of ’em,” he said. “There must be hundreds of them living up here. Something’s got them all stirred up.”

Just as suddenly as it started, the noise broke off. Jack went out to the bare spot, expecting to see a mob of little men. Ellayne followed, warning him to be careful. He wouldn’t have been surprised to find dozens of dead Omahs lying about: it sounded as if they might have had a riot.

But there was nothing.

“Where are they?” Jack said.

“We don’t know anything about them.” Ellayne stood close enough to clutch Jack’s arm. “We don’t know whether they’re animals or people, or neither, or both. There’s no telling what they might do.”

“I hope ours is all right,” Jack said. He whistled, softly at first, then louder. After a few moments, some high-pitched whistles answered him.

Out from behind a screen of creepers came ten of the little hairy ones. Ellayne jumped. Jack felt his muscles tighten.

“They’re smiling!” Ellayne said.

To Jack they all looked alike, and they were all smiling, showing bright white teeth. He noticed that their eyeteeth were longer and sharper than the others. A bite from an Omah might be nasty. Bites from ten of them might be a lot worse than nasty. But even their teeth weren’t the most noticeable thing about them.

Each of them clutched a handful of Ellayne’s hair and waved it vigorously, like children playing with pinwheels.

“They look happy,” Jack said.

They started chattering again, and before you knew it, they’d formed a line and were parading in a circle around the two children, hopping, chirping, and brandishing the golden hair.

“Are they dancing?” Ellayne said. “I really think they’re dancing!”

“Just don’t move,” Jack said.

The Omahs danced around them several times, and then all darted off at once in different directions, vanishing like smoke into the underbrush.

While the little hairy men were dancing around Ellayne, waving locks of her hair, Ellayne’s father, the chief councilor, was trying not to dance. But he was so angry that he found it hard to keep his feet on the floor.

Roshay Bault had not seen his daughter since he’d kissed her good night the night before. A whole day had gone by, and a whole night, and half of another day. And because he was an intelligent man, as Ellayne said, he wound up at the chamber house demanding answers from the prester. The prester had Ashrof brought in so that he could demand answers from him; and they soon worked it out that Ellayne had gone off to climb Bell Mountain, in company with the half-witted stepson of a municipal carter. Van was sent for, too. The chief councilor had more than enough wrath to pour out on them all.

“I’ll send men on horseback up the river after them,” the chief said, “and a fast rider to Obann with a letter to the Temple demanding the immediate installation of a new prester who is not an idiot. You had all better pray that my daughter is back under my roof by this time tomorrow!”

“My dear sir,” said the prester, “I understand how you feel. But how far can a couple of children get on foot? Your men are sure to overtake them—have no doubt of it. But surely it’s unjust to say the chamber house bears any blame.

“Really, it’s all the boy’s fault. Who knows what he told Ellayne to get her to go with him? Children sometimes have fantastic notions. But you have heard from the reciter how he tried to dissuade the boy from his insane idea. How could he have known your daughter was involved? Neither of the children ever mentioned it.”

“Excuses! Lily-livered excuses! I’m not interested!” the chief thundered. “I sent my daughter here to learn her letters, not to be lured into a suicidal prank. The boy told the teacher what he was going to do, and the old fool didn’t stop him. And neither did the stepfather!”

Van quaked and stammered.

“But sir, I know nothing, not a thing!” he said. “Jack isn’t even my son. He was always mooning about, ever since his mother died. I’ve never understood him. He never tells me what he’s thinking. He is not quite right in the head. If only this fool of a teacher had told me, I would have put a stop to this. I swear!”

Ellayne’s father glared at them all. He was not chief councilor for nothing, and they knew it.

“I’ll be burned,” he said, “if I don’t see the lot of you as beggars in rags before this is over.”

Ellayne was not thinking of her father.

Hours before sundown, the Omahs brought them two more rabbits for their supper, and a thing that Jack said was a baby woodchuck, and a heap of greens with white swellings below—wild onions, with a nice wild smell. All the Omahs that they saw had made themselves armlets or necklaces of Ellayne’s hair.

“We’ll save the rabbits for tomorrow,” Jack said. “This woodchuck’ll be plenty for tonight.”

“You’d better give them all some bread,” Ellayne said.

They had a grand supper, all they wanted to eat and drink, and a grand fire to keep off the chill. The Omahs seemed to enjoy watching them build the fire, clean and cook the woodchuck. Jack gutted the rabbits and wrapped them in the woodchuck’s hide.

When night fell, and their bellies were full, and the fire crackled busily, Ellayne told Jack one of the stories from her book. Several Omahs squatted by the fire. She was sure that they were listening to the story.

“When Abombalbap first rode out on adventures,” she said, “he got lost in Lintum Forest, and he might have died before he found the way out again. But the Seven Hags of Balamadda rescued him just before he starved to death, and brought him back to their secret place in the middle of the forest. They used magic so that all the paths would bend away from it and no one would find the place unless they knew stronger magic.

“They nursed him back to health, and told him they read it in the stars that he was born to be a hero, and someday he would heal the Wounded King of the Dolorous Marches, and all that land would be green again. So they gave him a sword and a spear, a shield and armor, and taught him how to be a warrior. They knew more about that than anybody else. And after they’d taught him, Abombalbap could drive his spear right through the trunk of a tree and cut a man in half from crown to crotch with his sword.

“But the evil witch, Raddamallicom, found out about it all, and she plotted to lure Abombalbap into her castle and trick him into drinking a poison potion. The Little People in the forest, the Skraylings, were her slaves, and they spied on the Seven Hags and told her everything. She made a plan to make Abombalbap believe the hags were only pretending to be good to him and that they were going to kill him and make a magic potion from his heart’s blood that would make them all young and beautiful again. It wasn’t true, but Abombalbap didn’t know—”

Somewhere down below, out on the desolate plain, rose up a howl that stopped Ellayne’s story.

It was a long, lamenting howl that started low and climbed higher and higher until it was a marrow-chilling shriek, like a giant claw scraping on ice. Ellayne clapped her hands over her ears and tried to scream, but Jack clapped a hand over her mouth and held it there.