The Waterstone (17 page)

Pippit gave a long series of croaks, clearly indicating that if you were expecting danger, you ought to be going in the opposite direction.

They edged nervously forward, Birdie keeping watch to the right, Tad to the left. Pippit dragged between them, tugging at their tunics and making doomful sounds.

Birdie said doubtfully, “I don’t see anyth —”

Before she finished her sentence, Pippit gave a terrified squawk and leaped violently backward, knocking both children off their feet. Just where they had been standing, a heavy bundle of rope thudded down onto the path. The bundle quivered, jerked, gave a hiccuping little heave, and then — with a gigantic tug — gathered itself into a bag, turned upside down, and shot up into the air. Tad and Birdie stood staring after it.

“It’s a net,” Tad said after a moment. “Like our fishing nets back home, only bigger.”

“It’s a trap,” Birdie said. “If it weren’t for Pippit, we’d have been caught in it.”

Pippit made satisfied noises, indicating that he had done his job well and been proved right, while Tad and Birdie had behaved foolishly and been proved wrong.

“Look!” Tad said. “It’s doing something. The net’s moving all by itself. Look — it’s running along a line, on a little wheel. Let’s follow it.”

They scampered along the ground beneath the net bag, which was zipping busily through the branches overhead. Then the net stopped abruptly with a jerk, released itself from the line, and dropped heavily onto a long wooden platform.

The platform was much higher than the tops of the children’s heads. A thick strip of oiled cloth ran across the top of it and then around the bottom in a long unbroken loop. The cloth, Tad realized, was moving somehow, dragging the limp net along with it.

Whump!

The whole platform shook.

Whump!

“What’s
that
?” said Birdie.

Tad stood on tiptoe and pointed.

“It’s a
club
,” he said. “Birdie, it’s an enormous club! It’s connected up over that platform somehow. This must be how the Diggers hunt. They must catch things in those nets, and then the club falls down on top of them and . . .”

“Squashes them,” said Birdie, looking horrified.

Whump!

“That could have been us,” Birdie said again in a small voice. “I don’t think I like the Diggers much.”

“We’ve come all this way,” Tad said. “We can’t stop now. Besides, we need their help.”

Birdie nodded reluctantly. “Let’s get away from here,” she said. “Come on, Pippit. No, not
that
way. That’s back the way we came. This way.”

Pippit gave a distressed-sounding croak, clearly saying that backward was by far the best way to go.

They had been walking steadily for some time — Pippit grumbling unhappily behind them — when they heard, far up ahead, a babble of voices. Tad hushed Pippit, and they moved forward cautiously, their feet silent on the stony ground. As they drew nearer, the voices grew louder and more distinct, and the babble resolved itself into the sound of two people bickering.

“I tell you, I saw it,” the first voice — a high excited tenor with a tendency to squeak — said.

The second answered in a suspicious growl. “And you saw the ferrets, too, not seven days ago, all lined up in the moonlight, you said, with their little eyes a-gleaming, and what did we find when we got out here?”

An unhappy mutter from the squeaker.

“I’ll tell you what we found,” the growly voice continued relentlessly. “Stones, nothing but stones, and all that hauling for no reason.” There was a ringing clatter, followed by a protesting grating noise.
“Ferrets!”
the growly voice said in disgust.

“Anyone can make a mistake,” the squeaker said defensively.

“And anyone does,” the growler retorted. “Over and over and over again. And always on the days when I’m on duty. Pick another day, why don’t you, and share your mistakes with another watchman?”

“It was right overhead, I tell you!” It was the first voice, shriller. “You’d have to be blind to miss it, big as it was, and nasty-looking, too, with its big hooky beak and little yellow eyes. . . .”

Birdie nudged Tad violently in the ribs. “It’s the hawk,” she whispered. “He’s talking about our hawk. He must have seen us. But the other one doesn’t believe him.”

They edged forward cautiously and peered around the edge of a jagged granite ledge.

“What’s
that
?” whispered Birdie, staring. “What are they
doing
?”

There was a wide archway cut in the stone of the mountainside before them. The archway could be closed off with a pair of heavy wooden doors, but now the doors were swung wide open to the afternoon sun. Just outside the doors, a pair of figures, their backs toward the children, struggled awkwardly with a complicated-looking device on metal-rimmed wooden wheels. The taller of the two suddenly stopped whatever he had been doing, straightened, and turned. He was a Digger. His face and body were covered in short reddish-brown fur, and his eyes were as round and dark as a pair of polished black beads. He wore a tight leather cap on his head, and a leather apron with a row of pockets across the front.

“It’s gone now, anyway,” the tall Digger said crossly. He was the squeaker. “By the time a chap can get any attention —” He stopped suddenly as he caught sight of Tad and Birdie.
“Who’s there?”
The squeak, startled, became piercing.
“Who are you?”

“That’s quite enough for one day, Grummer,” the growler said testily, straightening up in turn and clutching the small of his back. “We’ve all had quite enough of your confusions and commotions and false alarms —” He stopped in midsentence as Grummer tugged insistently at his arm. Then he, too, turned to look toward the children. His eyes widened and his mouth fell open.

“What did I tell you?” the squeaker said smugly.

“Fishers, as I live and breathe,” the shorter Digger said. “And young ones, if I’m not mistaken. Come out, then, the both of you. We won’t hurt you. Unless mayhap Grummer here falls on you by tripping over his own big feet. Where do you two come from? And what brings you to Stone Mountain?”

Tad and Birdie hesitantly moved out from behind the sheltering ledge and came forward.

“I’m Tadpole. Tad,” Tad said. “And this is my sister, Birdie. We come from the northernmost of the Ponds.”

“A goodly distance,” said the shorter Digger drily. His name, he told the children, was Werfel, though Tad and Birdie would always think of him as the Growler. He was the day’s watchman, charged with guarding the gate and keeping alert for strangers and enemies.

“We take it in turns,” he told the children, “since it’s a dull job most days, and none of us likes to be taken from our proper work. There’s not much that comes to Stone Mountain, for all that Grummer here sees ferrets behind every rock and tree. We’re well protected, mind, and the word gets around.”

Grummer looked so downcast that Birdie felt sorry for him. “Well, ‘you can’t hide too often from the Owl,’” she said. “That’s what our father always says. It means it’s safer to hide even if the Owl isn’t there than to
not
hide and find out that the Owl
is.
“

“There’s them that will wish they’d listened to me someday, when their bones are munched by a hungry ferret,” Grummer said darkly.

Tad was peering curiously at the workings of the contraption on wheels. Now that he had a chance to study it more closely, he saw that it resembled an immense bow laid on its side. The bow could be raised or lowered with a crank and its heavy string could be pulled back by means of a hook and a winch. The bow was partially drawn now and loaded with a huge metal-pointed arrow that was longer than Tad himself. Werfel gave the device an affectionate pat on the wheel.

“What is it?” Tad asked.

“It’s a ballista,” Werfel said. “A mechanical crossbow. A very powerful weapon, this is. Properly set up, it can take a hunting bird out of the air — down before it knows what hit it, and a good thing too.”

He squinted up measuringly at the empty sky. Tad and Birdie exchanged worried glances.

“But
not
,” Werfel continued, with a telling look at Grummer, “
not
something to be hauled out at a moment’s notice, heavy as it is, because
someone
sees a falling leaf and thinks that it’s a dangerous flying menace.”

As he spoke, he was tugging at the winch and loosening ropes and pulleys. The taut bowstring slowly relaxed. Werfel released the poised arrow.

“Next time,” he advised the disgruntled Grummer, “next time you start seeing birds, you just come out here by yourself and throw rocks. Now make yourself useful and help me roll this thing back inside.” He turned to Tad and Birdie. “And you two better come along with us. All strangers must report to the High Council, the rules say, and Furgo’ll be wanting to know all about who you are and what’s your business. Bring your frog.”

He set his shoulder to a brace above a metal-rimmed wheel. “Come on, Grummer, shove! Put some effort into it! Don’t mess about over there like a flitty-headed butterfly!”

The stone passage leading into the mountain was cool and dim, illuminated with lamps set at intervals high up in the walls. The lamps burned with a strange bright blue flame that made a hissing noise. As they walked past, their shadows swelled and shrank eerily in the blue light, first dwindling down to almost nothing, then shooting up very dark and tall against the rock walls.

Werfel and Grummer, trundling the crossbow, rumbled along in front, still bickering. Scraps of phrases, alternately tenor and bass, drifted backward.

“. . . nonexistent birds . . .”

“. . . proper attention to duty . . .”

Tad, trailing behind with Birdie, felt increasingly apprehensive. Werfel and Grummer seemed nice enough, but the Diggers were strange, Voice had said.
What if we wanted to get out of here
, Tad thought,
would they let us go?
He glanced up at the rough ceiling of the passage and suddenly thought of the entire mountain of rock over his head.

On the right, hollowed out of the solid rock, there was a small room, evidently a sitting room for the current watchman. A long metal tube stuck out of the wall next to the door. Werfel put his mouth near the end of the tube and began to speak into it. Then he shifted position, bringing the tube close to one ear. A message seemed to have been delivered and received.

“Right,” Werfel said importantly. “Now, you younglings come with me, and we’ll go find Furgo. The High Council is expecting you.
You
can go back to the gate and keep watch, Grummer. Just try not to spot any more of them stony ferrets or phantom birds.”

Grummer, muttering sullenly, began to trudge back up the passage in the direction of the gate.

Tad and Birdie hurried after Werfel. They rounded a corner, passed through another stone archway — and stopped dead in astonishment. They were in an enormous cave, a cave so huge that its ceiling was lost in shadow. It seemed that the entire center of the mountain was hollow. Lining the rock walls on either side were rows of stone houses, buildings piled upon buildings, with flights of narrow stone stairs leading to their upper stories. Tad and Birdie had never seen so many dwellings clustered together.

“They just live like this? All of them crowded on top of each other?” Birdie asked unbelievingly. “Why, there must be hundreds of them, all in the same place.
Thousands.
All together, like a huge school of minners. How do they do it?”

Tad shook his head in amazement.

Werfel, now far ahead of them, paused and beckoned.

“Come along now!” he shouted. “This way!”

The cave was filled with a steady hum of activity. In the distance there was a steady pounding and clanging of hammers and picks, and repeated sounds of something heavy rolling, then stopping, then rolling again. In open-fronted workshops, Diggers in leather aprons hammered slabs of red-hot metal over roaring fires, or bent over wooden benches, piecing together peculiarly shaped objects that Tad didn’t recognize. Everyone Tad, Birdie, and Pippit passed stopped whatever they were doing to stare at them. Probably most of the Diggers had never seen a Fisher before, Tad realized. Or a frog.
We must look funny to them, not having any fur.

He was quite taken up with that thought, imagining how he would look with a sleek coat of reddish fur, when Birdie suddenly screamed and Pippit gave a squawk of terror. There before them was an immense silver-colored . . . something. It was moving frantically, its huge jointed arms pounding vigorously up and down, its eyelike red lights flashing brilliantly. Without warning, it gave off an earsplitting whistle and spat out a scalding cloud of steam. Birdie and Pippit leaped backward so fast that they almost knocked Tad down. A little group of Diggers, dwarfed by the massive whatever-it-was, were rapidly shoveling lumps of black rock into a fiery mouth in the object’s side. The Diggers wore padded leather protectors over their ears, and the fur of their faces and arms was black with dust.

Werfel, his face filled with concern, was hurrying back toward them, waving his arms up and down.

“It’s all right!” he panted. “It’s all right. It won’t hurt you.” He panted for a moment, trying to catch his breath. “It’s called a steam engine. The coal goes in there, see, to fuel the fire, and the fire heats up the water in the boiler. That’s the big tank there.”

Tad gaped at the engine. This was more than he could take in. “Those black rocks — they
burn
?”

Werfel nodded. “The fire boils the water, see? Then the steam from the boiling water goes through those pipes there and pushes those arms up and down” — he pointed —“which makes those wheels go round, which moves the mining cars.” Tad followed the pointing finger to a row of little wheeled carts fastened to a cable. Each cart held a Digger carrying a shovel or a pickax. As Tad watched, the carts trundled off into a side tunnel and disappeared. At the same time, a second set of carts — these loaded to the brim with silvery-colored ore — emerged from the tunnel, moving in the opposite direction. More Diggers rushed forward to unload them.