Brother Dusty-Feet (7 page)

On and on they went, the Palmer in front, the boy and the dog following enchanted at his heels; down from the stone-walled upland fields, and the sheep grazing on the thyme-scented turf, to the lush grass and the woodlands below. By deep meadows and reed-fringed streams and the green shade of beech woods they went, keeping always clear of the lanes and clustering villages where people might see them pass. Presently the Palmer slackened speed for the others to come up; and they went on three abreast, the Palmer in the middle, and Hugh and Argos on either side.

They went more slowly now, and the Palmer began to talk again, sometimes to Argos, but mostly to Hugh. But now, instead of pilgrim-ways and distant countries, he talked about the country they were passing through and the wildlings that lived in it –
strange talk, about the airpaths that the woodcock followed down from the north on winter nights, and the ways of the vixen with her cubs. He seemed to know as much about the green plover as though he had been one, and as much of Brock the Badger as though he had lived all his life in an underground sett. Many and many things he told Hugh: about dormice and curlews, wild bees and grass-snakes and otters; and Hugh jogged along at his side, forgetting his sore shoulders, and not even noticing how hot he was nor how tired his legs were getting.

At last, towards evening, they dropped into a wooded hollow with a speckled trout-stream singing through its stillness, and all its slopes shadowy pink with foxgloves under the trees; and the Palmer suddenly grew silent and sat down with his back to an alder tree. Hugh sat down too, and watched him, hoping for more, and Argos settled himself at their feet. Presently the Palmer took out his reed pipe again, and began to finger it, smiling a little secret smile to himself all the while.

‘Come closer,’ he ordered suddenly. ‘Come very close and sit very still, and you shall see what I never yet showed to anyone.’ And he began to play.

It wasn’t a tune exactly, not this time; it was just note after note, with now a pause, and now a run like falling water. And the woods grew very still to listen. Little shivers began to run from Argos’s nose right down his back to the tip of his tail, and he crawled nearer and nearer to the Piper, until once again he dropped his head on to the man’s ragged knee. Then a rabbit popped up from the undergrowth, hesitated, with twitching nose, and scuttled closer to sit on its haunches at the Piper’s feet.
Another came, and another; a russet field-mouse crept out from under the foxglove leaves, its eyes black as sloes and bright as stars in its tiny whiskered face. With a flash of living blue out of nowhere-in-particular, a kingfisher landed on a low branch beside the Piper’s head. A robin came, and a hare, a bush-tailed squirrel, and a cock chaffinch with a breast as pink as a rose. The air was full of the flitter of soft wings, and the undergrowth was all a-rustle with bright-eyed furry creatures drawing in to the place where the Piper sat. They thronged round him, cuddling to his feet and perching on his shoulders, quite unafraid of Hugh or Argos. Hugh sat as still as the alder tree, and it seemed to him that the piping that had called Argos and the woodland creatures was calling him too, calling the heart out of his breast, reminding him of things he had forgotten quite soon after he was born, talking about the rainbow above Magdalen Tower, and all the dreams that he had ever dreamed in his eleven years. . . .

Hugh never noticed when the piping stopped; but suddenly he found that everything was quiet, and the long pipe was lying in the Piper’s lap. Then, very slowly, the Piper held out his hands; and the wild things came to him as though by invitation. Soft little noses explored his fingertips, long silky ears were laid back under his caressing hand; a mouse ran up his arm to his ragged shoulder, and sat there among the small birds, cleaning its face. . . .

At last the Piper dismissed them, with a slow, wide gesture of his hands, and once again the air was full of flittering wings, and there were whisperings and rustlings under the foxglove leaves; and when they
died away, the little hollow was just as it had been before the Piper began to play.

The Piper looked at Hugh, with a smile glimmering far back in his strange green eyes. ‘A trick of the pipes,’ he said. ‘A fine trick, is it not?’

Hugh nodded. He could not speak just yet. He felt as though he had been somewhere a long way off, and had not yet quite got back. He was still a little dream-bound when he followed the Piper up through the freckled foxgloves to the meadow above.

‘It is growing late,’ said the Piper. ‘See how the shadows reach out their hands towards tomorrow’s dawn. We must be on our way.’

Once again he sped on in front, while Hugh and Argos followed at his heels; on and on, straight across country, as the rooks fly home at sunset, while the shadows lengthened and the evening grew more and more golden. At last they came through a spinney, and saw, farther up the valley, the huddled roofs of a village, with a church tower rising in the midst. The daylight had scarcely begun to fade, but already a candle shone in one of the cottage windows, to welcome someone home.

See,’ said the Piper, halting on the woodshore – and he put his hands on Hugh’s shoulders and looked deep down into his eyes, ‘there is Lillingfold Village, and your friends are waiting for you. But come away with me! Leave the light in the window yonder, and come away with me to the wildwood. I will teach you the magic of my pipes; I will give you your forest heritage; only come away with me now – now, before they come to look for us.’

Just for a moment the pipes seemed to be calling
to Hugh again, but he shook his head and said: ‘No, I’m sorry, but I must go back to my friends now.’

‘Perhaps one day, when you only see the stars through a window-pane, and you’ve lost your heritage, you’ll wish you had come away with me tonight.’

‘I
don’t
see the stars through a window-pane,’ said Hugh firmly. ‘I’m one of the Dusty-Feet, like my friends, and I’m sorry – I shan’t ever forget today – but I won’t come with you.’

The Piper looked deep into his eyes for a moment longer, and then he dropped his hands from Hugh’s shoulders. ‘Aye well, go then,’ he said. ‘Go back to your comrades.’

‘Aren’t you coming too?’ asked Hugh. ‘To supper, you know?’

But the Piper said, ‘No, I have bread of my own. The joy of the wilderness go with you, small brown brother.’ And he turned on his heel and disappeared among the trees.

He had gone so swiftly and so silently that it was as though he had simply melted into the wild that he loved. Argos whimpered in a trouble way, looking up into Hugh’s face. Then they turned back towards the village; and suddenly both of them were very weary.

The shadows were rising knee-deep across the meadows, but the sky was still full of sunshine, a wonderful sky of golden green, barred with clouds of fiery sunset that were like great wings. And beside a little stream that ran between banks of meadowsweet and rose willow-herb, they came upon Jonathan, sitting peacefully with his back to an alder tree.

‘Hullo,’ said Hugh, and sat down beside him.

‘Hullo,’ said Jonathan. ‘Where’s the Palmer?’

‘He wouldn’t come back to supper, after all.’

Jonathan nodded. ‘And was it a good day?’

‘Y-yes,’ said Hugh. ‘Yes, it was lovely. Queer, too.’

‘Queer?’ asked Jonathan.

Hugh began to tell him about the queerness as best he could; about the wonderful piping, and the wild things that had come in answer to it, and about the Piper wanting him to go away with him. ‘Who – what do you suppose he was?’ he asked, when he had finished and Jonathan still sat gazing in front of him. ‘He wasn’t an ordinary Palmer. You don’t suppose he was one of
Them
, do you?’

Jonathan looked down at him, smiling a little, so that his brows and the corners of his mouth quirked up towards his ears. ‘Who knows?’ he said. ‘Call him “the Piper” and leave it at that. It’s not polite to ask too closely the Who and What of the people one meets on the road.’

For a little while they sat in a companionable silence, and then Jonathan uncurled his legs and got up. ‘It’s time we were getting back, or the others will have eaten all the supper.’

So Hugh got up, and Argos woke with a bounce and got up too, sneezing so that all his four legs shot in different directions; and they set off towards the village. By this time rushlights had been lit in other windows to welcome the menfolk home from work in the fields; and suddenly, just for a moment, they thought it would be rather nice to have a home; a home with a candle in its window.

On the outskirts of the village they met Nicky coming to look for them.

‘We thought you’d all got lost,’ said Nicky; and
then he took a good look at Hugh, as well as he could in the dimpsey, and said, ‘My eye! You look as if you’d been dragged through a gorsebush backwards! You haven’t been pixie-led, have you, youngster?’

After Lillingfold the Players turned south again, and for a little while, as the blue glimpse of Oxfordshire fell farther and farther behind them, Hugh felt as though something was pulling him the other way, reproaching him for turning his back on it, for breaking faith with his dream. But he wasn’t breaking faith, not really, he thought; he still meant to go to Oxford – one day. And presently his regrets grew fainter and fainter still, until once again he almost forgot about it.

Through the rest of that summer they wandered on, by Malmesbury and Newbury to Maidenhead, where they acted a morality play on the steps of the Market Cross and Argos bit a fat Alderman who he thought was going to steal the tilt-cart. The Alderman kicked Argos, and the Players went to his rescue (Argos’s, not the Alderman’s), and there was a fight with the townsfolk, and they had to leave the town in a hurry to avoid being arrested by the Watch.

After that they headed for Cambridgeshire, and in the golden September weather all the world seemed to be heading in the same direction: merchants and drovers, other companies of players, pedlars and bear-wards, quack doctors and swarthy Egyptians, all pouring in to buy and sell, act plays or tell fortunes for pick-pockets at Stourbridge Fair. At every corner they saw more people coming up the by-lanes; and when they were not passing slow
flocks of sheep and droves of cattle, they were being passed themselves by rich merchants on fine horses with strings of laden pack-mules behind them. It was like that when they were still two days from the end of their journey, and by the time they came in sight of the fairground under the walls of Cambridge, the roads were so packed that they could hardly crawl along, and the dust rose so thick that everyone was powdered white with it, and their eyes got red and sore and it was hard to breathe without coughing.

Hugh had never seen a fair before, not even St Margaret’s Fair at Bideford, because Aunt Alison had never given him a day off or a silver penny to go to it. So his first sight of the great Fair of Stourbridge left him dizzy and gasping. It was loud as a thunderstorm, glorious as a rainbow, and huge as the Four Cities of Fairyland rolled into one. But he did not get a chance to see much of it on the evening they arrived, because it was late and there was a great deal to do. They did not try to find lodgings at one of the inns of the city, because that would be much too expensive, and anyway, all the inns would be taken now, by bigger and richer companies; but after they had got the usual licence to perform, they went in search of a clear space that nobody else had found first, and when they found one, made camp on it. They tethered Saffronilla and fed and watered her, and proclaimed next day’s performances, and then Jonathan spread his mat, and put on his spangled tights and tumbled for the little crowd they had just gathered, until Jasper had collected the price of supper in his hat.

But already old friends had begun to come across each other, and Nicky, coming back with a pail of
water from the nearby stream, said, ‘Zackary Hawkins is here, but his man is laid up with boils all over.’

‘Ye saints and sinners! That’s ill fortune!’ said Master Pennifeather. ‘What does friend Zackary mean to do about it?’

Nicky shrugged. ‘Oh, carry on as usual and risk it.’

And then, seeing Hugh’s bewilderment, he explained that Zackary Hawkins was a quack doctor, and that quack doctors were not allowed in the great fairs because the real doctors had managed to get a law passed forbidding them. So when they
did
set up their stands at a fair they always had a man whose job was to keep a look-out for the stewards and law-officers, and give warning if any came that way. Because Zackary Hawkins’s man was laid up with boils, he would have to risk being taken unawares by the stewards of the Fair, which was a nuisance.

‘Oh, well, nothing venture, nothing gain,
I
always say,’ said Ben Bunsell, with his mouth full. ‘Daresay we’ll be able to do a bit of watch-dogging for him, from time to time.’

When supper was over they lay down to sleep under the tilt-cart, all but Jonathan, that is. He sat up until midnight to see that nobody stole Saffronilla or the costume baskets, and then he woke Master Pennifeather to take his place, and just before dawn Master Pennifeather woke Benjamin. It would be like that all the time they stayed there, for a fair was not at all an honest place.

It was all so strange and exciting, that first night, that for a long time Hugh could not go to sleep at all. He lay listening to the night sounds of the great fairground and watching, between the spokes of the nearest wheel, the dark shape of Jonathan sitting
beside the remains of the fire, until at last everything got blurred together and he was not sure which were camp-fires and which were stars. And then quite suddenly it was morning and the sun was slanting through the scarlet wheels of the tilt-cart, and the fairground was growing noisier every moment, as it awoke to the new day.

All that morning they were very busy putting up the stage and getting everything ready for the performance; and in the afternoon came the play itself, and a great crowd to watch it. And when the Players counted out the silver in Benjamin’s hat on the sharing table, they found they were quite rich – rich enough even to spend a few pence at the sideshows if they felt like it, and
still
have enough to pay their Fair Dues when the time came for paying them.