Manly Wade Wellman - John the Balladeer 05 (17 page)

 
          
“And
as for Ruel Harpe,” I went ahead, “there’s not much of a future in a-being
afraid of him. I take it that you ladies fear him, but I don’t and I won’t.”

 
          
“Not
so loud, John, not so loud,” Alka begged to me. “If he should hear—”

 
          
“I
say nair word I wouldn’t say to his face,” I interrupted her, not at all
politely. “But this time, I do hope that he and I understand one another. He
knows by now that I don’t fear him, and he knows that I’m not without help. I
have two-three powers of my own.”

 
          
“Oh
yes,” breathed Tarrah. “That’s true. You’ve fought other fights in your time,
and won, and that gives you strength.”

 
          
“And
method,” said Alka.

 
          
“So
I’ve heard tell. I go ahead in the faith that it’s true.”

 
          
“You’re
right that Ruel recognizes this in you,” said Alka, and took a taste from her
cup. “He wants to persuade you, not destroy you. He counts on you as an ally.”

 
          
Tarrah
shuddered
her shoulders at that, and I looked at her.
“Now I know for sure you don’t love him,” I said.

 
          
“No,
it’s not love,” she said back. “It’s fear, John, what you’ve been talking
about. Fear is stronger than love. He told us both that, Alka and me both, when
he brought us here.”

 
          
“There
might could
be a lot in what he said about that,” I
said, “but I don’t know for sure, I just don’t know. I’ve seen love come in
stronger than fear in my time. Likely it depends on who loves and who fears.”

           
“That sounds like the truth,”
whispered Tarrah. Her chair was close to mine, but she didn't nudge me with her
foot or her knee. “A real human being can afford to love deeply, but mustn't
fear deeply,” she said.

 
          
“Or
must whip fear somehow,” I said. “Must whip fear right down to its socks.” I
thought that over. “We have nothing to fear but fear itself,” I said then.

 
          
“
Roosevelt
said the same thing,” said Tarrah.
“Franklin D. Roosevelt.”

 
          
“And
Henry David Thoreau said something like it, before
Roosevelt
,” said Alka.

 
          
“Whoever
said it was right,” spoke Harpe, a-coming in past the red curtain. “I'm glad
you're all here, because reading that villainous Greek writing of Judas can
make a man lonely.”

 
          
He
sat down with us, picked up the jug, and poured himself another of his shots of
blockade.

 
          
“What
does Judas say?” I asked as I’d asked before, but Harpe shook his head to me.

 
          
“That's
something I can’t impart just yet, but he says terrifying and wonderful things,
in what I take to be only a preface to what follows,” Harpe replied me. He
studied me. “John, you're sullen, you're surly. Whatever you seem to hold
against me, you shouldn’t. You have no reason. So why not be happy?”

 
          
“Why
must I be happy?” I returned to him. “That old man Yakouba trusted me, and you
made me thieve from him.”

 
          
“I
did nothing of the kind,” he smiled. “Yakouba is one of the wise men of the
desert people, and he knew that he couldn't quite trust me. But when he saw
you, he felt that you were trustworthy, and you were—you are. It was I who did
the thieving, if you insist on calling it that. I transported you bodily across
the sand and the sea back to
Cry
Mountain
, complete with the book.”

 
          
“Which
you should ought to give back to that poor old man/*

 
          
“Never
that,” Harpe said. “What would he ever do with it except hide it? It's in the
proper hands now, and in those hands it will do wonders. So let's be friends,
John. Take a drink with me.”

 
          
“No,
I thank you,” I said.

 
          
He
narrowed his eyes. “That might be an insult, but I won't accept it as such.
You’re too valuable to me and I'm too valuable to you, whether you admit it or
not. A highly interesting future is coming to us both, an amazing one.”

 
          
“There
may be a lot in what you say,” 1 said.

 
          
“Surly
again,” he crooned at me. “But I daresay I know of something that will cheer
you up.” He finished his drink.
“Now, back to work.
Wish me luck.”

 
          
“Luck,”
said Alka, and she was the only one of us who spoke. Nor did she say “Good
luck.”
Just “Luck.”

 
          
“Thank
you, my dear.”

 
          
He
tramped away to the red curtain and past it.

 
          
“He
always thanks you,” said Alka. “He's good at thanking. He has a gentleman's
manners.”

 
          
“Yes,
he has,” 1 agreed her. “You can't take that away from him.”

 
          
“You
can't take anything away from him,” said Tarrah, flat in her voice, and got up.
She headed for the tunnel to the outside. She went fast, almost she ran. Her
hair fluttered.

 
          
“Where’s
she a-going?” I wondered Alka.

 
          
“Why
don’t you go and find out?”

 
          
“Sure
enough,” I said. “I'll just do that thing. It feels kind of indoorsy in here
just now.”

 
          
For
the air did feel close. Maybe Harpe did that to it, a-studying so hard. I got
up and followed Tarrah out of there.

 
          
I
came into the open amongst the trees, those big, quiet trees with their leafy
branches that shaded all the top of
Cry
Mountain
from heaven's sight. I looked on the
stockade. There was a move out there, amongst more secret trees. It was
something dark and tall itself, something a man wouldn't much care to study. I
looked another way, and there I saw Tarrah over toward the cleft in
Cry
Mountain
's rock. She knelt down there, her knee and
thighs a-showing from under her short skirt. I made out that she was by
Scylla's grave.

 
          
I
ambled over there to her. She was a-putting flowers on the fresh dark earth
we’d dug up and then shoveled back in. The flowers were broad white ones, sort
of like dogwood flowers, but they weren't—they didn't make a cross shape,
didn’t have that little dark bunch like nails you see on dogwood. And their
stems looked like vine stems, not like twigs off a tree. I didn't know air such
a flower, nowhere in the mountains. Maybe it was something that just only grew
up there.

 
          
Tarrah
was a-laying out a pattern of them, like a five-pointed star. She looked up at
me from where she knelt.

 
          
“I
thought I'd do this for Scylla,” she said.

 
          
“You
mourn for her,” I guessed. “Maybe she was your friend, after all.”

 
          
She
got to her feet, and slowly shook her head no.

 
          
“Scylla
wasn't my friend,” she said. “She wasn’t anybody's friend—didn't know how to
be—not even how to be her own friend. She was raised a witch up north, the way
I was out in the West, but it must have been a harder
raising
than mine. I doubt if there was much love in her witch society. At least, she
didn't show any.”

 
          
“How
did she truly feel about Harpe?” I inquired her.

 
          
“Well,”
said Tarrah, “she’d snap at him, almost rebel against him. But she was afraid
of him, and showed it. When she died, she didn’t curse him, she cursed you.”

 
          
“It
doesn’t seem like to me that her curse hurt me,” I said.

 
          
“You’re
able to fend it off,” said Tarrah. “
John, that was an awful
curse—frightening
. I don’t dare repeat one word of it to you. But, as I
say, she was afraid of Ruel Harpe. Like all of us. We’re all afraid of him.”

 
          
“Not
me, I’m not,” I felt I had to say. “And well he knows it by now. He shows that
he knows it, he’ll make a joke about it now and again.”

 
          
She
looked hard at me. I saw her eyes shift in her head as they looked at one of my
eyes, then the other. Then she turned her face down to study Scylla’s grave.

 
          
“You
prayed peace for her,” she said. “I hope it works.”

 
          
I
walked off where the stockade ran, and she came with me. Out there amongst the
treetops, we heard the humming song of that swarm of big bees. On the ground,
across the crumpled root of a tree, something black and fuzzy seemed to slip,
like the biggest caterpillar you air saw in your dreams. The Flat, that was.
I’d seen one one time, on
Yandro
Mountain
. Up high somewhere, I heard something I
couldn’t make out to see. It went
gong-gong,
gong-gong.
That had to be a Toller, what you hear tell is the biggest thing
that flies; though I don’t know what it looks like exactly. And big and little
shadows deep in amongst the trunks and brush, all a-looking where I stood
almost against the weathered poles of Harpe’s stockade. You could look right,
you could look left, you could look back yonder, and things skulked in the
trees, behind the trunks, and some up in the branches. They seemed like as if
they slipped out of sight just before you had a clear look. Inside there, we
were hemmed in with them, besieged by them; Harpe’s sentinels that he’d brought
there by magic, to guard his fortress.

 
          
“It’s
like being in jail here,” said Tarrah at my side. “Like being held prisoner.
Sometimes 1
feel
so cramped inside these walls. Ruel
Harpe doesn't care—he goes where he pleases, anywhere in the world—but he never
lets us go. Perhaps he's afraid that we'd run away from him."

 
          
“Scylla
sort of hinted something like that," I recollected.

 
          
“It
can get tiresome," Tarrah sort of muttered.

 
          
“Yes,"
I agreed her, and headed back to those caves where we lived. She came along
behind me, and inside, and into the big main room with its table and chairs, with
the window to see away from
Cry
Mountain
, the braided rope in the comer, the
curtains over the doors to the passages. Alka sat where we’d left her, a-gazing
at that clouded window glass across the room.

 
          
“I've
been trying something," she said as we came to the table. “I tried to make
a picture come from the outside, the way Ruel can. But nothing happens for
me."

 
          
“When
he does that, he holds onto that amulet he wears," said Tarrah. “That must
help to make his window work."

 
          
“To
make all his enterprises work," Alka added on. “Now he's going to make
more tremendous things—unthinkable things—work with that book by Judas he’s
translating."

 
          
“How
right you are, Alka," said Harpe cheerfully as he came in. “But you don't
seem completely happy to say
it.
Aren't you happy,
Alka? Aren't you, Tarrah?”

 
          
“No,
I'm unhappy," Tarrah dared to say to him. “Scylla's death bothers
me."