The Whispering Mountain (8 page)

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Authors: Joan Aiken

BOOK: The Whispering Mountain
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Hawc, eager to reach his objective, flapped along faster and faster, giving Arabis some terrible tweaks; she could run like a deer but there was no possible hope of keeping pace with him when he flew at top speed.
“Wait you now, you old mule of a bird, os gwelwch yn dda!” she panted. “Will you be having the scalp off me?”
He gave an apologetic croak, “Hek, hek, hek!” and slowed down a little, but soon forgot and began going faster again.
“Wchw!” Arabis gasped. “I have a stitch on me that could have been made by Cleopatra's Needle, indeed!”
But catching Hawc's anxiety she ran as fast as she could; in little more than ten minutes they had left the town behind them and entered the stretch of narrower gorge below.
“Taking me to those empty houses, are you?” Arabis said, much puzzled. “Are you sure the sense is not clean gone from you, you old gwalch?”
But the falcon drew her on steadily, though now more slowly; it was plain he disliked the neighbourhood, and
Arabis could see why, for the whole overhang of cliff above seemed likely to topple down and bury them at any time.
“Hai how!” Arabis muttered. “Men will be fools, I am thinking, to build houses in such a place.”
Tiptoeing near, she looked up and down the deserted row and softly called,
“Owen! Owen! Are you by here, boy, or is my old hebog making a fool of me?”
She wondered if Owen could have run away from his grandfather and be sheltering in one of the houses, though she would have expected him to choose a less dangerous refuge. But there was no answer to her call.
Then, as she went slowly down the row, a slight movement attracted her attention; she peered through one of the glassless window-holes. For a moment she thought she had been mistaken; she was looking into an empty front room with a door leading to an inner room beyond. The door stood half open. Then she saw what had caught her eye: a foot extended from behind the doorpost and was moving up and down, as if somebody in the back room were lying on the floor doing keep-fit exercises.
Greatly startled, anxious, but unhesitating, Arabis pushed open the front door and went quietly in. Hawc, with a harsh croak of disapproval, let go of her hair and went to sit on a little spindly ash tree a hundred yards off.
“Owen?” Arabis said in a low voice, and then, a little louder, “Is anyone by here?”
No answer, but a faint muffled grunt from the next room. Arabis ran through, and what she saw there made her eyes go round as saucers.
“Owen!” she whispered on an indrawn breath. “Achos dybryd, who have done this to you, boy?”
Owen's right hand had been tied to his left foot, and his right foot to his left hand. The ropes fastening them together had been passed over the hen-roost beam that crossed the room at knee-height, so that he hung suspended from it. He could have rested, if he chose, on the straw-heap which was piled under the beam at one point, but he had preferred to work his way along to the door so that, by dragging the upper part of his body painfully half over the beam, he might be able to make that faint, desperate signal with one foot. A thick cloth was tied over his mouth, which was stuffed with hay.
“Wait, you, a little half-minute and I will have those things off you,” said Arabis through her teeth, and with shaking hands she pulled out the small knife that she carried always for cutting witch hazel and wild liquorice. In a moment she had the cords cut and lowered Owen gently to the floor. He made an inarticulate sound behind his gag, and rolled his eyes towards the roof warningly.
“Easy, then, boy!” She sawed through the cloth and flung it in a corner; Owen spat out the dusty hay that had been half choking him.
“Danger!” he croaked. “Mustn't stay here, Arabis—house may be buried—any minute!”
“Hwt, boy, will I be leaving without you? Stir your old stumps and come along with you, then!”
It took Owen three tries before he could stand upright, so numb from lack of blood were his hands and feet; but at last he managed it, leaning on Arabis, and staggered out of the house.
“Best leave me now, Arabis,” he muttered. “If those men came back—if they caught you—'
“What men? No, never mind for now! Leave you? Ffiloreg! As if I should do such a thing! But where can I take you that is not too far?” she muttered, her brows creased. She could see that he was feverish; plainly it was out of the question that he should walk a mile uphill, right through the town, and back to the Dandos' caravan.
Besides, whoever it was that had tied him up so brutally—could that strange man with the moustaches have had something to do with it?—might come back, or be in the town and see them go by.
“I have it!” she exclaimed at length. “I will take you to Brother Ianto! Do you think you can walk a quarter of a mile, Owen bach?”
He nodded faintly. She tucked her arm through his and led him up the gorge, away from the dangerous overhang to a point where the cliffs on either side of the track were sheer vertical rock.
“Only a few more steps now, cariad! There's brave you have been. Wait you now, by here, while I call the good brother.”
Owen, dizzy and only half conscious, was not particularly surprised when she disappeared into a cleft in the rock. Hawc, who had been flapping along uneasily behind them, planed down and settled with a croak on Owen's shoulder.
In a moment Arabis was back with a small, brown, wizened man in a monk's habit who took one look at Owen and remarked,
“Bed, him! Bit of fever there is on him, nothing much. Come you this way, my man.”
And when Owen, taking a faltering step, began to slip towards the ground, Brother Ianto, with arms thin and wiry as steel cables, picked him up bodily and carried him into a warm, steamy cave at the end of a short passage. There he was laid on a bed of moss and obliged to swallow a mug of hot water. It had a strong and disagreeable taste of rotten eggs, but went gratefully down his dusty and aching throat.
“He will do,” Brother Ianto said. “A long sleep, that is all he needs.”
“I will be gone from you, now, then,” Arabis said, “and I will be bringing back some of my good broth and herb tea by and by. And I am grateful to you, indeed, Brother Ianto!”
“No matter for that, child! I have had a fine pot of ointment from you for my rheumatic old leg-bones, that have made me lively as a young colt. And your worthy father have cut my beard with not a penny to pay, and loosed a noble gale of poetry on me while he did it. No thanks needed among such friends!”
Arabis left the cave, and the sound of her footsteps echoing in the rock passage was the last thing Owen heard before he sank into a heavy, dreamless sleep.
When he woke up again he lay gazing about him in bewilderment. The little cave was dim, lit only by two tapers that stood in front of a rude statue of St. Ennodawg, and misty from the steam of a little hot spring that ceaselessly bubbled and sank in one corner. Brother Ianto sat working away at something in another corner; presently he
took his work, whatever it was, outside into the daylight to have a look at it. Owen, roused a little more by the movement, now began to remember where he was and what had happened to him; involuntarily, he let out a groan of anguish.
Brother Ianto came back quickly.
“Are you in pain, with you, boy?” he said.
“The harp!” Owen muttered. “They took the harp, I couldn't stop them. But that's not the worst—'
He was unable to go on just then. At the thought of the letters he had been made to write, a great lump of despair and misery came up into his throat and nearly suffocated him. His grandfather would think—everybody would think—
“Oh, what shall I do?” he muttered hopelessly.
“Humph,” said Brother Ianto. “When did you last have to eat, boy?”
Owen tried to remember. He had eaten a little with the thieves, Prigman putting morsels into his mouth. Was that one day ago, or two? How long had he been in the empty house? He shook his head.
“As I thought,” Brother Ianto said. “Weak from lack of food. But in a good hour here comes someone to put that right. Split peas I have by here, but I am thinking they would be a bit hard for you.”
Arabis came into the cave. Her hair and the red cloak she wore shone with raindrops. She carried a covered basket in one hand, and a covered can in the other.
“Herb tea first,” she said, pulling a little flask from the basket, “then broth.”
Owen would have preferred the broth first; the herb tea
tasted even nastier than the mineral water from the cave spring, but both Arabis and Brother Ianto assured him that it would do him good, and when it was drunk he did feel strong enough to sit up and swallow two mugfuls of delicious broth.
“And I brought you some picws, and a loaf of bara brith for your supper, Brother Ianto,” Arabis said, taking them out and putting them on a ledge of rock. The spicy scent of plums and cloves and cinnamon filled the cave.
“Too good for me, they are,” Brother Ianto objected, busy at his work, whatever it was. “Dried peas are enough.”
“Oh, pooh, pooh,” Arabis said. She surveyed Owen anxiously and asked him, “The sleep have done you good, is it?”
He nodded. He did feel better, almost well in body, but his mind was so sore and wretched that he hardly knew how to bear it.
“Right, then,” Arabis said. “If I don't have your story out of you this minute, I am afraid my ears will grow tongues on them and be grumbling away at you like a pair of old ravens.”
So Owen told his story.
“And then they left me in the cottage,” he concluded. “Bilk tied me up the way you saw, and put the gag on me; I thought I was done for.”
“How did old Hawc come to find you?” Arabis demanded.
“I heard him outside; at least I heard the whistling sound of a hawk's dive and I thought there was just a chance, as
you were staying in Nant Agerddau, that it might be Hawc.”
“But how could you call him?”
“Do you remember when I was travelling with you in the wagon, how I trained Hawc to come if I whistled ‘The Ash Grove'?”
“No danger I'd forget,” Arabis said laughing, “when Dada made us walk a hundred yards behind the wagon because he said that if he heard that tune one more time he would go wild mad and take the shovel to us. But, Owen bach, you had that great gag stuffed in your mouth. How to make the old hebog hear you?”
“Oh,” said Owen, rather embarrassed, “I whistled through my nose.”
“Through your
nose,
boy? What kind of a tale is that? Tell to the crows!”
“True, though,” Owen said, and produced a strange droning tune through his nose that might just be recognized as “The Ash Grove.” Hawc, who was perched near by on a knob of rock, turned his head alertly and was across the cave with one flip of his wings to sit on Owen's shoulder. “I learned it on the boat coming home from China; the bo'sun taught me,” he added awkwardly.
“Well! There is useful!” Brother Ianto said in his quiet way. “Otherwise there would not have been too much chance for you, I am thinking.
“Just let me get my hands on that pair,” Arabis muttered vengefully. “Hard put to it their own wives will be to recognize them! And taking your granda's precious harp—
oh!”
Her hand flew to her mouth. She stared at Owen and Brother Ianto.
“What did you say their names were?”
“Bilk,” Owen said. “Bilk and Prigman.”
“That was it, then! Where are the wits in me?
That
was what those two men were stowing away so tidy! And each of the wretches meaning to rob the other!”
“What are you talking about, girl?” But there was a little more colour in Owen's pale cheeks.
Arabis told of her morning's watch and the two men hiding their booty.
“Keeping an eye on the quarry all day, I have been,” she said. “But no chance to go back and take a peep—always someone about down below. Hurry back now, though, I must, or maybe that one called Bilk may go and shift it again.”
“I'll come with you,” Owen said, struggling to his feet, wonderfully restored by the news. “Those men are dangerous. If they caught you, gracious knows what they mightn't do—really you shouldn't go near at all.”
“There's silly! Go I must, boy, if the place is to be found.”
Owen realized the truth of this. “Let us hurry, then,” he said. “If I can only get the harp back to grandfather, then the letters will not matter so much—perhaps I can explain—'
He was nearly dragging Arabis from the cave.
“Wait, you, my young hotheads,” Brother Ianto said. He rummaged in a crevice, and produced another monk's robe. “Put this on you, boy, it will fit you well enough. It was poor Brother Twm's, who was so glad to get home to
his native land that he died and went to heavenly rest the very next day. Pull the cowl over your head, see, and if those two men should be roaming the town they will not know you from Merlin the Magician.”

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