Bell Mountain (The Bell Mountain Series) Read online

  “All right, then—what do you want to know?”

  “You’re really going to climb Bell Mountain? All the way up?”

  “I’m really going to do it.”

  “To ring the bell?”

  “You bet.”

  “But Ashrof said you’d never get up the mountain. It’s too dangerous. You’ll fall, or get eaten by a bear, or freeze to death.”

  Jack laughed. She really had been listening yesterday.

  “Don’t be silly,” he said. “If it was impossible to get to the top of the mountain, there wouldn’t be a bell up there.”

  “But how do you know there even is a bell?” Ellayne said. “That’s what I don’t get. Ashrof doesn’t think there’s a bell.”

  Jack’s chin tilted up a little without him knowing it.

  “Oh, there’s a bell up there, all right,” he said. “I know.”

  “How? How do you know?”

  “Because a long time before Ashrof ever told me about it, I dreamed of it. That’s how I know.”

  Ellayne asked a hundred questions, and Jack answered them. He didn’t like her, but he liked talking about the bell. The keg and the log got to be uncomfortable by and by, so he asked her into the house, and they sat at Van’s table. She darted glances all around like she’d never been in a house before. He couldn’t know that Ellayne’s house was so fine and roomy inside that Van’s place was a wonder to her. He would’ve stared just as she did, had he been inside her house—staring at walls that were painted and regularly scrubbed clean. Van’s walls were bare plaster, stained with smoke.

  They’d just about talked themselves out when Ellayne again brought up the subject of the danger.

  “Oh, I’ve already heard all about that,” Jack said. “Everything outside the stockade is dangerous, to hear Van tell it.” And he told her about Van’s trip to Caristun. That story seemed to get under her skin.

  “It reminds me of something else I’ve heard about,” she said. “The last time my father was in Obann City, just before the winter, there was a reciter from the Temple who’d gone all balmy in the head. He was marching up and down the street in a filthy robe, with ashes on his head, yelling at the top of his lungs about the wrath of God and the world coming to an end. Everybody dropped what they were doing to listen to him. You couldn’t help but listen, my father said. He said it was like having icicles grow down your back. Until finally a couple of guards from the Temple came and hauled him off, and that was that. The First Prester really doesn’t like that kind of talk, my father says. He wouldn’t be surprised if they put that reciter in a dungeon and cut his tongue out.”

  Jack tried to imagine Ashrof doing a thing like that, but couldn’t.

  “I wonder what made him do it,” he said.

  “Who knows? My father said a lot of the people on the street nodded their heads, agreeing with the madman. Well, that’s Obann for you, he says.”

  Ellayne leaned across the table. “After I heard you and Ashrof talking, and thought about it all day,” she said, “I remembered that man.

  “What if it was true—what he said, about God being angry and the world coming to an end? And what if there really is a bell on the mountain? What if God’s been waiting all this time for someone to ring it? If I were God and if there was a bell that people were supposed to ring so I would hear it, I guess I’d be pretty mad if they never rang it, not once. Do you see?”

  Jack nodded. He did see, or at least he saw dimly. “It’d be like forgetting God, wouldn’t it?” he said. “No wonder He’s angry.”

  “That’s why I came here!” Ellayne said. “I had to find out if you were really going to try to ring the bell. Because if you are, I’m coming with you.”

  It took a moment for that to sink in. Jack thought he’d never heard anything so outrageous in his whole life.

  “You must be crazier than I thought!” he said. “Why under the sky would I want to take you with me? A girl! I suppose you’d climb the mountain in that dress and in those shiny shoes!”

  She smacked her palms on the table, making it jump.

  “You really are the most ignorant boy I’ve ever met!” she said. “I’d wear boys’ clothes, stupid! And boots. And I’d have you cut off my hair so I could be disguised as another boy. Nobody but you would know the difference.

  “And anyhow, I’ve got something you don’t have and that we’ll need if we’re going to get anywhere.”

  “Oh! And what’s that?” Jack sneered.

  Ellayne grinned at him.

  “Money!” she said.

  CHAPTER 6

  How to Have Adventures

  In all his life Jack had never been more than a mile or two away from his hometown and had never been taught about maps or geography. He could see the mountain from his own backyard. All he had to do, he thought, was to keep on walking toward it until he got there, and then somehow climb it. He thought it might take a day or two to get there and maybe another day for the climb. Had he been left alone to act on such notions, he surely would have come to grief.

  “You’re lucky I came along. You don’t know anything,” Ellayne said, when they met in secret the next day. The first thing they decided to do was to keep it secret that they knew each other. Neither Ellayne’s parents nor Van would have dreamed of letting them play together—not that they were playing. This was serious business. So today they met in Van’s tack shed, Jack having hung a rag from the doorpost to let Ellayne know Van wasn’t home.

  “There aren’t any roads to Bell Mountain,” she told him. “The only people who ever get close to the mountain are loggers, and they float everything up and down the river. With all the time they lose hauling things around the shallow places, it takes a week.

  “Besides, you don’t go straight up the mountain. You can’t. When you can’t go by the river anymore, there are the foothills, and they’re all in thick forest. No roads there! Before you got anywhere near the mountain, you’d first have to get through the forest.”

  “How do you know so much about it?” Jack said.

  “My father has money in logging. My brother Dib has been all the way up the river several times. They talk about it over supper.”

  “Oh.”

  “But we can’t go up the river, anyhow,” Ellayne said. “Sooner or later my father will know I’ve run away, and Van’ll know you’re gone, and they’ll come looking for us. Father will turn out the militia. If we go up the river, someone’s bound to see us and we’ll probably be caught. So we have to find another way.”

  “Van won’t bother to come after me,” Jack said.

  “They’ll figure it out that we’re together. My father’s not stupid. He’ll be after both of us.”

  “So which way should we go, then?”

  Long ago in Obann there used to be roads to take people almost anywhere they wished to go and books that listed all the towns along the roads and the distances between them. There were no such books anymore; the cities listed in them were ruins, and time had erased most of the roads. As for maps, no one between the mountains and the sea had made a map in hundreds of years. Neither Jack nor Ellayne had ever seen one. So although Ellayne knew much more than Jack, she didn’t know much.

  “We’ll have to go by a roundabout way,” she said. “We’ll either have to go north of the river, or south.”

  “We’d meet too many people going north,” Jack said. He knew from Van that the lands between the Imperial River and the Chariot River were full of farmers and herdsmen, with loggers in Oziah’s Wood and some villages too small to have stockades.

  “South’s better,” Ellayne agreed. “If we can get to Lintum Forest without being stopped, we’ll have a good chance of going all the way.”

  “Lintum Forest—King Ozias was born there!” Jack said. “I forgot that. Well, that is the way we ought to go! It’s King Ozias’ bell we want to find. It’ll bring us good luck to go through Lintum Forest. How far is it?”

  Ellayne didn’t know. Her br
others never went there. “There are outlaws in it,” she said. “I’ve heard that much.”

  “If there are outlaws there, that means it’s a good place to go to avoid getting caught.”

  The next day they met, Ellayne brought along a bulky package that turned out to be a book—the first one Jack had ever seen, not counting the books at the chamber house. Thanks to Ashrof’s teaching, he was able to read the letters burned onto the leather cover.

  “The Mem … Mem-o-ire of Abombalbap,” he read. “What in the blazes is that?”

  “It’s a book about how to have adventures,” Ellayne said. “My father used to read this to me at bedtime, and now I can read it for myself, so he gave it to me. My mother doesn’t think these are the right kind of stories for girls.”

  “How can this help us?”

  “Abombalbap was the rightful heir to a castle long ago. His stepmother wanted to kill him when he was still a baby, so she gave him to a shepherd to feed to the wolves. But the shepherd kept him alive instead, and raised him. When he was old enough, he traveled all around having adventures until he found out who he really was and got his castle back.”

  Jack had never heard of anything like that. “What’s a castle?” he said.

  “It’s a place sort of like the Prester’s Palace in Obann. It has high walls and towers and a moat around it. There used to be lots of castles in the old days.

  “Abombalbap had adventures with bandits, and Heathen raiders, and robber lords, giants, dwarfs, magicians—and he always came out on top. The book tells you how he did it.”

  Jack picked up the book. “We can’t take this with us. It weighs too much.”

  “I know that!” Ellayne snapped. “I’m just showing it to you to prove I know all about adventures.”

  Had they known better what lay ahead of them, Jack and Ellayne would have planned much more carefully, or else given up the idea altogether. But they didn’t know, and they wanted to leave soon, so they planned accordingly. If they ran into trouble, Ellayne said, they would just do whatever Abombalbap did when he was in difficulties.

  She cut open the lining of her coat and hid money in it, wrapping it so it wouldn’t jingle—a trick she’d learned from the book. Jack was amazed when he saw the money.

  “You’ve got so much more money than Van—and he’s a grown man who gets paid a penny a day. You didn’t steal it from your father, did you?” he said. She had silver pennies, threepenny pips, fivepenny moons, and something he’d never seen in Van’s possession—three gold pieces, newly minted “spears” (so called for the image they bore of a spearman standing at attention).

  “Of course I didn’t steal it!” Ellayne said. “My mother and father give me an allowance, and I save it. I was going to buy a horse and carriage when they said I was old enough to have one. It ought to be enough to get us to the mountain and back. We’ll need to buy food and lots of other things.”

  They’d need sturdy boots, she said, and warm clothes for Jack and fur bags to sleep in, like the loggers had. They’d have to buy them in another town—too risky to buy them here, where people would notice and tell her father.

  “We’ll want to buy weapons, too,” she added. “Bows and arrows for hunting for food along the way, and swords and knives—just in case.”

  Jack could only marvel. She really did know all about adventures, and she was going to spend all her money on theirs. Van would never buy him boots. He felt as if they were all but on the mountain already.

  “Don’t tell me you know how to use a bow and arrows,” he said.

  “We can learn. I can ride a horse, though.”

  He shook his head, dazzled. “I can get us rabbits and woodchucks with my slingshot,” he said. “We won’t go hungry. I can cook them, too. But I never thought of any of the rest. I had you figured all wrong. Now I’m glad you’re going with me—you really do know what you’re doing. I can hardly wait to get started! How about tomorrow morning, first thing?”

  Ellayne wanted to make it the day after: she needed time to get some things together. “We’ll both need to carry packs,” she said, “with everything in them that we’ll need. I’m sure there are some clothes of my brothers’ that’ll fit you, and I’ll need some of their things, too. Maybe you ought to pack some cooking gear. And don’t forget your slingshot.”

  CHAPTER 7

  The Journey Begins

  Jack didn’t think that day would ever come. He was sure something would go wrong. Van would hurt himself on the job, and Jack would have to stay home and tend to him; Ellayne’s father would find out; or Ashrof would decide to tell on him because he was sure Jack would come to a bad end if no one stopped him.

  He would have liked to say good-bye to Ashrof and ask the old reciter for his blessing. He knew the priest at the chamber house didn’t like Ashrof, thought he was too old and foolish. Jack would have been happier with Ashrof’s blessing, but knew he’d have to do without it. He could make it up with him when he came back.

  He stuffed a canvas sack with two small pans, two knives and two forks, his slingshot, some bread, some onions, and what little spare clothing he had. It didn’t seem like much. He found an old wineskin that would serve for holding water.

  It didn’t take him very long to get his things ready, leaving him with the rest of the day stretched out before him and nothing to do. He wished he could read Scriptures. But the Old Books were written in an ancient and difficult language. You’d have to study hard for years, Ashrof said, before you could read them. “And the Temple would prefer you didn’t read them,” he would add. That was another thing that he’d explain when Jack got older.

  He fretted and fidgeted through the day. Van came home a little late for supper, complaining about the councilor who had to be driven all the way out to Oziah’s Wood and back the same day, just to see some cowherds who owed him money.

  The hardest thing of all was getting to sleep that night; but eventually Jack managed it.

  To his surprise, he didn’t dream about the mountain.

  Early morning found him in a little patch of woods not far from the stockade, hugging himself against the cold and grumbling against Ellayne for being late. She probably wasn’t coming at all, he thought. This was a joke, a big joke on him. Or else her father had caught her out at the last minute, and Jack would be blamed for the whole thing and sold down the river to unload barges in Obann for the rest of his life. He’d get her for that.

  Someone’s feet crunched dead leaves and sticks.

  “Oh—there you are,” Ellayne said.

  He hardly would have recognized her. She had boys’ clothes on, stout boots on her feet, and had tucked her hair up under a floppy cloth cap that otherwise would have been too big for her.

  “What kept you?” he snapped. “I’m freezing!”

  “It isn’t easy to sneak out of my house. The maid’s very nosy. Here, I brought you some things.”

  She laid down her bag and from it took out a knitted wool cap and a woolen jacket decorated with a yellow check pattern. It hung loosely on Jack’s shoulders, but it was the warmest garment he’d ever had on his body.

  “See if these boots fit,” she said. “They were my brother Josek’s, but he grew out of them. The cap is Dib’s, and he’ll be mad when he finds out it’s gone. Try not to lose it.”

  He had to stuff bits of torn-up cloth napkin into the toes; then the boots fit him well enough.

  “I guess we’re ready,” he said, stomping a little to get his feet used to their new homes. “Which way is Lintum Forest?”

  “It’s somewhere south of here. I don’t know how far. But it’s a big place. It shouldn’t be too hard to find.”

  That was good enough for Jack, because he knew no better.

  CHAPTER 8

  An Empty Land

  Jack knew a path that wound through the little woods. Ellayne followed him.

  “One thing I don’t get,” he said. “I’m glad you’re coming with me, don’t get me wrong—but w
hy did you want to? You didn’t dream about the mountain. You never thought of it until you heard me talking to Ashrof. What made you want to do this?”

  She grunted as she yanked her pack free from some sticker bushes. “It’s hard to explain,” she said. “As soon as you said you were going to go up the mountain, I had to go, too.

  “I don’t know how to say it—but I want to do something! Not just grow up and marry whoever my mother and father want me to marry, and wear nice clothes, and never see anything and never know anything, except what everybody else in the world has already seen and already knows.”

  “Your ma and pa have been all the way to Obann lots of times,” Jack said. “You’d get to see Obann.”

  “Anybody can do that!”

  “I’m only asking because I don’t want you changing your mind and wanting to go back.”

  “I won’t!”

  It didn’t take long to pass through the woods. Jack noticed the green leaves were sprouting on the berry bushes just as they ought to sprout, in spite of the funny weather. Robins sang in the trees, blue jays scolded, cardinals chirped. Squirrels raced along the branches and up and down the trunks, pausing to chatter and scold.

  The children emerged from the woods.

  “So that’s the land!” Ellayne said. “I’ve never seen it before. There’s so much of it!”

  Before them, almost as vast as the sky itself, stretched a rolling moor, wave after wave of grey-green grass and scrub and clumps of brush, with knots of trees here and there. Neither Jack nor Ellayne had ever seen the sea; few people in Obann ever had. But if you have, you will know better what the land looked like: a motionless ocean. Not a road, not a trail, not a single herd of goats or sheep or cattle with its drover, not a solitary human being on foot or on horseback—Jack had seen it before, but never really looked at it. It just went on and on until it vanished into a distant haze.