Bell Mountain (The Bell Mountain Series) Read online

  “The next hill looks mighty far away,” Ellayne said.

  Something chirped, making them jump. Up from a grey tussock, practically at Jack’s feet, sprang an Omah. It carried a sharpened stick like a spear and wore Ellayne’s hair around its neck.

  “Look who’s here!” Jack said. Ellayne beamed. “I think he wants to come with us,” she said. “I’m sure he does!”

  “Let’s find out.”

  They set off, and the little furry man scampered along with them, chittering merrily, finding his way effortlessly around the tussocks.

  “Fellow, we’re very glad to have you,” Jack said.

  “Jack, you can’t just call him ‘Fellow.’ It’s impolite. We have to give him a name.”

  “Maybe by the time we think of one, he’ll have left us,” Jack said.

  But the Omah stayed with them all day, and Ellayne decided to call him Manawyttan, after a hero in one of her old tales.

  “The name’s bigger than he is,” Jack said. “Let’s just call him Wytt.”

  CHAPTER 12

  A Camp in a Cave

  They made good progress that day. Sometimes Wytt disappeared, but never for long. Under a low bush coming into purple bloom, he showed them a nest with eggs in it, pale green with dark green speckles. Jack put them carefully into his pack. Wytt broke into one with his sharp stick and sucked out the contents.

  “I hope we don’t have to eat them like that,” Ellayne said.

  “I’ll boil them if we have enough water,” Jack answered.

  The next hilltop drew them on, and by pushing hard, they got there late in the afternoon. But they didn’t go up to the top. At the foot of a deep gully about halfway up the slope, where they would have missed it in the shadows, Wytt showed them a hole that turned out to be a man-made cave in the side of the hill, with a flat stone floor and a curved roof of tightly fitted bricks.

  “Do you think we should stop here for the night?” Jack said. The Omah whistled and bobbed his head.

  “I think he understands every word we say,” Ellayne said. “If only we could understand him! We probably don’t have time to get up to the top and set up camp before dark. I suppose it’s best we stop here. But I don’t like being underground.”

  They had to prepare their fire right away, while they still had light. The slope was overgrown with brush, with some big pieces here and there that had fallen off trees. Jack used two more of his matches to get the fire going, and wondered how much longer they’d last. Maybe they’d come to a town where they could buy some more—if things like matches were for sale out here, far from the great river that carried most of Obann’s commerce.

  Night fell before they’d finished their supper. The rabbits were splendid, and the eggs would serve for breakfast. While they were still eating, Wytt went off somewhere.

  “Probably having a look-round,” Jack said. “I think he can see in the dark. If there are Omahs on this hill, he’ll want to find out about them.”

  “Do you think the Omahs on different hilltops know each other?” Ellayne said. “Maybe they go on visits from one hill to the next.”

  Jack made a torch. “To see how far back this cave goes,” he explained, “and what else is in it.”

  “Hadn’t that better wait till daylight? What if it’s dangerous?”

  “It’ll be just as dark back there by day as by night. And I’m not sleepy.”

  Ellayne didn’t want to be left behind; and as they were already in the cave, going farther in wouldn’t be that much worse, she thought. She made a torch, too, and they went together.

  “Watch out for holes in the floor,” she said.

  Nothing like this had ever been built in Ninneburky. The front of Ellayne’s house was brick, but not like this. These bricks were as smooth as glass to the touch, and they fit together perfectly. A tall man on tiptoe couldn’t have touched the curved ceiling of the passage.

  “Look at this floor,” Jack said. “It’s all one sheet of stone and as flat as a slate. It’s like they melted the rock and poured it out. How did they do things like that?”

  “And rusty somethings stuck in the ceiling,” Ellayne said, holding her torch over her head and looking up. “What was this place?”

  “Who knows? Something they built in Empire days.”

  How far they went, they couldn’t have said. It was all the same: a straight passage into the side of the ruin, unvarying in its level floor and glassy brick. Their shadows capered along the walls, distorted by wavering torchlight. The children plodded on and on, and began to wonder if the passage would take them clear to the opposite side of the hill. But it didn’t.

  Jack stepped on something that crunched under his boot. That stopped them. Until then, the floor had been as clean as if someone swept it every day.

  He moved his foot and looked down.

  “All over the floor!” he said. “I think it’s bones.”

  Ellayne choked back a cry and clutched his arm. She didn’t speak, but pointed ahead with her torch.

  Jack caught his breath.

  Just ahead of them, bones choked the passage almost to the ceiling. It was as if someone had dumped them by the cartload—many cartloads. They lay in heaps. And many of them were skulls, round and white with black eye sockets, broken teeth, and fleshless jaws gaping. Out of the midst of the bone pile rose an iron staircase with a rusted handrail.

  “This is as far as we go,” Jack said. Ellayne nodded, not daring to speak. They backed away together until darkness swallowed the bones, then turned and hurried back to their fire.

  The fire had almost burned out while they were gone, and it took some doing to build it back up without using up another precious match. Not that they needed the warmth, Ellayne thought. She was sweating like mad, but without feeling at all overheated. She saw it dripping off Jack’s forehead, too. But to do without a blazing fire just now would be unthinkable.

  “I don’t know how we can sleep here tonight,” she said.

  “We have to sleep here. There’s nowhere else,” Jack said. “Think I like sleeping by all those dead men’s bones? But I’ll bet there were plenty of dead people on the other hilltop, and it was all right. We just didn’t see them.”

  “Well, I wish we could say prayers. It’s too bad we don’t have a prester.”

  “Ashrof says you don’t need a prester. You just say a prayer, and God hears it.”

  That almost made Ellayne forget the bones. “He said that? But how can you pray when you’re not in the chamber house and you don’t have the prester to lead you?”

  “He did say the prester wouldn’t like it if he heard him saying that,” Jack said. “But Ashrof says that’s how it is in the Old Books. When people in Old Obann wanted to say a prayer, they just said one. I guess we could, too.”

  Ellayne thought about the bones, shivered, and said, “Yes, let’s! We can pretend we’re in chamber.”

  They took off their hats and stood together. Not having a prester to say a prayer that they could repeat after him, they couldn’t help feeling they were doing something improper. But what was proper in a cave full of dead men’s bones?

  “God, please watch over us and keep us safe tonight—and help us get to the mountain,” was all Jack could do. Ellayne prayed, “And don’t be angry with us for not having a prester.” And they both said, “So be it,” which was how the prester always finished a prayer in chamber.

  It did make them feel better. They sat down by the fire and looked out the entrance of the cave at the stars above, at the plain below. A hard day’s hiking, a good supper, a few moments of intense excitement, a cozy fire, and a prayer—that was enough to send them to sleep much sooner than they would have expected.

  Jack woke up wide awake with the grey morning in his eyes and the song of Bell Mountain ringing in his mind.

  He’d had the dream again, clearer than ever. His whole body tingled. The fear that always gripped him when the mountain sang released its hold as soon as he opened his e
yes, leaving him with a fierce desire to see the mountain. He got up, stiff and sore, but too excited to notice.

  Ellayne slept on. He did notice Wytt was back, curled up beside her like a pet cat.

  Never mind—he wanted to see the mountain.

  With his breath making white puffs in the predawn chill, Jack scrambled up to the top of the hill, bulling his way through barricades of wiry underbrush, sometimes crawling on his hands and knees, racing up the slope. He came out on top and turned to the east.

  Silent now, Bell Mountain towered proudly over the others with its crown of clouds taking on a tint of gold as the sun rose beyond the wall of peaks. Jack stretched and took deep breaths. The cold air was like a drink of water to a thirsty plowman.

  Ashrof was right, he thought: you didn’t need a prester. God heard those prayers we said last night, he thought. Heard them and wasn’t angry, and sent him his dream again to prove it. He knew the mountain was far away, a march of many, many days—but there it was. And he was going to climb it.

  “Thank you, God,” he said.

  He turned to face south, to get a first look at the ground they’d have to cover that day. The grey plain rolled on below him with other isolated hilltops visible. And something else—

  A shadow, a dark shadow, just barely visible, due south.

  Lintum Forest.

  CHAPTER 13

  The Theologian and the Assassin

  There is not much to tell of that day’s journey. As hard as they pressed to reach the next hilltop, it was too far away, and they had to spend the night on the plain.

  It was not as bad as they’d feared. Wytt led them to a place where a trickle of clean, cold water welled out of a crack in the earth to become a little pool. Trees grew all around it, providing some shelter from the wind. Once Jack had the fire going, and they’d piled up dead leaves, dead reeds, as much as they could gather, to make their beds, “It won’t be so bad,” Ellayne said. They slept under the stars, and aside from a little extra shivering and stiffness the next morning, they were well able to continue their trek.

  They would have been astounded to know that as they stopped, hours later, for rest and a bite to eat, their names were on the lips of a very important personage.

  Far away in Obann City, in the Temple itself, in a very nicely appointed private study with thick rugs and rich hangings on the walls, the First Prester, Lord Reesh, angrily rattled a sheet of reed paper in his hand.

  “Do you know what this is?” he said. “It’s a letter from the burned fool who’s the prester at the new chamber house in a place called Ninneburky. It’s almost all the way up the river.”

  “I know the town, my lord,” said the other man in the room—an unremarkable-looking fellow with a sad face and a little pointed beard.

  “Good. Because you’re going there,” Lord Reesh said. “As soon as I explain this.

  “Two children from Ninneburky have run away to climb Bell Mountain. You are to find them. If they are still on their way to the mountain when you overtake them, don’t interfere. Follow them. See to it that they get there. I want to know every single thing that happens to them, Martis. If they climb the mountain, climb after them. If they get to the top and find a bell, you are to prevent them from touching it, and no one is ever to see or hear from them again.”

  The people of Ninneburky, even the prester himself, would have been appalled to learn that the First Prester had a confidential servant whose duties included killing people. For that is what Martis did, in addition to ferreting out secrets, spying, stealing, and arranging for certain persons to be accused of and punished for crimes they hadn’t committed. Not even the other oligarchs knew about Martis. To everyone in the city, he was only a clerk in the Temple. He even looked like a clerk.

  But to Lord Reesh—who considered himself the first oligarch as well as the First Prester—he was a very necessary tool. And because he had served Lord Reesh for years, and never failed him, Martis enjoyed a certain liberty in speaking to his master.

  “Do you think a pair of children might actually climb the mountain, my lord?” he said.

  Reesh snorted, and dropped himself into the sturdy, well-padded chair behind his hardwood desk. He was old and fat, and the letter had jangled his nerves.

  “Don’t tell me you haven’t made a study of the Scriptures, Martis,” he said.

  “I am aware of the verse in Penda in which King Ozias speaks his intention to place a bell atop Mount Yul, sir. It’s not recorded whether he actually did so. I’m surprised Your Lordship takes it seriously.”

  “I know the verse, and you know the verse,” Reesh said, “but there’s no way under the sun that an ignorant boy in an upriver village knows the verse! But then he didn’t get his idea from studying the Old Books. According to the prester in Ninneburky—who’s too scared out of his skin to lie—the curs’t boy dreamed it. He dreamed about the bell on Bell Mountain!”

  “Surely someone at the chamber house put the notion in his head,” Martis said.

  “Don’t be so reasonable, Martis. It irritates me. I’m the theologian here, not you. And I say that if a child has a dream like this, there’s a fair chance that he’ll get to the top of the mountain. Besides which—I’ve had the same dream myself.”

  To this Martis had no answer, and was wise enough not to venture a foolish one.

  “I’m an old man,” Reesh went on, “and I’ve seen and heard many things. Of course there have always been lunatics who tried to climb Bell Mountain. Most of them died trying. A few, madder than the rest, pretended they’d been to the top and come back down. My predecessors in this office silenced them.

  “Even if I were convinced that these two children were as deluded as the others, now is hardly the time to indulge such fantasy. By this time next year, we shall have a major war on our hands, and we won’t want the people distracted by talk of Bell Mountain. But in this case, Martis, it’s not just idle talk and moonshine. The boy’s dream proves it.”

  “My lord, that is an extraordinary thing for you to say.”

  “Do you think it gives me pleasure to say it? I, who’ve believed in nothing all my life but the stability of the state and the mission of the Temple to hold the state together while we all try to claw our way out of barbarism?

  “Until I received this letter, I dismissed my own dreams as the ramblings of an overworked mind in its old age. Now I suppose that if we made an investigation, we’d find that many people have had this dream—the very old, the very young; slaves and shepherds and servant girls; trappers alone in the woods. You know what I mean.”

  Martis nodded. He knew. “There is a verse in Prophet Ika, I believe,” he said, “about such people having dreams.”

  Lord Reesh glared at his servant, as if to pierce him with his pale blue eyes—tired and old and watery, but for a moment keen as steel.

  “If there is a bell up on that mountain, Martis, I want to know,” he said. “And under no circumstances is that bell to be rung. If it is ever to be rung, that decision will be made here, in this office, by me or by my successor.”

  Martis bowed. “I understand perfectly, my lord. You can rely on me.”

  Lord Reesh was glad Martis hadn’t made a fuss about assassinating children.

  This was the day Jack made his first kill with the slingshot. It was a lucky shot, right in the head.

  “Jack, you got him! Our supper!” Ellayne cried. But Jack was already on the run, in case his prey was only stunned and were to get up and run away before he could lay his hands on it.

  Jack had not shot a rabbit or a woodchuck, but a good-sized bird that ran about in zigzags instead of trying to fly away. It had long legs and a long neck, and it was like no bird Jack had ever seen or heard of. Its feathers were colored a dirty white with brown streaks and speckles. It had big orange eyes and a sturdy hooked bill that was more like a hawk’s bill than anything else—if there could be such a thing as a long-legged hawk that ran instead of flew. Certainly its wings
looked like the bird ought to have been able to fly, if it wanted to. And it had a crest of long black feathers at the back of its head.

  Jack’s lucky shot had killed it outright, and there it lay.

  “What kind of bird is that?” Ellayne wondered.

  “I don’t know. It looks like something that might be in that book of yours.”

  “Do you think it’s fit for eating?”

  “We’re going to find out by eating it,” Jack said. “It’s big enough to make a good supper.”

  Wytt summoned them with a burst of chirps and whistles. He’d found the bird’s nest. It was just a hole in the ground, lined with soft feathers, and the large grey eggs looked like stones. Ellayne took all four of them for their breakfast.

  They’d come far enough the day before to gain the next hilltop with time to spare. Like the first, its flattened top was a scattering of ruins, isolated bits of wall and cracked pavement. But what most interested them was the view from the top, facing south.

  “So that’s Lintum Forest!” Ellayne said. “We ought to be there in another day or two. But please—no going in! It stretches for as far as the eye can see. If we ever got lost in there, we’d never find our way out.”

  “It can’t be so bad, if King Ozias was born there,” Jack said.

  “My father says it’s full of outlaws and rebels. And witches, too, I expect.”

  “It is part of Obann, though. There must be settlers and foresters.”

  “Only a fool would go in.”

  They made camp under the shelter of a sturdy wall, had the bird for supper (rabbit was a lot tastier, Jack thought), and fell asleep by their fire. Wytt found water in the morning, and once they’d refilled their waterskin, they set off toward the forest.

  Martis, having made excellent time on horseback by traveling straight through the night along the River Road, was already halfway to Ninneburky.

  CHAPTER 14