The Farthest-Away Mountain Read online

  Whenever she looked ahead, the jagged teeth, like the spears of a vast army, seemed to stretch for miles, ahead and on both sides; and even looking back, she couldn’t see any sign of the meadow. The sun had really gone in now, and the sky overhead was gray and threatening. She grew more and more weary, but there wasn’t one friendly flat surface to rest on, just the endless, treacherous sea of spikes. It was no good turning back, she could only go on. It was worse than the wood. Much worse.

  At last Dakin grew so tired she knew that very soon she must either sit down and rest, or fall down. Her head had begun to whirl, and she realized she must be terribly hungry. Even without the little troll, her knapsack felt like lead, and her heart almost as heavy.

  As she staggered on she felt a lump come into her throat. First she told herself it was just tiredness, then, as it grew bigger, that it was hunger, but despite all her efforts to deceive herself, two big tears bloomed slowly on her lower eyelashes and made two wet, crooked paths down her brown cheeks.

  They met on the end of her chin and fell with a small splash on a particularly spiteful-looking point of rock.

  What happened next would have surprised Dakin if she hadn’t already had more surprises that day than she knew how to deal with. The rock on which her tear had fallen began to melt, like a fast-burning wax candle. First the sharp point disappeared, then the thickening column beneath it sank and sank with a faint hissing sound, until it had quite melted away and there was nothing left but a flat place—exactly the size and shape of Dakin’s foot.

  Wrenching her scuffed boot from between two other spikes, she put it on this flat place. How lovely it was to rest it there! She stood on one leg. She had stopped crying, but another tear that had been on her cheek now slipped off and fell on another point of rock. The same thing happened as before: the sharp point melted, or at any rate quickly disappeared, and now there was a place for her other foot, and she was able to have quite a nice rest. But still ahead, behind, and all around her stretched an endless desert of other spikes, which Dakin didn’t at all see how she would ever get through.

  And then she had an idea.

  “Aren’t I silly!” she said aloud. “It was my tears that made the spikes go away. Tears must have power over the horrible rocks, just as laughter had power over Drackamag. Oh dear—but I don’t feel a bit like crying now I’ve had a rest! What shall I do?”

  After thinking a moment, she said: “Well. I didn’t feel like laughing when Drackamag was outside the cabin, either. But I did it, because I had to. Now let’s see if I can’t make myself cry.”

  So she looked up at the miserable, gray sky and thought about how alone she was, how the little troll, her friend as she’d thought, had deserted her, about poor Old Croak, lonely, friendless, and afraid on his lily pad. She wasn’t crying yet, but something was happening deep down inside her, so she made herself think about home, and how her mother would feel when she came down to make the breakfast and found her gone. She thought of her mother crying, of her father’s face with all its lines showing plainly as they did when he was sad or angry. She thought of Triska, when night came and there was no one in the bed beside her. (Here it came! Oh, goodness, floods— had she overdone it?) She started to walk forward.

  The tears fell fast, and each one melted a spike so that she could move another step. Now she thought how she would feel tonight, without Triska, with no mother to kiss her and tuck her in—heavens! She couldn’t see where she was going for tears! Thick and fast they fell, and her feet met only flat ground as she walked, and cried, faster and faster.

  All of a sudden, she stumbled and fell. As she was falling, she had a horrible feeling that she was going to come down right onto one of the spikes, that it would stick into her. She flung her hands forward, expecting them to be grazed or even pierced by the sharp points, but—wonder of wonders! No such thing. She fell onto something quite soft.

  Rubbing the last tears out of her eyes, she sat up and looked around. The spikes were nowhere to be seen. She was on a grassy path between two high walls of rock, far too steep for anyone to climb. The path led upward, around a corner. Picking herself up, she ran ahead. When she got around the bend, she stopped.

  6

  ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞

  The Mountain Path

  She was on a ledge, high, high above a beautiful valley. The grassy path led away to the left, around the rock wall, out of sight. Unless she wanted to go back, she had no alternative to following this path. Ahead was a sheer drop of thousands of feet, and this drop would be on her right all the way along the path, too. The path was narrow. She was quite an experienced climber, but she didn’t like the look of it. She would have to watch her step very carefully along there.

  Before she started she thought she had better eat something, so she sat down on the ledge and opened her knapsack. The bread and cheese tasted delicious. She only wished she’d brought an apple. And she hadn’t thought about anything to drink. Lucky she’d left the toffee at the cabin; she would certainly have wanted to eat it, and it would only have made her thirstier. If that were possible... Goodness, how salty that cheese was! She’d never noticed before, but then before there’d always been plenty of water in the pump, ice-cold, bubbling, crystal-clear water... She swallowed, not that there was much to swallow. Hermouth felt as dry and shriveled up as an old bit of leather.

  Still, there was nothing to be done about it, so when she’d packed her knapsack again and got up she started along the narrow path. It followed the sides of the mountain in bends and curves, all the time going upward. After a while it grew even narrower, so that Dakin had to flatten her front against the side of the rock and edge her way along sideways.

  “It’s lucky Margie taught me to climb,” she thought, “and never to look down.” She must be very high above the valley by now; it was a long time since she had looked. The sun was setting, and it was getting colder and colder—partly because she was getting higher. Her thirst got worse until she thought she couldn’t stand it any more. She didn’t let herself think how frightened she was of falling, but she felt the ledge get narrower and narrower until only half the length of her feet fitted onto it, her heels hanging over the edge and her hands clinging to little ridges in the rock.

  “I can’t go on like this much longer,” she suddenly realized. “Soon it will be dark!” This was a fearful thought. What would happen when night came? And she couldn’t see to find handholds? She couldn’t cling like a monkey to one place all night! What a fool she’d been to start this part of her journey when the day was nearly over! What a fool she’d been, perhaps, to leave home at all.

  She edged her way around another bend, and now her eye was caught by the sun down below her. Half of it had already disappeared behind the horizon. The rest, half a big red ball, was giving out its last five minutes of light. All the valley was already in shadow. Most of the mountain was, too. When she had edged around the next bend, she would be plunged into the beginnings of the night.

  Suddenly she was panic-stricken. Margie had once warned her that if she looked down when she was on a high, narrow ledge, she might become too frightened to move. This happened to her now for the first time. She clung to the gigantic mountain wall until her fingers turned white. Her legs trembled under her; her breath came in gasps of terror.

  “Oh, help me—somebody—help me!” she whispered.

  “Certainly,” said a voice above her head. “If you know the password.”

  7

  ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞

  The Gargoyles

  Dakin stared upward through the gathering darkness. When she saw a wickedly grinning little stone face on a long neck sticking out of the rock above her, it was lucky her fingers were too stiff to open or she would have fallen from shock.

  “P-password?” she gasped.

  “Yes, yes,” said the stone head impatiently. “Hurry up, you’re going to fall backward at any minute.”

  “But I don’t know it!” cried Dakin.

/>   “Too bad, you’ll have to die then,” said the head with a careless chuckle. “Fancy trying to climb up here without it! Someone should have told you not to.”

  “I was warned,” said Dakin miserably. “Oh. why didn’t I listen?”

  “Who warned you?”

  “A little brass troll we keep on our mantelpiece. He said—”

  “A troll!” exclaimed the head in quite a different voice. “Tell me about him!”

  But now the sun went down completely. An icywind began to blow, making a low, whining sound around the crags, and Dakin knew that she had a few seconds at best before her hold gave way.

  “Oh, please!” she begged. “Save me! I know what you are, you’re a gargoyle, and one of the reasons I came was to see you! If you are cruel and wicked, it’s only because you’re sad! Save me, save me, I know you will!”

  Looking into the evil, grinning face of the gargoyle as she spoke, she saw it suddenly change. All the upturned, gleeful lines cut into the stone turned downward. The mouth opened and a strange cry came out, like the moan of the wind:

  “AAAAH...”

  It was the saddest sound Dakin had ever heard.

  “Aaaah,” it moaned. “Little child, little wise child! You are the first—the only one who has ever under stood. Hold on, hold on a little longer! Brave the fear and the cold wind of death! Go forward till you come to my brothers, one after another, and say to them what you’ve said to me. Without the password I many not save you, but yet you not die, for there has never come one like you and there will never come another. Go on, go on, go on!”

  Dakin tried, but her hands would not move.

  “I can’t!” she cried. “My hands are frozen! Oh, I’m going to fall!”—for she felt her legs buckling.

  The gargoyle seemed to slip down the face of the rock, and its neck grew longer. When it came near her head, it stretched its neck to one side and bent its face until its mouth was over her fingers. A hot, strengthening breath blew suddenly on her right hand, taking away the icy numbness. Then the neck stretched the other way, and the fingers of her left hand were brought back to life by the prickly breath.

  “That is all that I, Og, dare to do,” whispered the gargoyle into her ear. “Your hands will be warm and strong till you reach my brother Vog, around the next bend. He will breathe on your knees to keep them stiff. Next you will come to my brother Zog. He will bring your feet back to life. After that... I don’t know. But be strong, for our sakes! Forgive me for making you afraid—I could not help it! Go now, go quickly, for you are still in danger.”

  Dakin did not need to be told that, for although her hands were now warm and alive and she could move them along to find new holds, her legs were as weak, the path as narrow, the wind as cold, and the oncoming night as dark as ever—and she was still almost paralyzed with fear. But something in the gargoyle’s voice—something pleading, frantic almost—gave her new hope and strength. “It must be knowing that I’ve come here for a reason, not just out of a stubborn fancy,” thought Dakin. “Though what the reason is, I still don’t know.” And with a great effort, she began to edge her way forward again.

  Now she had to climb mainly by touch. Her hands, though, seemed to have eyes of their own, and her fingers found places to hold on to which her real eyes couldn’t see. When her knees gave way, her hands took a firm grip on the ridges of rock and held up her whole body until her knees felt stronger and she was able to go on.

  As she rounded the next bend she called out loudly, “Vog! Vog! Are you there?”

  “Shhh!” hissed a voice somewhere low down on the rock wall. “Who calls me by my name? Who raises his voice in this dread place?”

  “I’m a her, not a him. My name is Dakin. Your brother Og said you’d help me because I know that gargoyles are only wicked because they’re sad.”

  “Ahhh!”

  It was the same mournful moan as before.

  “How do you know this secret of secrets?” asked Vog.

  “I saw pictures in a book about churches,” panted Dakin. “All the gargoyles in the pictures looked like evil spirits, but their stone eyes seemed to me to be full of sorrow.”

  “And have you never heard that you will turn to stone if you look at one?”

  “Yes, my mother said so. But it can’t be true.”

  “It is true.”

  “But I looked your brother Og in the face, and I didn’t turn to stone!”

  “Perhaps you were like stone already?”

  “Oh yes, of course! From fear of falling. Did that save me?”

  “That, and your own knowledge of us... What did Og say I was to do?”

  “Blow on my knees.”

  “Why? Only give the password and I can lift you from the path.”

  “I don’t know it.”

  “Oh woe!” cried Vog. “Then we are all doomed! For without the password you will never get past the Colored Snow Witch who guards the snow line. And unless you get past her, you cannot reach the top.”

  “Well, we’ll see,” said Dakin. “I’ve got this far. Now blow on my knees, or they won’t hold me until I reach your brother Zog.”

  So Vog blew the same prickly breath onto her knees, and immediately Dakin felt them take on new strength. Though her feet were now so cold that she couldn’t feel them, somehow she made herself go forward, and very soon she heard a voice, even lower, right on a level with the path, cry out:

  ’’Beware, beware, you will break my long neck with your great clumsy feet! One more step and you fall to your doom!” and the horrible, wicked chuckle of a gargoyle who did not yet know that Dakin understood him.

  “You’re not really bad enough to laugh at the thought of me falling,” she said through the darkness. “You’ve been made bad through sadness.”

  “Ahhhh!”

  “Yes, ahhhh,” she said, a bit impatiently. “Now, Zog, breathe on my poor cold feet and tell me what to do next.”

  It was really lovely to feel her feet coming back to life, like climbing into a warm bed after a long walk through the snow.

  “Oh, thank you, Zog, that’s so much better,” she said. “Well! I wish one of you would blow on my eyes so that I could see in the dark, that’s all, and perhaps give me a drink, and then I’d be ready for anything, even Drackamag and the Colored Snow Witch.”

  Zog let out a hiss like a snake (and indeed, a gargoyle with its long neck is not unlike a snake with a goblin’s head). The hiss seemed to rise upward until it was above her head.

  “The eyes I cannot manage,” came Zog’s voice.

  “But as to the drink: even down below where humans live and our kind have no life, water still pours out of our mouths. Put back your head, child of wisdom and mystery, and open your lips.”

  Dakin did this, and a moment later a delicate stream of clear cold water ran into her mouth and down her throat as fast as she could gulp.

  Whether there was something magic about the water or not she didn’t know, but she suddenly felt not only warmer and stronger, but much braver as well.

  “Oh, Zog, you are a good gargoyle!” she cried. “Ahhhh...”

  “Never mind that,” she interrupted quickly. “Now, give me your advice. What lies ahead? What must I do?”

  “I know nothing,” said Zog. “We, my brothers and I, are only sentinels. Those whom the great Drackamag wishes to pass hold the password: others we are ordered to let fall to their deaths.”

  “Drackamag is wicked, isn’t he? I mean, really wicked, not like you?”

  “Wicked! Aye, wicked, wicked as a witch’s claws, wicked as a wizard’s words!”

  “Then I suppose that the only visitors he would want to see must be wicked, too. He wouldn’t want good people coming up here, I mean people who wanted to help you and Old Croak, for instance.”

  The moaning voice of Zog changed suddenly into a much more normal, friendly tone, almost like a person’s voice.

  “You have seen Croak? He is still alive? Oh. tell me about him, t
ell me about the warm, sweet world of the meadow! Do the flowers still grow there, do the birds still sing? Is it all as it was so long ago?”

  “Yes, it’s all beautiful. Especially after walking through that hateful wood. And Old Croak is very nice, but he seems afraid.”

  “We are all afraid—all of us,” said Zog, moaning again. “But tell me more. Is the Lithy Pool still there in the midst of the meadow, with its sweet magic waters?”

  Dakin felt herself grow cold again with a different kind of fear. “Lithy Pool? What Lithy Pool? There was no pool in the meadow!” she said. If she had missed bathing in the Lithy Pool... The troll had said she must.

  Zog seemed puzzled. “Has Drackamag then destroyed that well of wonders?” he asked. “I know he would if he could, but I dared hope he had not the power... Yet if the Lithy Pool is gone, how could Croak live? For as I heard, he is still a frog, and frogs cannot live without a pond.”

  “A pond?” exclaimed Dakin. “Oh yes, he has a pond. It’s inside a sort of little house. But that can’t be the—” She stopped. Then, in a voice hushed with uneasiness, she went on: “Don’t tell me that pond is the Lithy Pool?”

  “There is but one, right in the middle of the meadow. It has lilies growing on it, and it is very deep. Some say it goes down to the middle of the earth, and all who bathe in it are protected from the powers of evil.”

  “Oh no, oh no!” thought Dakin. “That means I’ve got to go all the way back—down the path, across those awful spikes—hours and hours! I can’t do it, I simply can’t!” Aloud to Zog, she said: “The troll said I should bathe in the Lithy Pool. Do you think it’s important enough to go back for?”

  “It depends on whether you want to live or die,” said Zog. “If you are an ordinary human child, without magic on your side, I do not see how you have reached here without having bathed in the Lithy Pool. It’s impossible that you should reach the top of the mountain without some special protection. What troll?” he asked suddenly, as if he’d only just realized what she’d said.