The Farthest-Away Mountain Read online

  “And what do you think I’d do next, Graw? When you and the Master had gone poof? Well, first of all I’d knock the top clear off this mountain so I could stand up straight without banging my head. I’d knock it off and fling it down there into the valley, right onto that little village you can see down there. That’d wake ’em up that something unusual was going to happen! They’d look up, and then they’d see me, with my head sticking out of the top of the snow.”

  He sat there chortling contentedly for a few moments.

  “And then,” he went on, “what I’d do is, I’d dig Old Paintpots out of her hole in the ground and I’d make her scrape all those awful colors off the snow. I might even make her eat the lot, caterpillars, hot snow, sticky snow, the lot! The sight of so much whiteness would be the finish of her, I wouldn’t wonder, mad old hag that she is.

  “Then I’d climb out. My shadow would go right down the mountainside and fall on that village. Wouldn’t they just die of fright when they saw the size of me! Ho, ho, ho, Grawkins! How they’d shriek and run, and I’d crash down the mountain in a few big strides, and I’d scoop them all up, little ants that they are next to me, and then I’d—I’d—”

  The happy, excited voice of the giant petered out. It was as if he’d run out of ideas. He paused for a few moments and then muttered, “Well. Don’t know what I’d do with them really. I might just sort of... No, that’d be no fun. Ah, they’re so small. No good for slaves, no good for playing with or keeping in cages... What’s the use of them... I dunno...” The muttering died away, and after a short while there was a trembling thud as the ogre’s head fell back against the wall of the cave, and then great thunderous snores began which made all the mountain rumble.

  14

  ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞

  Another Poem

  Dakin ventured to peep out, and up. She really couldn’t see much except what looked like a mountain of the coarse cloth, and leather, and far, far up, a vast area of hair—a jungle of hair, from which the snores seemed to be coming. The candle was in a giant holder on the floor not far away from her. Well, Drackamag was asleep, but where was Graw?

  She crept out and looked all around the cave, as much as she could for Drackamag’s huge body, and then she saw him. He was still firmly imprisoned in the ogre’s enormous hand, which had fallen back on his knee. Only the creature’s head stuck out from among the treelike fingers. Dakin could see he was struggling to free himself, but it was useless. He was caught.

  “If I had an ax,” thought Dakin, “I could chop his head off.” And then she thought about doing it and added aloud, “No, I couldn’t, not really...”

  It was no trouble at all to crawl under the heavy folds of Drackamag’s clothes to get through to the entrance to the passage. His bulk was blocking most of it, but she got there by running along a sort of channel in his jacket and then dropping through ahole she found in it. The worst part was going along the passage itself. Very little candlelight could pass the sleeping giant, so it was pitch dark. She ran along as fast as she dared and soon came to a turning. As she rounded it, a blinding light hit her eyes—the evening sun reflected on the colored snow. She was out!

  What was more, the effect of the troll’s magic bead had worn off. She could see herself again. And, she reminded herself, be seen.

  She sat down in the mouth of the cave to think.

  Far below she could see her own village. Drackamag’s dream plan for what he would do if the Master were to go poof in the Lithy Pool was fresh in her memory. How easily she could imagine the panic and terror the ogre could cause if he ever showed himself on that side of the mountain! Far away it might be, but the ogre was big enough to frighten the life out of all her friends and neighbors if he ever did come bounding down the slope, crashing through the trees of the Wicked Wood, taking the fields and the river in one great stride, and then... Dakin shuddered. No, no—something had to be done. Something had to be done.

  But what?

  Dakin bit her lips and screwed her eyes shut. Think, girl, think! Everything depends upon one thing: Who is the Master? She had thought all along that Drackamag was. Graw was his watchdog: he was certainly the biggest thing alive on the mountain (or rather, in it) and all the decent creatures, the gargoyles and Croak and the troll, were afraid of him. But there was something—or somebody—worse than poor, brutal, stupid Drackamag. He’d talked as if the Master had made him. And brought Graw to life. Nothing could be done, Dakin decided, until she’d discovered who this Master was.

  An idea came to her. Her books of poems had helped her before. Maybe it could again. She took it out of her pocket and let it fall open.

  Evil can come in many a guise,

  And wrong advice confuse the wise.

  Three good heads are better than one,

  Even though they be of stone.

  Almost before she’d finish reading, Dakin was on her feet and peering all around her. The sun was just about to start sinking below the horizon. She had much less than an hour before nightfall. She must work quickly.

  She was looking for the white trail she had kicked up in the morning, coming up from the back entrance to the gargoyles’ tunnel. If Zog was right, and the Colored Snow Witch slept all day in what Drackamag had called her “hole in the ground,” she wouldn’t have had a chance to splash her magic colors around over the kicked-up white snow. Yes! There it was! And—oh, heavens! She’d almost forgotten, she was so used to going barefoot, that Graw had picked her up right out of her boots, which were still there, stuck to the yellow sticky snow. The short white trail below them must lead straight to the entrance to the tunnel, although she couldn’t see it from here.

  “Oh dear, oh dear!” thought Dakin in dismay. “How can I wade, or kick, or anything, my way through this awful snow? Each color does a different kind of harmful magic. I managed it with boots to protect my feet, but now—!”

  The snow at the edge of the castle cave door happened to be purple. It was a particularly horrid sort of purple, really poisonous looking, and it seemed to be giving off a poisonous sort of smell. Dakin bent and sniffed at it from a safe distance. Oh yes—disgusting, and, how strange, just like the smell of Graw’s wing. The thought of stepping on it with bare feet gave Dakin the shivers. But what could she do? Every moment was precious. The sun’s lower rim was already touching the far-off horizon.

  “This is the test, then,” she thought, stiffening herself. “I must trust the Lithy Pool water. After all, Drackamag said it was so powerfully good that he had to build the cabin so he wouldn’t have to look at it.”

  She lifted her long, full skirts, took a deep breath, and stepped into the purple snow.

  It actually fizzled as her foot sank into it, and a cloud of evil-smelling purple steam rose up around her legs. Her feet felt very peculiar, but she certainly didn’t feel any pain or anything else, and after the first few steps she gained courage and walked boldly through: past the purple patch, into a navy blue patch (where all the snow screamed the second her foot touched it), through a green patch (the caterpillars formed under her feet, but scattered like slush under them as she walked), and a red patch (her feet smoked, but were not burned), to the yellow. Here she could feel that the sticky snow was trying to get a grip on her feet, but failing.

  And now she’d reached her boots.

  It was lovely to slip her cold feet into them. She took time to undo the laces and lace them up again tighter. Then she slipped down into the tunnel.

  Who Is the Master?

  She had no candle this time, and it was much harder climbing down than it had been climbing up. She slid most of the way, and felt sure she would have been very badly grazed and bruised several times if it hadn’t been for the magic of the water. The way was frightening and hard, but at last she was sticking her head out of the mouth of the cave on the other side of the mountain, where only this morning Drackamag had poked his finger, feeling for her.

  “Zog!” she whispered loudly.

  She saw
a slight movement close by on the rock, and there was Zog’s little face, all the carved lines upturned with joy at seeing her.

  “AAAAAAAAAH!” he moaned with pleasure. “You’re back! You’re still alive! Oh, tell me, tell me—No, wait!”

  He turned his head the other way on his long neck and made a strange gurgling whistle. Then he said, “I’m calling my brothers. You had better tell us all at once.”

  “But is it safe for them to leave their places?”

  “Nothing is safe! But at evening Drackamag sleeps early, and sometimes when we are very lonely we meet together and talk.”

  Very soon first Vog, and then Og, came sliding around the corner of the rock face, and soon the three of them, like so many disembodied gnomes, were close to her, rubbing their hard, cold little heads against her and moaning “Aaaaaah!” until she put her hands to their mouths in turn to silence them.

  “Shhhh!” she said. “Drackamag’s asleep, but you never know who else might be watching or listening...

  The gargoyles looked alarmed, and their necks twisted this way and that as they peered around.

  “Who, who, who?” they asked, one after the other.

  Dakin sat down on the ledge, and the brothers glided down to stay near her. Og and Zog rested their necks on her shoulders, and Vog, with a jealous look, nestled his head in her lap. Dakin petted him like a cat.

  “Now listen, all of you,” she said, using the very firm tone of her mother when she had something serious and rather stern to say. “I see that we four are friends, and we are enemies of whatever the evil is that rules this mountain. No, now don’t start ‘ahhh-ing’ straightaway; we’ve got to be very serious and we’ve all got to think.”

  The gargoyles all nodded their heads solemnly, and she went on:

  “Now, you told me several things that I’ve been thinking about. First of all, you, Zog, said that you gargoyles are only sentinels and that you know nothing.”

  “True, true!” moaned Zog sadly.

  “It is not true,” said Dakin severely. “To begin with, you all know the password.”

  The gargoyles looked at each other.

  “For another thing,” Dakin went on, “you know what it is that the troll stole. Now, don’t start fussing about what a deep secret that is, because I know already that he stole the Ring of Kings. But why couldn’t you have told me that?” They all hung their heads. “But the most important thing of all is that I believe you know who the Master really is.”

  At this the gargoyles snatched themselves away from her and huddled all together, their necks entwined, their stone heads shivering so much that they grated together.

  She parted them firmly with her hands.

  “Enough of that,” she said. “You’ll chip each other’s ears off. Now. Do you want the evil spell taken off this mountain or don’t you?”

  “We do, we do!” moaned the brothers.

  “Then you’ll have to help me, even if it is forbidden, even if it is dangerous. I’ve taken risks, and you’ll have to take some, too.”

  Again they looked at each other, and this time they slowly nodded.

  “All right,” said Dakin. “Now, first of all—the password.”

  Og slid up close to her and whispered, “Dragon’s fin!”

  “Oh, goodness! Is it still that? I knew that all the time. The troll said it would have been changed.”

  “She—he—never changes it,” whispered Og.

  “She? He? Who? The witch?”

  The gargoyles were huddling again. Og looked miserable with terror.

  “Yes—yes. The witch. Shhh! It’s nearly dark. He—she—the witch will be waking up soon.”

  “But why are you all so afraid of her—I suppose the witch is a her?”

  They didn’t answer. The light was fading quickly now. Dakin shivered herself.

  “Croak told me she was harmless, except for the magic colors she puts on the snow.”

  Again they were silent. Dakin suddenly felt very frightened. Could Old Croak have been wrong? She remembered the poem:

  Evil can come in many a guise,

  And wrong advice confuse the wise...

  “How many years has Croak been shut in that cabin?” Dakin asked.

  “Two hundred!” they moaned. “He has forgotten! He knows only what Drackamag tells him He doesn’t even know who he once was, they say...”

  “That’s true!” cried Dakin.

  “Shhh!” the gargoyles hissed.

  “But the witch—the witch can’t be the Master! Drackamag isn’t afraid of her! He said he’d dig her out and make her eat all her snow; he called her ‘Old Paintpots.’”

  Zog put his face to her ear and whispered, “Drackamag himself does not know the truth! The witch is only a disguise. The Master is the witch only at night. By day we do not know what he is, or where he is—that is the terrible thing! He is invisible. But his power—his voice—can be anywhere on the mountain. He may be here now!”

  The three of them huddled together, terrified. It was quite dark now, and the darkness seemed to press in upon them.

  Dakin, suddenly loving them more than ever, pulled them to her and cuddled their cold heads.

  “Did the witch change you, too? You weren’t always like this?”

  “Gargoyles everywhere were once people, or trolls like us,” explained Og. “We are lucky, in a way. We are still alive, we can still talk and think and move a little.”

  “We can still feel,” said Vog, and they all nestled closer to her and moaned, “Ahhhhhh...” very softly.

  “Why? Why didn’t you become like other gargoyles, just stone heads?”

  “The Master needed us to guard the mountain. He put us against the wall by the path. We are not allowed to meet together like this, and talk. If he ever caught us...”

  “Oooooooooh...”

  “We would be broken off and thrown down the cliff or turned into ordinary gargoyles, unmoving, ugly, and dead, forever!”

  Dakin gently pushed them away and stood up.

  “In that case,” she said, “you must go back to your proper places. But before you go, is there anything else you can tell me that might be useful to me?”

  From the darkness she heard three voices, one after the other:

  “You cannot harm the Master by day. He is everywhere and nowhere. He is an evil spirit. He cannot be touched.”

  “At night he becomes the witch. He—she—seeks the ring by the light of the witch ball. Then he is visible, he has a body, he cannot melt into air until morning.”

  “The password will not protect you if he knows that you have come to save us. You must pretend you come with news of the ring. Then he will not harm you till he has it.”

  “But you said my troll stole the ring.”

  “Your troll, as you call him, is Gog, our fourth brother. He stole the ring at the christening of Prince Rally. He stole it because, like us, he was in the Master’s power. He, too, was a flesh-and-blood troll then. We all went to the christening on the Master’s orders. He told us that whoever stole the royal ring for him would be set free. Gog managed to slip it from the Queen’s finger as she was cuddling the baby and we were all pressing around to look. We four brothers ran with it back up the mountain.

  “But on the way we began to quarrel. We knew that when we returned to the Master, he would imprison us three again and let Gog go. It had been so lovely, that day of freedom! We couldn’t bear the thought of being heads of stone again, perhaps for another hundred years. So we quarreled with Gog and he ran away from us, and that is the last we ever saw of him. But we know that the Master punished him from afar, for he knew what had happened, and although he has no power except on the mountain he sent a spell which turned Gog into a small brass figure, just as Gog came to the far side of the Wicked Wood.”

  “That’s where we found him!” exclaimed Dakin “And us he punished as you see. And ever since then, for seventeen years, he has been searching the wood by night, looking for the l
ittle brass troll who was our brother Gog.”

  “Oh! I do hope he got out of the wood all right,” thought Dakin, and then asked aloud, “Why does the Master—the witch—want the ring? Why is it so important?”

  “First because it is magic. With that ring, he could take power over the whole country, not only this mountain.”

  “Also,” said Vog, “without the ring, the prince cannot marry. It is the law of the land that that ring must be put on the finger of every royal bride. The royal family will die out without the ring, and since they are good and take care of the people, the Master hates them.”

  “Now I understand,” said Dakin. “Thank you. You’ve been very brave. Now go back to your places. I’m going to look for the witch.”

  15

  ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞

  The Witch

  She kissed each of them and then climbed back into the cave. It was absolutely pitch black in there, and she popped straight out again.

  ’’Are you still there?”

  “We are just going.”

  “Blow on me before you go.”

  At once she felt rather than saw them cluster about her, and the next moment felt their life-giving, strengthening breath envelop her. She tingled all over.

  “Oh, that feels better! Thank you, dears. Now hurry, I’ll be all right.”

  Back into the inky cave she crawled, and this time she hardly missed her eyes. Her hands and feet found holds by themselves, and as she moved along the tunnel, her mind was working quickly.

  “Only at night is the Master solid and only at night can he be harmed. But at night be takes the shape of a witch. Now, what did Old Croak say? That there’s only one thing the witch is afraid of, and that’s the color white. But Old Croak was wrongabout a lot of things. How wise am I to rely on On the other hand, what else can I rely on?

  “Now, what have I got that’s white? My apron... that’s quite big. The only trouble is it’s filthy, it’s really not white any longer. My petticoats! Let me think, did I put a white one on, or are they all red flannel?” She stopped, picked up the edge of her skirt, and fumbled among the petticoats. Flannel. Flannel. Flannel. “Oh, dear, oh dear!” she said aloud. “It’s my own fault for being too lazy to iron a cotton one!”