The Whispering Mountain

by Joan Aiken

  Hwfa pulled himself up clumsily but his feet, wildly kicking, failed to get a grip of the creeper which threshed about beneath him. Owen grabbed and steadied it.

  “Put your feet on my hands. Right! Now pull up again!”

  Supporting and shoving from below, Owen assisted Hwfa to climb about halfway up the rope. Then Luggins, leaning down from above, grabbed hold of Hwfa’s wrists and gave him a mighty heave upwards.

  “Owen! Get on the rope!” yelled Mog. “Make haste, man!”

  Seeing that Hwfa was half supported by Luggins, Owen sprang on to the rope himself; only just in time. A massive black wall of water, high as a house, came churning down the gorge, casting great rocks aside, uprooting trees and tossing them about like twigs. The end of the creeper was dragged downstream, the weight of two bodies made it creak ominously and start to give. But Luggins, exerting all his strength, fairly lifted Hwfa into the tree, half skinning him in the process, and Owen flung himself up the rope, climbing faster than he ever had even in the shrouds of the Thrush with his father’s critical eye on him. Just as he flung himself over the tree-trunk the rope parted and fell into the torrent, where it was instantly swept away.

  “Duw!” panted Luggins. “That was a close one then! Are you all right, with you, Owen man?”

  Owen nodded. He was still getting his breath. They all gazed down, awestruck, at the tossing, racing water beneath. The flood had risen to within a few feet of the roots of their tree.

  “Never have I seen it come down so quick,” Mog said, from his higher branch. “Regular cloudburst there must have been up at Pennygaff. Owe all our lives to you, we do, Owen, I reckon!”

  “No matter for that,” Owen said. “After all you’d never have been here but for offering to come with me. I only hope the other three got safely home before the flood rose.”

  “My goodness, yes,” said Luggins.

  Hwfa was silent, gloomily surveying his scrapes and grazes.

  For two hours the swollen river roared beneath them, and the rain beat down, stripping the last leaves from the tree where they sat uncomfortably perched. Then by degrees the sky cleared and a watery sun shone out again.

  “How are we going to get down out of this hurrah’s nest now our rope’s gone?” asked Luggins.

  Dove and Mog instinctively looked to Owen for suggestions. Hwfa muttered,

  “Let’s see what Mr. Genius Hughes have to offer.”

  Owen considered. The flood beneath them was ebbing now, but still looked to be seven or eight feet deep.

  “Best we jump down while there’s water underneath to break our fall,” he said. “Otherwise it’s going to be a long drop to the ground.”

  “I can’t swim,” objected Luggins.

  “Dewi Sant, hold on to me, then, boy,” said Mog, who could.

  “I can’t swim either,” said Dove. All eyes turned to Hwfa, who sat biting his nails. He remained silent.

  “Best wait a bit longer then, maybe,” said Owen doubtfully, though he was itching to get on.

  Not long after, though, a large tangled mass of branches and wreckage came sliding along on the flood; there were great boughs, whole young trees and part of a wooden bridge, all jammed together.

  “Quick, lads, now’s our chance!” cried Owen, as this mass drew near. “Jump in and hang on to anything that will hold you up.”

  Mog nodded and, to encourage Hwfa, who was looking mulish, give him a sudden vigorous push that knocked him head-over-heels into the water; Luggins did the same to Dove and then valiantly plunged in himself. Owen, pausing only to pull the strap of his crossbow tighter and button his glasses into his jacket pocket, dived after them, and a splash nearby told him that Mog had followed his example.

  Luggins and Dove managed to seize hold of the bridge, which easily supported them; Mog swam down with the current and grabbed the branch of a young birch tree; but Owen, coming to the surface and looking round him, could see no sign of Hwfa. Then, behind him, he heard a kind of bubbling grunt and, turning, was just in time to see Hwfa’s agonised face appear above water for an instant, then sink again.

  Owen immediately dived towards the spot where he had seen Hwfa vanish, searching as best he could among the half-sunk wreckage which was all being swept downstream. For a moment he thought he had failed and his heart sank in despair; then his groping hand encountered a face; feeling back over it he seized hold of Hwfa’s hair and with a few powerful kicks brought him up to the surface. By great good-fortune a felled pine-trunk was floating by; Owen was able to get one arm over it and instructed the choking, water-logged Hwfa to do likewise.

  “Are you all right?” he inquired. Hwfa nodded without speaking.

  “Heigh-ho, boys! Having a fine old joy-ride then?” called the irrepressible Luggins as they went tossing along between the rocky, tree-grown cliffs. “Join Owen Hughes and all the fun of the fair, is it? Swingboats first, then merry-go-round!”

  “More like the Tunnel of Death,” muttered Hwfa. “Lucky if we’re not all sucked underground.”

  Owen, too, had been worrying in case the Gaff river did another of its sudden plunges to subterranean regions, but luckily they had not been carried for more than half a mile when the current swirled round a corner and deposited them, soaked, grazed, bruised, but otherwise unhurt, on a spit of land in the middle of the flood. They tottered weakly on to higher ground.

  “What’s the good o’ this? It’s an island. We’re still marooned,” Dove said disgustedly.

  “Not for long. Look how fast the water’s going down now,” Owen pointed out. “I reckon we’ll be able to wade across in fifteen minutes.”

  “Bit of dinner, I could use,” Mog said. “Wonder if there’s any blackberries on this island.”

  He roamed off and began to explore; presently they heard him shout.

  “Hey, boys! Hey, come here! A drowned corpus there is on this island!”

  They rushed through the bushes to the spot where Mog stood pointing. The body of a man, dressed in a tartan kilt and prune-coloured velvet hunting-jacket, lay propped against a chestnut-tree. Nearby was a musket, which had been discharged, and a smaller fowling-pistol. A hunting-knife had fallen from the dead man’s hand. Not far off, to the boys’ astonishment, they discovered no less than three wild boars which the man had evidently killed.

  “Got stuck on the island with them when the flood came, maybe,” Dove said. “There’s brave he must have been. Pity he got drowned.”

  “Stupid! He’s not drowned, with him,” Hwfa pointed out. “Dry, his jacket is.”

  It was true. This part of the little knoll which formed the island had evidently been high enough to escape flooding.

  “Then what killed him?” Luggins wondered.

  “Where are you eyes, boy? Nasty great wound he do have on his leg; same place as Follentine, but devil of a lot worse. One of the old pigs must have spiked him.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Owen, who had been carefully examining the apparently lifeless body. “I don’t believe he is quite dead; see, his eyelid fluttered just then.”

  Seizing the man’s hat, which lay by him, he ran off to the river for water. While filling it he observed that the hat was richly embroidered with gold thread; three white feathers on it were held in position by a clasp containing a diamond the size of a walnut.

  Some great lord, Owen thought vaguely, returning with the water, which he sprinkled carefully over the man’s forehead. Meanwhile Luggins rubbed his hands, while Dove and Hwfa collected dry wood and kindled a fire.

  “Food he’ll be wanting if he’s alive,” Mog said, and began gathering up the chestnuts which lay plentifully strewn in the grass under the tree.

  Hwfa discovered a knapsack and brought it, wide-eyed.

  “Look at this, will you! A crown embroidered on it, there is! And a bottle of wine inside. Good thing to give him some of that, eh, Owen boy?”

  It was the first time he had spoken to Owen directly, without a sneering or hostile note in his
voice.

  “Ah, that’s capital!” Owen said, taking the flask with a smile of thanks. “Can you hold his head, Hwfa, while I trickle some into his mouth?”

  But at this moment the hurt man made a faint movement and opened his eyes, looking up in bewilderment at the ring of faces above him.

  “Hech, sirs! What’s all this clamjamfry, then?” he asked weakly.

  8

  The little port of Malyn was huddled in a V-shaped cleft at the point where the Gaff river emerged from underground long enough to grind its way through the black Cliffs of Draig (where once a dragon was said to have nested) and so out into the stormy Atlantic.

  No dragon nested on the cliffs nowadays. But there were plenty of fisher-folk in Port Malyn who considered, although they would not have dared even whisper the thought aloud, that the Marquess was just as bad, if not worse. High above the town, approached by one narrow, winding, precipitous road, his castle brooded like a raven perched on the very brink of the cliff; it was said that if the Marquess chose to toss a peach-stone from his bedroom window it would fall a thousand feet before it sank into the waves. And many believed that more things than peach-stones had been hurled from that window; guests who offended the Marquess, prisoners who had the foolhardiness to defy him, were known to have vanished without a trace. But of course it was quite possible that their bones still mouldered somewhere inside the castle, which was very extensive, or down in its dark dungeons which burrowed deep, nobody knew how deep, into the cliff below.

  On a wild gusty evening, at about the time of Owen’s encounter with the wild boar in the Fforest Mwyaf, another traveller, conveyed in a hired chaise and pair belonging to the Boar’s Head Inn at Nant Agerddau, was rapidly passing through Port Malyn.

  “Humph,” this personage observed, glancing about him as the driver guided his horses carefully along the quay-side, between lobster-pots and piles of fishing-nets, “a romantic hamlet, verily, but it appears to be a trifle blighted, down-at-heel, nodding to its fall, would you not say, my good fellow?”

  In fact many of the little tumbledown houses stood empty; the tenants had been turned out, due to their inability to pay Lord Malyn’s extortionate rents.

  “Wb,” grunted the driver, who considered that he was paid to drive, not talk, and he got down to lead his horses up the last steep, zigzag ascent to the castle, glancing somewhat resentfully at his passengers. The traveller’s small dark-skinned servant, who, like his master, was dressed in furs, quickly took the hint and jumped out, but his master ignored the driver’s expression and continued to sit comfortably in the chaise, exclaiming at the wild prospect of mountain and forest that began to open out behind them as they mounted the hill.

  “And that will be the Shambles Light, I infer, presume, dare say? Most picturesque, most! And yonder, far off, must be the brow, apex, peak, of Fighat Ben, the famous summit I observed at Nant Agerddau? Summit to write home about, as you would say, ha ha!”

  “Hwch,” said the coachman.

  “And this battlemented edifice ahead is belike the seat, snuggery, diggings of the excellent Marquess of Malyn? A most desirable and commodious residence, indeed!”

  “Hwt,” said the driver. He pulled his team to a halt—not that they needed much pulling—before a stone archway, inhospitably barred by a pair of massive iron gates.

  Finding no sort of bellpull or knocker, the driver picked up a stone from the road and beat on the gate with it; the resulting hollow clangs presently had their effect; a wicket opened, and a liveried porter thrust out his head and eyed them in a surly and forbidding manner. By and by he withdrew his head again and instead stuck out a placard bearing the message:

  WHAT DO YOU WANT?

  “Gentleman to visit his lordship,” said the driver curtly. And he muttered under his breath, “Sooner him than me, indeed to goodness!”

  The porter reversed his placard. On the other side it said:

  NAME?

  “His Excellency the Seljuk of Rum.”

  The porter clanged his grille shut and vanished; after a longish interval he reappeared and with much grating and grinding began to undo the iron bolts.

  “Well, well?” cried the Seljuk impatiently when the gates stood open wide enough to admit the carriage, “what are you waiting for? Drive on, my good chap, fellow, old boy!”

  “Two sides to that, I am thinking,” said the driver. “Hired to drive you to Caer Malyn, I was, not right into the castle. Sooner put you down here, I would.”

  “Tush! Pshaw! Odds bodikins! In fact, fudge, my good man. Pray continue!”

  Grumbling, the coachman climbed back on the box and drove the chaise across a paved courtyard. But when they came to an inner archway he stopped again.

  “Come, come, come?” cried the Seljuk. “Proceed, my dear crony, I beg. There is yet another court, campus, quadrangle, beyond that archway, can you not perceive, remark?”

  “Do nicely this one will,” the driver said. “Not keen to go any farther, I am, see?”

  And in spite of all remonstrances he proceeded, with the help of the small servant, to unload the Seljuk’s baggage by the inner gateway, and then assisted his passenger to alight with rather more haste than civility. Since at this moment two powerful men in the livery of footmen—though they rather resembled prizefighters—appeared and silently shouldered the Seljuk’s bags, the latter paid off his driver and followed them without further objections. The driver for his part hardly waited a second, so anxious was he to be gone; he swung his horses round and fairly galloped them across the outer court, through the gateway, and down the dangerous hill.

  Meanwhile the Seljuk and his servant, following their two guides, passed through a complicated maze of courts, cloisters, halls, and passages, all on different levels, due to the fact that Castle Malyn was built up the side of a steep hill, until they reached a luxuriously furnished set of apartments which had evidently been made ready for the guest. High-piled fires of sea-wrack blazed in the hearths, giving out green flames, hot water steamed in a gold bath, candles burned in golden sconces, while a polite but silent majordomo (all Lord Malyn’s servants seemed either forbidden or unable to speak) handed the Seljuk a note which said: “His Worship the Marquess will be graciously pleased to receive you at six o’clock in the north tower.”

  “Thanks, my good chum,” said the Seljuk when he had read this message. “Five o’clock is it now? Then you may depart, make tracks, hop off; I shall not require your services further.”

  The major-domo bowed and retired, intimating that he would return just before six and escort the visitor to Lord Malyn’s apartment. With the assistance of his own servant the Seljuk then rapidly bathed and exchanged his travelling-garments for satin pantaloons, a cambric shirt, a striped cummerbund and a sort of Eastern smoking-jacket, very gorgeous in plum-coloured brocade. Next he consulted a large timepiece and finding, with satisfaction, that it was still but fifteen minutes after five, he extracted from his valise a small compass. Bidding the small servant remain there, and murmuring, “Upsy daisy! All aboard! Tally ho!” he quitted the apartment and proceeded in a northerly direction, consulting his compass at frequent intervals, whenever he came to a choice of directions. He stopped from time to time, as well, to gaze about him in wonder—and indeed, Castle Malyn was a remarkable place. Although situated a thousand feet above the Atlantic, subject to the full force of the wind, it was so strongly built that scarcely a hint of the gale blowing outside could be felt within its walls; in fact the air was oppressively warm and the Seljuk found himself obliged to give a twitch to his moustaches, which were beginning to droop. On account of this moist heat, the numerous large ferns planted in golden tubs prospered amazingly; many of them were well over six feet high. The granite walls had mostly been left in their natural state, unadorned, but the floors were everywhere carpeted with ankle-deep gold velvet, so that the Seljuk, who wore Turkish slippers of soft leather, was able to advance without making the slightest sound.

  At l
ast, after climbing several flights of steps, he arrived in what appeared to be the castle’s main hall. This was some forty feet long, ornamented with boar-spears and sets of tusks; the heat here was even greater, and the potted ferns had grown to the size of young palm trees. Thanks to their protective cover the Seljuk, moving silently forward, was able to elude the notice of two or three footmen who were throwing dice by the main entrance, and to arrive unobserved near a doorway from which Lord Malyn’s voice could be heard issuing.

  This entrance was partially screened by thick, yellow velvet curtains. Moving so that these draperies would conceal him both from the footmen and from the sight of anyone inside the room, the Seljuk proceeded to gaze abstractedly at a grinning boar’s head on the wall, while he listened with the closest attention.

  “And you expect to be paid for that?” Lord Malyn was saying.

  “Well, we done the prig, didn’t we? We run the risk o’ being cotched by the macemongers. Wasn’t our fault the twangler was gone a’ready.”

  “Indeed, a most remarkable tale,” the Marquess said silkily. “So, on the very night that you were to perform my errand, you will have me believe that by some bizarre coincidence, the curator’s grandson had already made off with the object?”

  “That’s about it, gaffer. Beats cock-fighting, dunnit, how these things comes about? The young kinchin had left a note for his granfer, scribed very neat: “Dear Granda, sorry to prig your property but I’m off.” And that’s the probal truth, your worship, sure as my name’s Elijah Prigman, ain’t it so, Bilk? Prigged the bandore, he had, before ever we got there.”

  “By gar, that’s so,” agreed Bilk. “Stole a march, he did, the miching young co. I’ll lay the miserable sand-blind little foister is halfway to London by now.”

  “Sand-blind?” the Marquess said sharply. “You have met this boy then? You know what he looks like?”

  There came a suppressed grunt from Bilk; it sounded as if his partner had kicked him.