by Joan Aiken
It was very cold; a grey, windy afternoon turning gloomily to dusk. Emmeline pushed cold hands deep in her pockets; her fingers met and explored a round, unusual object. Then she remembered the thing she had picked up in the dark under the oak tree. She pulled it out, and found she was holding a tiny flask, made of some dark lustreless metal tarnished with age and crusted with earth. It was not quite empty; when Emmeline shook it she could hear liquid splashing about inside, but very little, not more than a few drops.
“Why,” she breathed, just for a moment forgetting her fear in the excitement of this discovery, “It is—it must be the Druids’ magic drink! But why, why didn’t the warriors drink it?”
She tried to get out the stopper; it was made of some hard blackish substance, wood, or leather that had become hard as wood in the course of years.
“Can I help you, my child?” said a gentle voice above her head.
Emmeline nearly jumped out of her skin—but it was only Mr. Iachimo, who had hobbled silently up the street.
“Look-look, Mr. Yakkymo! Look what I found under the big oak in the churchyard! It must be the Druids’ magic drink—mustn’t it? Made of mallow and vetch and succory, steeped in mead, to give warriors courage. It must be!”
He smiled at her; his face was very kind. “Yes, indeed it must!” he said.
But somehow, although he was agreeing with her, for a moment Emmeline had a twinge of queer dread, as if there were nothing—nothing at all—left in the world to hold on to; as if even Mr. Iachimo were not what he seemed but, perhaps, a spy sent by Queen Belavaun to steal the magic flagon.
Then she pushed down her fear, taking a deep breath, and said, “Can you get the stopper out, Mr. Yakkymo?”
“I can try,” he said, and brought out a tiny foreign-looking penknife shaped like a fish with which he began prising at the fossil-hard black substance in the neck of the bottle. At last it began to crumble.
“Take care—do take care,” Emmeline said. “There’s only a very little left. Perhaps the defenders did drink most of it. But anyway there’s enough left for you, Mr. Yakkymo.”
“For me, my child? Why for me?”
“Because you meed to be made brave so that you can make people listen to you play your flute.”
“Very true,” he said thoughtfully. “But do not you need bravery too?”
Emmeline’s face clouded. “What good would bravery do me?” she said. “I’m all right—it’s old Scrawny I’m worried about. Oh, Mr. Yakkymo, Colin and Mrs. Vaughan say they are going to kill Scrawny. What can I do?”
“You must tell them they have no right to.”
“That wouldn’t do any good,” Emmeline said miserably. “Oh!—You’ve got it out!”
The stopper had come out, but it had also crumbled away entirely.
“Never mind,” Emmeline said. “You can put in a bit of the cotton-wool that you use to clean your flute. What does it smell of, Mr. Yakkymo?”
His face had changed as he sniffed; he looked at her oddly. “Honey and flowers,” he said.
Emmeline sniffed too. There was a faint—very faint—aromatic, sweet fragrance.
“Wet your finger, Mr. Yakkymo, and lick it! Please do! It’ll help you, I know it will!”
“Shall I?”
“Yes, do, do!”
He placed his finger across the opening, and quickly turned the bottle upside down and back, then looked at his fingertip. There was the faintest drop of moisture on it.
“Quick—don’t waste it,” Emmeline said, breathless with anxiety.
He licked his finger.
“Well? does it taste?”
“No taste.” But he smiled, and bringing out a wad of cotton tissue, stuffed a piece of it into the mouth of the flask, which he handed to Emmeline.
“This is yours, my child. Guard it well! Now, as to your friend Scrawny—I will go and see Mrs. Vaughan tomorrow, if you can protect him until then.”
“Thank you!” she said. “The drink must be making you brave!”
Above their heads the clock of St. Chad had tolled six.
“I must be off to the West End,” Mr. Iachimo said. “And you had better run home to supper. Till tomorrow, then—and a thousand, thousand thanks for your help.”
He gave her a deep, foreign bow and limped, much faster than usual, away down the hill.
“Oh, do let it work,” Emmeline thought, looking after him.
Then she ran home to Mrs. Vaughan’s.
Supper was over; Colin, thank goodness, did not come in, and Mrs. Vaughan wanted to get through and be off; Emmeline bolted down her food, washed the plate, and was dismissed to the streets again.
As she ran up to the churchyard wall, with her fingers tight clenched round the precious little flask, a worrying thought suddenly struck her.
The magic drink had mead in it. Suppose the mead were to give Mr. Iachimo hiccups? But there must be very little mead in such a tiny drop, she consoled herself; the risk could not be great.
When she pulled her book from the hole in the wall a sound met her ears that made her smile with relief: old Scrawny’s mew of greeting, rather creaking and scratchy, as he dragged himself yawning, one leg at a time, from a clump of ivy on top of the wall.
“There you are, Scrawny! If you knew how I’d been worrying about you!”
She tucked him under one arm, put the book under the other, and made her way to the telephone box. Scrawny settled on her feet for another nap, and she opened The Ancient History of Kimball’s Green. Only one chapter remained to be read; she turned to it and became absorbed. St. Chad’s clock ticked solemnly round overhead.
When Emmeline finally closed the book, tears were running down her face.
“Oh, Scrawny!—they didn’t win! They lost! King Cunobel’s men were all killed—and the Druids too, defending the stronghold. Every one of them. Oh, how can I bear it? Why did it have to happen, Scrawny?”
Scrawny made no answer, but he laid his chin over her ankle. At that moment the telephone bell rang.
Emmeline stared at the instrument in utter consternation. Scrawny sprang up; the fur along his back slowly raised, and his ears flattened. The bell went on ringing.
“But,” whispered Emmeline, staring at the broken black receiver, “it’s out of order. It can’t ring! It’s never rung! What shall I do, Scrawny?”
By now, Scrawny had recovered. He sat himself down again and began to wash. Emmeline looked up and down the empty street. Nobody came. The bell went on ringing.
At the same time, down below the hill and some distance off, in Wansea High Street, ambulance attendants were carefully lifting an old man off the pavement and laying him on a stretcher.
“Young brutes,” said a bystander to a policeman who was taking notes. “It was one of those gangs of young hooligans from up Kimball’s Green way; I’d know several of them again if I saw them. They set on him—it’s the old street musician who comes from up there too. Seems he was coming home early tonight, and the boys jumped on him—you wouldn’t think they’d bother with a poor fellow like him, he can’t have much worth stealing.”
But the ambulance men were gathering up handlfuls of half-crowns and two-shilling pieces which had rolled from Mr. Iachimo’s pockets; there were notes as well, ten shillings, a pound, even five-and ten-pound notes. And a broken flute.
“It was certainly worthy their while tonight,” the policeman said. “He must have done a lot better than usual.”
“He was a game old boy—fought back like a lion; marked some of them, I shouldn’t wonder. They had to leave him and run for it. Will he be all right?”
“We’ll see,” said the ambulance man, closing the doors.
“I’d better answer it,” Emmeline said at last. She picked up the receiver, tremb
ling as if it might give her a shock.
“Hullo?” she whispered.
And a voice—a faint, hoarse, distant voice—said,
“This is King Cunobel. I cannot speak for long. I am calling to warn you. There is danger on the way—great danger coming towards you and your friend. Take care! Watch well!”
Emmeline’s lips parted. She could not speak.
“There is danger—danger!” the voice repeated. Then the line went silent.
Emmeline stared from the silent telephone to the cat at her feet.
“Did you hear it too, Scrawny?”
Scrawny gazed at her impassively, and washed behind his ear.
Then Emmeline heard the sound of running feet. The warning had been real. She pushed the book into her pocket and was about to pick up Scrawny, but hesitated, with her fingers on the little flask.
“Maybe I ought to drink it, Scrawny? Better that than have it fall into the enemy’s hands. Should I? Yes, I will! Here, you must have a drop too.”
She laid a wet finger on Scrawny’s nose; out came his pink tongue at once. Then she drained the bottle, picked up Scrawny, opened the door, and ran.
Turning back once more to look, she could see a group of dark figures coming after her down the street. She heard someone shout,
“That’s her, and she’s got the cat too! Come on!”
But beyond, behind and through her pursuers, Emmeline caught a glimpse of something else: a high, snow-covered hill, higher than the hill she knew, crowned with great bare trees. And on either side of her, among and in front of the dark houses, as if she were seeing two pictures, one printed on top of the other, were still more trees, and little thatched stone houses. Thin animals with red eyes slunk silently among the huts. Just a glimpse she had, of the two worlds, one behind the other, and then she had reached Mrs. Vaughan’s doorstep and turned to face the attackers.
Colin Vaughan was in the lead; his face, bruised, cut, and furious, showed its ugly intention as plainly as a raised club.
“Give me that damn cat. I’ve had enough from you and your friends. I’m going to wring its neck.”
But Emmeline stood at bay; her eyes blazed defiance and so did Scrawny’s; he bared his fangs at Colin like a sabre-toothed tiger.
Emmeline said clearly, “Don’t you dare lay a finger on me, Colin Vaughan. Just don’t you dare touch me!”
He actually flinched, and stepped back half a pace; his gang shuffled back behind him.
At this moment Mrs. Vaughan came up the hill; not at her usual smart pace but slowly, plodding, as if she had no heart in her.
“Clear out, the lot of you,” she said angrily. “Poor old Mr. Iachimo’s in the Wansea Hospital, thanks to you. Beating up old men! That’s all you’re good for. Go along, scram, before I set the back of my hand to some of you. Beat it!”
“But we were going to wring the cat’s neck. You wanted me to do that,” Colin protested.
“Oh, what do I care about the blame cat?” she snapped, turning to climb the steps, and came face to face with Emmeline.
“Well, don’t you stand there like a lump,” Mrs. Vaughan said angrily. “Put the blasted animal down and get to bed!”
“I’m not going to bed,” Emmeline said. “I’m not going to live with you any more.”
“Oh, indeed? And where are you going, then?” said Mrs. Vaughan, completely astonished.
“I’m going to see poor Mr. Yakkymo. And then I’m going to find someone who’ll take me and Scrawny, some place where I shall be happy. I’m never coming back to your miserable house again.”
“Oh, well suit yourself,” Mrs. Vaughan grunted. “You’re not the only one. I’ve just heard: fifty years in this place and then fourteen days’ notice to quit; in two weeks the bulldozers are coming.”
She went indoors.
But Emmeline had not listened; clutching Scrawny, brushing past the gang as if they did exist, she ran for the last time down the dark streets of Kimball’s Green.
The Lame King
Crumbling rainbows are useless as a diet,” said Mrs. Logan. “I don’t like ’em. Prefer something solid to bite on.”
Under her breath in the front passenger’s seat, Mrs. Logan’s daughter-in-law Sandra muttered, “Shut up, you dotty old bore.” And, above her breath, she added to her husband, “Can’t you drive a bit faster, Philip? It will be terribly late by the time we get home. There’s the sitter’s fee, don’t forget. And we’ve got all our packing to do.”
“You have all tomorrow to do it in,” mildly pointed out her father-in-law from the backseat.
She flashed him an angry diagonal glance, and snapped, “There’s plenty of other things to do, as well as packing. Cancel the milk, take Buster to the dog’s hotel, fill out all the notification forms—”
“I would have done that, if you had let me,” said old Mr. Logan in his precise tones. He had been a headmaster. Sandra made no answer to this, merely pressed her lips tight together and clenched her gloved hands in her lap. “Do drive faster, Philip,” she said again.
Philip frowned and slightly shook his head, without taking his eyes off the road. He was tall and pale, with a bony righteous face and eyes like faded olives. “Can’t; you know that perfectly well; it’s illegal to go over sixty with senior citizens in the car,” he said in a low voice.
His remark was drowned, anyway, by the voice of his mother, old Mrs. Logan, who called from the back, “Oh, no, don’t drive faster, Philip dear, please don’t drive any faster! I am so loving this landscape—I don’t want to lose a moment of it! Our heroine, speeding to who knows where or what destination, is reminded of childhood—those bare trees, the spring mornings passed paddling in brooks when the water went over the tops of your wellies—the empty fields—”
Old Mr. Logan gently took her hand in his, which had the effect of checking her.
“It is a pretty country,” he said. “I like all the sheep. And the shapes of the hills around here.”
“How much farther?” said Sandra to her husband.
“About another four hours’ driving. We’d better stop for a snack at a Cook’s Tower.”
“Oh, why?” Sandra said crossly, in a low tone. “It’s just a waste of money giving them a—”
“No wolves now. It must have been so exciting for shepherds in the old days,” dreamily remarked old Mrs. Logan. “Virginia came down like a wolf on the . . . but then when you try and fold on the dotted line it never tears straight. That is one thing they should put right in the next world.”
“And I’m sure they will,” said her husband comfortingly.
“I hope my thoughts are not without sense.”
“Never to me, my love. Look at that farm, tucked so snugly in the hollow.”
“Will the place we are going to be like that?”
“Anyway the tank needs filling,” said Philip to his wife.
“What this trip will have cost,” she muttered.
“It had to be taken sometime. And we’ll get the Termination Grants, don’t forget,” Philip reminded his wife in a murmur.
“Well, but then you have to deduct all the expenses—”
“Sometimes I think my daughter-in-law treads in the footsteps of Sycorax,” absently remarked old Mrs. Logan, who sometimes caught Sandra’s tone, though not the things she actually said.
“Oh, come, you would hardly call little Kevin a Caliban?” her husband remonstrated mildly.
“Parting from Kevin is the least of my regrets. He is all the chiefs and none of the Indians. And stubborn! Combs his hair five times and then says ‘I don’t want to go.’”
“Kevin will grow up by and by. If he were a character in one of your books, you would know how to make him grow up.”
“Ah,” she said with a sigh
, “no story would grow in my hands now. It would fly apart in a cloud of feathers. You say a few words—and they come back and hit you like boomerangs. What did Western man do before he know about the boomerang? What did swallows do before they invented telegraph wires? Language is so inexact—I do not mean to assert that swallows themselves invented the wires—”
“For God’s sake, shut up,” muttered young Mrs. Logan in the front seat. Old Mr. Logan laid an arm protectively round his wife’s shoulders. She, with an alert, happy face, white hair flying around in wisps, continually gazed out of the window as the car sped along. “Haven’t seen so much grass in ten years,” she whispered. Her elderly husband looked at her calmly and fondly. Sometimes a shadow of pain flitted across his face, like that of a high jet over a huge field, but it was gone the moment after.
“There’s a place,” said Philip. “We’ll stop there.”
A Cook’s Tower had come in sight: square white pillar, castellated at the top, with red zigzags all the way down, and a wide parking lot glittering with massed vehicles.
“Park somewhere close in, we don’t want to waste twenty minutes helping them hobble,” muttered Sandra.
“I’ll park as close as I can,” replied Philip with a frown, and called to the pair in the back, “Fancy a snack, Mum and Dad? Cup o’ tea? Sandwich?”
He tried to make his voice festive.
“Oh, there’s no need for that, my boy,” said his father. “We’re all right, we’re not hungry. Save your money.” But his mother called, “Oh, yes! A nice cup of tea and a last rock cake. Rock of ages cleft for me. . . . A book called The Last Rock Cake, now . . . that would have been a certain seller, once; these days, I suppose, The Last Croissant. Take the queen en croissant; a husband in Bohemia would be a Czech mate. Oh, cries his poor silly wife, I am nothing but a blank Czeque; good for nothing but to be wheeled away to the Death House.”
