by Joan Aiken
‘They do say,’ Juan told me comfortingly, ‘that it took the devil seven years to learn ‘yes’ and ‘no’ in Euskara. Then he forgot the words again, and so threw himself into the river Nive.’
We fed and watered our tired ponies, groomed them, washed the Harlequin’s shoulder and anointed the Demon’s fetlock, and in general made much of them; they, as much as we, seemed glad of the rest. And we talked, a little, of the Gente and Father Vespasian, puzzling over what it could be that made them consider it worthwhile to keep so pertinaciously on our trail.
‘Do you believe that it was what Brother Bertrand said – about the shadows?’ demanded Juan. He cast a somewhat fearful glance at the gloomy sky and cloud-wrapped peaks. Any kind of demon, dwarf, or spectre might, it seemed, come out of those high and misty regions; if we had heard a Satanic cackle or hobgoblin howl we would not have been much surprised. Yet we heard nothing but the scream of eagles and the lonely call of the cuckoo.
‘How can I tell? I do not understand, though, why the Gente should follow us – unless they are too frightened of – of that Being – to break away.’
‘Perhaps they think that we shall lead them to a hidden treasure,’ said Juan fancifully; and then, with a shiver: ‘Do not let us talk about them any more. I will tell you, instead, about the laminak.’
‘What is the laminak?’
‘Are, not is. They are little people. They live in the forest over the mountains to the south – the Iraty Forest.’ He waved an arm to where the pale sun, momentarily, was trying to peer through wreaths of mist. ‘They are little old ghosts, very, very old, they have been in the world since long before human people came here. Once they had the whole globe to themselves. But then the people came and built houses and towns, so the laminak, who hate noise, went away to live in the forest. But they are not enemies of men – good men; in fact they would dearly like to be friends with us, and help us. During daytime they hide in dark corners, under yew trees’ roots, or behind carts in barns, watching, watching, watching the way that people do things; then, at night, when the farmer is in bed, out will come the laminak to try to help him, churning his milk or turning his cheese or leading the horses out to plough or collecting the eggs in the henhouses. But they are so clumsy! They drop the eggs, they spill the milk, they break the ploughshare. They have no proper fingers, only ugly small stumps. And they are stupid, poor things; however often they try, they can never learn human ways of doing tasks.’
‘Like me trying to learn Euskara.’
‘Never mind, Felix!’ said Juan kindly. ‘You are good at many other things. Whereas the poor laminak are good for nothing at all. And this makes them sad, so sad that sometimes you can hear them crying, crying, in the forest or farmyard, as if their hearts were ready to break; as if they could not endure their existence one moment longer. Poor little outcasts! It must be dreadful to feel that you have no place in the world, that nobody values you or can use what you offer.’
He spoke with such feeling that I looked at him in surprise.
‘Keep your heart up, lad! You are not one of the laminakl Think how happy your Uncle León will be to have you with him, if he has lost all his own family.’
But Juan merely sighed, and made no answer.
Toward evening, as the rain and fog still did not abate, I caught four more fish – indeed, they were so fat and fearless that it was plain no human beings ever troubled those waters – and we cooked two for our supper, leaving the other two in the hollow of a rock for breakfast, wrapped in fern.
When night came, as it did early, we retired to bed under the tilted cart and huddled together, beneath our blanket, on a pile of damp larch needles.
‘Gab-boon, Juan.’
‘Good night, Felix.’ Then he added a short phrase in Euskara that I had heard him say on several previous nights.
‘What does that mean, Juan?’
‘It is something our old cook Barbe used to say when she bade me good-night.’ He thought for a moment, and then, with a chuckle, translated:
‘If I die before I wake,
You can have the birthday cake!’
And so we went laughing to sleep.
But I still felt, in a corner of my mind, that by obliging Juan to leave the poetry contest, I had accidentally dealt him some wound from which he would not recover.
6
A venomous neighbour; we recommence our travels; enter a gorge; yet another encounter with the Gente; succeed in eluding them for the time; discover the hermitage of Brother Laurent; are visited by the Demon; and see our refuge destroyed
I awoke with a start, feeling something heavy and clammy that tightly constricted my arm. Leaping up, letting out a yell as I did so, I flung out my arm to cast off whatever it was, and suffered, as I moved, a keen stabbing pain in my right wrist. A tangle of coils flew through the air; they resolved into a thickish black-and-yellow snake which straightened out with lightning speed as it struck the ground and flashed away, vanishing into a clump of fern before I could stamp on it or find a stone to dash out its brains.
‘Oh – what is it – what is it?’ gasped Juan, rousing from deep sleep and jumping up in terror.
‘A snake bit me, a viper – cursed thing! It must have crept under the blanket for the warmth, and twined round my arm.’
‘Ugh!’ shuddered Juan. ‘If I had known! I cannot endure snakes! But – oh, poor Felix! What can we do? Is it a bad bite, do you think?’
‘How can I tell?’
I sucked at my wrist and spat; sucked and spat again. There were two neat little punctures.
‘You had best wash it in the brook,’ suggested Juan, and I did so, holding my arm in the icy water until it was numb and blue. Meanwhile Juan rekindled the fire from last night’s still-warm embers, and contrived a grid of green saplings to toast our two remaining fish.
‘How does your arm feel now – is it very sore?’ he inquired anxiously, as we breakfasted. ‘Should we burn the wound with a hot ember, do you think? Or – I remember hearing it said that a good thing to do is to slash over a snakebite, slash a crisscross; that lets out the poison, they say, and protects the wound.’
I, too, had heard this, and said resignedly, ‘Well, if that is best, that is what I had better do.’
I sharpened our knife on a stone, rinsed it in the brook – all this while using my left hand, for the right one was commencing to swell and throb – and then studied the bite, which was on the inside of my wrist, about an inch from the base of the thumb. I had no wish to cut through the great blood vessel which runs close by there.
‘Is it very hard to do it with your left hand? Would you prefer that I do it?’ asked Juan in a voice that faltered a little.
I was about to say yes – then glancing up at him observed that he was white as death, although his eyes were resolute; noticing also that his hands trembled uncontrollably, I shook my head, grinned at him wryly and, with two quick slashes, drew the blade of the knife twice over the snakebite, this way, that way, then again held my arm in the brook until the blood stopped flowing.
Juan meanwhile had torn some strips off the bit of cloth that the hermit had given us, and when my arm ceased to bleed he dabbed on some of the caustic we had purchased for the Harlequin’s sore shoulder.
‘What is good for a pottoka cannot do you any harm,’ he said gruffly. Then he neatly bandaged the small wound.
‘Thanks, Juan; I daresay I shall do very well now. What devilish bad luck, though! Who would ever have expected to come across a viper so early in the year?’
‘Remember how very warm it was two days ago; that hot sun must have waked him from his winter sleep,’ said Juan. ‘Oh, Felix, I am so very sorry for you. I would not have had such a thing happen for the world.’
‘It was not your fault, lad! It was pure misfortune. Come, we had better leave this forsaken spot and find a track as soon as we can, while the weather favours us.’
The day was indeed glorious – as a kind of atonement, it seem
ed, for the wretchedness of the previous twenty-four hours. A hot sun beamed over the ridge to our left, the raindrops sparkled on the larches, and hundreds of thrushes were singing joyfully. We saddled our ponies – Juan solicitous to help me when I had trouble tightening my girth – stamped out the embers of the fire, mounted, and rode on our way, following the course of the brook in an upward direction and singing, ‘Halte- la, halte-la, halte-la! Les montagnards sont la!’ which is a song they sing in the Pyrenees.
In spite of my misfortune with the snake, our spirits were high. We were friends again, nobody appeared to have tracked our course from Licq-Athérey to this neighbourhood, the day was young, and the weather good. Our ponies, well rested, tossed their heads and champed on their bits; they seemed as eager as we to explore new ground.
For three hours or so we proceeded uphill at a walking pace; the going was rough, rocky, and set about with trees and smaller bushes; after a while the glen gradually grew narrower until there was hardly more than a footway by the waterside, sometimes not even that; once or twice we were obliged to turn back; for, though we ourselves might have scrambled through on foot, the valley sides were too steep and broken for the ponies, and we were obliged to find a detour over thickly forested hillside. But we always rejoined the stream (now a young torrent dashing between close rocky banks) and presently our glen joined another, wider and shallower, opening in a southeasterly direction, which we decided to follow, for it seemed to go toward the Pic d’Orhy.
There were mountain pasturies up here, spangled with flowers, so many and of such different kinds and colours that Juan was continually crying out with rapture; every now and then he must dismount in order to study some especially beautiful or unfamiliar bloom; indeed, I could not help becoming a little impatient with him and was tempted to say something sharp, but held my peace, remembering the grief I had caused him by obliging him to quit the poets’ contest. So I let him gaze, and exclaim, and pick the blossoms, which he then carefully inserted, to flatten them, in the little poetry book which he had brought away from the Abbey of St Just.
I myself endured increasing discomfort from my bitten arm, which burned and throbbed in a dull, continuous nagging torment, so that I found myself reluctant to speak, except in short sentences, or move in the saddle; I was glad that the track here appeared reasonably well marked and smooth, promising to lead on steadily, perhaps to some pass over the mountains into Spain.
There were flocks here and there in the pastures, sheep, goats, and cattle, where the snow had melted off the upland meadows; the sound of their bells echoed sweetly among the hills, and Juan remarked, ‘If bells can disperse evil spirits, as they say, there must be very few devils in the mountains.’
‘In these mountains at least,’ I amended.
We found a shepherds’ encampment, and were able to purchase milk and bread from them, and some cheesecloth to replace the bundle that we had lost at Licq-Athérey. We asked our way, too, and were able to confirm our hope that the snowy peak ahead and slightly to our right was the Pic d’Orhy. But the men, itinerant herders, knew nothing of any hermit’s refuge and shrugged at our questions; the mountain slopes, they said, were studded with old ruins, huts, barns, and shelters; the one we sought might be in any of thirty different valleys.
On we went, climbing steadily, our ponies’ hooves sometimes breaking the crusts of old snow which the sun had not yet melted. Now and then, looking back, we were able to see a wonderful panorama of peaks, ridges, and ravines, and, farther away, plains, forests, and cities; at one time I thought we had a glimpse of the blue Atlantic Ocean, many leagues to the west of us. But by late afternoon I was hardly able to appreciate these vistas, for my arm was giving me such pain that I felt sick and feverish; a clanging hammer seemed to be beating inside my temples, my tongue was clogged, my vision dulled, and, going aside from the track, I was obliged to dismount and vomit up the milk that I had drunk for the noon-day meal. Climbing back onto the fidgety, wilful Demon was an almost impossible task; and when he flung his head up, dragging on the reins which I held in my right hand, it required all my control not to cry out with the sudden pain. After that experience I rode on without attempting to dismount again. Although I longed with all my being to drink from the icy, plentiful mountain brooks and miniature waterfalls which zigzagged down the sides of our valley to join the main gave, the prospect of the exertion needed for alighting and remounting again was too grim, so I remained in the saddle, league after painful league.
That Juan eyed me anxiously at frequent intervals I was vaguely aware, but riding on at a steady, plodding pace was now the extent of what I could manage; I had no strength to look about me and could not waste energy on idle speech or pay much heed to our route; I held all my attention on my pony’s black shaggy mane, allowed him to pick his own way, and, sometimes, thought of Father Vespasian’s eyes; they seemed to float ahead of me in the air, like two ruby-red coals.
Once or twice I heard Juan inquire, with diffidence, ‘Do you think that we are heading in the right direction, Felix?’ and I nodded, or made some mumbled reply, but in truth we could have been riding along the highway to Gehenna for all the attention I really gave to the matter.
Toward twilight I noticed, through my fog of pain and sickness, that the steep track we had taken threaded a gorge which was becoming so exceedingly narrow and dank that it seemed as if we were riding along in the bottom of a sewer. The rock walls, here only ten or twelve feet apart, rose up sheer on either side to a towering height above us; they must have been at least six to eight hundred feet high. The sky overhead was no more than a thin strip of light, and our ponies could only just see to pick their way along by the side of the mountain torrent, which must, at one time, have carved this tremendous gash in the face of the rock. It was an eerie, unchancy place, dusky, and damp from the spray of the stream and many other trickles down the rock walls; the ponies liked it no better than we, they shivered and snorted, and tried to break into a trot, but the ground was too slippery and strewn with fallen shale for this to be safe. I shivered, too, feeling dizzy, feverish at one moment, ice-cold the next.
‘What an evil spot this is!’ said Juan. ‘It is like a tunnel through the mountain. I hope that it leads to Spain!’
The gorge did, after a while, widen out, and ahead of us we beheld two cascades, white and gleaming in the dusk.
‘Oh, Felix, how beautiful!’ exclaimed Juan. His tone was full of wonder. Painfully I lifted my head and saw that one of the falls described a great arch of water, an unbroken white bow falling from cliff to ground. It must have done so for many hundreds of years. At another time I, too, would have exclaimed and gazed at this sight in admiration; now I felt too ill to give it more than a brief, incurious glance.
Beyond the cascades could be seen the dark arch of a cave entrance in the cliff, and beyond that the track came to an abrupt stop, save for a faint zigzag up a steep rock slope, suitable for izard or wild mountain hare, but quite impossible for our ponies, surefooted and agile though they were.
‘Miséricorde!’ exclaimed Juan in consternation. ‘The path goes no further! It is a cul-de-sac. We shall have to turn back, Felix.’
He gazed at me in great distress. I tried to rouse myself to reply, ‘Well, if we must, we must…’ but the words would hardly leave my tongue.
‘Oh, why, why did this have to happen?’ he lamented. ‘Of all the times! When you are so ill -I can see that you suffer atrociously, your face is very flushed and you keep twitching your brows. Should we, do you think, stop here and pass the night in that cave? Perhaps you will feel better by tomorrow morning –?’
But I croaked, ‘No – no!’ Why, I could not say, but I had a most unreasoning dread and horror of the cave mouth that showed black beyond the cascades. Once we set foot inside there, I felt sure that we should never emerge again. The ponies shuddered their coats and whinnied nervously; if I had been able to express my thoughts, I would have said they agreed with me.
Jua
n made no argument, but reined the Harlequin round in a circle and started back down the slippery path. El Demonio followed him unbidden, and I sat slumped in the saddle, with my head hanging forward, my chin resting on my chest, regardless of our surroundings, heedless of my horse’s movement, or the sound of the waterfalls and river beside us; mindful of nothing save the blazing pain in my arm and the urge, which had been growing in me for the past half hour, to tumble myself off my pony and into that foamy torrent; to plunge deep, deep into that cool water and be at rest.
Ahead of us the walls of rock drew together.
‘Perhaps it is the cleft in the rock that Roland made with his sword Durendal!’ Juan called back, trying to sound cheerful.
To me the narrow cleft seemed like a crack in the side of a house, which we must enter.
‘As if we were ants,’ I muttered, but to myself, not aloud.
And then, out of the cleft, came filing a group of men, leisurely, taking their time, neither hurrying nor threatening, but quiet with satisfaction, like farmers who have concluded a bargain, seeing the new flock of sheep brought into the fold. There was a tall white-haired man with a black patch over one eye; a hunchback astride an ass; one man grossly fat, with a tiny pea-head sunk between his shoulders; two of them carried muskets, others had clubs; I lost count of them, I could not hold up my head long enough to take a lengthy survey. In any case, what difference did it make? They had us now, there was no question of that.
‘Grand Dieu,’ I heard Juan whisper.
The white-headed man said politely, ‘Bon soir, mes amis! So we meet again! How pleasant that now we shall be able to invite you to dine and pass the night with us – on other occasions you have seemed so shy! You have not appeared anxious for our company. And yet we love you so dearly! We have such esteem for you. We have been so eager to entertain you.’
