Manly Wade Wellman - John the Balladeer 05

by The Voice of the Mountain (v1. 1)

  I hopped out of the bed and into the bathroom and had me a good wash, face and hands and neck and ears. I scrubbed my teeth. I soaped the stubble on my face and shaved it off close, and looked better. I tried to comb my hair I’d washed the night before. It was still wavy over my ears, and pale threads showed in the dark of it, silvery-white as the strings on my guitar. Finally I dressed myself and went out along the narrow hallway and into the main room.

  They were all at the table together, Harpe and the three women. They looked round and hailed me, the whole bunch. Harpe put up a hand, a-grinning the way I’d come to know he did. He wore a good-cut white jacket and a white shirt and a blue neck scarf. Scylla shone her eyes and sort of smiled, but it was a smile as tight as a snake’s. Alka nodded, and the light shifted on her big wide glasses. Tarrah downright beamed on me. She'd made up her face and her hair was combed down at the sides, with a red ribbon round her temples.

  “Just in time, John, we're having breakfast," said Harpe, in a purely welcoming voice. “Sit down, and choose what you'd like to eat."

  I took a chair, and there was a plate and knife and fork set for me there, and a coffee cup. Midways of the table stood a big china platter with a whole heap of scrambled eggs and a stack of slices of home-smoked ham, and beside that a dish of grits and another of hot biscuits and another with a round chunk of butter. Likewise a jar of honey. I helped myself well, for I was hungry. Tarrah leant across me, a-shoving herself to me as she leant, and poured me out coffee from a silver pot. I started in to eat, and it was as fine a breakfast as a man could wish. I wondered where they'd got it by just a pull on their rope.

  Scylla squinted at me. She knew what was on my mind.

  “That happens to come from Buck’s Tavern, outside Asheville," she told me, and, as usual, she spoke to me in words edged with acid. For some reason, she truly hated me. It showed in all she did and said with me like as if she had a knife in her hand.

  I tried not to rile her. “I've eaten at Buck's in my time," I said. “They give you the best of rations there. They know what they’re doing."

  “At this moment, they must wonder what they’re doing, or who’s doing," said Alka, a-taking a forkful of scrambled eggs. “They wonder what made a big breakfast for a party of hungry customers vanish into the thinnest air."

  With that, we sort of chatted back and forth like a bunch of choice friends at breakfast. All of them wanted to know if I'd had a good night’s sleep, even Scylla asked me that, not so harsh in the voice as a moment or so back. I ate well and had me another cup of coffee.

  When we’d all finished, Harpe leant back in his chair. “Ladies,” he said, “I want to talk to John in private.”

  “Talk to John,” Scylla repeated him. “Talk about what—the Judas Gospel? You’ve been harping on that ever since John came here.”

  “Just about how he fits in here,” replied Harpe. “In private, I said.”

  “And I’m not to hear?” she squeaked at him, at me, at the other two.

  “Wherever you’ll be, probably you’ll hear something of what we say to each other, Scylla. You’re good at eavesdropping. But you won’t take part in the conversation.”

  “Well, I swear!” she squalled out, and Harpe laughed, the loudest I’d heard him laugh so far.

  “Don’t swear, Scylla,” he teased her. “You mustn’t swear. Somebody somewhere might hear you, and not like it, and punish you for it. The preachers say you can go to hell for swearing.”

  She got up, a-glowering. “The preachers,” she echoed. “They all ought to go to hell themselves. Well, you others, come on.”

  The three of them picked up the dishes. Harpe watched them trail off, one behind the other, past their green curtain. Then his eyes came round and fixed me.

  “By now, you realize that you’re established here,” he said. “I won’t say caught here, that sounds too much like prison. Established here, with everything set to your advantage.”

  “I don’t rightly see what the advantage would be to me,” I said, and he grinned broader and harder yet.

  “Wealth,” he said. “Isn’t wealth worth having?”

  From the inside pocket of his white coat he fetched out a roll of bills, big enough to choke a cow.

  “I told you how easily I can get this,” he drawled. “Here and there in those gambling places. Not only at dice. At black jack and chemin de fer, games like that. I could give you half of this and never miss it. Isn’t wealth good?”

  “Don’t give me aught of your money,” I said. “Sure enough, wealth can be good, if it so happens you can buy some good thing with it for yourself.”

  “Of course, John, of course.” He tucked his big roll away again. “Wealth can buy luxury to an extent you’ve never known.”

  “Luxury,” I repeated him. “I haven’t known air great much of that in my time. I keep on a-settling for comfort now and then, but I haven’t known air great much of that, either.”

  “Rule over people in time to come,” he said. “Over peoples.”

  I shook my head. “Nair in this world have I wanted rule over air soul, and I sure God haven’t wanted air soul to have rule over me.”

  He gazed at me, and shook his own head. “If these things don’t have a pleasant sound to you, how about sweet love?”

  I reckon I just only gopped at him on that, and he snickered.

  “I said love,” he repeated me. “The love of the woman you most truly desire. Perhaps I’ve read you pretty clearly on that subject. I see a response in you.”

  I studied his grinning face, his squinted eyes, those bannery eyebrows that turned up. It came to my mind that he not only looked like Satan, the old boy himself, but that he wanted to look like him a-making his promises. All these will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me, Satan had said one time, to what Son of Man you all know. I’m not about to compare myself to one so high, but I said naught to Harpe. If I said naught, that should be enough for him and me and all the world.

  “But just at present,” he went on, “I need your help on a very, very important matter. Remember the troglodyte settlement we saw on the Sahara yesterday—those cave dwellers? Let’s just call them up to look at again, there at the window.”

  His Satan-face grinned as his hand went to the T-shaped amulet he dangled at his neck. He spoke the words I recollected, “Fetegan . . . Gaghagan . . . Beigan . . . Deigan . . . Usagan ...”

  The window lighted up and cleared itself to us. I saw what he’d showed me before, the cave places in the face of the bluff, those folks in their long gowns and robes and head-scarfs, on the move back and forth. It was daytime, and air thing in sight was burnt to a blaze in the sun.

  “It’s only a little after nine o’clock here,” said Harpe, “and over there, five hours later in the east, just past two. That’s the heat of the day in that African desert. Go get your hat, John, or the heat will strike you flat as a pancake.”

  “What you a-talking about?” I asked.

  “Go get your hat,” he said again, “and bring along your guitar, too. I’m going to take you with me.”

  “Take him there with you?” rattled out the shrill voice of Scylla, and she came a-scurrying in. “I heard that, Ruel, I heard you say—”

  “Of course you heard,” Harpe cut her off, his own voice gone sharp as steel.

  “Yes, I did hear, and you said—”

  “You have your own shrewd ways of hearing at a distance,” he broke in again. “I’ve known you to do that in the past. A useful sort of magic,” and now he sneered at her, “to hear at a distance. But this time I don’t approve.”

  “Neither do I approve,” she said, a-coming to the table to stand and face him.

  He got up from his chair. I saw that he wore tan shorts and knee-high boots of tawny leather, beautifully cobbled.

  ''You think,” Scylla yammered, “that John can be of some special use more than I’d be.”

  “That’s exactly what I think,” allowed Harpe. “H
e will be accepted, trusted, where you would never be. Where I’m not quite trusted. And I’ll put him to use.”

  “And leave me here?”

  “And leave you here,” he nodded her. “Scylla, you’d be of no help where we’re going, and John will.” His eyes were on her, like the muzzles of two pistols. “Go and leave us alone.”

  “Leave you alone!” she howled. “I’ll leave you alone, all right —I’ll leave everybody alone!”

  She hustled herself away, back of the green curtain. Harpe shrugged at me.

  “She’ll sulk now,” he said. “She was the first I chose to help me, and it’s hard for her to recognize the fact that she’s not my equal here. She’ll be ugly about things for a day or so, maybe for several days. But just now, you and 1 are going to travel.”

  He went to a side shelf and picked up a white cork helmet and set it on his head.

  “Come here close to me, John,” he bade me. “We have to make our journey almost as one. Here, put your arm around my shoulders.”

  I did that, a-slinging my guitar behind me. He grabbed me tight round the waist. His free hand hoisted up the T-amulet on its chain and laid itself flat on his helmet. He said words, so slurred together and muttered I couldn’t make them out.

  I felt a windy whirl all round me, I saw a moving whiteness like a storm of snow, and my feet rested nowhere, on naught. My eyes went blind, my ears sang. And then, all of a sudden, brightness. I stood on solidness. Sight came back to my eyes. I looked down.

  Sand at my feet, all glittery with the hot sun on it.

  I lifted my eyes and saw the caves in the bluff, saw people in their robes and head-veils, all a-standing and a-gopping at us. Farther off beyond them, beyond what the window on Cry Mountain had shown, grew trees, fluffy-topped palms and orchards of leafy, smaller trees.

  “You see date palms,” said Harpe beside me. “Almond trees. And over there beyond, fields of beans. There you have the diet of these tribesmen—dates and almonds and beans. They have barley bread, too, and that makes a balanced ration.”

  “No meat?” I asked.

  “On special occasions. One sheep, slaughtered and cut into kebabs, can feed this whole village.”

  Harpe stepped from beside me and hailed a tall thin man, who bowed to him with a hand to his forehead. Harpe touched his helmet and said something in that language I didn’t know, and the thin man trotted away into one of the caves. He came back with somebody I’d seen before in Harpe’s window, the white-bearded one in the blue silk gown.

  He and Harpe bowed and touched their foreheads and talked for a moment. Then Harpe made a beckon sign to me, and I walked over to join them, my guitar under my arm.

  “John,” said Harpe, “let me introduce my friend, Yakouba. You can call him Imam or Rabbi, whichever you like. He is eager to meet you. I’ve told him that you are a haham—a traveling holy man from beyond the oceans.”

  Yakouba smiled on me, with stained teeth a-showing through his white whiskers. He bowed and touched his forehead. I bowed and put out my hand to him, and he stared at it and then he took it in his own brown fingers, thin as twigs. He smiled again.

  “Ya haham, ” he said in a thin old voice. “Ya haham. Kehm. ” He rattled out a big chunk of his language to Harpe, who replied him in the same language, then turned to me.

  “He says he likes you, John. He says you have the blood of kings—he can tell by how you stand, by how you look and speak. That he knows you for an honest man—he's never quite accepted me for that. And he wants to talk to you."

  “I can’t speak air word of his language," I had to say.

  “He has a little English, and maybe the two of you can manage with that. But I can’t stay and interpret. He hasn’t invited me."

  With that, Harpe touched the amulet on his neck and muttered, and he was gone from sight like as if he hadn’t been there. The folks round about blinked, but they weren’t upset to no great much of an extent. Likely they’d seen him disappear a good few times before that.

  The old man named Yakouba touched my arm and pointed to my guitar. “Sing?" he said.

  I did my best to be calm. Harpe had gone off and left me, only God knew where the place was or how to get away from it. But I smiled the best I could and I put my left hand to the neck of the guitar and my right to the strings. I hit one or two chords, and all those folks stood round and stared and harked, and I decided I’d try something with sweet, slow music.

  Into my mind came a hymn, a right lonesome-tuned hymn with the words drawn out one place another to fit the music. I’d heard it all my life in church houses, and I reckon others before me had heard it all their lives, too. I touched the silver strings, and I sang:

  “By cool Siloam’s sha-ady rill

  How fa-air the li-ily grows,

  How swe-et the breath, beneath the hill,

  Of Sharon’s dewy rose . . .’’

  I put my palm to the strings and stopped then. But they wouldn’t let me stop. They hollered me, they waved at me, so I picked and sang the thing again. And that time a little beardy man played it with me on a sort of flute cut out of a cane twig, the sort you blow into the end instead of the side. He followed me right well. We finished a-playing, and again yells.

  “Shiloah, ” some one of them said. “Sharawn. ”

  So they knew some of the words, and what they meant. Old Yakouba looked at me, long and quiet and friendly, and stroked down his blizzardy white beard with his skinny right hand. Then he reached out and took my arm.

  “You come,” he said.

  I slung my guitar behind me. He led me to a cave, and inside.

  There was a square room chopped out in there, lit by lamps in notches in the rock walls. It was more or less fifteen feet to a side, with a high ceiling woven of some kind of reeds and, all the way round it, a shelf of mortared rocks with rugs and cushions on them. In a far corner a woman in a white robe, with black braids of hair, cooked something on an iron plate over a pot of coals. Yakouba pointed to a place on a shelf, and motioned for me to sit down. I did that, and he sat on a little wooden stool in front of me.

  Then he spoke to the woman, who took a wooden spoon and hiked two chunks of something from the plate onto a baked clay dish. She dripped something on them from a kind of pitcher, and fetched them to us.

  He took one chunk and I took the other. It looked to be made of the little bittiest spaghetti in the world, all shiny wet with what the woman had put on it.

  “Kanufah, ” he said, and took him a bite, so I took me one. I reckoned the thing had been fried in butter and soaked in honey. “Good,” I said to Yakouba, and we went ahead and ate the things up. I recollected from somewhere that if you ate with these desert folks, that made you friends somehow.

  Trusted friends. And Yakouba had told Harpe that I was one to be trusted.

  He wiped his beardy mouth. “Ya haham, ” he said, as he'd said before. “Good man,” he managed in his deep-throated English. “Good. You good. I show.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “Thank you,” he said after me. “Now I show.”

  He stooped down beside his stool and dragged away a worn- out mat that looked to be woven of brown bark strips. Underneath was a slab of slatey gray rock, set into the floor. It looked to be a yard long and half that wide. Yakouba fumbled out a straight knife from somewhere. It was of old dark steel, and it had writing of some kind on the blade—maybe Arabic, maybe Hebrew, how could I know? With the point he pried at the edge of the gray rock slab, got it up to where his thin fingers could grab hold, and hoisted it up and away.

  “See,” he said to me. He was a-doing his possible best to talk in a language I knew.

  He had opened up a hole in his stone floor. Amongst the shadows inside it lay some kind of bundle, a hairy-looking bundle, brown and white. Yakouba bent lower and hoisted it out, sat on his stool, and held the thing in his arms. He cuddled it to him, like a precious treasure.

  He spoke to me in his language that I co
uld by no way understand, and I shook my head, and he smiled in his beard at my ignorance.

  “Book,” he smiled. “Yahouda book.” And I could understand that.

  “Judas,” I said.

  “Judas,” he repeated me, and nodded and smiled again, proud as proud could be.

  I looked at the bundle. It was near about as big as a ham. Its hairy cover seemed like as if it was goatskin, old goatskin, cracked here and there. I saw where it was stitched shut, with a thick twisted thread of something. 1 put out my hand to feel. With a wider smile, he reached it out to me, put it into my arms.

  “See,” he said.

  He'd done that thing to show he trusted me. He'd told Harpe that he knew I was a good man. I'd had people to trust me before that, turn to me, believe in me. I don't know what causes them to trust in me, I only know I should ought to do my best to deserve it.

  “Thank you,” I told him, proud for his trust.

  As I spoke, my head swam, my ears rang like gongs. Again it was that white swirl all round me, like a blinding storm of snow. A moment later, things cleared from my mind and my eyes and ears, and there I stood, in Harpe's big main room on Cry Mountain.

  I was a-standing in the comer where the rope hung down. And with me, just then a-letting the rope go, was Ruel Harpe, with a happy, toothy grin that showed all the way across his face. And I was a-holding something to me with both arms. I looked. Sure enough, it was the goatskin bundle Yakouba had trusted me to touch. I must have had a blank stare on my face, for Harpe laughed loud and long.

  “It worked,” he said, near about choked with his laughing. “Worked—it worked.”

  “What happened?” I asked him.

  He reached to take the bundle from my arms, and hugged it hard to him. “It worked,” he said one more time. “You got it for me.”

  “Me?”

  “I told you that Yakouba never quite trusted me. He wouldn't show me this. But he believed in you, John—people do believe in you, and so did Yakouba—let you have the book—”