by Dave Butler
“Yes, because I can’t resist a good story.” The dewin sighed. “Though it may be no use. You see, I think what I need are songs that are tied to me somehow. To me or to my folk. I suppose, in a way, that’s what a folk is: a group of people tied together by stories and songs. So if I sing ‘My gen ee thavad thee,’ I can sometimes get a spark out of it and make it do something for me, like, say, pacify an agitated ewe, but ‘Farewell and adieu to you, Spanish ladies’ leaves me cold.”
“Because that’s an English song.”
“That’s what I think, boyo. So if you were a dewin, the songs that would probably work best for you would be Punjabi songs. Or maybe songs about London—are Londoners your folk?”
“I don’t know,” Charlie said. “I’m not sure I have a folk.”
The dewin pursed his lips and blew through them softly. “That’s a sad thing. If you don’t have a folk, you’re alone in this world. But don’t rush to think it about yourself. Maybe you do have one and you just don’t know it. You simply haven’t figured out who they are.”
“I had my bap,” Charlie said. “He…he’s gone. And there’s the queen.”
“The queen?” The dewin’s face lit up. “Queen Victoria, you mean? Well, that’s a grand folk, isn’t it, if it includes a queen?” His hand shot across the page, scrawling out more words Charlie couldn’t read.
Charlie nodded. “And my friends. They make a strange kind of folk, though. A pixie and two trolls and two chimney sweeps.” The trees seemed to have doubled in height, and he felt alone.
“I’ll keep an eye out for your friends,” Lloyd Shankin said. “Are there hulders with them, then?”
Charlie shook his head. “The hulders stayed in London. Grim Grumblesson—he’s one of them—is afraid of heights, so even if he weren’t too big for the flyer, he couldn’t have come with us. Also, he had business in London. And he and Ingrid, I think they’re going to get married.”
The dewin laughed as he wrote. “Charlie of Whitechapel, you’ve lived enough life for three songs, at least. And who knows? Perhaps you and I shall become great friends, and then songs about Charlie Pondicherry will become personal to me, and songs of power.”
Charlie decided to take a risk. “Do you know a man named Caradog Pritchard?”
“Caradog Pritchard, is it?” The dewin dropped his pen into the crack of the book and stared at Charlie with a curious expression, craning his neck like a bird. His eyes drifted together, focused on Charlie, and then kept going, until he looked cross-eyed.
It was too late to take the name back, but Charlie did his best to look casual. “He’s a friend of my bap. I’m going to see him.”
“Is he, then?” The dewin laughed. “Well, boyo, your bap knows some interesting people. Caradog Pritchard is mad.”
“Oh.” Charlie’s shoulders slumped.
“It’s the Cader, you see. There are three stories about the Cader. Old stories. Gerald of Wales knew them, and he wrote, what, a thousand years ago.”
“Gerald?”
“Indeed. He was a churchman, old Gerald. Wrote one of the first books about Wales, and he said, first of all, the fish swimming in the streams and lakes of the Cader have eyes only on one side of their heads. One eye each, Cader fish. And he also said there’s an island in a lake in the high valleys of the Cader that shows up in a different place on every map. That one at least is true.” He chuckled. “Mind you, only the English even try putting it on maps anymore. The Welsh know better because we know the island moves.”
Cader Idris was beginning to sound like a very odd place. “You said three stories?”
Lloyd Shankin nodded. “The third story is this: you sleep a night on the Cader, and either it makes you mad or it makes you a poet.” He leaned forward slowly and winked at Charlie. “Or both.”
“Have you…slept on the Cader?”
The dewin Lloyd Shankin set his book down and stood. “Caradog Pritchard, that’s a name to conjure with. I first heard of him, oh, a decade since, maybe. I suppose he must have come from somewhere else, down from the north, I wager. They’re strange up there. Too Welsh, if you know what I mean.” Shankin grinned a crooked grin, and his shoulders hunched up around his ears. “Mind you, in the south they’re not Welsh enough. I never heard of Pritchard as a boy. But a few years ago, folks around Machine-Town began to talk of the madman Pritchard, who lived alone with the birds up on the top of Cader Idris.”
A madman? Charlie’s bap wanted him to find and talk to a madman?
Could Shankin be insane? His eyes bulged and spun when he talked about the mountain.
Charlie took a small step back. “Machine-Town?”
“Well, that’s what the Sais, the English, call it. It’s the town where I lived as a child.” The dewin wrung his hands and frowned. “Sad, really. That’s time, though. It changes everything, and there’s nothing can stop it.” He leaned forward. “But listen, Charlie, you’re on a journey into Wales, and you’ve met me in a lonely place. You know what that makes me, don’t you?”
Charlie shook his head and stepped back farther. He avoided the dewin’s gaze.
“I’m the curious old man at the crossroads, boyo. I’m the toad at the well. I’m the crow perched on the fence, warning you of what’s on the other side.”
“I don’t understand.” The dewin was sounding more mad with every sentence, but there was also something convincing about his voice. Charlie half expected to see one-eyed fish swim through the air between the trees around him.
“I mark the beginning of your journey. I point the way forward into your adventure, in which you’ll gain great treasures of knowledge.” Lloyd Shankin crept forward a step with each phrase, forcing Charlie into a slow retreat. Then, suddenly, the Welshman backed away and grinned, his eyes returning to their usual slightly unfocused stare. “Anyhow, that’s the way a storyteller would have it.”
“Really?” Charlie asked. “How can you be sure it isn’t the other way around?”
“Pardon?”
Charlie felt a little bit pushed, and he wanted to push in turn. He stepped forward, forcing the dewin to back up a pace. “How can you be sure I don’t mark the beginning of your journey? Maybe I point the way for you to go to have an adventure and learn treasures of knowledge.”
Lloyd Shankin cocked his head to one side and opened his mouth, but he said nothing.
Charlie heard the dwarf’s whistle, a long, sharp blast.
Should he tell Lloyd Shankin he was a prisoner?
But what if the Welshman was mad?
“I’m sorry,” he said to the magician. “I’ve got to go.”
When Charlie came back to the wagons with his third armload of wood, they were stopped. The first wagon was mired in a muddy trough formed where a stream flowed into the track and, rather than flowing over it and continuing on, filled it for several wagon lengths with thick black mud.
The driver of the first wagon was heaving dirt from the forest in front of the wagon wheels with a shovel. The forest soil was only somewhat drier than the mud of the path, so it wasn’t helping very much.
The dwarf who could get things done stood in front of the team of donkeys, holding them by their bridles and pulling. He threw his whole back into it and shouted guttural words Charlie didn’t understand, with the donkeys’ names in the middle of the nonsense. “Chakhta rukho Mary sham! Bill khuffatum yacha!”
The donkeys didn’t move. They tried, but the mud sucked at their hooves and at the wagon’s wheels, and they made no progress.
The dwarf saw Charlie. “Toss your sticks under the front wheels!” he shouted.
Charlie did as he was told. Then he stepped back and crossed his arms over his chest.
“Go collect more branches, Donkey.” The dwarf threw his back again into pulling at the donkey team.
The donkeys all had slightly different coloration, so Charlie knew them by name. Mary and Bill didn’t budge. Mary put her head down and seemed to ignore the dwarf pulling her bridle.
Bill reared back and made noises that sounded like whimpering.
“I can pull the wagon out of the mud,” Charlie said.
“No, you can’t.”
“I can.” Charlie wasn’t sure why he was offering to help. After all, this dwarf was his captor.
Only he wasn’t really offering to help. In his heart, he wanted to show the dwarfs he was stronger than they were.
Charlie’s master stopped pulling and looked at Charlie through narrowed eyes. “You can, can you?”
“You’ll have to move the donkeys. And wind me a little more.”
The dwarf snorted, but then rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Not much, though. Another quarter turn.”
“Fine.” Charlie didn’t really know how much that was, because he couldn’t wind his own mainspring, which was in the middle of his back. All his life, his bap had wound it while pretending to give Charlie back rubs. Since his bap’s death, he’d had his friend Bob to help instead.
Maybe someday he’d get a tool that would let him reach the center of his back. Maybe Bob could help him with that.
Detached from the wagon, the donkeys managed to slosh their way through the mud and out onto the track, though Mary never looked up and Bill didn’t stop whimpering until he was on firm footing. Charlie took his shoes and socks off and set them aside, then stepped into the wet spot. Mud squelched between his toes, and mosquitoes buzzed around him.
Charlie grabbed the pole Mary and Bill had been yoked to. It had a crossbar with metal eyes in it, and each donkey got yoked under one side of the bar. “Wind me.”
Muttering under his breath, the dwarf sloshed through the mud. He reached under Charlie’s coat and wound Charlie a bit. As his mainspring tightened, Charlie felt more energy in his chest and limbs.
“Thank you,” he said.
The dwarf frowned.
The dwarf with the shovel stepped back and leaned on his tool. “You sure you’re not going to break your new toy, Syz?”
Charlie’s master shrugged. “If it breaks, I’ll scrounge all the parts. Maybe the Old Man will want them.”
Charlie rested the crossbar across his shoulders. The long pole pressed against his neck and pointed forward. Could he really do it?
He pulled. The wagon inched forward, but not much, and he heard the sucking sound of the mud as it pulled back.
Charlie leaned forward and grunted. He felt his body hum with the effort, and he kicked back against the ground, trying to dislodge the stuck wagon.
The dwarf who could get things done chuckled.
Charlie pushed with all his might. “Pondicherry’s of Whitechapel!” he roared, and the wagon rocked free.
The two dwarfs shouted and jumped aside as mud splattered up onto their leather and silk. Charlie staggered forward—and slightly to one side, because of his limp—and the wagon came with him.
He kept roaring as he charged up onto the drier ground and for a dozen steps beyond that, and he was still roaring when he fell facedown onto the dirt. The donkeys’ pole fell on top of him and he lost consciousness.
* * *
Charlie opened his eyes with his face in wet dirt. The dwarf who could get things done stepped away from him. He must have been winding Charlie’s mainspring.
Charlie dragged himself out from under the pole and climbed to his feet.
Charlie’s master looked at him and frowned. “I expect I have to call you Harry now.”
“Thank you,” Charlie said. He didn’t feel grateful, but being called Harry was much better than being called Donkey.
“My name is Syzigon.” Syzigon stroked his triple-plaited beard.
The other dwarf laughed. “I’ll move the donkeys out of the way so Harry here can pull across the other wagons.” He touched two fingers to the silk scarf wrapped around his head. “Atzick.”
That sounded like a name, too. Charlie didn’t want to introduce himself as Harry, so he just nodded.
Atzick started unhitching Bess and Jim from the second wagon. Bess leaned to her left and bit Jim every chance she had, and Jim brayed constantly. The two older dwarfs sitting in the front of the second wagon waved at Charlie.
“Well, Syzigon,” Charlie said. “Better wind me a little more.”
“You still call me Master,” Syzigon said, but he reached up under Charlie’s coat to tighten his mainspring.
Syzigon unhitched his donkeys and led them across. Bad Luck John tried to run away as soon as he was unhitched, but Syzigon had a tight grip on the donkey’s bridle, and the escape attempt ended immediately. Victoria seemed to be sleeping until Syzigon tugged her bridle to move her.
Charlie pulled the remaining wagons across more easily because he got a running start on the dry ground before hitting the mud. The other dwarfs said nothing to him as he performed the task, though afterward, when they were again traveling west on the forest track, the old woman sat with Syzigon for a long time on the last wagon. Huddled close together in discussion, they looked up at Charlie as they talked, and Charlie wondered what they were saying.
Charlie gathered firewood.
He saw no more trace of the wild-eyed storytelling dewin Lloyd Shankin. When Charlie had filled the wooden boxes in all three wagons, the sun was low to the horizon before them, and Syzigon blew three sharp whistle blasts to call the wagons to a halt.
As the wagons rolled into a tight circle, every adult sprang into action at once. Astonished by the sudden motion, Charlie sat on a fallen log and watched. Atzick unhitched the donkeys and retethered them to pegs in a thick patch of grass a couple of paces from the wagon. Atzick also hobbled Bad Luck John with a short leather strap around both his front legs, just above the hooves, and he tethered Bess away from the other donkeys. Atzick whistled and laughed as he worked.
The two elders then rearranged the wagon poles, together lifting and attaching each pole to a ring on the side of the wagon before it, to turn the space around the fire into a little blockaded shelter. One seemed to know what the other was about to do before it was done, and the dwarfs touched hands and shoulders often as they worked.
Syzigon took sticks from the wooden box in his wagon, piled them in a careful wigwam within a ring of blackened stones, and lit a fire. Charlie thought of Lloyd Shankin and his efforts to sing a fire into existence. Was the dewin mad? And if he was, had his words about Caradog Pritchard been true? Or had everything he’d said been nonsense? Syzigon’s fire building involved no music, just short, efficient actions, and when he struck flint and steel together, he seemed to be commanding sparks to come into being.
Yellario emerged from her wagon with two sacks that turned out to contain metal rods. Baby Yezi rode in a sling on her chest. Yellario quickly constructed a spit from the rods, and by the time yellow tongues of flame danced up from Syzigon’s fire, a row of birds hung over them, waiting to be roasted. Yellario’s arrangement of the birds was beautiful: they were evenly spaced, facing the same direction, and wrapped and stuffed with rosemary and other herbs.
The little boy jumped out of the back of his wagon with a tassel-eared cat, which he led over to the donkeys before unleashing it. He then let a second and a third cat out, one from each wagon. All three cats circled the donkeys slowly, sniffing at the air, and then disappeared into the trees.
The woman dwarf from Atzick’s wagon took a small box from her pocket and began walking in circles around the camp, including the space where the donkeys were picketed. Her first circle was walked at a normal pace, but after that she began to shuffle in an irregular, dancing gait. She moved like a bird, ducking her head forward and then throwing it back, and she sang words Charlie couldn’t understand. He thought she took pinches of dust from the little box and scattered them every few steps.
He was afraid to ask her what she was doing and even more afraid when she caught him looking and pierced him with a green stare.
“I can stand watch,” Charlie offered Syzigon when the smell of roasting bird filled the air and the dwarfs began to sit.
&n
bsp; Syzigon chuckled. “You mean I should wind you all the way so you can stay up all night and keep us safe from harm? And you promise you won’t run away, don’t you, Harry?”
Charlie hung his head.
“I won’t be winding you any more tonight,” Syzigon said. “I suggest you lie under my wagon. You’ll be safe there, and I’ll know where to find you in the morning. You wander off somewhere and shut down, there’s no guarantee we don’t leave you.”
Charlie crawled under the wagon. It was cold, but he could stand it, and besides, he knew he would lose consciousness before long.
“You want some chicken?” a tiny voice at his ear said.
Charlie turned his head and saw the young dwarf boy from that morning. He was squatting, his head barely beneath the bed of the wagon, and holding a roasted bird’s leg in his hands.
“Hello, I’m Charlie.”
“A certain dwarf who is my father says you’re Harry,” the little boy said. “But you can be Charlie to me. I’m Aldrix. And a certain dwarf who is my mother says I can offer you a little chicken if you like. She doesn’t think it will hurt you.”
Charlie shook his head. “I don’t need to eat. But thank you.”
Aldrix shrugged and sank his own teeth into the chicken. “That’s a good trick, Charlie,” he said between mouthfuls. “I need to eat a lot.”
“I’m…I’m different,” Charlie said.
“You’re a machine,” Aldrix said. “That’s good. We’re going to Machine-Town. Maybe you can meet other machines there.”
Wasn’t that where the dewin had said he had lived as a child? “Is that where the Old Man is?”
Aldrix shook his head. “Close, though. The Old Man lives in a maze. I’ve been there.”
That didn’t clarify anything. “Who’s the Old Man, then? Is he a dwarf like you?”
Aldrix considered. “I don’t think a certain dwarf who is my father wants me to say too much to you. You’re not one of us.”
“I’m not?” It was a silly question.
“No, you’re more like a tool, or a helper. Like one of the donkeys. Like the Old Man, maybe.”
