Table of Contents
Title Page
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Epilogue
Books by Natalie Babbitt
Gofish - Questions for the Author
Copyright Page
Prologue
There was a time once when the earth was still very young, a time some call the oldest days. This was long before there were any people about to dig parts of it up and cut parts of it off. People came along much later, building their towns and castles (which nearly always fell down after a while) and plaguing each other with quarrels and supper parties. The creatures who lived on the earth in that early time stayed each in his own place and kept it beautiful. There were dwarfs in the mountains, woldwellers in the forests, mermaids in the lakes, and, of course, winds in the air.
There was one particular spot on the earth where a ring of mountains enclosed a very dry and dusty place. There were winds and dwarfs there, but no mermaids because there weren’t any lakes, and there were no woldwellers either because forests couldn’t grow in so dry a place.
Then a remarkable thing happened. Up in the mountains one day a dwarf was poking about with a sharp tool, looking for a good spot to begin mining. He poked and poked until he had made a very deep hole in the earth. Then he poked again and clear spring water came spurting up in the hole. He hurried in great excitement to tell the other dwarfs and they all came running to see the water. They were so pleased with it that they built over it a fine house of heavy stones and they made a special door out of a flat rock and balanced it in its place very carefully on carved hinges. Then one of them made a whistle out of a small stone which blew a certain very high note tuned to just the right warble so that when you blew it, the door of the rock house would open, and when you blew it again, the door would shut. They took turns being in charge of the whistle and they worked hard to keep the spring clean and beautiful.
But the spring they had discovered was in a cup of land surrounded by cliffs and eventually the spring began to fill up the cup, until after a while there was a little lake there with the top of the spring house standing out in the center like an island. And the lake kept getting higher and higher. After a few years the spring house was completely submerged and the dwarfs could no longer get down to it, although they could see it easily through the clear water and could still make the door open and close with the whistle, just the same as before.
The water in the lake began in time to fill up with creatures of its own, as water has a way of doing, and one of these creatures was a lovely little mermaid. The dwarfs named her Ardis and one of them made her a pretty doll out of linked stones with a trailing fern fastened to its head for hair. Ardis loved the doll very much and played with it all the time, and in exchange she promised to keep watch over the spring in the house of rocks, now far down under the water. So the dwarfs gave her the special whistle and she kept it hanging by a chain on a sharp bit of rock at the water’s edge. Every morning she would blow the whistle to open the door and then she would dive down and play with her doll inside among the bubbles. At night she would come up and blow the whistle again to close the door, and swim away to sleep.
While all this was happening, the water in the lake had risen so high that it began to spill over in one spot where there was a V-shaped gap in the cliffs, and it tumbled down into the dry and dusty place ringed by the mountains. It fingered itself into a great many streams and watered the land so well that everything was soon green and fresh. Forests sprang up and woldwellers came there to watch over the trees. And then, later, the people began to arrive. They built towns and they crowned a king and they enjoyed a great many quarrels and troubles, all of which they created quite by themselves. The dwarfs withdrew deep under the mountains where they wouldn’t have to watch and they went on mining and almost never came out. In time they separated into groups of two or three, each group mining where it chose, and they never lived all together again. The woldwellers, who were admired by the people for their knowledge, stayed in their trees and came down to answer questions from time to time, but after a while they grew irritated by the foolishness of these questions and wouldn’t always answer. Eventually the people stopped coming to ask.
And something very sad happened to Ardis. One day, when she was in the spring house playing with her doll, she heard a new and pleasing kind of sound. She put down the doll and swam up to the top of the lake. There on the bank sat a man, the first she had ever seen, making pretty music on a round box with strings pulled tight across it. Ardis stayed to listen, hiding behind a water lily, with only her eyes and ears out of the water. After a while the man put the round box aside and, leaning over to drink from the lake, noticed the whistle hanging from its sharp bit of rock. He picked it up and blew through it, but he was only a man and couldn’t hear the sound it made. As Ardis watched in dismay, he started to toss it away, paused, looked at it again, and finally hung it around his neck. Then he picked up his strange instrument and wandered off. She cried to him to come back, but he didn’t hear.
Ardis dove trembling to the spring house, but the blast the man had blown on the whistle had made the door swing shut. The house was locked. Ardis could peer through the cracks between the rocks and see her doll lying inside, but there was no way to get it out. After that, she was sad all the time. At night she would swim up to the spot where the whistle had hung, and weep for hours. Someone heard her once and made a song about her, but no one could help her, for the dwarfs were far away.
And in the meantime, in the land below, towns were built and burned and built again and kings and their people lived and died and enjoyed their troubles for years and years and years. Ardis and the dwarfs and the woldwellers were largely forgotten except in stories and songs. Nobody believed they were real any more except for an occasional child or an even more occasional worker of evil, these being the only ones with imagination enough to admit to the possibility of something even more amazing in the world than those commonplace marvels which it spreads so carelessly before us every day.
In his workroom at the top of the tower, DeCree, the Prime Minister, was pacing up and down. Occasionally he would pause, throw up his arms in a gesture of helplessness, and then resume his pacing. From her perch, his cockatoo watched with beady interest, turning her head this way and that as he crossed and recrossed before her.
“There will be civil war!” he burst out at last. “Splits, upheavals, and people taking sides! Smiles will be forgotten and spring will escape notice! Little flowers will push up, only to be trodden down, and birds will sing unheeded.”
From a pile of cushions in a corner of the room, his Special Assistant, a skinny, pleasant boy of twelve named Gaylen, put down the book he had been reading and frowned. “Civil war?” he said. “But why? What happened?”
“It was like this,” said the Prime Minister, climbing onto the stool at his desk. “I went down, you see, to show the King how far I’ve gone on m
y dictionary. He was pleased with the first part. He liked ‘Affectionate is your dog’ and ‘Annoying is a loose boot in a muddy place’ and so on, and he smiled at ‘Bulky is a big bag of boxes.’ As a matter of fact, there was no trouble with any of the A’s or B’s and the C’s were fine too, especially ‘Calamitous is saying no to the King.’ But then we got to ‘Delicious is fried fish’ and he said no, I’d have to change that. He doesn’t care for fried fish. The General of the Armies was standing there and he said that, as far as he was concerned, Delicious is a mug of beer, and the Queen said no, Delicious is a Christmas pudding, and then the King said nonsense, everyone knew the most delicious thing is an apple, and they all began quarreling. Not just the three of them—the whole court. When I left, they were all yelling and shouting and shaking their fists. The King and the General were glaring at each other, and the Queen was trying to get everyone to listen to the recipe for Christmas pudding.”
“That doesn’t sound like civil war to me,” said Gaylen, turning back to his book with a smile. “It only sounds silly.”
“Of course it’s silly,” said the Prime Minister impatiently. “But a lot of serious things start silly.”
Gaylen put his book down again and sighed. “Why don’t you just leave Delicious out of the dictionary?”
“I can’t do that,” said the Prime Minister. “If this is going to be a proper dictionary, I can’t leave anything out.”
At that moment there was a great racket in the courtyard below. Gaylen ran to the window and looked down. People were pouring out of the castle door to form a noisy ring around two men shoving each other about on the grass. After a moment, one knocked the other flat, shouted “Plums!” and strode triumphantly back inside, followed by the cheering crowd. The man who had been flattened swayed to his feet and went off muttering.
The Prime Minister shook his head sadly. “Now here’s a pretty kettle of fish,” he said.
“Or apples,” said Gaylen.
Gaylen had lived in the castle ever since he’d been left, a tiny baby, gurgling in a basket at the main gate. The basket had been carried in to the King, who was very annoyed to see its contents.
“Now, by Harry,” the King had said with a frown, “I suppose some silly mother thinks I’ll adopt this baby and leave the kingdom to him when I die. Well, I won’t do it. I expect to have a son of my own some day. Take this baby away and see if one of the kitchen maids will have it.”
But the Prime Minister was hovering nearby and sprang forward when he heard what the King was saying. “Please, your Majesty, let me have the baby,” he said. “I’ll take good care of him, and I promise he’ll never be a bother to you.”
“Humph!” said the King. “What on earth do you want a baby for? Well, go ahead. Take it. Why not?” So the Prime Minister went joyfully off with the basket and the King promptly forgot all about it.
Now the truth is that DeCree was a very lonely man. He had never had a wife, and he lived all by himself in the castle tower. But it wasn’t a wife he was lonely for, it was a child. He wanted a child so badly that it kept him awake thinking about it. And when he couldn’t sleep, he got overtired and caught colds and went about snuffling, with his beard wrapped around his throat to keep it warm. It made him feel achy and wretched and when he went to advise the King on important matters, he would say things like “Dow thed” for “Now then,” and “Dot eddy bore” for “Not any more.” When he did this, the King would get cross, and that made the Prime Minister feel worse than ever.
But after the baby came to live with him in the tower, the Prime Minister slept nine hours every night without even snoring and he was never lonely again. So he named the baby Vaungaylen, which means “little healer.” It was a very long name, so the baby was mostly called Gaylen for short, which suited him very well, and as soon as he was old enough, the Prime Minister taught him to read and write and made him Special Assistant. And if Gaylen came to believe that the world was a bright and flawless garden where no weeds grew, a garden in the center of which the castle tower rose high and watchful and serene, it was not to be wondered at. After all, he was cared for very tenderly, with never a wish ungratified, and he and the Prime Minister loved each other as much as any real father and son since time began.
That night the conversation around the King’s dinner table was strained. Nobody was letting anybody forget the arguments of the afternoon.
“What’s for dinner tonight?” said the King to the Queen with a broad smile. “Apples, I hope?”
“Dear me, no,” said the Queen in a bored tone. “Not apples again. One gets so very tired of them.”
“Well, at least, seeing as it’s nearly spring,” said the King through his teeth, “I don’t suppose we’ll have to sit through a Christmas pudding.”
The Queen turned away with a toss of her head and spoke to the General, who sat nearby. “Wine, General?”
“Beer or nothing!” he answered grimly.
Just then the royal dinner was carried in, a huge roast of venison with carrots and potatoes and a variety of fruits in bowls. The guests began muttering to each other about the meal. Everyone was dissatisfied with it in one way or another, but the Prime Minister rose and bowed to the Queen. “An excellent dinner, your Majesty,” he said politely. “I’m sure we’ll all enjoy it enormously.”
“Even without fried fish?” asked the Queen, glaring at him.
“Well, of course,” answered the Prime Minister in an effort to be generous, “one can’t eat fried fish every night.”
“One can’t eat fried fish any night at all unless one is a troublemaking old fool,” said the King flatly.
The Prime Minister sat down abruptly and closed his eyes.
“Very well, then,” came a deep voice from the end of the table, “where are the nuts? The walnuts, the chestnuts, the pecans?” It was the voice of Hemlock, a brother to the Queen, who stood at his place scowling. “Where, I say, are the nuts? We always have nuts for dinner.”
“We never have nuts for dinner,” said the King, “starting now.”
Hemlock smiled dangerously. He was a tall, unpleasant man and a friend to no one, not even his sister the Queen. He reached into his pockets and pulled out two large handfuls of nuts, which he threw high into the air. Then he turned and left the room. The nuts came raining down on the tabletop, splashed into the wine and bounced off the heads of the guests, who rose in a body, with a great deal of noise and confusion.
When the King had restored order at last and everyone was sitting down again, he thumped on the table with his fist. “See here,” he said, “this cannot continue! Now, where has Hemlock gone?” He looked around, frowning. “Well, let him go. Things always seem more peaceful without him. And anyway, DeCree started all this and he’ll have to find a way to settle it.” He looked at the Prime Minister. “Well?” he said.
“Well,” said the Prime Minister hopefully, “we could just forget all about it.”
“No,” said the King, “we couldn’t.”
“Then,” said the Prime Minister, “we’ll have to find out what everybody thinks and write it all down and then whatever gets the most votes for Delicious will be the thing I use in the dictionary.”
“That’s a very good idea, DeCree,” said the King. “Go all around the kingdom and ask everybody. It’ll turn out to be apples, anyway.”
“Beer,” said the General.
“Pudding,” murmured the Queen.
The King looked as if he were going to lose his temper, but he gritted his teeth and managed to pull himself together. “Start right away on this journey, DeCree,” he said. “There’s no time to lose.”
“But I can’t go myself,” protested the Prime Minister. “I’m too old for a long trip like that.”
“Then who shall go?” asked the King in some alarm. “Whom can we trust?”
“I’ll send my assistant, Vaungaylen,” said the Prime Minister.
“Well, all right,” said the King, “as long as he’
s trustworthy.”
“He’s an upright and honest boy,” said the Prime Minister firmly, “and the apple of my eye.”
“The pudding,” murmured the Queen.
“Now, by Harry,” the King began angrily, and then paused. Someone was galloping across the courtyard below and on over the drawbridge. The King went to a window and peered out. “There goes Hemlock,” he announced. “He’s riding that big gray horse of his, Ballywrack. Well, maybe he’ll stay away. I wish he would, by Harry. He’s always trying to take over and run things.” He went back to his place at the table and looked severely at the assembled guests. “Too many cooks spoil the soup, you know,” he said.
“Too many cooks spoil the pudding,” murmured the Queen.
The next morning everyone gathered in the courtyard to see Gaylen start off. He had been well equipped and instructed by the Prime Minister and knew exactly what to do. There was a large notebook in his saddlebag, and pens and ink, the proclamation he was to read to the people, and a map of the kingdom. It was not very large, as kingdoms go, perhaps thirty miles square, and there were four towns. It was on the basis of this number that DeCree and the King had decided to allow four weeks to complete the poll.
“Four weeks if he’s trustworthy, that is,” said the King to the Prime Minister, whom he had drawn to one side.
“I raised him myself,” said DeCree, “and he’s true to the core.”
“I hope so,” said the King. “There’s something about this whole business that makes me nervous.”
“You don’t need to worry about Vaungaylen,” said the Prime Minister.
“Well, maybe,” said the King suspiciously. “Maybe. What’s his choice for Delicious?”
“He hasn’t said,” replied the Prime Minister.
“Just as well,” said the King. He turned back to where Gaylen sat high on a fine horse, waiting to start off. The horse, whose name was Marrow, was one of the King’s best and was draped in the royal colors. “Here, boy,” said the King to Gaylen. “Here’s a little something to munch along the way.” And he handed up a sack of apples. Gaylen said thank you and stowed the apples away in his saddlebag, alongside the packet of cold fried fish and the sheaf of recipes for Christmas pudding.
The Search for Delicious Page 1
