Black Pearls (6 page)

"Still," I told him, "they are gone now. The piper kept his part of the bargain."

"He kept it with magic. Those rats were under a spell." Father brought his bowl to the fire, held it out for me to fill. "For all we know, that spell caster is in league with the devil. Would you have me help Satan earn his keep, boy?"

There was nothing to say. It mattered little whether the piper was a heavenly messenger or the devil's own son. Father would not be persuaded to pay for help he no longer needed. We finished our meal in silence and went to our beds the same way.

It was three days later, on St. Paul and St. John's feast day, when the piper came back to Hameln. The mayor gave him no money, and the rest of the council scolded him for trying to do business on a feast day. Then they all hurried off to church. Which is where Father and I were when the rat-catcher followed his debtors into the great nave of St. Nicolai. The mass was beginning, and we two had just found a bench in back when the piper strode in the door. He made his way down an aisle in the direction of the altar. I watched him stop at the seventh station of the cross, glance briefly at the council members who had taken seats up front, and then look up at the statue of Our Fallen Savior.

The piper, in that moment, bore little resemblance to the smiling magician who had played the rats down our streets only days before. Older, wearier, he looked as pained and tormented as the image above him on the Way of Sorrow. By the time he woke from his sad trance, the councilmen had all closed their eyes and assumed pious expressions. The piper turned on his heel and went back to the street.

Underneath the chants for mass, I heard a different music start up in the square outside. Though it sounded faint as fairy tunes, something in this lively melody made me restless. After a while I could bear it no longer and, bracing my crutch against the bench, rose from my seat. Father was used to my standing so as not to pain my bad leg. When I left his side and walked out the door, he remained unmoving and still, so still I suspected he had fallen asleep.

If the music had been faint in the church, it was not much louder in the open air. It sounded like a melody played a great distance away, and so it proved to be. A crowd of children—from toddlers carried by their brothers and sisters to boys and girls of twelve summers—hurried past me on the road out of town toward the mountains. I looked ahead of them and saw a line of children, wide as the road, stretching from the gates of the city into the hills.

I shook my head, wondering what could be drawing them away, when my little family of beggars rushed by. "Come on, Emmett!" they cried. "You will miss it all if you do not run." They buzzed past me like a swarm of bees headed for the hive. Only Use and a tall boy named Heinrich stayed behind.

"You will never keep up with your bad leg, Emmett, sir," Use said, studying me with sad, grown-up eyes.

"He is too old to go, anyway," Heinrich told her. "Come on, Use, or we, too, will be left behind."

"Wait!" I hobbled after them. "What is it? What is that music?"

Ilse hung on my crutch, jumping with eagerness. "You see? He hears it." She pulled and tugged me ahead. "Emmett can come, too."

"But the piper said..." Henrich turned, talking as he walked backwards toward the peaks of the Weserbergland.

"How old are you, Emmett, sir?" Use unfastened herself from my crutch, tried pushing me from behind.

"Nearly fifteen," I told her, suddenly feeling that my age was something to be ashamed of.

"I told you." Heinrich turned back to face the mountains. "He is too old. The piper said only children could hear his song."

"I cannot hear it well," I told them, stopping to listen again. The piper's music swelled from far away, but it sounded sweet today, not at all like the brisk high-pitched tune with which he had lured the rats.

"Emmett is our friend," Ilse announced. "He must come with us. He will share the food and new clothes."

"Food?" I asked. "Clothes?"

"Yes," Ilse told me. "Can you not hear it in the music?" She cocked her pretty head to one side, as if she held a seashell to her ear. "There will be more than we can ever eat if we go with him, Emmett." She smiled, her whole body alert, eager. "And firewood for Mama. And a medicine to cure her cough."

"And puppets," added Heinrich. "I hear a puppet show. There will be benches to watch it on, and no one will kick us away because we lack coins."

"I hear milk for all the babies," Ilse said. "And new shoes with no holes!"

"There is all this in that music?" I hobbled faster, my face to the mountains. But I despaired of keeping up with the rest. Then, as we passed our street, I remembered the lumber cart. "Wait here, Use," I said. "We shall catch the piper yet."

By the time I had harnessed old Patience and ridden the cart to the spot I'd left them, Heinrich had gone on ahead and only Use remained. I pulled her up next to me and we took off at a good pace. As we traveled through the huge gates that guard our town, we passed others along the road, and they begged rides, too. Soon the cart was packed with little ones, laughing and waving their hands at those who must walk. We moved more slowly now, but at last I heard the music grow louder.

When we caught up to the piper, he had marched the children through the open fields and into the foothills of the mountains. He put down his pipe to survey the line of young ones still snaking its way out of town. I, too, turned to see them, and the sight took my breath away. I had not realized how many children lived in Hameln, but here they all were! It looked like an army, like the children's crusade that had gone to fight the infidels when my grandfather was a boy. Granddad had loved to tell how the children across Germany and France dropped their milk pails and hoes to take up swords and shields.

There were no swords in the ranks that filled the winding road from Hameln, but surely that small army marched with as good a will. On sturdy legs, they came hurrying to join us, and those who were too young to walk were carried by those who were not. I could have varnished a dozen chests in the time it took them to move to our position in the foothills. When they had, a great hush fell over them all as the piper raised his hand to speak.

I pulled the cart as close as I could, and by picking up a few of the children who had crept nearer still, we were able at last to be no more than a few yards from the man who had saved Hameln from the rats. He was not dressed in the gay costume he had worn before; instead, he was clad in green, like a hunter. He sported no cap, but wore a cape with a great clasp that gleamed in the sun. "
Kinder,"
he said. Children. "Your parents are in church. They seem to believe they need not live a holy life so long as they bend their knees at mass." His smile, like a mischievous child's, belied his harsh words. "But I bear you no ill will on their behalf. In fact, I hope to spare you the hardships that have fixed themselves like barnacles to the souls of your elders."

He finished speaking, then took up his pipe and played a short tune. His music was no longer faint, but as clear as if I had leaned over a tumbling falls and was letting the roar fill my ears. I wasn't sure what the piper's words meant, but his music made a picture in my head. I saw deep woods broken by a single ray of sun piercing it from overhead. A bird, like the ones on my crutch, flew out of a tree and called to me.

Then the music stopped and the piper spoke again. "Love and song are your birthrights," he told us. "Like good Moses, I have come to lead you out from this hard Egypt to a place where you shall have both." He lifted his pipe once more to his lips and, though I cannot say how, played a chain of notes that sounded like laughter. For a
dizzy
moment, time melted away and I was holding my mother's skirts, smiling into her surprise.
Toads in our cake, Emmett? What will Papa say?

As I listened, the music turned slower, sadder. Now—perhaps it was in the way the piper rolled his fingertips across the stops—the notes sounded like sighs. Their softness made me think of Mother again, but this time I remembered her voice, how it was thin as a whisper in those last, lost days:
And where will I get fur?

"In the place I am taking you, lambkins," the Piper told us, putting aside his pipe for the third time, "it is always spring, and buds are forever new. Nothing grows old and sour. No one is cold or hungry or lame." At this last, a few young ones turned to look at me, but I did not mind being singled out. It felt almost like an honor, as if my bad leg had earned me this moment.

When the rat-catcher ended his speech and headed up the steep wall of rock ahead of us, his tune changed again. It trickled from his pipe like a sweet May drink that made us want more with every sip.

I do not know what the others on the path below us heard in that song, but I know each child in our cart found something different in the ditty. One boy laughed like a yipping pup, shouting that it announced a holiday for apprentices; another said the tune would take us to the other side of the mountains, where a great ship with a crew of child sailors lay in port; poor Gretchen insisted the piper was playing a palace, where she would wear gowns with jeweled bodices and diadems in her hair. I looked at the beggar girl's tangled mop and almost laughed out loud, but Use cupped my chin in both her hands and turned my face to hers.

Flushed and eager, the little girl was more alive than I had ever seen her. "Come, Emmett!" she cried. "The piper is playing Mama's cure. If we follow, I will see her healthy and warm."

It was clear we could not ride up the cliffs. Old Patience was already silver with sweat, and even a billy goat could not have dragged Father's cart across that rocky slope. "We shall have to go on foot from here," I told the children. Forgetting that I was not a goat but only a one-legged boy, I hoisted myself to the ground and held up my arms for Use. She found my crutch and lay it in my hands instead. That was when it first occurred to me that I might not be able to follow the others.

I was swamped with a familiar loneliness, the ancient hurt of someone who has always watched while others ran and played, just out of reach. As the rat-catcher scrambled nimbly up the rock, playing all the while, I saw where he was leading everyone. Not with my eyes, since nothing was visible beyond the crest of the mountain. But the place came clear to me, as sharp and real as wind on a hilltop.

In the land the piper played, everyone flew. On wings wide as banners, radiant and fine as sunlight, young and old traveled effortlessly through the air. My mother was in his song, but she was no longer pale and coughing. Instead, she soared between clouds and birds, waving as she looked down at me and the mountains below. I waved back, already straining upward, feeling my own wings sprouting from my back. Even as I dug my crutch into the rocks strewn along my way, new wings, like two sweetly burning kisses, worked their way through my shoulder blades. Mama smiled encouragement and opened her arms, while those tender, feathered buds began to uncurl and lift me above the earth.

But not soon enough. For while the other children following the piper used both hands to haul themselves over boulders and swing across ravines toward the piper's music, I kept hold of my crutch. Though the rat-catcher's tune gave me wings, they were only a promise, a dream of what I would be when the piper led us home. I did not, could not, throw away my third leg just yet. Soon all the children except Ilse had left me behind.

"Do not worry, Herr Emmett," the faithful girl told me. She worked her little body under my free arm like a second crutch and tried to lift me over the narrow, winding gorge carved by a now vanished stream. "I will help you." She followed the piper's progress with longing eyes but would not leave me to fend for myself. With each small advance we made, I could see the end of the line of children moving further into the distance and hear my little friend's sighs grow longer and more forlorn.

Finally I could bear it no more. "Ilse," I told her, "you must leave me and go on." I had the pledge of the music to keep me company, and the vision of my wings. I brandished my crutch like a sword. "I will meet you up ahead."

"
Nein,
Herr Emmett." The yearning for her own dream was still in her eyes and voice, but she would not forsake me. She only adjusted my weight across her tiny shoulder and set out again for the ledge where the piper had come to a stop. "We are almost there."

Four more times, before we reached the others, I begged Use to go ahead. And four more times she refused. The piper was stationed above us, playing a sweet, jolly tune that gave us both fresh hope. But when we had at last caught up to the others, even his music could not keep my good leg from trembling like the bad. I was unable to take another step. "Here we are at last," I panted, throwing myself on a small grassy space between boulders. "Hurry up! I will come as soon as I have got my breath again."

Ilse raised her eyes to the mossy crag above the crowd of young ones. There stood the piper, guarding the entrance to a mountain cave. Many of Hameln's children, even my little beggars, had told me how they played in such caves, how they followed dark tunnels to underground rivers or to the sudden light and flowers of mountain meadows. Which is why, when the rat-catcher smiled and walked into the cave, not one of the children was afraid to follow.

He remained just inside the entrance, now waving the children in, now playing his sprightly marching tune. Soon nearly the whole crowd had walked into the cave—big brothers carried little ones, friends raced arm in arm, stragglers picked up their pace and dashed toward the black hole in the mountain. Each of them raced for the dream the song had promised them, each sure they were only steps from making it come true. On they marched, looking for grand meals and new shoes, dead parents and lost sisters, ball games that would never end and dolls that could grow up with their owners. Beds of lace and silver dishes, talking dogs and smiling moons and rivers full of fish that caught and cooked themselves.

The piper stayed just inside the cave's mouth, waving to each child who passed. All the while he kept playing and all the while wings fluttered in my head and heart. "Go on, now," I told Use. I struggled to my feet and settled onto my crutch again, even though I could feel a blister where it rubbed under my arm. "I will follow fast behind."