Manly Wade Wellman - John the Balladeer 05 (15 page)

 
          
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 could 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—”

           
“He just let me touch it,” I cut him
off, for I'd heard enough to be mad with what happened. “He nair thought I’d
steal it. You tricked him and you tricked me. That’s a natural fact, and I
don’t like it one bit.”

 
          
He
walked to the table in the middle of the room and put the bundle down on it,
and stood with one hand on the bundle.

 
          
“You’re
angry, John,” he said. “I see the veins stand out on your temples. But don’t
try anything foolish now, and don’t try anything foolish later. Yes, I admit I
watched you and Yakouba at the window yonder. When the exact second arrived, I
just tugged the rope to bring you and the book, the way I’d bring a ham or a
sack of meal or anything else. And if you didn’t understand, you helped. Now—”

 
          
Behind
the green curtain that led to where the women had their places rose a scream
and another scream, loud enough to jangle your ears. Next instant, Alka came
a-dashing into sight, and Tarrah a-dashing behind her.

 
          
“Scylla!”
screamed Alka, her eyes a-bugging out behind her glasses. “She’s dead—she’s
killed herself!”

 
          
“Killed
herself?” roared out Harpe, so loud that the curtains moved.

 
          
And
he was off at a dead run for the door where Alka and Tarrah had come out. I ran
after him, and the two women followed us, both of them a-moaning and a-sobbing.

 
          
Another
long, rock-walled hallway there, like the one to my room, with some sort of
light in it. Harpe headed straight for a swung-open door at the far end. In he
went, and so did I.

 
          
The
room in there was as bare as a cell in a jailhouse. Tan rock walls with naught
on their blankness, and a tan rock floor with no carpet. A wooden chair, the
kind you call a kitchen chair, a wooden table, a cot bed with a blanket of a
dead gray color, and on that lay Scylla, lay Scylla as absolutely quiet as a
rag doll, her sharp face squinched up with the wrinkles a-show- ing like scars,
her eyes clamped tight shut.

 
          
“We
saw her take something and swallow it,” Tarrah chattered behind us.

 
          
“So
she did,” said Harpe, beside the bed. He stooped down and picked up a little
bottle as long as your thumb. “So she did,” he said again. “This was a poison I
developed. It had certain plant juices in it—never mind what plants. It can
kill you quicker than prussic acid, than the bite of a black mamba.”

 
          
He
was as calm in his voice as a lecturer. I looked at Scylla. No doubt she was
stone dead. I’d seen enough dead folks in my time to know death when I saw it.

           
“She took that bottle from a shelf
in my room,” Harpe said, and tucked the bottle into a pocket of his white
jacket. “She wanted to die—die instantly.”

 
          
“
Wh-
why?” stuttered one of the two women, I couldn't rightly
say which. Harpe swung round to look at each of us in turn. His face was as
calm and steady as a stone face.

 
          
“She
hated you, John,” he said to me.
“Thought you were getting in
her way, here.
That’s why she killed herself.”

           
“Is that aught of a reason for
suicide?” I asked him.

           
“A good proportion of suicides are
committed to make people sorry you’re dead,” he allowed, still calm, still
off-hand. “Don’t say that’s a silly reason, we all know it’s silly. But that’s
what happens. And Scylla hated you so
much,
she
couldn’t stand it another minute to be in the same world with you.” Back at the
bed, he drew the two edges of the blanket up and
clear
over Scylla, so that she was cloaked and swaddled where she lay, from her head
to her toes. When he turned back to us again, he still didn’t seem to care a
shuck.

           
“So you two ladies saw her do it?”
he inquired them.

           
“Yes, we saw,” Tarrah quavered out.
“She called us in here to see. She said that she’d been forsaken—been snubbed.”

           
“She said it was John’s fault,”
Alka added on. “And she swallowed whatever was in that bottle, and she shouted
out a curse on John.”

           
Tarrah
shuddered
her shoulders. “It was the most terrible curse I ever heard. What she said
was—”

           
“Shut up, Tarrah!” Harpe pure down
blared at her, and flung up his hand. “Don’t repeat a word of that curse, it
will
double it. Did she curse me, too?”

 
          
“No,
sir,” said Tarrah. “It was only John she spoke against, she wanted to hurt him.
That goes back to the first hour John was here.”

 
          
“That’s
right,” Alka put in. “The first time you talked to him, we were all back in
here together, the three of us. Scylla had some dried leaves. She crumbled them
and blew them in the air and said a spell. It was to call John to come to her
and hear what she had to say.”

 
          
“Hear
what she had to say?” Harpe repeated her. “Here in her room, is that right?
John was to come to her, not me?”

 
          
“I
can't tell what her thought was, but John didn't come,” said Alka. “Scylla was
furious. She spit on the floor because he didn't obey her. That's when she
began to hate him.”

 
          
Maybe
she'd begun before that, I told myself. While Alka talked on, I recollected
something into my mind. I started in to whisper it to myself, under my breath.
Harpe stared at me. “What’s that you say, John?” he asked. “Speak up.”

           
I said the rest of the business out
loud: “. . . I do charge you upon pain and peril of your present and
everlasting damnation that you, neither air other wicked witch, do at air time
hereafter to the end of the world, meddle or make any more, but you let be this
man John in peace and quiet.”

 
          
Harpe
nodded his head at me. “Those words should protect you,” he said. “I know that
spell for warding off the curse of a witch. It's in
The Nine Tomes of Magic.
I have that with the books in there on my
shelf.”

 
          
Where
I'd seen it was in Thompson's book
The
Mysteries and Secrets of Magic
_f
but I didn't see why I'd need to
mention that. All I said was, “I reckoned it was a good enough one to commit to
memory.”

 
          
He
gazed down to where Scylla lay like a log, all wrapped up in her gray blanket.

 
          
“Well,
so I've lost her.” He said it with no more bother in his voice than he’d have
shown if he'd lost a quarter dollar. “She shouldn't have been so hasty.”

 
          
“She
must have been crazy,” I said.

 
          
“Scylla
was always a little crazy,” he returned. “Alka and

 
          
Tarrah
have been more or less sane, but not Scylla/’ He drew him a long breath. “Now,”
he said, “we have to bury her.”

           
“Don’t we have to report this thing
to the courthouse?” I asked.

 
          
“No,
we certainly don’t.” He shook his head hard, from side to side. “That law
doesn’t come up here on
Cry
Mountain
. Alka, Tarrah, will you go to the
storehouse and bring out the spade and mattock? John, you come along with me.”

 
          
All
of us went out of that room where Scylla lay so dead, and along the hall and
out through the main room and the tunnel to the outside. Harpe led me to pace
round under the dark, shadowy trees.

 
          
“No
grave near the stockade anywhere,” he said. “I don’t know what effect a grave
close there might have on those outside. Here, John, this way.”

 
          
He
didn’t speak air word more till he’d led me right close to the big gash where
Cry
Mountain
’s voice waited to be heard. He studied the
ground next to some laurel.

 
          
“Here,”
he said, “this place will do.”

 
          
Yonder
came
Alka and Tarrah to join us. One had a big spade,
the other a mattock with two good grubbing blades on it. Harpe took the spade
and laid it to the mossy ground and measured with it, measured again. He drove
in the edge of the blade all round an oblong in the ground.

 
          
“Six
feet long, I judge, and two wide,” he said to us.
“Big enough
for Scylla and to spare.
John, would you use the mattock?”

 
          
The
mattock—Tarrah held it out to me. I took it in my both hands, a good grip on
it, and set my feet the right way. Up I swung it and brought it down, swoop!
and
slammed it deep into the earth. I heard the pop of a
root I’d cut through. I upped it and swung it again.
Again.
It loosened the ground for Scylla’s grave. As I moved along the side of the
oblong Harpe had marked out, to loosen more, he was behind me with the spade.
He brought up dark, pebbly earth in big chunky jobs. I looked at his big,
bunchy forearms in the short sleeves of his bush jacket. He'd be a right strong
man, you could judge. I wondered myself for about the sixth time, how he'd be
to fight with.

 
          
We
cleared out that six-by-two stretch, a shovelful deep. I picked away again,
beneath where we’d worked the one time. Alka and Tarrah just stood and looked
on, eyes stretched wide in their faces. Deeper I drove the mattock, to make
more loosening for Harpe to shovel out. He was a-sweating at his work, and so
was I, a little bit. We kept on, and kept on a-keeping on. We deepened Scylla’s
grave. Finally, it was near about three feet deep. Harpe stood up and stuck his
shovel in the big heap of dirt and wiped his face with a big white
handkerchief.

 
          
“That
will do,” he decided. “Room enough for her.”

 
          
And
you could be dead certain sure in your mind that not a damn did Ruel Harpe care
for what Scylla had done to
herself
.

 
          
“Come
on, John,” he said to me. “Let’s fetch her out.”

 
          
He
and l went back in and along the hall to where Scylla lay a-waiting to be
fetched out. I slid an arm under her shoulders where she was all wrapped up,
and Harpe took hold of her by the ankles. We lifted her. She wasn’t stiffened
for all that time we’d taken to dig her grave; that thing doctors call rigor
mortis hadn’t truly set in as yet. We carried her out, all the way into the shadowed
open and to the side of the grave. Alka and Tarrah sort of moaned as we lowered
her down to the damp, dark bottom.

 
          
I
smoothed the blanket over her the best I could. Harpe was a-going over to get
his shovel.

 
          
“Wait,”
I said. “Wouldn’t it be all right to say some words over her?”

 
          
“Words?”
he repeated me, still a-holding the shovel in his big hands. And he
grinned
me, like as if we were at a play- party. Plainer
than plain, you could know that he nair thought of this as a funeral, he only
thought of it as a burying, what you might could do for a dead dog or dead
mule.

 
          
“What
sort of words do you mean, John?” he asked.

 
          
“Air
man or woman who dies
should ought
to have some words
said at the grave,” I said to him, and looked him betwixt the eyes to say it.
“I meant some words of comfort for Scylla here.”

 
          
He
wagged his head, and grinned betwixt his mustache and his knife of a beard.
“Why,” he said, “she hated you, and you know it.”

 
          
“Sure
I know it,” I admitted to him, “but I didn’t hate her. Sometimes she pestered
me,
how she looked on me, how she talked, but nair once did
I hate her. She’s dead now and I hope she can have peace, and maybe a chance to
think on what’s truly right and wrong.”

 
          
“Of course, of course.
You believe in a life after death.
You believe in heaven and hell.”

 
          
“Sure
I believe in heaven and hell, the both of them. And I’m here to say, either
which of the two you go to, you’re a-going to be right surprised at who you
meet there.”

 
          
At
that he laughed, laughed a hearty laugh, as at a big joke. “Come now, John,
don’t be sardonic. It doesn’t become you, when you wish to be the man of good
will in this world.” He looked past me. “What’s your thought on the subject,
you two ladies?”

 
          
“I
agree with John,” said Alka, so soft you could barely hear her, and “Yes,” said
Tarrah, no louder than Alka.

 
          
Harpe
snickered all over. “Well, all right,” he said. “Go ahead with your burial
service, John. But I warn you as the personal friend I want to be,
be
careful of what names you use.