Sci Fiction Classics Volume 4 (6 page)

"This is rough enough," said Cotton. "We could have sent for my coach!"

"And lost four hours," said Marburton. "These fellows were idle enough,
and Izaak wanted an especially heavy cart for some reason. Izaak, you've
been most mysterious. We saw neither your tackles nor your baits."

"Suffice to say, they are none too strong nor none too delicate for the
work at hand."

Away from the town there was a touch of coming autumn in the air.

"We might find nothing there," said Marburton, whose spirits had sunk
again. "Or some damnably small salmon."

"Why then," said Izaak, "we'll have Bedfordshire to our own, and all of
September, and perhaps an inn where the smell of lavender is in the sheets
and there are twenty printed ballads on the wall!"

"Hmmph!" said Marburton.

At noon of the next day, they stopped to water the horses and eat.

"I venture to try the trout in this stream," said Percy.

"Come, come," said Cotton. "Our goal is Bedford, and we seek Leviathan
himself! Would you tempt sport by angling here?"

"But a brace of trouts would be fine now."

"Have some more cold mutton," said Marburton. He passed out bread and
cheese and meat all round. The drivers tugged their forelocks to him and
put away their rougher fare.

"How far to Bedford?" asked Cotton of the driver called Humphrey.

"Ten miles, sir, more or less. We should have come farther but what with
the Plague, the roads haven't been worked in above a year."

"I'm bruised through and through," said Marburton.

Izaak was at the stream, relieving himself against a tree.

"Damn me!" said Percy. "Did anyone leave word where I was bound?"

Marburton laughed. "Izaak sent word to all our families. Always
considerate."

"Well, he's become secretive enough. All those people following him
a-angling since his book went back to the presses the third time. Ah,
books!" Percy grew silent.

"What, still lamenting your loss?" asked Izaak, returning. What you need
is singing, the air, sunshine. Are we not Brothers of the Angle, out
a-fishing? Come, back into the charts! Charles, start us off on 'Tom o'
the Town.' "

Cotton began to sing in a clear sweet voice the first stanza. One by one
the others joined, their voices echoing under the bridge. The carts pulled
back on the roads. The driver of the baggage cart sang with them. They
went down the rutted Bedford road, September all about them, the long
summer after the Plague over, their losses, heartaches all gone, all deep
thoughts put away. The horses clopped time to their singing.

Bedford was a town surrounded by villages, where they were stared at when
they went through. The town was divided neatly in two by the doubled-gated
bridge over the River Ouse.

After the carts crossed the bridge, they alighted at the doorway of a
place called the Topsy-Turvy Inn, whose sign above the door was a
world-globe turned ass over teakettle.

The people who stood by the inn were all looking up the road where a small
crowd had gathered around a man who was preaching from a stump.

"I think," said Cotton, as they pulled their baggage from the cart, "that
we're in Dissenter country."

"Of that I'm sure," said Walton. "But once we Anglicans were on the outs
and they'd say the same of us."

One of the drivers was listening to the man preach. So was Marburton.

The preacher was dressed in somber clothes. He stood on a stump at two
cross streets. He was stout and had brown-red hair which glistened in the
sun. His mustache was an unruly wild thing on his lip, but his beard was a
neat red spike on his chin. He stood with his head uncovered, a great worn
clasp Bible under his arm.

"London burned clean through," he was saying. "Forty-three parish churches
razed. Plagues! Fires! Signs in the skies of the sure and certain return
of Christ. The Earth swept clean by God's loving mercy. I ask you sinners
to repent for the sake of your souls."

A man walking by on the other side of the street slowed, listened,
stopped.

"Oh, this is Tuesday!" he yelled to the preacher. "Save your rantings for
the Sabbath, you old jail-bird!"

A few people in the crowd laughed, but others shushed him.

"In my heart," said the man on the stump, "it is always the Sabbath as
long as there are sinners among you."

"Ah, a fig to your damned sneaking disloyal Non-Conformist drivel!" said
the heckler, holding his thumb up between his fingers.

"Wasn't I once as you are now?" asked the preacher. "Didn't I curse and
swear, play at tip-cat, ring bells, cause commotion wherever I went?
Didn't God's forgiving Grace …?"

A constable hurried up.

"Here, John," he said to the stout preacher. "There's to be no sermons,
you know that!" He waved his staff of office. "And I charge you all under
the Act of 13 Elizabeth 53 to go about your several businesses."

"Let him go on, Harry," yelled a woman. "He's got words for sinners."

"I can't argue that. I can only tell you the law. The sheriff's about on
dire business, and he'd have John back in jail and the jailer turned out
in a trice. Come down off the stump, man."

The stout man waved his arms. "We must disperse, friends. The Sabbath
meeting will be at …"

The constable clapped his hands over his ears and turned his back until
the preacher finished giving directions to some obscure clearing in a
woods. The red-haired man stepped down.

Walton had been listening and staring at him, as had the others. Izaak saw
that the man had a bag of his tools of the trade with him. He was
obviously a coppersmith or brazier, his small anvils, tongs, and tap
hammers identifying him as such. But he was no ironmonger, so Walton was
not duty-bound to be courteous to him.

"Damnable Dissenters indeed," said Cotton. "Come, Father Izaak, let's to
this hospitable inn."

A crier appeared at the end of the street. "Town meeting. Town meeting.
All free men of the Town of Bedford and its villages to be in attendance.
Levies for the taking of the Great Fish. Four of the clock in the town
hall."

"Well," said Marburton, "that's where we shall be."

They returned to the inn at dusk.

"They're certainly going at this thing full tilt," said Percy. "Nets,
pikes, muskets."

"If those children had not been new to the shire, they wouldn't have tried
to angle there."

"And wouldn't have been eaten and mangled," said Marburton.

"A good thing the judge is both angler and reader," said Cotton. "Else
Father Walton wouldn't have been given all the morrow to prove our mettle
against this great scaly beast."

"If it have scales," said Marburton.

"I fear our tackle is not up to it," said Percy.

"Didn't Father Walton always say that an angler stores up his tackle
against the day he needs it? I'll wager we get good sport out of this
before it's over."

"And the description of the place! In such a narrow defile the sunlight
touches it but a few hours a day. For what possible reason would children
fish there?"

"You're losing your faith, Marburton. I've seen you up to your whiskers in
the River Lea, snaggling for salmon under a cutbank."

"But I, praise God, know what I'm about."

"I suppose," said Izaak, seating himself, "that the children thought so
too."

They noticed the stout Dissenter preacher had come in and was talking
jovially with his cronies. He lowered his voice and looked toward their
table.

Most of the talk around Walton was of the receding Plague, the
consequences of the Great Fire on the region's timber industry, and other
matters of report.

"I expected more talk of the fish," said Percy.

"To them," said Cotton, "it's all the same. Just another odious county
task, like digging a new canal or hunting down a heretic. They'll be in
holiday mood day after tomorrow."

"They strike me as a cheerless lot," said Percy.

"Cheerless but efficient. I'd hate to be the fish."

"You think we won't have it to gaff long before the workmen arrive?"

"I have my doubts," said Marburton.

"But you always do."

Next morning, the woods became thick and rank on the road they took out of
town. The carts bounced in the ruts. The early sun was lost in the mists
and the trees. The road rose and fell again into narrow valleys.

"Someone is following us," said Percy, getting out his spyglasses.

"Probably a peddler out this way," said Cotton, straining his eyes at the
pack on the man's back.

"I've seen no cottages," said Marburton. He was taking kinks out of his
fishing line.

Percy looked around him. "What a godless-looking place."

The trees were more stunted, thicker. Quick shapes, which may have been
grouse, moved among their twisted boles. An occasional cry, unknown to the
four anglers, came from the depths of the woods. A dull boom, as of a
great door closing, sounded from far away. The horses halted, whinnying,
their nostrils flared.

"In truth," said Walton from where he rested against a cushion, "I feel
myself some leagues beyond Christendom."

The gloom deepened. Green was gone now, nothing but greys and browns met
the eye. The road was a rocky rut. The carts rose, wheels teetering on
stones, and agonizingly fell. Humphrey and the other driver swore great
blazing oaths.

"Be so abusive as you will," said Cotton to them, "but take not the Lord's
name in vain, for we are Christian men."

"As you say." Humphrey tugged his forelock.

The trees reached overhead, the sky was obscured. An owl swept over,
startling them. Something large bolted away, feet drumming on the high
bank over the road.

Percy and Cotton grew quiet. Walton talked, of lakes, streams, of summer.
Seeing the others grow moody, he sang a quiet song. A driver would
sometimes curse.

A droning flapping sound grew louder, passed to their right, veered away.
The horses shied then, trying to turn around in the road, almost upsetting
the carts. They refused to go on.

"We'll have to tether them here," said Humphrey. "Besides, Your Lordship,
I think I see water at the end of the road."

It was true. In what dim light there was, they saw a darker sheen down
below.

"We must take the second cart down there, Charles," said Walton, "even if
we must push it ourselves."

"We'll never make it," said Percy.

"Whatever for?" asked Cotton. "We can take our tackle and viands down
there?"

"Not my tackle," said Walton.

Marburton just sighed.

They pushed and pulled the second cart down the hill; from the front they
kept it from running away on the incline, from the back to get it over
stones the size of barrels. It was stuck.

"I can't go on," said Marburton.

"Surely you can," said Walton.

"Your cheerfulness is depressing," said Percy.

"Be that as it may. Think trout, Marburton. Think salmon!"

Marburton strained against the recalcitrant wheel. The cart moved forward
a few inches.

"See, see!" said Walton. "A foot's good as a mile!"

They grunted and groaned.

They stood panting at the edge of the mere. The black sides of the valley
lifted to right and left like walls. The water itself was weed-choked,
scummy, and smelled of the sewer-ditch. Trees came down to its very edges.
Broken and rotted stumps dotted the shore. Mist rose from the water in
fetid curls.

Sunlight had not yet come to the bottom of the defile. To left and right,
behind, all lay in twisted woody darkness. The valley rose like a hand
around them.

Except ahead. There was a break, with no trees at the center of the cleft.
Through it they saw, shining and blue-purple against the cerulean of the
sky, the far-off Chiltern Hills.

"Those," said a voice behind them, and they jumped and turned and saw the
man with the pack. It was the stout red-haired preacher of the day before.
"Those are the Delectable Mountains," he said.

"And this is the Slough of Despond."

He built a small lean-to some hundred feet from them.

The other three anglers unloaded their gear and began to set it up.

"What, Father Walton? Not setting up your poles?" asked Charles Cotton.

"No, no," said Izaak, studying the weed-clotted swamp with a sure eye.
"I'll let you young ones try your luck first."

Percy looked at the waters. "The fish is most likely a carp or other rough
type," he said. "No respectable fish could live in this mire. I hardly see
room for anything that could swallow a child."

"It is Leviathan," said the preacher from his shelter. "It is the Beast of
Babylon which shall rise in the days before Antichrist. These woods are
beneath his sway."

"What do you want?" asked Cotton.

"To dissuade you, and the others who will come from doing this. It is
God's will these things come to pass."

"Oh, hell and damn!" said Percy.

"Exactly," said the preacher.

Percy shuddered involuntarily. Daylight began to creep down to the mere's
edge. With the light, the stench from the water became worse.

"You're not doing very much to stop us," said Cotton. He was fitting
together an eighteen-foot rod of yew, fir, and hazelwood.

"When you raise Leviathan," said the preacher, "then will I begin to
preach." He took a small cracked pot from his large bag and began to set
up his anvil.

Percy's rod had a butt as thick as a man's arm. It tapered throughout its
length to a slender reed. The line was made of plaited dyed horsehair,
twelve strands at the pole end, tapering to nine. The line was forty feet
long. Onto the end of this he fastened a sinker and a hook as long as a
crooked little finger.

"Where's my baits? Oh, here they are." He reached into a bag filled with
wet moss, pulled out a gob of worms, and threaded seven or eight, their
ends wriggling, onto the hook.