Enchanted Pilgrimage

32

Late in the afternoon of the third day they came on water. The character of the land had changed. The bleak desert of the Blasted Plain had gradually given way to a still dry, but less forbidding, upland. On the evening of the first day they had seen far in the distance the great blue uplift of the Misty Mountains and now, as they went down to the little stream, the mountains stood, perhaps no more than a day away, a great range that climbed into the sky, leaping from the plain without the benefit of foothills.

They had run out of water before noon of the second day, having been able to salvage only a small skin bag of it from the packs the fleeing horses had bucked off. They had spent some futile hours trying to reach the well in the courtyard of the castle, but the way had been blocked by a mass of fallen stone and still-shifting rubble.

The campfire had been lit, and supper was cooking.

"There'll be enough left for breakfast and that is all," said Mary. "We're down to the last of the cornmeal."

"There'll be game up ahead," said Hal. "Rough going, maybe, but we won't starve."

Sniveley came down the hill and hunkered by the fire. "Nothing stirring," he said. "I scouted all about. Not a thing in sight. No tracks, not even old tracks. No tracks of any kind. We're the only living beings that have ever come here. And we shouldn't be here. We should have gone back."

"It was as far back as it was forward," said Gib. "Maybe farther. And there is still the ax we're carrying for the Old Ones."

"The Old Ones," said Sniveley, "if we ever find them, whatever they may be, will take that precious ax of yours and smash our skulls with it."

"Quit your complaining, Sniveley," said Hal. "Sure, we've had tough luck. We lost our horses and most of our supplies, but we came out of all that ruckus at the castle without a scratch, and this is more than we could have reasonably expected."

"Yeah," said Sniveley, "and I suppose that when He Who Broods Upon the Mountain comes down and takes the last stitch off our backs and boots us so hard he leaves the mark of footprints on our rumps, you'll be saying we are lucky that he didn't—"

"Oh, stop it," Mary cried. "Stop this squabbling. We are here, aren't we? We all are still alive. We found water before we suffered from the lack of it and—"

"I got thirsty," Sniveley said. "I don't know about the rest of you, but I got so thirsty I was spitting dust."

Bucket came ambling over to the fire and stopped. He stood there, doing nothing at all.

"I wish," said Gib, "I could figure that one out. He doesn't do a thing. He can't talk, and I'm not too sure he hears."

"Don't forget," said Cornwall, "that he was the one who warned us back there at the castle. If it hadn't been for him, we might have been caught flat-footed…»

"Don't forget, as well," said Hal, "that he carried more than his fair share of the supplies we salvaged. He ran out those ropes he uses for arms and latched onto the packs…"

"If it hadn't been for him," protested Sniveley, "we never would have got into this mess. Them wheels were after him, I tell you. Whatever they might have been, they never would have bothered with us or with that bunch of creeps who were living in the castle. None of us were that important to them. It was either the Chaos Beast or Tin Bucket that was important to them. They were the ones they were out to get."

"If it hadn't been for the wheels," Gib pointed out, "we still would be penned back there in the castle. The wheels scared the Hellhounds off, and we took some roughing up, but it all worked out for the best."

"It's funny," said Oliver, "how we now can talk so easily of the wheels. At the time we were scared out of our wits of them, but now we can talk quite easily of them. Here is something that we didn't understand, something frightening, something entirely outside any previous experience, and yet now we brush off all the mystery of it and talk about the wheels as if they were common things you might come upon at any corner you turned."

"Thing is," said Hal, "there's been too much happening. There has been so much strangeness that we have become numbed to it. You finally get to a point where you suspend all wonder and begin accepting the unusual as if it were everyday. Back there in the world we came from all of us lived quite ordinary lives. Day followed day without anything unusual happening at all, and we were satisfied that nothing ever happened. We were accustomed to nothing ever happening. On this trip we have become so accustomed to strangenesses that we no longer find them too remarkable. We do not question them. Maybe because we haven't the time to question."

"I have been doing a lot of wondering about the wheels," said Cornwall, "and I'm inclined to agree with Sniveley that their target was either the Chaos Beast or Bucket. More likely the Chaos Beast, it seems to me, for they probably did not know, or those who sent them, did not know the Chaos Beast was dead. It would seem unlikely they would have known of Bucket."

"They could have," Sniveley objected. "Somehow they could have been able to calculate the time, if they knew about the Beast, when Bucket was about to hatch."

"Which brings us to the question," said Cornwall, "not only of what the wheels were, but what was the Chaos Beast, and what is Bucket? Is Bucket another Chaos Beast?"

"We don't know what the Chaos Beast looked like," said Gib. "Maybe Bucket is a young Chaos Beast and will change when he gets older."

"Perhaps," said Cornwall. "There is a man at Oxford, a very famous savant, who just recently announced that he had worked out the method by which, through some strange metamorphosis, a worm turns into a butterfly. It is unlikely, of course, that he is right. Most of his fellow savants do not agree with him. He has been the butt of much ridicule because of his announcement. But I suppose he could be right. There are many strange occurrences we do not understand. Maybe his principle is right, and it may be that Bucket is the worm that in time will metamorphose into a Chaos Beast."

"I wish," said Mary, "that you wouldn't talk that way in front of Bucket. As if he were just a thing and not a creature like the rest of us. Just a thing to talk about. He might be able to hear, he might understand what you are saying. If that is so, you must embarrass him."

"Look at Coon," said Oliver. "He is stalking Bucket."

Hal half rose from his sitting position, but Cornwall reached out and grabbed him by the arm. "Watch," he said.

"But Coon…"

"It's all right," said Cornwall. "It's a game they're playing."

The end of one of Bucket's arms had dropped onto the ground, was lying there, the tip of it quivering just a little. It was the quivering tip of the tentacle that Coon was stalking, not Bucket himself. Coon made a sudden rush; the arm tip, at the last moment, flicked out of his reach. Coon checked his rush and pivoted, reaching out with one forepaw, grasping at the tentacle. His paw closed about it and he went over on his back, grabbing with the second forepaw, wrestling the tentacle. Another tentacle extruded and tickled Coon's rump. Coon released his hold on the first tentacle, somersaulted to grab at the second one.

"Why, Bucket's playing with him," Mary gasped. "Just like you'd use a string to play with a kitten. He even let him catch the tentacle."

Hal sat down heavily. "Well, I'll be damned," he said.

"Bucket's human, after all," said Mary.

"Not human," said Cornwall. "A thing like that never could be human. But he has a response to the play instinct, and that does make him seem just a little human."

"Supper's ready," Mary said. "Eat up. We have breakfast left and that is all."

Coon and Bucket went on playing.