Shadowgate

5 – Happy Vale

Just before dawn, Lief was woken by a clamour of shouting, banging and clattering. Horses were snorting. Harness was jingling.

‘What is it?’ he asked sleepily.

‘They are preparing to leave,’ said Barda, throwing aside his blanket and sitting up with a groan.

‘Indeed we are,’ said a sharp voice. ‘And if you intend to come with us, you had better rouse yourselves.’

Rust emerged from the shadows. ‘Bess sent you these,’ she snapped, throwing a cloth bag on the ground. ‘Put them on, and keep them on. The sight of your naked faces offends us as much as your smell.’

She turned on her heel, and left them.

‘I do not think she is very fond of us,’ Barda grinned. He up-ended the bag. Three masks tumbled out.

The first was a massive animal head, striped in black and yellow. The second was smaller and older, but far more exquisitely made. It was a blue-feathered bird head with a yellow beak. The third, the smallest of all, was a shapeless mass of grey fur, with a black nose and bent whiskers.

Barda put on the striped mask and was instantly transformed into a glaring stranger.

He threw the bird mask to Lief. ‘This is yours, I suspect, young Lewin, since you are to be Bess’s songbird,’ he said.

Reluctantly, Lief pulled the blue-feathered mask over his head. To his surprise, he could hear, see and breathe far better than he had expected.

All the same, he felt uneasy. He touched his feathered face and a chill ran down his spine.

Jasmine put on the grey mask. Kree screeched and flew to a higher branch. Filli chittered anxiously.

‘They do not like it,’ Jasmine said sadly. ‘They do not know me.’

Barda burst out laughing. ‘I am not surprised!’ he said. ‘No-one would know you. No-one would know any of us! Why, we could travel the length and breadth of Deltora and never be recognised! This is a fine plan!’

He jumped to his feet and strode off to hitch Otto’s horse to the wagon.

‘I am not so sure,’ Jasmine muttered. ‘But—’

She broke off as an eerie, high-pitched screech floated from the direction of the field.

‘What was that?’ Lief gasped.

‘I do not know,’ Jasmine said, puzzled. Then she shrugged, dismissing the problem from her mind.

‘But in any case, we made Bess no promises,’ she continued. ‘We will stay with the Masked Ones only as long as it suits us.’

Lief nodded unhappily. He could not rid himself of the feeling that somehow he had lost control of his own destiny.

Dawn was breaking as the wagons moved out of the forest and turned onto a rough road that ran beside the mountains.

Only the drivers rode. Everyone else walked beside the wagons, or trailed in a straggling line behind them.

Barda drove Otto’s wagon. Lief and Jasmine trudged beside it. Kree flew high above, keeping them in view but never venturing close enough to be noticed.

The road became smoother and broader, and the wagons picked up speed. In another hour they passed a new sign. The Masked Ones pointed and jeered.

Lief sighed. Plainly Mad Keeth Nose, whoever he was, believed that the king chose to build bridges and roads instead of ordering more food to be grown.

If only I could order the crops to grow strong, and the trees to bear fruit, he thought. If only it were that simple!

Now and again the wagons passed a tiny village. People always came running to stare and wave.

The Masked Ones would wave back. Some would juggle a few coloured balls or play a tune on a pipe. But the wagons kept moving.

‘Why do we not stop?’ Jasmine said, as they passed the fourth such ragged group.

‘It is not worth their while to perform at small places,’ sighed a woman behind them.

They turned to look at her. She was wearing a neatly made ginger cat mask. The eyes behind the mask were dull. Plainly she was one of the ‘bareface hangers-on’ the fox-woman had spoken of with such contempt.

‘How long have you been with the Masked Ones?’ Lief asked, eager to keep the conversation going.

‘My man and I joined them last winter,’ the woman said in a low voice. ‘He does heavy work around the camp. I mend costumes and masks. Make them, too, sometimes, for once I was a fine seamstress.’

Again she sighed. ‘At least we eat every day now, which is more than we did at home. But I am sick of travelling.’

‘What of the mask?’ Lief asked.

‘Oh, I am used to that by now,’ the woman said carelessly. ‘Most of the time I forget I am wearing it.’

She raised her hand to her mask.

‘Even at first, I did not mind it,’ she said slowly. ‘I have no love for what is beneath it. And neither does my man, I am sure, whatever he says. I was branded on my cheek, in the time of the Shadow Lord. Whatever beauty I had is long gone.’

Lief said nothing. For once he was glad of his own mask. It hid the pity he knew his face must show—and what could helpless pity do but make this sad woman even sadder?

By mid afternoon, Lief knew they must be well into opal territory. But clearly they had crossed another border also.

They had left the budding hope of the east behind them. Gradually they had moved into the desolate realm of the Sister of the North.

Thorns tangled on the roadsides. Crops were yellow and stunted. Kree was the only bird in the sky.

Lief felt Jasmine nudging him, and looked up.

The fox-woman stood by the side of the road just ahead. When they reached her, she fell into step beside them.

‘When we arrive in Happy Vale, go straight to Bess’s wagon,’ she said to Lief, her voice totally without expression. ‘Bess wishes your training to begin at once.’

She stepped to the side of the road again and began walking rapidly towards the front of the procession without a backward glance.

Happy Vale turned out to be nothing like its name. The windows of its houses, taverns and shops were filmed with dust. Dead leaves blew in the deserted streets.

The wagons of the Masked Ones creaked down the main road. Eerily, the town clock chimed four.

‘Where are all the people?’ Jasmine whispered.

‘Dead or gone, no doubt,’ the woman in the cat mask muttered. ‘Bess thought that because things had begun to grow again in the east, it would be the same everywhere. She was wrong, it seems. Now, I suppose, we will have to go back the way we have come.’

Her voice was flat and listless, as if she did not care what she did.

If the Masked Ones do decide to turn back, we will have to leave them, Lief thought. Well I, for one, will be glad of it.

The line had slowed to a crawl. Lief and Jasmine craned their necks to see what was happening.

‘There is a noticeboard in the town square,’ Barda called down to them. ‘People are slowing to read it.’

In a few more minutes they had reached the square. The first thing they passed was a fountain, which had been sealed with planks of wood. The tall clock tower rose behind it.

The noticeboard came next. As Lief looked at the notes pinned to it, his heart sank.

All the small ones seemed to speak of a life that was now ended, and a future that was never to be. The much larger notice on the right-hand side dominated them all.

Lief bent his head in an agony of frustration. How many people would die, how many more towns would be abandoned, while he, Barda and Jasmine hid behind masks and dawdled towards their goal?

Travel hidden.

He ground his teeth, but knew that he had to heed Doom’s warning. Secrecy was their most powerful weapon. He had to be patient.

Not long afterwards, they reached a field where wagons were being pulled up into a rough circle.

Masked children of all ages were already scurrying about, collecting sticks for the central fire under the stern eye of the frog-woman.

Rust the fox-woman was standing by the fence, shouting orders at some people who were unloading large red boxes from a covered cart.

Bess’s wagon was on the far side of the field, beneath the overhanging branches of a tree.

‘You had better be off, Lewin,’ Barda said, climbing down from the wagon seat. ‘We will see to things here.’

Reluctantly, Lief started across the field. As he passed the growing wood pile, a small figure carrying a towering bundle of sticks darted heedlessly across his path.

There was no way of avoiding a collision. Lief staggered and the child fell. Sticks flew everywhere.

‘Watch where you are going, bird-head!’ the child shouted angrily.

His small black eyes were sparkling with fury through a grinning, hairy mask. He was the boy Lief had noticed the night they were captured. The boy wearing the mask of a…

… a polypan, Lief realised, remembering the strange, thieving beast he and his companions had met on the River Tor.

The polypan-boy scrambled to his feet and began gathering his fallen sticks.

‘Now I will be the last of all Plug’s orphans to bring fuel for the fire,’ he grumbled. ‘That means I will be last in the line for food. And it is all your fault!’

‘Zerry!’ the frog-woman roared. ‘What are you playing at, you lazy young hound?’

The boy’s head jerked around. Without waiting to pick up the rest of the sticks, he shot away towards the wood pile.

‘It was not me, Plug!’ Lief heard him shouting as he ran. ‘It was his fault! He tripped me!’

Lief hurried on, wondering how many of the children in the camp were orphans, taken in by the Masked Ones to be trained in their ways. Quite a number, if Zerry’s words made sense.

He reached Bess’s wagon and moved under the tree to the back.

The door was closed. A lumpy sack was propped against the wall beside it. The sack smelled very strongly of rotten fruit. Here and there a thin white stem poked through the rough cloth.

Curiously, Lief pinched off the tip of one of the stems and squinted at it. It was not a stem, he thought, but a root. Some sort of crop. And, by its smell, it was from the field beside the forest.

He remembered how rough the ground had felt when he was lying in the field. That was because the Masked Ones had been digging there, he thought. Digging there for five whole days!

He saw that a large, empty iron pot hung over a pile of wood nearby. Bess was planning to make soup from the white roots, it seemed. Lief wrinkled his nose at the thought of it.

He moved to the door and raised his hand to knock. Then, with a shock, he heard voices coming from inside the wagon. He pressed his ear against the door, and listened intently.

‘Yar hart as raling yar had, Bess!’ hissed a voice he recognised as that of Quill, the eagle-man.

‘Ta bay was lad ta as!’ Bess growled back. ‘Ta sayns are all taya!’

The boy was led to us, Lief translated to himself. The signs are all there!

‘Sayns!’ snarled Quill. ‘Trackary, ya mayn! Can ya nat say at, Bess? Ta kang chays tas bay ta spay an as bacas ha laks layk Bede!’

… Trickery, you mean! Can you not see it, Bess? The king chose this boy to spy on us because he looks like Bede…

Yes, that is just what a tyrant king would do, Lief thought uneasily. He would know that Bess was more likely to accept someone who looked like her lost son.

But why did the Masked Ones fear spies at all? What were they hiding?

‘Ya ar wrang, Quill,’ he heard Bess say coldly. ‘Na, plays layv ma. Ha wal ba haya an a marnant.’

‘Haya?’ the eagle-man thundered. ‘Bat, Bess, ha wall say…’

Lief’s heart thumped. ‘See what?’ he whispered. ‘What will I see?’

‘Ha wal nat naw wat ha as saying,’ snapped Bess.

He will not know what he is seeing…

The door of the wagon began to open. Swiftly Lief jumped back, then took two rapid steps forward, as if he was just arriving. Quill stepped out of the wagon and they almost bumped into one another.

‘Oh—I beg your pardon!’ Lief stammered.

The eagle man stared, then brushed passed him without a word and strode away. It was impossible to tell whether he had been deceived.

‘Ah, Lewin!’ Bess called from the dimness of the wagon. Suddenly her voice was warm and welcoming. ‘Come in!’