The Waterstone (16 page)

Tad took a deep breath.

Can the hawk be trusted?
he asked the old man silently.
Will he truly do as he says?

Look and see
, Witherwood answered in the same way.

Tad moved his Eye, searching for the hawk’s mind. There. A strange ripple of being. It felt, as he drew closer, like blue wind. Clean and clear, threaded with a black vein of sorrow — a mate, lost — but no deceit there, no falsehood.
Honest and honorable
, Tad thought.

He had his answer.

He moved closer to the great bird, reached up, and laid his hand on the tip of the longest wing feather.

“Could you take us to Stone Mountain?” he asked.

“In three hours, as the hawk soars,” the harsh voice answered. “If you can cling to my back, little brother, I shall take you to the Burrowers and bring you safely home again.”

“He can take us to the mountains,” Tad explained to the others. He found it hard to remember they could not understand the hawk’s words. “To the Burrowers, he said.”

“The Burrowers . . .,” Voice said. “He must mean the Diggers. They’ve built whole towns there, underground, in huge rooms whittled out of rock.” He paused, looking worried.

“Diggers are strange,” Voice said.

Birdie came to stand beside Tad.

“If you’re going to the Mountains,” she said in a determined voice, “I’m going with you.”

She was wearing her snapping-turtle look. Tad’s heart sank. He couldn’t let Birdie go along. Who knows what he might find at Stone Mountain? It might be dangerous. If anything happened to Birdie, he would never forgive himself.

“No, you’re not,” he said. “You stay here, Birdie, where it’s safe. And take care of Blackberry and Pippit.”

Birdie ignored him.

“Voice can look after Blackberry,” she said.

“No, I can’t,” said Voice. “Weasels give me crawly feelings.”

“And Pippit can stay with them,” Birdie continued.

Pippit gave a horrified squawk that seemed to say that weasels gave him crawly feelings too.

Birdie stuck out her lower lip and looked more obstinate than ever.

“You’ll all be fine,” she said loudly. “The Sagamore before, the one in Witherwood’s book —
he
didn’t go to the Mountains alone. He took friends with him. You wouldn’t want Tad to go all by himself, would you?”

“Yes,” said Tad.

“No, of course not,” said Voice at the same time.

The hawk broke in, its harsh voice tinged with amusement. “This shouting one is your mate?”

Tad shook his head vigorously. “She’s my sister,” he said. “My younger sister, Birdie. She’s only nine. She wants to go with us.”

“Your nest-mate,” the hawk said. He nodded approvingly. “A female as valiant as the males. It is a trait much prized among the Families.” His voice dropped and saddened. “Such was my mate, Kakaara, Lady of the High Air, Wind of my Heart.” The hawk fell silent for a moment. Then he stretched his neck and flexed his broad wings. Banded feathers rippled. “I can easily carry two,” he said. “Or three or four. You groundlings are as small as the veriest mice.”

It was an unfortunate comparison. Tad decided not to repeat it.

“All right,” he said ungraciously to Birdie. “He says he can take both of us. But if you go, you can’t change your mind in the middle, you know. You’ll have to go all the way. We’re not going to turn around halfway there to bring you back.”

“As if I’d want you to,” Birdie snapped, glaring.

The hawk gave a hoarse caw that might have been a chuckle.

“Truly a young hawk,” he said.

Hastily, preparations were made for the journey. Voice assembled a picnic-packet of food, wrapped in a fresh green leaf and pinned with bent thorns. Birdie explained (several times) to Blackberry that she would be back soon and that Voice would look after him in her absence. She made Voice scratch Blackberry behind the ears and persuaded the weasel to roll over on his back so that Voice could tickle his stomach. Blackberry soon became entranced with his new friend and developed a tendency to frisk and to poke Voice playfully in the stomach with his nose.

“Nice weasel,” Voice said unenthusiastically. He was trying to maneuver a bench between himself and Birdie’s pet. “Good Blackberry.”

Pippit, however, refused to be left behind. He croaked piteously, clinging first to Birdie and then to Tad, and then flinging himself flat in the dry grass and kicking, a picture of froggish misery.

“We might as well take him,” Birdie said. “Besides, we might need a watchfrog. Remember how he warned us about the Grellers.”

Pippit stopped kicking and sat up, rolling his eyes hopefully.

“I suppose you’re right,” Tad said in an exasperated voice. He turned on the suddenly revived Pippit. “But you behave yourself, Pippit. Don’t go wandering off. And don’t
hop
on people all the time.”

Pippit subsided into the grass, blinking rapidly, clearly trying to look like the model of a well-behaved frog.

They scrambled onto the hawk’s back, with the help of a twig ladder thoughtfully produced by Voice, and perched, one behind the other, on the bird’s broad shoulders, settling themselves between his folded wings.

Even now, Tad thought with a churning feeling in his stomach, they seemed awfully high above the ground. Sitting there, they were as high as Witherwood’s stone chimney.

The hawk roused, flexing his wings. Beneath their bare legs, Tad and Birdie could feel the shifting ripple of powerful muscles.

“We fly, Sagamore,” the great bird said.

“He’s going, Birdie,” Tad said over his shoulder. “Hang on. And hang on to Pippit.”

He raised a hand in farewell to Voice and Witherwood. They were standing close together in the cottage dooryard, Witherwood leaning on his wooden crutch. As Tad watched, Witherwood’s hands moved, spelling out a message. “Farewell!” Voice called up to them. “My master wishes you safe journey!

Good fortune, Sagamore
, Witherwood spoke in Tad’s mind.

“Take good care of Blackberry!” Birdie shouted.

At the sound of his name, the weasel pricked up his ears. Then he kicked up his hind legs delightedly and butted Voice in the stomach. Voice’s lips formed the word
Oof
, and he sat down without meaning to, heavily.

There was a rustle of unfurling feathers, then a violent buffet of wind struck them as the hawk leaped into the air. Tad felt as if the bottom had dropped abruptly out of his stomach. The ground fell dizzily away. The children, peering over the hawk’s shoulders, could see Witherwood and Voice waving beneath them, faces upturned to watch them go.

The wavers on the ground grew smaller and smaller. Soon they were only brown dots at the edge of a clearing the size of a dinner plate. Then they were gone altogether, lost in a great sweep of browns and faded greens. Tad caught his breath. He had dreamed all his life of the world beyond the pond, but he had never dreamed of anything as immense — as magnificent — as this. The world was far vaster than he had ever or could ever have imagined. From the air, the land spread out endlessly in all directions, rising and falling, fading bluely into distant horizons, farther than his eyes could see. He had never in his life felt so small and insignificant. He clutched the hawk’s feathers tighter and felt Birdie’s hands behind him, gripping his shoulders.

The world below was dry. Tad could see it, even at this great height. What should have been rich summer greens were sickly pale. The forest was striped and splotched with brown and yellow and ashy gray. Some trees thrust naked branches out of the forest canopy: skeletal, leafless, dead. Far away, in the distant east, an ominous column of smoke was rising. Tad remembered what the Dryad had said about forest fires.

The bird climbed higher and higher, wings beating strongly in a powerful rhythm. Then the hawk’s flight leveled. Now he sped smoothly through the air, sometimes gliding, wings outstretched, like a paddler before a carrying current of water. Wind whipped through the children’s hair. The red-brown feathers brushing their arms and legs were beautifully soft and smelled sweetly of dried grass and pine needles. Tad had never seen the sky so close, so brilliantly blue. He felt as if he could reach up and touch it and that if he did, it would be as smooth and cool as the inside of a shell or the surface of a rain-washed stone.

The hawk flung itself onto a rising updraft of air and soared. He let out a long keening cry. Tad realized that the bird was singing — or rather chanting — a battle song to the drumbeat rhythm of the wind.

I am the Harrier.

I am the Hunter.

Cloud-rider, Wind-rider
,

Lord of Air.

I am the Death-dealer.

I am the Blood-breaker.

Storm-rider, Rain-rider
,

Lord of Air.

There was a lot more like that, all rather boastful, and somewhat monotonous after a while. The repetitive beat was soothing. Bah-bah-bah, bah-bah-bah, Lord of Air. Tad’s eyelids drooped, and he began to feel sleepy. He must have even dozed a bit, for he jerked awake suddenly to find that the chant had ended. A long chain of mountains now lay before them in the distance. One loomed taller than the rest, its lofty peak silvered with unmelted snow.

“Stone Mountain,” the hawk said.

The mountain for which the hawk was heading was shaped like a swimming fish. It had a high humped back with a sheer rocky ridge running along the very top of it like a dorsal fin; then it trailed sinuously away to the south, curving gracefully like a fish’s powerful tail. A bare white outcropping on the mountainside marked the fish’s eye, and a pair of ragged hillocks looked a bit like tail fins.

“We could call it Fisher Mountain,” Tad said over his shoulder. He had to shout to be heard over the rushing of the wind. “Maybe it’s a good omen, Birdie.”

Birdie shouted something back, but the wind whisked away her words.

The hawk was preparing to land. He slowed and began to lose altitude, braking dexterously with twists and tilts of its broad flight feathers. Gradually, as the children watched, objects on the ground came into focus. Shapes of trees emerged from the blurred sameness beneath them; then the outlines of branches and leaves. They dropped lower, moving in long lazy circles, down and down. Finally, with a sharp upward flip of his tail, the bird settled to the ground. His talons made a scraping sound on the rock-strewn surface.

“There.” The hawk gestured with his beak, pointing out the direction. “That way can be found the Burrowers. They may be able to lead you to what you seek.”

Tad and Birdie, clinging to feathers, slid cautiously down from the bird’s back. It felt strange to be standing on solid ground again after the swift flight through the upper air. Pippit sprang incautiously after them, changed his mind in midair, gave a panic-stricken squawk, and landed with a thud next to Tad’s feet.

“I will stay here at the edge of the trees and wait for you,” the hawk said. “The Burrowers are no friends of the Families, and I have no wish to face their flying arrows. I will be here when you return. You have only to climb the path and circle behind the boulders, and you will reach the door to their dens.”

The hawk shook his wings fussily and began to preen, smoothing and rearranging his feathers one by one with his beak.

“We’ll be as quick as we can,” Tad said.

The bird paused in his grooming. “A safe wind beneath you, Sagamore,” he said. He motioned with his head toward Birdie. “Have a care for the young hawk.”

The path was narrow and dusty, and rough with gravel, and once the children left the shelter of the trees, the stones were uncomfortably hot under their bare feet. Tad, glancing back over his shoulder, saw the hawk staring after them, motionless and almost invisible in the dappled sunlight at the edge of the forest. The bird nodded once, encouragingly, and blinked one amber eye. Then Tad, Birdie, and Pippit rounded an immense granite boulder, and Tad lost sight of him.

The path wove in and out through a field of huge stones that looked as if they had been dropped by giant children playing a giant game of pebblehop. There were so many turns and twists and backtrackings that Tad lost all sense of direction. It felt as if they were going around in circles. He was hot. And his feet were beginning to hurt. Then Pippit suddenly stopped dead in the middle of the path and began to croak unhappily.

“He’s tired,” Birdie said to Tad.

She prodded the frog with her toes. “We can’t stop
now
, Pippit.”

But Pippit refused to budge. He hunkered down stubbornly, blinking rapidly, and making agitated little wheezing noises.

“What’s the matter?” asked Tad.

“He won’t go,” Birdie said. “Come
on
, Pippit.
Move.
“

Pippit hunched his head into his shoulders and pretended to be a rock.

“There’s something wrong,” Birdie said. “There’s something he doesn’t like up ahead.”

Pippit whimpered.

“We
have
to go on,” Tad said.

“It’s all right, Pippit,” Birdie said. “You’ve warned us. ‘The most dangerous snake is the one you don’t know is there.’ That’s what Father says, Pippit. If you’re expecting danger, then you’re prepared.”