Swords and Crowns and Rings (4 page)

She flashed the tense child a look that made Mrs Hanna promise herself she'd give Cushie a jellybean the moment her mother had gone.

‘She's always good,' she protested. ‘Me and Jackie love her, don't we, dotie lamb? So go on now, Mrs Moy, be off with you and that poor baby, and mind you bring good luck home with you.'

It was wonderful how the very sight of fashionable, superior Mrs Moy brought out in Peggy Hanna the coarsest Irish desire to tease.

‘Now then,' she said to Cushie, ‘Jackie's not up yet, as it's Saturday, so you run away upstairs and tell him to come down and we'll all have a dog's breakfast.'

This meant eating out of tins anything handy, bully beef, sardines, apricots. It was mucky and delicious, and one of the little girl's great joys. Clutching the jellybeans, red for her and black for Jackie, she scampered off, already in a daze of happiness and peace.

‘The whole day,' she said.

‘We'll go and find the dwarfs then,' said Jackie. ‘See what a fine day it is on purpose!'

Jackie was always right, and Cushie believed every word he said.

They set off after breakfast. Jackie had not thought to tell his mother where they were going. With no intention of deceit, he had gone into the shop and asked her for provisions for an expedition, easy to carry, for they were going a thousand miles. She gave him walnuts, raisins, two chocolate bars, and a bottle of ginger beer, saying, ‘You'll not be needing lunch, seeing as you're having a picnic. And Jackie, make certain Cushie wears her sunbonnet every minute, for you know how her mother is about freckles.'

The children drank the ginger beer first, for it was easier to carry that way, and set forth. The town was small, and soon they passed the ramshackle shanties on the outskirts. Several people saw them, a quaint pair, the chubby golden-haired girl in the starched red sunhat and the hearty, stout Jackie, rolling along beside her with a seaman's gait.

They stopped beside the train tracks to watch a train go by and, satisfied, crossed the railway bridge and followed the dirt road towards the hills. It was a fine winter's day, but it followed long rain. Puddles lay everywhere, flitting with discs of light.

‘They're dragon scales,' said Jackie.

When the road came to an end, sheep tracks led up the slopes. The sheep had chosen easy grades, and the children climbed quickly. Soon they saw in the sunlight the muddy river showing its intermittent gleam, a serpent of brass.

‘I thought we'd see the sea,' said Cushie.

But the hills were a wall about Kingsland, some far, some near, showing gloomy gullies and abrupt stony fells where the stunted scrub clung like grey and bronze lambswool.

The children had not known their town was so small. It was an islet in the wide valley, a taut thread of railway track connecting it with another, smokier island to the south, Ghinni Junction. Extensive, livid green patches of undrained bog still marked this marshy vale, and as the cloud shadows slid across the landscape they saw a myriad lakelets darkening and shining in a slow blink.

Cushie was not a talker. She stumped along behind Jackie, ever higher and higher, eyes on the track. Supple wet brown leaves stuck to her buttoned boots.

‘Is it far now?'

‘No, not far.'

‘Where do your people live then?'

‘In the stories it's in the mines in the hills because the dwarfs dig gold and make swords and crowns and rings.'

‘Could you make a crown?'

‘I expect so,' he said confidently.

The country was folded and crumpled and scarred from the old workings, the gravel dumps meagrely covered with grass and thorny vines. But the bush had returned to the gullies, tall stringy-barks with trunks black from January fires, mountain casuarinas and swamp grass. Rapid sharp whistles, very shrill, sounded from this cover and the alarm signal was followed by an undulant rag of blinding green that streaked low out of the gully, stretching, condensing, swinging into a tight orbit, scintillant with tiny eyes, breaking up into a chain that billowed over the rise and vanished into the deeper vale beyond.

‘Wild budgies,' said Jackie. ‘Frightened.'

She saw the eagle far above, apparently standing on the tip of one wing. Burning in sunlight, the blue turning the ends of all his feathers to dazzling fuzz, he gave one skelloch of rage or deprivation, and rowed away as slow as a king.

Bringing her gaze back to earth, Cushie said, ‘There's smoke over there.'

The ruined stone building had crumpled in upon itself; it was like an outcrop with a crooked stovepipe at one end.

A little smoke and a thin dirty smell of damp burning wood came from this chimney. Yet it seemed impossible that anything living existed in the derelict corrie, where ancient fragments of machinery mouldered in the wet grass, and rusting metal rods stuck up out of the earth like bristles.

‘Is that where they live, your people?' whispered Cushie. Jackie surveyed the hut doubtfully. Presently there emerged from a hole in its drystone wall an aged Chinese. He seemed rather afraid of them, but gave each of them a dried peach, hard as leather, wherein small worms writhed feebly.

A wire stretched behind the hut. On this rattled the stiffened hides of rabbits. The old Chinese looked anxiously at the children, showed a few dark-brown teeth, and retreated through the hole.

‘He's not them,' said Jackie.

Down the steep gully they saw a creek, noisy and shallow, beggarly willows around it. The children slithered and scrambled down the wounded slopes, where the hide had been ripped off almost a century before. Cushie felt sad and afraid. Her pinafore was yellow and white with clay, her boot clumped with it.

‘Mummy will be angry with me,' she said. At the dismaying thought she began to snivel. But Jackie did not hear. He had reached the creek where it was deepest, dammed between two little rapids.

‘There's fish!' he said. Cushie forgot to cry and slid down towards him. She peered through the clear water, where little fish flinched from place to place, and a brown butterfly drowned within reach of her hand. She scooped it up, but it was soaked and dead. The sun came out again and the children saw small spotted trout suspending themselves in the shallows as the eagle had done in the air, dragging one fin, balanced against the current. They were creatures of stone colours, yellow, cream, and chocolate.

Cushie's sunhat fell into the creek, and the fish vanished. This new catastrophe vividly brought back the image of her mother; she saw her standing there with the strap, and a terrifying look of disapproval and dislike.

‘I want to go home!' she wept and at the thought of what waited for her at home she sobbed all the more. Jackie fished up the red sunhat and wrung it out.

‘No, you don't,' he argued. ‘We haven't found any dwarfs yet and we haven't had lunch.'

Talking persuasively, spreading out the hat on a bush to dry, finding a flat stony patch to be their table, and two tottering mossy green slabs of wood to lean against for chairs, he coaxed the little girl out of her terrors. He cracked the walnuts and gave her the meats, counted the raisins and put her share on a leaf.

‘Is it magic food?' she asked hopefully.

‘It
looks
magic,' said Jackie, unwilling to lie. For in truth he was tired, his short legs ached, his wet shoes had rubbed his heels sorely. Though they had called down many black holes in the ground, many cobwebbed burrows in the cuttings, and got back echoes, the echoes were not answers but mindless jabberings.

The orderly, industrious dwarfs of the stories could not live here.

‘Perhaps they live in other hills,' he confessed. Glumly they ate their repast, sitting on the two old miners' tombs but knowing nothing of them or the wild golden history of the blighted water course.

Cushie said, ‘Listen!'

Above the sound of the wind palavering in the gullies he heard the clanking of a chain, scraping and thumping. The children scrambled to the track again, and followed the sound until they found it.

A terrifying half-creature humped in dusty garments of patterned umber, its lower half showing gleams of bright metal. Near by was a bloody rag of fur. In this the creature, as if ravenous even in its terror, swiped its beak so that fur fibres puffed in the air.

‘It's the eagle, caught in a rabbit trap,' said Jackie. A dreadful excitement filled him, a thrumming was in his ears. To see it close, the frowning insane eyes, the great wings unfolded, thrashing, hooking at the air, sweeping a wide circle in the dust! The blood-stained beak gaped; no sound came out; it slashed at the metal teeth that gripped its leg, at the leg itself. The teeth peeled down the leg a tiny fraction; blood dribbled on the ground.

‘Help it, help it!' screeched Jackie. Cushie joined in. They danced like lunatics, delirious with excitement and horror, screaming and bawling, until suddenly the old Chinaman rushed onto the scene, chattering and laughing and carrying a muddy sack and an axe. He threw the sack over the eagle's head, and chopped off its imprisoned leg. It must have been in mistake, for the man yelped with anger or vexation as the bird tottered a few yards, dragging one wing, scooping helplessly with the other, blood splashing the dust.

Once it got off the ground for a few feet, cannoned into low boughs, and fell. Yet it was determined to live, flapping lopsidedly into the deeper shadow of the trees, the man after it, slashing and shouting.

Cushie lost her head altogether and ran away down the track, shrieking dementedly. Yet her cries did not drown the noises behind, which reminded Jackie of a thrilling, disgusting day long ago when his father had tried to chop the head off the Christmas hen and only wounded it, so that it ran for ages about the yard, shrieking and bubbling and bleeding until it fell dead with its yellow feet up.

They passed the old rabbiter's hut, and skimmed, slipping and sliding and often falling over, down the track. Cushie's white stockings had torn knees; her own knees were skinned. Jackie's shirt was ripped. In a shared hysteria they lay for a while in the shelter of a broken monolith of concrete and squalled and thrashed their limbs.

After that they went exhaustedly down the hillside, taking the wrong sheep track and having to climb through a barbed-wire fence and skirt an old clay-pit half-filled with stinking water where bobbled a bloated monster that turned out to be a thrown-away mattress. Every way they went was shown eventually to be the long way round. Yet they were not lost, for the town was always in sight, lying beneath in a growing lake of winter shadow. The sun still shone on the hilltops and uplands, where wet rock faces fired up like western windows.

‘Why is it day up there and not here?' asked Cushie.

‘I don't know,' said Jackie, ‘but I'll know when I'm seven.'

Now the children were silent; every step Cushie took downwards into the imperceptible gloom of Kingsland made her more afraid of what was to come.

Jackie feared that it was more than five o'clock and Mr Moy would be standing in the shop looking at his gold watch and being mad. His own mother was ofen mad. She flew straight up into the air like a stepped-on chook, and when she came down again all unpleasantness was over. But Jackie was aware that Cushie's parents were different. She was often strapped, and did not seem to know for what reason. She was sent to bed in a dark room, too, and tended to associate the dark with punishment and disgrace.

The children were seen afar off, and met by the police sergeant in a motor-car. Jackie had never been in a car, and was thrilled and exhilarated. But the closer she got to the Hanna shop, the more afraid Cushie became, until at last she was speechless and pale as beeswax.

Mr Moy had, perhaps justly, blamed Mrs Hanna for the whole thing. She had discovered the children's absence when she had dashed back into the kitchen to fix herself a bite to eat between customers. Even then the silly woman had not been alarmed, though the two had never wandered away before. She thought they had gone down the street to visit a friend.

‘Without asking permission?' cried Mr Moy, taken away from his desk, forced to leave the Bank, an unheard of thing, the moment it closed its doors at midday. The face of the manager when the flushed, aproned shopkeeper flapped in, shouting to all that the accountant's daughter had been lost for two hours or more! The woman was idiotic as well as common.

‘They're only six,' cried the common woman, outraged. ‘They don't always remember to ask if they can do this or that! Lord, Mr Moy, can't you remember yourself at that age, silly as a chicken?'

His celluloid chops flushing, Mr Moy ignored the question.

‘Mrs Moy will be home on the six o'clock train,' he stated, ‘and what I shall say to her I cannot imagine.'

‘No use asking me,' snapped Peggy Hanna; ‘and I'll be obliged if you remember that my Jackie is gone missing as well.' She noticed the man's hand trembling as he snapped open his watch once more and added forgivingly, ‘But there, don't worry your head; the youngsters are right as rain. My Jackie is as sensible as a cat when it comes to safety.'

The police sergeant had said the same thing, and as it happened he was right. Still, it was after five when the car pulled up outside with the two dirty, muddy, bloodstained scapegraces in it, too scared to get out. Then Jackie rolled forth, sparkling-eyed, and gratefully Mrs Hanna aimed such a skelp at his ear that he was almost knocked sideways with the wind of it.

‘The devilment of you, taking off and not telling me!'

Then she put him aside and took Cushie in her arms, saying, ‘Don't cry now, lovey, you're home safe.'

‘I lost my sunhat,' blubbered Cushie, ‘and Mummy will be angry with me.'

‘Of course she won't,' said Mrs Hanna soothingly; but looking at the father's face she saw that she was telling lies. So did Jackie.

‘It was all my fault,' he said. ‘I thought of going. It wasn't Cushie. And she was very good and never howled very much even when she fell down the bloody hill.'