The Neverending Story (9 page)

  ire hunger and thirst pursued Atreyu. It was two days since he had left the Swamps of Sadness, and since then he had been wandering through an empty rocky wilderness. What little provisions he had taken with him had sunk beneath the black waters with Artax. In vain, Atreyu dug his fingers into the clefts between stones in the hope of finding some little root, but nothing grew there, not even moss or lichen.

At first he was glad to feel solid ground beneath his feet, but little by little it came to him that he was worse off than ever. He was lost. He didn’t even know what direction he was going in, for the dusky grayness was the same all around him. A cold wind blew over the needlelike rocks that rose up on all sides, blew and blew.

Uphill and downhill he plodded, but all he saw was distant mountains with still more distant ranges behind them, and so on to the horizon on all sides. And nothing living, not a beetle, not an ant, not even the vultures which ordinarily follow the weary traveler until he falls by the wayside.

Doubt was no longer possible. This was the Land of the Dead Mountains. Few had seen them, and fewer still escaped from them alive. But they figured in the legends of Atreyu’s people. He remembered an old song:

Better the huntsman

Should perish in the swamps,

For in the Dead Mountains

There is a deep, deep chasm,

Where dwelleth Ygramul the Many,

The horror of horrors.

Even if Atreyu had wanted to turn back and had known what direction to take, it would not have been possible. He had gone too far and could only keep on going. If only he himself had been involved, he might have sat down in a cave and quietly waited for death, as the Greenskin hunters did. But he was engaged in the Great Quest: the life of the Childlike Empress and of all Fantastica was at stake. He had no right to give up.

And so he kept at it. Uphill and down. From time to time he realized that he had long been walking as though in his sleep, that his mind had been in other realms, from which they had returned none too willingly.

Bastion gave a start. The clock in the belfry struck one. School was over for the day.

He heard the shouts and screams of the children running into the corridors from the classrooms and the clatter of many feet on the stairs. For a while there were isolated shouts from the street. And then the schoolhouse was engulfed in silence.

The silence descended on Bastian like a great heavy blanket and threatened to smother him. From then on he would be all alone in the big schoolhouse—all that day, all that night, there was no knowing how long. This adventure of his was getting serious.

The other children were going home for lunch. Bastian was hungry too, and he was cold in spite of the army blankets he was wrapped in. Suddenly he lost heart, his whole plan seemed crazy, senseless. He wanted to go home, that very minute. He could just be in time. His father wouldn’t have noticed anything yet. Bastian wouldn’t even have to tell him he had played hooky. Of course, it would come out sooner or later, but there was time to worry about that. But the stolen book? Yes, he’d have to own up to that too.

In the end, his father would resign himself as he did to all the disappointments Bastian had given him. Anyway, there was nothing to be afraid of. Most likely his father wouldn’t say anything, but just go and see Mr. Coreander and straighten things out.

Bastian was about to put the copper-colored book into his satchel. But then he stopped.

“No,” he said aloud in the stillness of the attic. “Atreyu wouldn’t give up just because things were getting a little rough. What I’ve started I must finish. I’ve gone too far to turn back. Regardless of what may happen, I have to go forward.”

He felt very lonely, yet there was a kind of pride in his loneliness. He was proud of standing firm in the face of temptation.

He was a little like Atreyu after all.

A time came when Atreyu really could not go forward. Before him lay the Deep Chasm.

The grandiose horror of the sight cannot be described in words. A yawning cleft, perhaps half a mile wide, twined its way through the Land of the Dead Mountains. How deep it might be there was no way of knowing.

Atreyu lay on a spur at the edge of the chasm and stared down into darkness which seemed to extend to the innermost heart of the earth. He picked up a stone the size of a tennis ball and hurled it as far as he could. The stone fell and fell, until it was swallowed up in the darkness. Though Atreyu listened a long while, he heard no sound of impact.

There was only one thing Atreyu could do, and he did it. He skirted the Deep Chasm. Every second he expected to meet the “horrors of horrors”, known to him from the old song. He had no idea what sort of creature this might be. All he knew was that its name was Ygramul.

The Deep Chasm twisted and turned through the mountain waste, and of course there was no path at its edge. Here too there were abrupt rises and falls, and sometimes the ground swayed alarmingly under Atreyu’s feet. Sometimes his path was barred by gigantic rock formations and he would have to feel his way, painfully, step by step, around them. Or there would be slopes covered with smooth stones that would start rolling toward the Chasm as soon as he set foot on them. More than once he was within a hairbreadth of the edge.

If he had known that a pursuer was close behind him and coming closer by the hour, he might have hurried and taken dangerous risks. It was that creature of darkness which had been after him since the start of his journey. Since then its body had taken on recognizable outlines. It was a pitch-black wolf, the size of an ox. Nose to the ground, it trotted along, following Atreyu’s trail through the stony desert of the Dead Mountains. Its tongue hung far out of its mouth and its terrifying fangs were bared. The freshness of the scent told the wolf that its prey was only a few miles ahead.

But suspecting nothing of his pursuer, Atreyu picked his way slowly and cautiously.

As he was groping through the darkness of a tunnel under a mountain, he suddenly heard a noise that he couldn’t identify because it bore no resemblance to any sound he had ever heard. It was a kind of jangling roar. At the same time Atreyu felt that the whole mountain about him was trembling, and he heard blocks of stone crashing down its outer walls. For a time he waited to see whether the earthquake, or whatever it might be, would abate. Then, since it did not, he crawled to the end of the tunnel and cautiously stuck his head out.

And then he saw: An enormous spider web was stretched from edge to edge of the Deep Chasm. And in the sticky threads of the web, which were as thick as ropes, a great white luckdragon was struggling, becoming more and more entangled as he thrashed about with his tail and claws.

Luckdragons are among the strangest animals in Fantastica. They bear no resemblance to ordinary dragons, which look like loathsome snakes and live in deep caves, diffusing a noxious stench and guarding some real or imaginary treasure. Such spawn of chaos are usually wicked or ill-tempered, they have batlike wings with which they can rise clumsily and noisily into the air, and they spew fire and smoke.

Luckdragons are creatures of air, warmth, and pure joy. Despite their great size, they are as light as a summer cloud, and consequently need no wings for flying. They swim in the air of heaven as fish swim in water. Seen from the earth, they look like slow lightning flashes. The most amazing thing about them is their song. Their voice sounds like the golden note of a large bell, and when they speak softly the bell seems to be ringing in the distance. Anyone who has heard this sound will remember it as long as he lives and tell his grandchildren about it.

But the luckdragon Atreyu saw could hardly have been in a mood for singing. His long, graceful body with its pearly, pink-and-white scales hung tangled and twisted in the great spider web. His bristling fangs, his thick, luxuriant mane, and the fringes on his tail and limbs were all caught in the sticky ropes. He could hardly move. The eyeballs in his lionlike head glistened ruby-red.

The splendid beast bled from many wounds, for there was something else, something very big, that descended like a dark cloud on the dragon’s white body. It rose and fell, rose and fell, all the while changing its shape. Sometimes it resembled a gigantic long-legged spider with many fiery eyes and a fat body encased in shaggy black hair; then it became a great hand with long claws that tried to crush the luckdragon, and in the next moment it changed to a giant scorpion, piercing its unfortunate victim with its venomous sting.

The battle between the two giants was fearsome. The luckdragon was still defending himself, spewing blue fire that singed the cloud-monster’s bristles. Smoke came whirling through the crevices in the rock, so foul-smelling that Atreyu could hardly breathe. Once the luckdragon managed to bite off one of the monster’s long legs. But instead of falling into the chasm, the severed leg hovered for a time in mid-air, then returned to its old place in the black cloud-body. And several times the dragon seemed to seize one of the monster’s limbs between its teeth, but bit into the void.

Only then did Atreyu notice that the monster was not a single, solid body, but was made up of innumerable small steel-blue insects which buzzed like angry hornets. It was their compact swarm that kept taking different shapes.

This was Ygramul, and now Atreyu knew why she was called “the Many”.

He sprang from his hiding place, reached for the Gem, and shouted at the top of his lungs: “Stop! In the name of the Childlike Empress, stop!”

But the hissing and roaring of the combatants drowned out his voice. He himself could barely hear it.

Without stopping to think, he set foot on the sticky ropes of the web, which swayed beneath him as he ran. He lost his balance, fell, clung by his hands to keep from falling into the dark chasm, pulled himself up again, caught himself in the ropes, fought free and hurried on.

At last Ygramul sensed that something was coming toward her. With the speed of lightning, she turned about, confronting Atreyu with an enormous steel-blue face. Her single eye had a vertical pupil, which stared at Atreyu with inconceivable malignancy.

A cry of fear escaped Bastian.

A cry of terror passed through the ravine and echoed from side to side. Ygramul turned her eye to left and right, to see if someone else had arrived, for that sound could not have been made by the boy who stood there as though paralyzed with horror.

Could she have heard my cry? Bastion wondered in alarm. But that’s not possible.

And then Atreyu heard Ygramul’s voice. It was very high and slightly hoarse, not at all the right kind of voice for that enormous face. Her lips did not move as she spoke. It was the buzzing of a great swarm of hornets that shaped itself into words.

“A Twolegs,” Atreyu heard. “Years upon years of hunger, and now two tasty morsels at once! A lucky day for Ygramul!”

Atreyu needed all his strength to keep his composure. He held the Gem up to the monster’s one eye and asked: “Do you know this emblem?”

“Come closer, Twolegs!” buzzed the many voices. “Ygramul doesn’t see well.”

Atreyu took one step closer to the face. The mouth opened, showing innumerable glittering feelers, hooks, and claws in place of a tongue.

“Still closer,” the swarm buzzed.

He took one more step, which brought him near enough to distinguish the innumerable steel-blue insects which whirled around in seeming confusion. Yet the face as a whole remained motionless.

“I am Atreyu,” he said. “I have come on a mission from the Childlike Empress.”