Victims of Nimbo (7 page)

“In love? What does that mean?”

Both girls looked at her with shock. Then, “You don’t know what it means to be in love?” Abbey exclaimed.

“What does it mean?”

Both Sarah and Abbey tried to explain what courtship was. But it was a hopeless situation. Enid seemingly could not grasp it.

Finally she asked with a puzzled look on her face, “So in your world a young man will come with gifts and sing songs just in order to get a female to be his?”

“Yes,” Sarah said firmly. “And that’s the way it could be here.”

“No. That will never be! All a man has to do if he wants a female, is simply to tell the king. And the king, if he likes the man, will give her to him.”

“You’re not a piece of fish to be given away!” Abbey cried. “Don’t you see that, Enid?”

The two girls struggled on but seemed to make little headway. Finally Abbey threw up her hands. “This is going to be harder than I thought.”

“Yes, it is,” Sarah agreed.

Enid kept looking at the two girls with wonder. “It must be very different from where you come from. I can’t even imagine such a place. And Teanor would never think of me as an equal. All he would do is allow me to serve him.”

Well, we’re going to change that
, Sarah thought but did not speak it.

All that morning, the girls wandered about Cloud Land. They were amazed at the way the Cloud People had adjusted to such a strange environment. They grew their own vegetables, and they also raised a small number of birds kept in cages. They were like pigeons, only larger. These they used for food. They also had small herds of goats, which they used for milk and which they slaughtered from time to time for fresh meat.

They both noticed that none of the men did any work at all. The women cared for the vegetables, killed the birds, did the cooking, and washed the clothes.

“Maybe we’ll free some slaves while we’re here,” Sarah said with determination. “We’re going to try.”

It was later in the day when Teanor came along. “The king will receive you.” He looked over toward Enid, who nodded her head and curtsied to him. “Hello, Enid,” he said. “Our clothes need washing.”

“Yes, Teanor. I will see to it.”

“Did you ever think of washing your own clothes, Teanor?” Abbey asked, staring at him.

“Men don’t wash clothes. Women do that,” Teanor said. “Come along.”

Sarah was seething inside but knew that this was not the time to argue.

Teanor ushered the girls to the palace, and soon they were standing before the king and Prince Jere.

“The men have not come,” the king said accusingly.

“It’s a hard journey, sire,” Sarah said quickly. “And the way is new to them. But I have decided that we will not wait for them.”

At that, King Celevorn gave her a puzzled look. “What will you do?” Sarah had formulated a plan the previous night as she lay tossing on her mat. She had thought it over this morning and decided that something had to be done at once. There was no way to know when the boys would come back from their hunting trip, and there was no way to know how long it would take them to follow the twisted path that led to the city in the clouds.

“I have decided to go to the Earth Dwellers myself.”

The prince gasped, and then he shook his head.
“You can’t do that, Sarah. They will make a slave out of you!”

“Or else sacrifice you to Nimbo,” the king said sternly. “Whatever possessed you to think of such a crazy thing? Just like a woman!”

Sarah felt her face flush. She wanted to spit out something in anger but managed to control herself. “I’m going to talk to Chief Maroni. We don’t know that he won’t listen to reason.”

“Reason? That man knows nothing of reason!” Celevorn exclaimed. “The way I understand it, he is totally under the power of Nomus, the high priest.”

“He used to be a good man from all we hear,” Prince Jere admitted. “But that priest has put a spell on him.”

“In any case, it would be suicide for you to go,” the king snapped.

Sarah drew herself up to her full height. “I am the servant of Goél. He has sent us into dark and dangerous situations before, and he has never failed us.”

“Goél is not here!” the king exclaimed.

“But I am here, and I am his servant! I will leave at once. If you would make me a map so that I may find the village of the Earth Dwellers, I would appreciate it.”

King Celevorn eyed Sarah as if she had lost her mind. “You will not need a map,” he said bitterly.

“Why not?”

“Because you will be caught by their sentinels. Don’t you understand, girl? We rarely dare go down from the trees anymore for fear of being caught. They cannot climb the trees, and that is all that saves us. But once one of our people falls into their hands, they are dead to us.”

Sarah Collingwood’s courage sometimes faltered, but it did not now. She lifted her chin and said, “King Celevorn, I will show you that a female has courage. I will leave at once, and we will see what a girl can do.”

Jere grinned broadly. “I shall write a song about that.”

Sarah knew a sudden moment of panic, but she carefully concealed it. “I will leave at once,” she repeated. “As soon as I have checked my weapons.”

     After the two girls were gone, the king muttered, “It will be the Six Sleepers from now on.”

“You think the other one will not go with her?”

“She didn’t say anything about that, so I doubt it. Well, we can do nothing but wait for the warriors to arrive. After all, she’s only a girl.”

S
arah—Abbey? Where are you?”

Josh entered the house eagerly, calling for the two girls as he came. The boys’ trip had taken longer than he had thought it would. Still, it had taken him almost four days just to get over his irritation with Sarah. He had not slept well, either, because his problem with her was troubling him.

On the way back, he’d even said to Wash, rather shamefacedly, “I haven’t been very wise about this trip, Wash. We should never have left the girls alone.”

Wash nodded. “I agree to that,” he said. “Besides, I hate to see you quarreling with Sarah. You two are the oldest friends of any of us.”

So as Josh burst into the house, he was firmly determined to apologize, something always hard for him. But only silence greeted his calls.

The others filed in, and Reb said, “They’re not here? I wonder where they can be.”

“Out hunting, probably,” Dave said. “Or maybe washing their hair down at the brook.”

Jake, however, saw a piece of paper tacked to the wall. “It looks like they left us a note,” he said. “See what it says, Josh.”

Josh crossed the room and plucked the paper from the wall. He did not read it at once, though, for he was looking at a second paper that was tacked under it. “Why, it’s a map,” he said.

“A map of what?” Dave asked.

“Well, ain’t that a pretty come-off!” Reb groaned. “Those girls off on some kind of adventure to someplace we never heard of—and without us.”

Josh’s conscience struck him hard then. “We should have been here,” he muttered grimly. “It’s all my fault.”

“Where
is
that place that they’ve gone to?” Dave asked.

“The Cloud People. Let’s see if we can make any sense out of this map.”

He lay the other paper flat on a table, and the boys all gathered around it. They studied the map, trying to understand it, and finally Reb exclaimed, “That trail’s as crooked as a snake!”

“It sure is.” Wash had a worried look on his face. “It goes through all kinds of woods. How we going to follow this?”

“They probably don’t have signposts up, either,” Jake said.

“Well, we’ve got to go anyway,” Dave put in. “It would have been better if we had stayed here in the first place.”

Josh took his rebuke silently. “Get your things together,” he said. “Let’s make sure we have all our weapons and all the food we can carry. This is going to be a rough journey.”

     “Well, I swan!” Reb gasped. “I never saw it rain like this.” His tall cowboy hat was soaked, and water was pouring off the brim in a torrent. His shirt and jeans were sopping as were those of all the other boys.

They had been marching for two days and had made good time until the rain started. Now they were wading through mud that sucked at their feet and made the going almost impossible.

“Feels like the start of a worldwide flood,” Wash gasped. His own floppy hat was pulled down over his ears, and he looked small and miserable, which he probably was.

“How we going to cook anything in this mess?” Dave complained. “We couldn’t build a fire in a million years. Everything’s soaking wet.”

“We’ll just have a cold meal and march on,” Josh said.

Reb shook his head sadly. “There’s not even a trail to follow anymore, Josh. This rain’s washed out all the footprints. All we’ve got is that map.”

“Well, let’s follow it,” Josh said. “At least we know we haven’t gotten off so far. Those two twin trees there—that’s one of the signs on the map that marked the trail.”

Two massive trees that had grown together rose into the air before them.

“Let’s keep going,” he said wearily. “We can make a few more miles.”

“Maybe it’ll stop raining,” Wash said hopefully as he trudged along beside Josh.

“I doubt it,” Josh muttered.

“Don’t be downhearted, Josh. We’ll be all right.”

“And what makes you think that?”

“Why, we always have been, haven’t we?”

“Always a first time.”

Wash looked over at him, and Josh was sure Wash saw the misery written on his face.

“Don’t be faulting yourself because we went hunting,” Wash said. “Going hunting was all right.”

“Well, this part of it
is
all my fault. We should have taken the girls with us.”

“’Course, if we had done that, nobody would have been home when Goél got there. He might have sent somebody else to help those Cloud folks.”

“I wish he had!”

“Aw, come on, Josh! You’re just wet and cold and miserable right now. We’ll do fine like we always do. Goél’s not let us down yet.”

“It’s all Sarah’s fault,” Josh said, abruptly changing his mind. “If she hadn’t acted the way she had, we wouldn’t be out here in this mess.”

“Well, I don’t think it was
all
Sarah’s fault.”

“Oh, it
was
my fault, then!”

“I think part of it was, Josh. You’d better face up to it. I expect we
were
wrong to run off and leave those girls.”

Josh glared at the smaller boy but could not answer. He knew that he had been wrong, and he wished desperately that he had behaved differently. There was no going back, however, so they trudged on until darkness came.

They made a cold camp, for everything was too
wet to start a fire. Then they ate the last of their food and slept, miserable and wet, all night.

The next morning they started out at dawn. Happily, the rain had stopped, and by noon they managed to build a fire.

For lunch, Reb shot something that looked like a large turkey but had scarlet and yellow feathers. “This is bigger than any turkey I ever saw. I hope he tastes as good as turkey.”

The fowl was strong tasting, but the boys were hungry, and they devoured every morsel.

All day long they trudged along. When the sun was going down, Josh checked the map one more time. “We should have come to this mountain that’s on the map here. I haven’t seen anything that even looks like a mountain.”

“There hasn’t been one,” Reb said. “Nothing bigger than an anthill.”

“Then we’re lost,” Dave said. “That’s fine!”

They examined the map carefully but could not figure out where they had gone wrong.

“I don’t know what to do tomorrow,” Josh finally said. “Go back and start over, I guess.”

Before they went to sleep that night, Jake sat beside Josh while they both stared into the small fire. “I don’t know as going back would do any good,” Jake said, “Why don’t we forge on and hope we find another one of the landmarks—or maybe even somebody to guide us?”

“I guess we’ll have to,” Josh said. He felt bone tired.

The next morning they struggled through underbrush that clawed at their jeans and tore their shirts. At noon they were about to pause for a rest when suddenly
Reb yelled, “Hey, look there! There’s somebody up ahead!”

Eagerly Josh looked. And there came a strange appearing individual. “Let’s talk to him,” he said. “Maybe he can tell us how to get where we are going.”

The man they approached was tall and lean with black hair and unfriendly dark eyes. He was wearing pants and a jacket made of animal skin with the smooth side turned outward. He looked sort of the way Robinson Crusoe would have looked, Josh thought.

“I’m afraid we’re lost. Can you help us?”

“I don’t make a living helping lost fools!”

Josh blinked but could see no reason for continuing along this line.

“Sorry to bother you,” he said. “But it would be a great help if you could just tell us where we are.”

“Where do you think you are?”

“I think we’re lost. We’re trying to get to the country of the Cloud People. Do you know the way?”

“Maybe I do, and maybe I don’t.”

The man seemed to be cantankerous on general principles. He stood eyeing the five boys, and finally he said, “If I were you, I wouldn’t go this way.”

“Why not?” Reb demanded.

“Because that’s where them Earth Dwellers live, and they’re bad people.”

“We’re not looking for any Earth Dwellers. We’re looking for the Cloud People.”

“Don’t I know that!” the man snapped. “But you have to go through the country of the Earth Dwellers to get to the Cloud People.”

“Well, then, are we headed in the right direction?” Josh asked almost in despair.

“Yep. Right into destruction. That’s where you’re headed.”