“That’s right,” said the woldweller with satisfaction. “I am nine hundred years old. And you came looking for me to ask me questions. Nobody does that any more, except him. They used to come all the time, two or three hundred years ago, but they don’t believe in me any more.”
“There’s a little girl in the town who believes in you,” said Gaylen. “She told me that she saw you here last summer.”
“Yes, yes, that’s so. Some of the children still believe. But they don’t come to look for me. Their mothers and fathers won’t let them, you know. They don’t believe in me but at the same time they’re afraid I might be true, so they won’t let their children come. Curious.” The woldweller sat down and stared off through the trees. He was so dry and light that the leaves under him lay quite crisp and uncrushed. “Of course, I’ve plenty to do without answering questions,” he said after a moment. “There’s the forest to look after. I hope you didn’t break off any branches on your way in. Careless, heedless, thoughtless you are, all of you. No appreciation. It was always like that, even in the old days.” The woldweller opened his mouth wide and wailed, a mournful wail of chagrin that seemed to wrap itself around the tree trunks and hover like smoke before it drifted away. He sat scowling for a moment and then turned abruptly to Gaylen. “Can you climb a rope, boy?”
“I guess so,” said Gaylen.
“Come up, then, and I’ll show you something.” The woldweller scurried up the rope and disappeared. Gaylen climbed after him, puffing and straining, and managed at last to poke his head through the first tier of leaves. He looked up. The rope still stretched far away above him, threading among branches that reached out in every direction like thick, muscled arms in frothy green sleeves.
“Come on, boy, climb!” came the woldweller’s voice high over his head.
Up and up went Gaylen, resting when a convenient branch presented itself, until at last he came to the end of the rope where it was knotted firmly around a sturdy branch. Here, more than halfway up the huge tree, was a hole in the trunk and out of this hole the woldweller peered beadily.
“Come in, boy. Come in. You’re slow as a caterpillar.” Gaylen dropped feet first through the hole and found himself in a neat round room completely empty except for a pile of ashes in the center and a mattress of leaves against the wall. On the other side there was another, larger hole and toward this the woldweller gestured impatiently. “Over here, boy,” he said. “Never mind the room. Look over here.”
Gaylen crossed and looked out through a wide break in the leaves.
“What do you see, boy?” asked the woldweller.
“Rain,” said Gaylen. “Rain and treetops. Like a wet, bumpy green floor!”
“What else?” prodded the woldweller.
“I can see a little of the first town, too,” said Gaylen, trying not to feel dizzy. “Way over there. It looks so small!”
“That’s right,” crowed the woldweller. “It is small. And flimsy. You’ve got nothing that lasts, you know. That’s not the first town that ever stood there. There was one before that, and one before that one, on back for nine hundred years. But this tree has stood here all along. What do you make of that, boy?”
“I think,” said Gaylen, feeling his head begin to spin, “that I’d like to go back down now.”
The woldweller stared at him for a moment, an expression of disgust deepening the wrinkles around his mouth. Then he sighed. “No change,” he said. “Not in nine hundred years. Not,” he added, “that it matters. Very well. Let’s go down.”
When they had reached the ground again and Gaylen was feeling better, he sat and watched the woldweller curiously. The old man was pacing about, examining the bark on nearby tree trunks for grubs, and patting down dead leaves around the roots of saplings that thrust up here and there. He was as tender in his ministrations as a mother with a baby.
“What sort of questions did the people bring, the ones who came to see you in the old days?” Gaylen asked after a while.
“Oh, they wanted to know about love, you see,” answered the woldweller, disappearing behind a thick trunk. “War, too,” he added, emerging on the other side. “And power. How to gain power. Things of that sort. A lot of nonsense. But I knew the answers then and I do now. He still comes, of course. At least he asks a few unusual questions.”
“Who comes?”
“Why, he lives in the castle of the present King. He calls himself Hemlock.”
Gaylen drew in his breath sharply. So Hemlock knew about the woldweller and came to see him! The shivery feeling spread over him again. “What does Hemlock want to know when he comes?”
The woldweller sat down on a tree root and yawned. “He used to come here when he was a little boy. I taught him magic tricks and he brought me rabbits.” He rattled the wooden fork against the saucepan and licked his lips. “He still brings me rabbits. I had one yesterday. He’s a bad man, you know. Evil. But it’s nothing to me. He can be evil if he chooses. He’s a man, after all. Men have had wars before and will again.”
“Wars!” said Gaylen. “Is that what he wants? War? But why?”
“Power, of course,” said the woldweller indifferently. “Power, just as it was in the old days and just as it always will be. I’ll help him as long as he brings me rabbits. Why not? It’s nothing to me.”
“But how do you help him?” asked Gaylen. “What does he want to know when he comes here? Please, you must tell me!”
“No, I mustn’t,” said the woldweller, “but I will. Why not? He wants advice, that’s what he wants. I give him advice. I’m a woldweller and this forest belongs to me and I can answer any question he asks.” He opened his mouth and wailed again, but this time it was a wail of pride and satisfaction that split the glimmering green calm of the forest like an ax. Then his voice dropped and he whispered, “He wants to know how to find the dwarfs who made the whistle, and he wants to know how to find Ardis in the lake…”
A sudden whinny from Marrow interrupted him. The horse lifted his head to listen and his nostrils flared. Then Gaylen heard it too—someone was coming through the trees.
“STOP!” boomed a voice, and Hemlock himself appeared, striding toward them. He was leading his great gray horse, Ballywrack, who was breathing hard, as if he had just been ridden far and fast. Hemlock’s face was as angry as the thunder that still muttered far above the trees. He came and stood over them, his fists clenched at his sides. “One more word to this meddling child,” he said to the woldweller, “and there will be no more rabbits for another hundred years!”
Gaylen drew back against the tree trunk, but the woldweller only yawned again and scratched his head. “Have you got a rabbit for me now?” he asked. Hemlock produced a rabbit from under his cape and held it out. The woldweller took it and tied it to the belt of hair at his waist. “I’ve seen it all,” he said quietly and his eyes went vague and cloudy. “Around and around. Coming and going like the spokes of a wheel for hundreds of years. It’s nothing to me.” He scuttled up the rope, disappearing into the leaves overhead and pulling the rope up after him. “Stop and look around you, boy,” his wheezy voice called faintly from somewhere far above. “You’re in the exact and precise center of the forest and that doesn’t happen twice in a hundred years.”
Gaylen stood looking up for a moment and then he turned to Hemlock. Suddenly he felt very young and skinny. “He means I’ll never see him again, doesn’t he?”
Hemlock scowled at him. “Take your horse and go on with your poll, or I’ll tell the King you’ve been mooning about the countryside wasting his time. I don’t know what the old man told you but it doesn’t really matter. The King wouldn’t believe you anyway. He’d think you were mad if you went to him with tales about a woldweller.”
Gaylen untied Marrow and started to walk off. Then he gathered all his courage and turned around. “Who is Ardis?” he asked. “The woldweller said you were looking for Ardis in the lake.”
“He told you that, did he?” said Hem
lock. “Well, it doesn’t matter. Ardis is only a dream.” He drew his cape more closely about him and scowled again. Then he shrugged and added, “What good are dreams, after all?” He turned and strode away, with Ballywrack after him, and disappeared among the trees. The green light of the forest glimmered tranquil and silent once more and Gaylen was left alone.
He trudged off, leading his horse, and it was several minutes before he remembered that he hadn’t asked the woldweller about his favorite food. But it seemed fair to guess that he preferred rabbits over everything else. Gaylen took out the large notebook and wrote:
Name—Woldweller
Age—Nine hundred years
Home—The exact and precise center of the forest
Choice for Delicious—Rabbits
And then he put away the notebook and continued on his way out of the forest.
The rain had stopped when Gaylen came at last to the end of the forest, and the sun, dropping away behind the mountains, bled orange and pink over the last remaining clouds. He remembered that he had had nothing to eat since breakfast, and now, as he rode along, he looked about for a friendly clump of trees where he could eat his supper and sleep for the night. A small orchard beside a stream some distance away looked cozy enough and he turned his horse toward it gratefully.
As he came nearer, he heard singing and saw the red wink of a campfire. Someone else had found the orchard appealing, but perhaps, thought Gaylen, whoever it was wouldn’t mind sharing a tree or two. He rode closer and found that he could make out the words of the song:
Heigh road, high road,
All roads are my road.
Where, whither, whence when the wind cries “Go”?
Heigh way, high way,
All ways are my way.
Here, hither, hence when the wind lies low.
Sweet moon, old moon,
You and me are bold, moon.
Rise after lunch when the sun’s on high.
Sweet light, bright light,
Stay for a night light.
Lie, linger, laugh when the sun’s gone by!
Gaylen climbed down from Marrow’s back and left him to browse in the sedges beside the stream. Tossing the saddlebag across his shoulder, he made his way through the trees to where the campfire crackled. A young man was sitting cross-legged against a tree trunk, turning a spitted chicken over the flames. He wore a suit of red and yellow and there was a lute lying beside him, a splash of brightly colored ribbons tied to its neck with their long ends splayed out over the grass like a rumpled rainbow. A dog lay nearby, a big brown dog who wagged his tail and barked when he saw Gaylen coming toward the fire.
“Hello, boy,” said the young man, looking up. “Sit and have a bit of supper. The chicken’s nearly done.”
“Thank you!” said Gaylen. “And would it be all right if I spent the night here, too?”
“Why, of course it’s all right! It isn’t my orchard, you know. It belongs to everybody. Or if it doesn’t, it should. In any case, I’ll be glad for the company.”
“I have some apples here,” said Gaylen, putting down his saddlebag. He found that he was feeling very glad for the company himself. “Some apples, and some cold fried fish. Share and share alike.”
All in all, it was a good and happy supper, and the brown dog cleaned up the scraps. There were no more walnuts in the apples, either, which was a great relief to Gaylen.
“Now then,” said the young man, “we can talk. Talking is almost as good as singing. My name is Canto and this brown beast here is my dear friend Muzzle. We’ve come across the mountains to the west and we’re headed over the mountains to the east. We sing for kings and anybody else who’ll stop to listen.”
“It must be fine to travel about,” said Gaylen. “I’ve never been anywhere before. I’ve lived in the castle here all my life and this is my first trip. My name is Vaungaylen.”
“Well, now,” said the young man, “if you’ve lived in the castle here, maybe you can tell me something about it. I stopped there two days ago and there was a very strange party in the evening. Everyone brought his own supper in a basket and nobody smiled at anybody. I started to sing a funny song I know about a cook and a Christmas pudding, but the King made me stop and sing something else!”
So Gaylen told the story of the Prime Minister’s dictionary and of how he himself was off on a poll to settle the dispute. The minstrel listened with such interest that Gaylen went on to tell him about Hemlock and the woldweller. But the minstrel put back his head and laughed. “Well now, as to that,” he said, “I wouldn’t have believed that. Any old man may live up in a tree and claim to be a woldweller, but that doesn’t mean it’s true.”
“But it was all just like the legend,” said Gaylen thoughtfully.
“Oh, well, there are legends, to be sure—I sing about them all the time. But they’re only pretty stories just the same.”
It was true, thought Gaylen to himself, that the spell of the forest and the woldweller was beginning to fade as the daylight faded, and Hemlock seemed far away and harmless. What damage could he do, after all, with woldwellers and dwarfs? But still, there was a walnut in the apple, and the Prime Minister was worried, and—he yawned. He was getting very sleepy.
“Did you ever hear of someone called Ardis?” he asked at last, remembering. “Ardis in the lake?”
“Now there’s a pretty song,” said the minstrel, taking up the lute and running his thumb over the strings. “A sad and pretty song, most of it forgotten. I’ll sing you the part my father taught to me, the only part he learned from his father. There must have been much more of it once, but it’s been lost, you see, for hundreds of years.”
Gaylen stretched himself out on the grass as the minstrel plucked from the lute a sweet cluster of chords. The night breeze stirred the gay ribbons and fanned the last twigs in the campfire into fresh low flame. Muzzle yawned and closed his eyes, and the minstrel began to sing:
Two moons wander where the water curls,
Two white moons in a pair of skies—
Two moons yonder like a pair of pearls
There by the lake where the water swirls,
There where she sits with her wet green eyes,
There where she weeps and droops and sighs,
Poor Ardis where the water curls.
Wet stars shimmer in the mermaid’s tears,
Wet white stars on the sky’s dark sleeve—
Wet stars glimmer through the long dark years,
Call down the words that she never hears,
Call to her there where the waters heave,
Call to her, “Ardis! Why do you grieve?”
No answer but the mermaid’s tears.
Gaylen fell asleep as the last notes dropped from the lute and melted on the warm night air like snowflakes. And his dreams were full of lakes and rain and the gleam of the mermaid’s scales among the reeds.
In the morning, muzzle was the first to wake up, and since his usual way of starting a new day was to go about licking the faces of anybody who happened still to be sleeping, it was no time at all before Gaylen and Canto were up themselves and about the business of breakfast.
An apple apiece and a leg of cold chicken from last night’s supper did the job nicely.
“There’ll be apples on these trees in a few weeks,” remarked the minstrel, looking up at the branches overhead, where the first buds were fattening toward their sweet annual explosion into white. There was a bluejay nagging among the leaves, his proud feathers an exact match to the morning sky. Gaylen sat, too, looking up contentedly. The Prime Minister had predicted that spring would escape notice this year, but nonsense! How could such a thing be? It was impossible this morning to believe in anything disagreeable or threatening. Still, thinking of the Prime Minister made him remember why he was sitting here, miles from the castle, on an early April morning. There was a poll to be completed, after all, he told himself sternly.
“I have to register your choice for Deliciou
s,” he said to the minstrel. He brought out the large notebook and sat poised to write.
“But I don’t belong to your kingdom,” said Canto.
“I know,” said Gaylen, “but you don’t especially belong to any other, either, so I think I should write you down. You might decide to settle here.”
“I’ll never settle anywhere,” said Canto, “but you can write me down if you like. I’ve an easy choice for Delicious, but not a simple one. Are you ready? The most delicious thing of all is a cold leg of chicken eaten in an orchard early in the morning in April when you have a friend to share it with and a brown dog to clean up the scraps. You’ll have to write it all down because every word is important.”
Gaylen wrote carefully in the notebook and then he said, “I have to know your age. And what shall I put for your home?”
“My age is twenty-five, I think,” said Canto, “and my home is wherever you like. I’m intrigued by this poll of yours,” he went on, “because it seems to me to be an excellent subject for a song. I’ll come back some day and you can tell me how it all turned out. I’ll come back when you’re twenty-five.”
“That’s a long time from now,” said Gaylen. “How will we know each other?”
“Here’s an idea,” said the minstrel, and he pulled out from the neck of his tunic a chain on which was hung a small key carved out of plain gray stone. “This key doesn’t open any doors,” he said, “and it doesn’t close any coffers. My grandfather gave it to me years ago. He got it from his grandfather. He said it was a good-luck charm. Well, I’ve never had any luck to speak of, good or bad. But maybe it will do something for you. And then, you see, I’ll come along when you’re twenty-five and you can show it to me and I’ll know it’s you. You’ll be able to recognize me all right because I’ll still be a minstrel, only I’ll be an old minstrel, almost forty, with a long gray beard and a shabby lute.”