The Search for Delicious by Natalie Babbitt
Gaylen stooped wearily to drink from the stream and immediately bumped his nose against the clammy back of another trout. Another trout? A dozen others. He drew back sharply and peered at the water in the half light. It was full of fish crowding downstream, their scales sparkling under the silver wash of a newly risen moon. And Gaylen saw that the stream itself was running shallower than it had that afternoon, was in fact dwindling. Then the wind was right. Hemlock—for it must be he—was somehow shutting off the water at its source and this little stream would soon be nothing but an empty, muddy trough. It must already be dry up above and the poor fish were following it down in a desperate search for deeper water. Gaylen plucked three from the scurrying host and laid them out on the grass for supper. “They’ll probably all be dead soon anyway,” he said to himself, trying to ignore a painful lump of pity that stretched his throat.
It occurred to him suddenly that the people of the kingdom were facing the same grim possibility. He stood and peered down in the moonlight. Far below, at the center of the valley floor, he could see the separate red eyes of a circle of campfires and he could just barely hear the sound of shouting and singing. Farther away to the left, a low hillside wore another bright circle of flames. “They’ve really begun the war,” he said to himself. “And all over a word in a dictionary, the ninnies!”
He turned away and built a fire of his own and ate his supper of roasted fish with his back turned to the scene below. “Where in the world do I belong?” he wondered again. “Well, I don’t belong down there,” he said out loud. “Let Hemlock do what he wants.” And then, “It’s nothing to me.”
When gaylen had finished his supper, he stomped out the campfire and stood thinking for a moment. Why wait, he asked himself, and waste the moonlight, when he could be looking for Ardis and the lake? All he had to do was follow the stream up along the mountainside and he’d surely find both before long, for the wind had said that all the waters began there. Anyway, it was better to be moving than just sitting in the dark.
“Not that I’m lonesome, though, you know,” he said to Marrow as they started off. “After all, I’m going to live alone now. That’s been decided. It’s just that I’m not tired enough to sleep.” But after an hour or two of difficult riding along the slope, they were both too weary to go on. The moon had retired behind a bank of clouds, tucking its glow in under the edges. The night was left black, and there was so little water in the stream by now that they could no longer rely on its gurgle for a guide. “We’ll stop at the first good spot we come to,” Gaylen promised, and Marrow’s ears twitched in reply. Before long they found a shallow, dry cave and soon both were sound asleep inside.
He woke quite suddenly in the middle of the night and sat up, his eyes wide in the blackness. Surely that sound he had heard was too real to be part of a dream! The wind had returned and was flouncing about among the treetops, and the moon had emerged again to hang like a medallion against the dark sky. Gaylen poked his head out into the glow and listened. There it was again, something crashing along up the bank of the stream. In a few moments the silhouettes of two men on horseback appeared, riding slowly and talking in loud, daylight voices that sounded harsh and disrespectful against the hushed dignity of the night.
“We could have come over the mountains farther south. You’ve brought us miles out of our way!”
“Quit complaining, Murk. We can’t work much till daylight anyway, and we’ll be there by that time.”
Silence. And then: “See here, Rankle. Are you sure this fellow Hemlock will do what he’s promised? It’s silly, stopping up that lake. No matter how strong we build the dam, it won’t hold for long.”
“He knows that. But he says he only needs a couple of days for the people to run scared. They’ve been fighting a war anyway and they’re already all in a pucker. He claims he’s turned them against the King, so that when he gets control, by being the only one with water, they’ll do what he says: kill the King and the court and crown him instead. He’s going to make me General.”
The other man gave a snort of derisive laughter. There was silence again and then he said, “Maybe it’ll work, but he still sounds crack-brained to me.”
“Of course he’s crack-brained,” said the first man. “He keeps talking about mermaids. But he’s clever too, Murk. And it’s a rich kingdom. We’d better hurry or the others will have the whole thing finished before we get there, and he’ll change his mind about making me General.” There was no more conversation. The two men spurred their horses and disappeared along the hillside into darkness.
Gaylen crouched in the cave listening to their hoofbeats die away. His tumbling thoughts clashed in a war of their own:
Hemlock wants to kill the King and the court!
And so? It’s nothing to you.
But don’t you see? That means the Prime Minister will be killed, too.
Yes, the old fool. He started it all, with his everlasting fried fish. Good riddance, I say.
He didn’t really start it. At least, he didn’t mean to. And anyway, he’s my father.
He isn’t your father.
Well, he’s as good as a father any day. And I don’t want him to be killed.
Why not? You’re not going back to the castle anyway. You don’t want to see any of them again. That’s what you said. If you get involved in it now, you’ll never get away afterwards. They won’t let you.
I’ve got to try to save him. Don’t you see? I can’t just let him die. And there’s Medley too. And Mrs. Copse. And…
Oh, for heaven’s sake! I give you up. You wanted to help before and they threw things at you. You tried to explain and they wouldn’t listen. And here you are, wanting to run right back into the middle of it.
I’ll come away again afterwards. I’ll say goodbye and come away again, back to the trees and the rocks and peace.
Never. You’re too silly. You’re a great baby. What became of all your fine anger and resolve?
I don’t know! I have to go and try. I have to! I don’t know why.
Gaylen sprang to his feet and dragged Marrow out of the cave. A moment later they were thrashing up along the hillside after the two men, up along the stream bed where the wet mud shone slickly in the bright moonlight. At last, just before dawn, he saw the light of torches up ahead and heard, against the trickle and splash of falling water, the crash of rocks being rolled about and the thud of an ax against complaining wood. Over it all, and floating into his senses as he came nearer, hung the wet, clean smell of reeds and moss, the muddy fragrance of lily pads, the damp freshness of breezes that have spent the night skimming over cool, dark water. He had come at last, with the whistle round his neck, to the lake.
Gaylen climbed carefully down from Marrow’s back and tied the horse to a sapling beside the muddy stream bed. Then he crept forward from rock to tree trunk, as near as he dared—and stared. In the first faint light of dawn, he saw the whole scene clearly. Before him, in a huge cup of cliffs, lay the lake, glimmering away into shadow, surrounded by a broad rim of trees and grass that tilted up, far to his right, to the top of the mountain ridge. To his left, where the mountainside sloped down to the valley floor, the rim of grass around the lake was very narrow and here there was a V-shaped gap, like a chip cracked out of the edge of the cup.
Below the V the beds of many streams fanned out and disappeared among the rocks. Some, like the one he had followed, angled off to the sides, while others curved down the slope to the kingdom below. This, then, was where the lake water had been spilling over for hundreds of years, spilling over and rushing down with life for trees and grass and animals and people in every drop.
But now, by the light of torches, a great many men, their shadows huge and menacing, were laboring to dam up the water. They had wedged a great cross of stout tree trunks into the V and were cramming rocks and branches and mud into the chinks. Now and then water would burst through somewhere in a shining jet and with yells and curses the men would attack the weak sp
Gaylen watched from behind a row of boulders not twenty yards away, listening to Hemlock’s shouts and the water splashing through the last few chinks. From below, one of the men called, “I don’t like the looks of that bottom rock!”
“It’ll hold,” cried Hemlock. “Give it more mud and it’ll hold. Long enough, anyway.”
Long enough! The words were chilling. Long enough to stop the water, to parch the people’s throats, to turn them in their thirst toward the murder of the King. Long enough to alter everything. “You’ve got nothing that lasts, you know.” The woldweller’s words came back to him. “But this tree has stood here all along. What do you make of that, boy?”
Through this memory he saw again the fond and gentle face of the Prime Minister and his heart gave a wrench. He looked up at the trees over his head and sighed. “It’s easy for you to stand there all along. You don’t know how it feels to care about anything. Why, you don’t even care about not caring!”
Suddenly, just as the sun lifted over the eastern arc of the mountains, there was a silence so absolute that Gaylen was jarred back to the scene before him. He held his breath. The splashing had stopped. Hemlock stood frozen for a moment, listening, and then he threw up his arms and yelled a great yell of triumph that rang and echoed against the cliffs.
“I’ve done it!” he shouted. “It works! The water is stopped and the kingdom is mine!”
Gaylen sank down behind the boulder. He was very, very tired. He rubbed his forehead with his fingertips and wondered what to do. The dam was complete, the water was stopped, and Hemlock and his men would be watching it and guarding it. How in the world could he save anybody? If only the cockatoo would come. He counted out the days on his fingers. Yes, it was Wednesday again. Perhaps the cockatoo would find him and then he could send back a warning. Perhaps the King and the court could escape over the mountains to the north. Perhaps, if there was time.
The sun was rising fast and the morning sky was hard and cloudless. It was going to be hot, one of those breathless, burning days that sometimes come along early to scout the way for summer. How convenient for Hemlock, thought Gaylen. People would grow thirsty quickly on a day like this. They would turn from their war and hurry to find water at the lake. And then…
He shook off the thought and remembered Marrow, tied among the trees below with nothing to drink. At least he could save one creature from thirst. He crept away, down to where the horse stood motionless beside the stream bed, and led him up, circling wide around the V where Hemlock and his men were resting now, and came to the banks of the lake well behind, out of their sight and hearing. Here, under the willows, he sat barefoot at the water’s edge and cooled his toes while Marrow drank. There was nothing to do but wait. Wait for the cockatoo, and wait for the people of the kingdom to come scrambling up the mountainside to find—Hemlock and the dam.
Gaylen stretched out on his stomach and gazed at the lake. It lay before him blue and flat and smooth as a mirror, half a mile across to where the clear reflections of trees and cliffs on the other side hung upside down and motionless. Here and there the upturned palms of lily pads were starred with white blossoms, and he was reminded suddenly of the water lily in Pitshaft’s cave, reminded of the carved curling fingers that held it, reminded at last of Ardis. He drew the whistle-key out from his jerkin and turned it over in his fingers, wondering about the mermaid. Where was she now? Would she come if he blew the whistle? Maybe she would help him if he gave the whistle back. He sat up, grasping the whistle in his fist. If he were to blow the whistle, Ardis might come and…
Just at that moment he heard a faraway squawk. The cockatoo! He sprang up and ran out from under the trees, searching the sky for the white speck. And there it was, circling high over the lake. He longed to call out to it, but he was afraid Hemlock would hear him, so he stood on a rock and waved his arms frantically. At last the cockatoo seemed to see him, and it started down in a wide spiral. Then Gaylen heard shouting from lower down. Hemlock had seen it too, had seen it and must know what bird it was. The shouts came nearer and suddenly there was a twang and a hum and a soft thud and the cockatoo fell like a stone at Gaylen’s feet, an arrow through its breast.
Gaylen barely had time to snatch the paper from its leg and race back to the trees before Hemlock and one of his men, bow in hand, burst out from the rocks and ran to where the dead bird lay. “That’s what it was, all right,” said Hemlock. “Bringing that boy a message, I suppose. He’ll be somewhere nearby, then. Come, let’s see if we can find him.”
Gaylen sprang into the branches of the first likely willow and climbed swiftly up and up until he was hidden among the leaves. Only then did he stop, gasping for breath, torn between sorrow for the cockatoo and anger at Hemlock’s cruelty. He could hear the men searching far below. After a few moments Hemlock cried triumphantly, “Here’s his horse! We’ll take it back with us. He can’t get far without it, and even if he could, there’s nothing he can do now. We can’t spend the day looking for him—we’ve got to keep watch over the dam.” Gaylen heard their footsteps and the soft thump of Marrow’s hoofs fade away through the trees.
He balanced himself against a forked branch and stared fixedly up at the leaves over his head, gritting his teeth to fight back hot tears. Hemlock was right. There was nothing he could do now. Unless Ardis—but it was foolish to pin his hopes on a mermaid. “Ardis is only a dream,” Hemlock had said many days ago, and perhaps it was true. All of them, the woldweller, the dwarfs, the voices in the wind, all were probably dreams, now that he came to think about it. He rubbed his eyes fiercely and opened the Prime Minister’s letter:
Vaungaylen: The King rides out today to reason with the people. All the streams are going dry, as you must know wherever you are. We hear from our scouts that Hemlock is damming up the lake. The King is sure this will prove to the people that Hemlock is behind it all and hopes to lead them to some resolution of the trouble. The war has not amounted to much as yet, I’m glad to say, for they have no leaders and are very disorganized. But we must get to them soon, for they are angry and confused. I’m coming, too. Perhaps we’ll meet at the lake. I pray for your safety, my dear.
The P.M.
Gaylen climbed wearily down out of the tree and wandered over to the edge of the lake. There he stretched out full length and dipped his hot face into the cool water. What good would it do, he wondered, if the King should ride up to the dam? Hemlock’s men could kill him themselves with their bows and arrows and spare Hemlock the trouble of churning up the people to do it. The cockatoo would carry no more messages, no matter how important, poor thing. Even Marrow was lost to him now. He sighed and closed his eyes. And then, because he was young and had not closed his eyes in many hours, he slept while the hot sun rolled silently up across the sky and even the birds seemed to wait in their nests.
When he woke, the sun had crossed, dropped, and disappeared, and it was night. Overhead, the moon hung round as the eye of an owl and the sky was bright with stars. A light breeze stirred the drooping branches of the willows. He could see, far around the brim of the lake, the red halo of a fire where Hemlock and his men kept watch over the dam. So the people hadn’t come. Not yet. Then they would doubtless come tomorrow. He stood up and stretched and wandered back along the bank to where a flat rock jutted out dimly over the water, and here among the shadowed reeds he sat watching the moon’s reflection glow and splinter and glow again as the breeze furrowed the surface of the lake. Through his mind ran the words of the minstrel’s song:
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.
Yes, he thought to himself, that was just the way it looked. Only, one of the skies was upside down. “It’s really the sky I’m und
After a moment or two, as he sat there, he had the curious feeling that someone was watching him. He turned his head cautiously and saw two wide, shining eyes staring up at him from the reeds that fringed the rock. Just as he looked into them, there was a soft splash and the eyes disappeared.
“Ardis!” he whispered. “Ardis, come back!” His heart thumped in his throat and he called again, very softly, “Ardis! I’ve brought you back your whistle!” He waited, holding his breath. Soon there was another little splash and the eyes appeared again, this time on the other side of the rock.
“Ardis!” His breath caught. Not a dream! Not a dream after all. With trembling hands he fumbled at his jerkin and, pulling the whistle and chain over his head, he held them up in the moonlight. “Oh, Ardis, see? I’ve brought the whistle back to you!”
Two small hands reached up and parted the reeds, and there before him was the round and lovely face of the mermaid in Pitshaft’s cave, only ever so much more lovely than the cold stone could ever have conveyed. And she was very young, like Medley; only a child, with her long hair curling wet and heavy over her narrow shoulders. How could she be so young, wondered Gaylen as he gazed at her, when she was so very, very old? Had she really been weeping for hundreds of years? How sad she looked! But he said to himself, “I must try to get her to help me save the King, for she’ll be just as indifferent as the others if I let her be.”
“Ardis!” he said aloud. “Come and tell me about the whistle, for there’s much I don’t understand. And then, if you’ll do a favor for me, I’ll give it back to you.”
The mermaid stared at the whistle and then looked searchingly at Gaylen. At last, after a long moment, she placed her little hands on the edge of the rock and, with a lithe twist, flipped herself up beside him. She was small and light and smelled of lilies, and her long tail, glittering with its myriad bright scales, curled gracefully under her. Gaylen was quite dizzy with admiration as he looked at her, but he kept his voice firm. “Tell me, Ardis,” he said. “Tell me about the whistle.”