Chapter 9: The Tale (concluded)

It wasn’t without hardship nor without dangers, but they reached the town, on a gray and windy day, before the winter would make things harder for anyone without a roof over their heads. For her, the town was the place to go to — if anything was left of the old order, any tiny seed around which hope might begin to crystallize, it would be where people lived and gathered, where none of the old hiding places, meeting places, dead letter-boxes, caches or hidden signs would still exist, for those had always had to be ephemeral, but the rules for finding them, if any recent ones had been set up, might still apply. And one of the rules had always been, look to the North. For him, the town, first of all, meant rest — he had not expected it, but more than half a year of traveling and surviving had worn him down. Maybe, once he had some understanding of this place, he could look for work, but not on the first day.

They paid the gate keeper, what he claimed to be the official fee for strangers entering the town, plus what he claimed would keep him from having them thrown into the castle dungeons for some crime he didn’t bother to name. They still had coins left to rent a room — like everywhere else, due to so many deaths, houses stood empty, and the rents of rooms were low. Neglected and in disrepair and with few panes of unshattered glass left in the window frames, the buildings still had walls and roofs and doors, though not much of the furniture was left, having been used for fuel in the first winters of the darkest years. There were trees enough in the surrounding woods, so that wood wasn’t so scarce now, but the craftsmen were scarce who could do more with trees than chop them up for firewood, and the sawmills and workshops had been destroyed, and the carts, and the roads had lapsed into decay, and the horses and oxen had long been slain and eaten. The town behind its walls hadn’t seen new destruction in the last few years, only further decay, but the surrounding countryside had.

The coins that were left would buy them food for maybe a week or two. “Why have you always only taken the coins of those bandits who had attacked us,” he had asked, before they had reached the town. “Why not the jewelry?”

She explained it so that he could understand. “It wasn’t ours to take. Never take more than you need, it brings bad luck. And then, the dead bandits’ friends will shrug off the loss of a few coins as well as the loss of a few of their companions, but they might feel compelled to hunt down those who had taken the more valuable stuff. And, jewelry is conspicuous, it draws attention to us. Attention is bad. And who knows where they got it from — what if we tried to sell a piece, and someone recognized it? Not worth the risk.” What she didn’t say was that she had also done it to protect him. She didn’t need the jewels, but he ... greed, a stupid move, and she’d have to kill him. Take more than you need and it brings bad luck. Not worth the risk.

It was about noon, now. They ate a simple meal — unlike accommodation, food was expensive, with so much of the agriculture in ruins, but there was food, which they ate without investigating too closely into what it was, and they even treated themselves to a jar of wine. She saw to it that he drank more than she did — not too much, though. They returned to the room they had found before they had lunch, on the third floor of a crumbling house near the town wall, a small dirty room with a window looking out across a narrow street onto the peeling plaster of the rear wall of some larger building. The window, its glass long gone, could be closed with a wooden shutter, almost a luxury these days, and the main attraction which this room held. The room was empty apart from a very roughly hewn table, a number of pegs on the walls to hang things on, and several blankets on the floor, dirty but not downright disgusting. Severe exhaustion, in combination with the wine, made him succumb to the overwhelming desire to roll himself up in two blankets and lie down on the floor, with a third blanket, which she folded up for him, to serve as a pillow. He slept almost the moment he touched the ground.

She hadn’t wanted to lock him in, but she wasn’t comfortable with leaving him, dead to the world, unprotected in an unlocked room. On her way out she spoke a few words to the landlord who lived on the ground floor, a thin, elderly, stern and tight-lipped man. A few friendly words in passing, hardly more than a greeting, accompanied by a nod and a faint smile — so casually spoken that he could not even really remember them afterwards. What he did remember, though, was the ice cold shiver they had sent down his spine, and the absolute necessity, whatever happened, to keep the sleeping man on the third floor from harm.

She had never been to this town, but, from paintings and engraved maps she had seen, in so much better and happier times, she had an idea of its layout, and that gave her an idea of where to look. The town was built around a steep hill, a rock about three hundred feet high, that some geological quirk had deposited here. At the top of the hill stood the castle, now in ruins. A paved street curved up from the town’s main square. After a few hundred feet the houses on both sides ended, and the street, getting steeper, became a path. On the left side, if you walked up, carved into the mountain, was a row of caves, one next to the other — underground stalls that had been shops where on sunny days a steady stream of cheerfully jostling, laughing, shouting visitors, but also more quiet townspeople on a stroll up to the castle gardens, had bought refreshments, candies, shawls, hats, bags, local artwork, antiques and cheap jewelry fake and real, and, generally speaking, useful or useless trinkets of all kinds. Now only a few of those stalls were open, the rest either had their heavy iron-studded doors firmly locked and shut, or had been deprived of their doors, leaving bare gaping holes in the rock, most of them with their walls black from fires that had consumed the shelves, the merchandise, and, it was to be feared, also the merchants. Holes that showed the dimensions of those stalls, about six feet wide, maybe eight feet high, and hardly more than twenty feet deep.

She paid no attention to the closed doors, but glanced into the open stalls, the empty ones, and the few that were occupied, their owners, whether male or female, hardly bothering to look back at her, their faces empty, knowing that in trying to sell their worthless goods to non-existent buyers they were just going through the motions, passing the time here to avoid having to pass it somewhere else. The wind blew a drizzling rain into her face now. Ahead of her the path led to a wall that had surrounded the castle gardens; the trellised gate in it, through which visitors had streamed to enjoy the greenery, the clean air, and the view over the city, now barred with heavy chains and solid rusty locks.

To her right the ground sloped down towards the town below it, but trees blocked the view. To her left the door of the last of the stalls, of the caves in the rock, stood ajar. She entered, closing it behind her. She was alone.

The room, with its rough walls hewn out of the rock, was almost empty, except for crudely made shelves left and right, displaying rather artless pottery and some pictures, watercolors and charcoal drawings, a few of them crudely framed and standing, others lying in a few thin stacks, the top ones having gathered dust. On the top shelves stood half a dozen burning candles, an astonishing luxury, given how scarce and expensive candles had become. At the back of the cave several coats, worn and tattered, were hanging from a row of iron cloak hooks. Someone must have had quite a heavy hammer to drive them into the rock.

The pottery seemed of little interest, but I took a closer look at the pictures.

“Wait — I? Who is ‘I’?”

I shrugged. “She. Her. Me. I. You know that this is my story. I’m telling it. So, do you want me to continue or not?”

Of course they did.

The pictures were of a fairly good quality, of a talented amateur kind. Vistas of the town, landscapes, the stuff that was, or had been, sold to tourists. Something seemed right. Something seemed wrong.

“Come in,” a female voice said, “here is another room where you can see more of my stuff.”

The voice had come from behind the coats. There was a narrow passage, its walls as roughly hewn as those of the cave, bent so that what lay behind it wasn’t visible from where it opened. I walked through. It opened into a vast underground chamber, with stonework walls, arches, and vaulted roofs. Candles were burning on huge iron candlesticks, and on ledges protruding from the walls. Oil lamps were burning on tables, which, apart from a few pillows on the uneven stone floor, were the only furniture. The woman, standing next to one of those tables, was older than I was, simply dressed, not looking much different from those in the other opened stalls that I had seen, only her eyes were more alert, and she seemed more eager to strike up a conversation.

“You wonder at the candles,” she said. “We are in the cellars of the castle, here. It’s a huge system of underground caverns, connected by tunnels and stairs, a labyrinth in which you can get lost and perish, if you don’t first fall victim to one of the numerous deadly traps. Much of it is empty, some of it is crumbling, but if you know where to look, there are things to be found. A huge stockpile of candles, for instance.”

Why did she tell me all this? Again, something seemed right, something seemed wrong, but increasingly I got the exciting feeling that there was something.

“Others do not fight you for those hidden treasures?” I asked.

“The castle is haunted,” she said. “They tend to keep away. It’s for their own good.”

There was an undertone of menace in her voice, now.

“It’s you who haunt the castle,” I said.

“Of course,” she replied. “But haven’t you come to look at the pictures, see if you want to buy one?”