Ronwy lit candles, chasing the gloom back into the corners, and motioned them to chairs.
“Be seated,” he said. “My servants will take care of your horses and bring food shortly. I’m glad of your company. My wife is long dead and my sons are grown men and it’s lonesome here. You must tell me what is going on in the Dales.”
Tom shivered in the evening chill and Ronwy began to stoke the fireplace. It had been built in later days, with the chimney going up through a hole in the cracked ceiling. “In the ancient time,” said the Chief, “there was always warmth in here, without fire; and if you wanted light, it came from little glass balls which only had to be touched.”
Carl looked at the table beside his chair. A book lay on it, and he picked it up and leafed through the yellowed pages with awe in him.
“Do you know what that is?” asked Ronwy.
“It’s called a book,” said Carl. “The High Doctor in Dalestown has a few.”
“Can you read?”
“Yes, sir, and write too. I’m the Chief’s son, so I had to learn. We sometimes send letters—”
Carl puzzled over the words before him. “But this doesn’t make sense!”
“It’s a physics text,” answered Ronwy. “It explains —well—how the ancients did some of their magic.” He smiled sadly. “I’m afraid it doesn’t mean much to me either.”
A serving-woman brought dishes of food and the boys attacked it hungrily. Afterward they sat and talked of many things until Ronwy showed them to bed.
He liked the City, Carl decided as he lay waiting for sleep to come. It was hard to believe in this quiet place that war and death waited outside. But he remembered grimly that the Lann had hunted him to the very edge of the tabooed zone. The witch-folk wouldn’t let him stay long here, in spite of Ronwy—and the Lann swords would be waiting, sharp and hungry, for him to come out again.
Chapter 3
WISDOM OF THE ANCIENTS
In the morning, at breakfast, Ronwy told the boys: “I will gather the men of the City in council today and try to get them to vote for making the things you need. These northern invaders are a savage people, and the Dalesmen have always been our friends.” His smile was a little bitter. “Or as nearly our friends as we outcasts have.”
“Where is the meeting held?” asked Tom. “In a great hall down the street,” said Ronwy. “But by our law, no outsiders may attend such councils, so you might as well explore the City today. If you aren’t afraid of ghosts and devils—and I, in all my life here, have never met any—you should be interested.”
“The City!” Carl’s heart thudded with sudden excitement. The City, the City, the wonderful magic City—he would be roaming through it!
“Be careful, though,” said Ronwy. “There are many old pits and other dangerous places hidden by brush and rubble. Snakes are not unknown either. I will see you here again in the evening.”
Taking some bread and meat along for lunch, Carl and his friends wandered outside and down the streets. Whatever fear they had was soon lost in the marvel of it all; but a great awe, tinged with the sorrow of a world’s loss, took its place.
The witch-folk were about their daily business, sullenly ignoring the strangers. Women cooked and spun and tended babies. Children scrambled through empty houses and over great heaps of rubble, or sat listening to the words of an old teacher sitting under a tree. Men were doing their various tasks. Some worked in the little gardens planted in open spaces, some were in smithies and carpenter shops, some drove wagonloads of goods down wide avenues which must have carried more traffic in the old days than Carl could imagine. The boy was struck afresh by the pitiful smallness of this life, huddled in the vast wreck of its godlike ancestors, puzzling dimly over things it could never understand—much less rebuild. He sighed.
A great gong boomed solemnly down the air, echoing from wall to wall. It was Ronwy’s first summons, telling the witch-men that a council would meet in the afternoon.
“Look, Carl. Look up there!”
The Chief’s son craned his neck as Owl pointed. Up the sheer wall of an ancient tower, up, up, up, unbelievably far up. The stories said these buildings had been called skyscrapers, and indeed, thought Carl wildly, their heights seemed to storm the heavens.
The scarred brick facing was gone after the first few stories, and only a skeleton of giant rust-red girders was left above, a dark net of emptiness through which the wind piped its mournful song. Clambering around on those mighty ribs were the tiny forms of men. The sound of their hammers and chisels drifted faintly down to the boys, and now and then the flame of a crude blowtorch would wink like a star caught in the steel net. The heavy ropes of a block and tackle reached from the heights down to the weed-grown street.
“What are they doing?” whispered Tom.
“They’re tearing it down,” said Carl, very softly. “Piece by piece, they’re ripping out the steel to sell to the tribes.” A shivering wind rippled about his words and blew them down the hollow canyon of the avenue.
There was a huge sadness in it—the little men of today, gnawing apart the mighty works they no longer understood. In a few hundred years, or a few thousand, what did it matter? Nothing would be left, nothing but rubble and waving grass and the wild dogs howling where men had once lived.
Sorrow wrestled in Carl with a slowly gathering anger. It was wrong, it was wrong. The ancient wisdom was not accursed! Men should be trying to learn it and use it to rebuild—not let time and the witch-folk eat it away. Already a priceless heritage was gone; if this greed and ignorance were not halted, nothing would be left for the future.
His gloom deepened as the three prowled further. So little remained. The buildings were gutted long ago. Nothing remained but empty shells and the clumsy things of today’s dwellers. Beyond this central part where the people lived, everything had simply been stripped of metal and left to crumble. The forest had grown far into the town.
Owl would not be stopped from climbing several stories up one of the towers, and Tom and Carl followed him. From that windy height they could look miles over the dead City and the hills and woods beyond.
To the north a broad river ran through the toppled ruin of a great bridge. Today, thought Carl bleakly, they had only a couple of wooden scows for getting over. He looked south too, after some sign of the Lann, but could see only waving, sunlit green of trees. They were waiting, though. They were waiting.
It was nearly noon when the boys found the vault which was to mean so much to them. They were exploring the southern edge of the inhabited section, skirting a wall of bush and young trees that screened off the long low sides of caved-in buildings, when Tom pointed and cried, “What’s that?”
Carl approached the thing gingerly, afraid in spite of himself. A pole stuck in the ground bore the skull of a horse—a common sign to keep off evil spirits. Beyond this were the two sides of a house otherwise fallen to heaps of brick and glass. At the rear of those parallel walls was a curious gray object like nothing he had seen before.
“It’s magic,” said Tom, holding fast to his lucky charm. “The witches put up that sign because they’re afraid of whatever it is.”
“Ronwy said there weren’t any ghosts here,” replied Owl stanchly. “He ought to know.”
Carl stood for a moment thinking. In spite of having no great faith in the old stories of evil, he could not keep his heart from thumping. The thing brooding there in the hot, white sunlight was of the unknown. But—it was that fear which had kept men from learning what their ancestors had to teach. “Come on,” he said swiftly, before he could have time to get really frightened. “Let’s go see.”