Gaal the Conqueror (15 page)

"Shagah! I knew it!" Eleanor said in a barely audible,
strangled voice. The chain bearing the Mashal Stone lay at his
feet. Before John could do anything to stop him he reached
down casually, picked it up, and hid it in the folds of his robe.
"This tower is powerful," he said. "We, the tower and I, have
dedicated ourselves to the Great Red Goat."

Eleanor could say nothing. Her whole body was shaking.

"That stone belongs to me. Give it back!" John cried fiercely.

"I told him you had challenged us. You have not sufficient
power to control the tower or to overcome the Great Red Goat.
The tower can only be controlled when there comes one whose
potency is greater than either of us. And I doubt that we will
allow him to come."

"You stole my stone! Give it back at once!" John was struggling to pull his sword out, but it seemed to be jammed in its
scabbard. He remembered an awful experience in a cave, and
his face flushed with angry determination.

The sorcerer did not seem to notice what he was doing. "The
tower will now discharge you, and you will be imprisoned. Be
thankful that the goat did not choose to kill you both," he said.

John took a step toward him, still struggling to extricate the
sword. But the sorcerer turned his back on them, and before
they knew what was happening he had disappeared. The floor
had began to tremble and the trembling grew in power.

"It's the earthquake again," John said, releasing his grasp of
the sword hilt and growing pale.

"Oh, no! What if-?" Eleanor left the sentence unfinished.
The floor began to sway beneath their feet, and a roaring sound grew around them. Suddenly they were flung down. The
earth seemed to turn upside-down and they felt themselves
dropping through space. There followed a terrible jolt, a resounding crash, and it seemed as though every bone in their
bodies had been broken.

Badly winded, John lay struggling to breathe. When he
opened his eyes he could not at first make out where they were
or what had happened. But moments later he gasped with astonishment. The earth's tremors had ceased. The tower had
fallen. It lay in a long pile of stones and rubble, as though it
had toppled like a tall tree felled by a woodcutter. But it must
have been done by magic, for John and Eleanor were lying on
the grass inside the iron bars of a cage beside the ruins. The
treasures they had carried were no where to be seen. As for
Eleanor, she lay in a rumpled heap, her eyes closed.

Eleanor was not dead. She was not even injured, though like
John she was bruised and sore. She stirred, tried to sit up, and
cried, "Oh! Oh! It hurts! I'm sure I must've broken something!"

Slowly they got to their feet, testing their limbs, feeling themselves here and there to check for lumps and bumps. John
fingered his right eye which was swelling. "It'll probably be
worse tomorrow," he said. But neither of them suffered any
broken bones.

Eleanor seemed dazed. "What are we doing in this cage?" she
asked. Gingerly they sat down and stared around them. "What
happened?"

"The tower fell down."

"Yeah-I can see that. But why?"

"The earthquake, I guess. It's a wonder we weren't killed. It's
magic, all right."

They were too shaken to grasp all that had happened. Only
as the afternoon wore on did the extent of their difficulties
become clear.

"I was so scared of him."

"Of Shagah? I know. There's something about his eyes."

"He reminds me of my dad."

"You're kidding! He doesn't look like him at all to me."

"I know, but I get the same scared, sick feeling-oh, John!
I wish you hadn't done it."

"Done what?"

"Grabbed the braided hair."

John said nothing. He himself had been wishing the same
thing, but he resented Eleanor saying so. His eye had swollen
shut, so he used the other to stare at her balefully.

"How will we get out?" she continued.

John shrugged his shoulders but still made no reply. His
anxiety was rising. He was thinking (as he tended to in moments of guilt or tension) of his father. Was he still waiting on
the frozen lake? As Mab, the powerful seer, his father could
raise his staff and melt the bars of their prison! But then he
remembered that his father had been on the point of death
before they had left Anthropos on their previous visit. If he
came back, he would certainly die.

The afternoon wore into evening. There was nothing to eat
or drink. They spoke little. John paced up and down the cage,
and Eleanor spent most of the time crying quietly, staring vacantly through the bars. The hope and sparkle had disappeared
from her eyes. It distressed John to see her. He experienced a
sudden impulse to put his arm around her to comfort her, but
it was something in those days that boys would be embarrassed
to do. More importantly, the thought that his own folly had
brought them into their predicament also stopped him. "She
blames me for it," he said to himself. "She'll think I'm just trying
to get her to forget what I did."

At that a feeling of resentment awoke within him again, and
with it a rage at his own folly. Repeatedly he asked himself,
"What in the world made me do it? It was so stupid." Yet he
hardened his heart, glaring resentfully at Eleanor from time to
time.

As darkness began to fall, Eleanor sighed and said, "Do you
think he'll come back?"

John was surly. "Who?"

"Shagah."

"I've no idea. Why?"

"They usually give you stale bread and water in prisons. At
least that's what it says in stories. Aren't you hungry?"

John's voice became hard and bitter. "Sure, I'm hungry. But
I suppose you're blaming me for the hunger too. I'm sorrybut as far as I'm concerned, what we both did is water under
the bridge. It's no use crying over spilt milk."

"I'm not crying."

"You were. You've done nothing else all day."

Eleanor's shoulders straightened and she glared at John. "I
didn't get us into this mess. You did. What are you doing about
it?"

"Oh, don't be such a smart aleck. Sure, you chickened out at
the last minute. But you were willing enough to leave the path
and come to the tower. You were the first to reach it."

"I was not!"

"Oh, yes, you were. I distinctly remember. I couldn't keep up
with you. Don't make me out to be a liar too."

"Well, that's exactly what you are. What's more, you think you
know everything about Anthropos, don't you? Just because you
came here first, you think you know it all. Well, you don't. You
haven't met Gaal yet-"

I won't bore you with all the details. Their quarrel got a little
uglier (they were saying things to try and hurt each other, without really stopping to ask themselves how true they were). But after a while they had nothing new or original left to say, so
they repeated themselves endlessly, saying the same things over
and over, only more hatefully and with long sulks in between.

Perhaps the enchantment around had something to do with
it. Both were a little shocked at what came out of their mouths.
It reminded Eleanor of the sort of things she had heard her
father and mother say at home in the trapper's cabin. As for
John, though he was shocked, he found he wanted to go on
saying ugly things.

Darkness found them sitting and sulking at opposite ends of
the cage, a couple of dim silhouettes wrapped in resentment
and self-pity. They must have sat for a couple of hours before
John's feelings began to change. He began to realize that he
was being both stupid and unfeeling. He was ravenously hungry, as he knew Eleanor must be, and since he had been taught
to believe that physical difficulties were tougher on delicate
girls than on boys, he decided that he ought to say something.
But at that moment Eleanor's silhouette curled into a ball and
lay down, and his better feelings took flight. "I guess she
doesn't want to make up. Well, if she doesn't then that's O.K
with me. Saying I'm sorry wouldn't help anyway. It's not as if
I could feed her."

By and by he grew drowsy, forgot the empty feeling in his
stomach and curled into a ball himself. The night was warm
and there was no breeze. Slowly an unpleasant half-dreaming,
half-waking state came over him. He tried to break out of it
several times, and eventually he succeeded. Drowsily he sat up,
stretched and then got to his feet. At first he couldn't tell what
had happened. Something was wrong-profoundly wrong.
When he realized what it was, he cried out in fear. The tower
was no longer in ruins on the ground. It stood tall and proud
in the thin light of a new crescent moon.

Over his body, and in spite of his fear, the same feelings
gripped him that had assailed him when he had first seen it. He began to tremble with an excitement he struggled vainly to
suppress. The blood rushed to his face, and he began to
breathe hard. At times he would stare at the tower, gripping the
bars of the cage until his hands grew weary. Then he would
pace from one side of the cage to the other, before taking up
his position again. His skin was dry, and although the night was
warm, he began to shiver as if in a fever.

Sometimes he would talk to himself, trying to solve an urgent
problem. But the problem would never define itself properly.
He knew his words made no sense. "If I could just say the right
words it would ... oh, dear, I'm getting it wrong again. Will it
never come right?"

Then the tower started disappearing and reappearing. But
sometimes it showed up in the wrong place or had the wrong
shape. And sometimes he was sure it was snowing. He broke
out in perspiration, felt a little better and lay down again. But
then the cycle would begin again, and once more he would
shake off the half-dreaming state and stare, puzzled at the tower and at the moon. In one moment of near lucidity he muttered, "It's not a full moon, so I'm not crazy."

"Of course, you're not!" The words, like the laughter that
followed them, startled him into full wakefulness. Shagah stood
outside the cage smiling at him. "I've been having second
thoughts," he said. "Perhaps we could get on together after A.
Would you like me to put the tower inside your cage? It might
convince you of my good intentions."

John said nothing. Shagah's words made no sense. He
glanced at the tower, now rising serene and solid against the
night sky. Suddenly it disappeared, reappearing immediately,
but in miniature before him. And Rapunzel's hair, also in miniature, hung from the tiny window. He heard Shagah say, "I'll
have to change your size too."

And suddenly there he was-at the foot of the tower in the
moonlight, hungrily seizing Rapunzel's hair. The only differ ence was that this time the owner of the hair did not seem to
be Rapunzel but Eleanor, who was smiling at him from the bed
and singing melodiously.

John trembled. A tumult of feeling swept over him-but his
predominant feeling was one of terror. "I don't trust you!" he
cried, hoping the sorcerer would hear him. "You're trying to
fool me!" The building shook angrily at his cry, and once again
it began to sway before collapsing about him in ruins. For a
long time he lay shaken and trembling, still inside the cage,
sobbing from time to time. Light filtered across the sky and the
sun was about to rise when he eventually fell into a real sleep,
and for a couple of hours he knew nothing more.

When he woke the sun was shining brightly. He turned his
head to look for the tower, but it lay in ruins, the stones scattered as they had been when it first fell. He shook his head.
"It must have all been a dream," he muttered and looked over
at Eleanor. She was sitting and watching him, and he could see
that she was pale and had been crying. Her hands trembled,
and she seemed to have shriveled inside herself. It reminded
him of the Eleanor he had seen in Canada.

"I didn't drink any," she said.

"Drink any what?"

"Shagah brought what I said he would-bread and water. But
I haven't touched it."