The Diamond of Darkhold - 4 (14 page)

CHAPTER 12
__________

Feast Night

Doon sat glumly on an old armchair that smelled of ashes and watched as Minny worked on the fire. She scraped at it with a rake that must have come from one of the greenhouses, pulling coals toward the rod they’d set up over two stacks of stones. Every time she came near Doon, she skittered past without looking at him, as if she was afraid he might stick his legs out and trip her. She fluttered her hands, patted her chest, and plucked at the hair at the back of her neck. She was the most nervous, twittery person Doon had ever seen. Trogg directed her with waves of his arms and shouts. “More fuel over there! Bank it up here! Quicker, Minny! Stop flittering!”

Behind Minny, the lame boy drifted silently around, fetching and carrying when she told him to.

“What’s his name?” Doon asked Trogg, pointing to the boy.

“Scawgo,” said Trogg. “He had another name, but I changed it to go with the names of my kids.” He turned away from the fire and planted himself in front of Doon. “See, I’ve picked up a lot of information about the ancient world in my time. Want to know anything, just ask me. I named my kids after ancient cities. There was New Yorick, and there was Kanza City, and there was Scawgo. Of course, lots of others. But I like the sound of those. Gave my wife a new name, too. She used to be Cora; now she’s Minny, after a city called Minny-Apple. In those ancient places, Drood,” he said, “there was
power.
I honor power. I draw it toward me, as I am a naturally powerful person.” He stood tall and puffed his chest out. “I chose my own name,” he said, “from the most powerful city of all: Washton.”

Doon remembered looking at the map in the book Edward Pocket had shown him. He was pretty sure that Trogg didn’t have the names of the cities quite right. “In a book I read—” he said, but Trogg interrupted him.

“Oh, books,” said Trogg. “Used to be very useful.”

“Yes,” said Doon. “So if you looked in this book, you could see that those cities’ names were actually—”

“I mean useful for fuel,” Trogg said. “Pretty much gone now, though. We burned ’em up ages ago, where I come from.”

“Burned them up?” Doon was horrified. “Why?”

“Because what’s the point of them? Full of squiggles. People have a lot more important things to deal with than figuring out squiggles. Matters of survival, Droon.”

“But in books, you can find out what people have discovered. You can find out how things work, and—”

Trogg pointed a finger at Doon. “You listen to me,” he said. “We know how things work. We don’t need any squiggles to tell us.”

“But if you would just even read the names of the cities—” Doon began.

“We don’t read,” said Trogg shortly. “So quit yapping about it. We don’t approve of reading; we stopped doing it long ago. It’s a useless trick. Everything we need to know came down to us from our fathers and our grandfathers and their fathers before them.”

Doon understood. Where Trogg came from, people didn’t know
how
to read. He blinked in amazement, but he didn’t say any more about it.

Minny bent over the pot of water, poking a long fork at the potatoes boiling in there. She seemed to be afraid of Doon. When he clanked over to look at what was cooking, she edged away from him, her hand fluttering at her throat, her face turned away. Doon went back to the smelly armchair and sat down to wait.

Trogg bent over a box of stuff near the fire and burrowed through it, tossing things out left and right, muttering furiously. “It’s not here,” he said at last, resting back on his heels. “Minny! Where’s that little bottle of salt?”

Minny and Scawgo were sitting facing each other, with a short board between them on which they were chopping up some soggy-looking onions. She glanced up at Trogg with tears dripping from her eyes and said, “It’s upstairs, husband. In the kitchen.”

“We need it,” Trogg said, glaring at her and Scawgo.

“Of course,” said Minny. “We’ll just put this down—don’t let that onion roll off, Scawgo. Hold the board steady—whoops, the knife is sliding—”

“Never mind!” Trogg bellowed. “I’ll send the new boy.” He turned to Doon and stared hard at him. “Go upstairs,” he said. “Get the little green bottle from the table in the kitchen. Do not even
think
about touching anything else. You will be searched when you return.”

So Doon hobbled off toward the apartment and climbed the stairs, his chain clanking the whole way. He found the bottle of salt on the table and put it into his pocket. Now. He was alone; no one was watching him. There must be some way he could use this moment. Could he go out a back window? But with his feet chained, he wouldn’t be able to land right. The two-story drop would probably break his ankles or wrists. Could he steal something useful, some kind of weapon, a knife, a hammer? But Trogg was going to search him; he’d find it right away. What else, what else? Doon swept his eyes around the apartment—the main room with its beds and couches and armchairs all crowded together at crazy angles, the kitchen with dirty mugs standing on the table, and smeared spoons, and the cabinets full of bottles and cans . . .

A thought came to him. The kitchen was where Trogg had stashed Scawgo’s treasures. Up high somewhere. If Doon couldn’t help himself here, maybe he could help the boy. Quickly, he flung open the doors of all the upper cabinets to see what was on their top shelves. Nothing in the first one, nothing in the second, but in the third, he saw a cloth sack way up on an other wise empty shelf near the ceiling. He’d have to guess that it held Scawgo’s little collection.

He dragged a chair over to the kitchen counter. If his feet hadn’t been chained, he could easily have stepped onto the chair and from there to the counter. But the chain made it impossible to separate his feet enough to get one of them onto the chair at a time. So, with both hands on the counter, he hoisted himself up, bending his knees until his feet rested on the chair’s seat. When he stood up and raised an arm, he found the top shelf still out of reach. He turned around with small clanking steps, sat on the counter, swung his feet up, and with some difficulty stood up again. This time, stretching his arm high, he managed to grab the sack with two fingers. He pulled on it and caught it as it fell.

Once he was down again, he took just enough time for one glimpse inside the sack—he saw something glittery and some papers—to feel sure enough that he’d got the right thing. Then he crossed the room with it and pushed the sack deep under the striped couch.

Back down the stairs—the quickest way was to sit down and slide—and out to the fire, where he handed Trogg the salt bottle.

“Took you a while,” Trogg said.

“Chained feet,” said Doon. “
You
should try it.”

Trogg patted him all over to make sure he hadn’t stolen anything, and Doon sat down again in the smelly chair and continued to wait for dinner.

Finally, on Gilly Street, he saw the two lights that meant Yorick and Kanza were coming back. It was clear from their excited cries that whatever they’d brought with them was dinner.

“We got it, Pa!” Yorick exclaimed as they pulled the wagon up close. “It was just where it was supposed to be. A bunch of other stuff, too.”

Minny peered into the wagon and nodded. “Mmmhmm,” she said. “Yes, very good, oh, very good.”

“So let’s get going!” cried Kanza. “I’m starving!”

Doon got up out of the chair to take a closer look. In the wagon, he saw some lumpy sacks and also what seemed at first to be a heap of wool.

Yorick reached in and with a grunt lifted the wool in his arms. Doon saw a head, and legs hanging down. A sheep! he thought. No, a lamb—it was smaller than a full-grown sheep. And it didn’t move; it was asleep or dead. Where had it come from? Had they gone up out of the cave to get it?

Yorick and his father laid the lamb down on the pavement not far from where Doon was sitting. Minny and Kanza stood nearby. From a bucket full of tools, Trogg took a couple of long knives, and he and his son set to work cutting off the lamb’s head. They cut off the four hooves next, kicking them aside, and then, with great wrenchings and gruntings, they peeled away the woolly skin until the lamb was a slippery red slab with sticklike stumps where the head and legs used to be.

Doon knew that people ate animals. They never had in Ember; there
were
no animals there. But in Sparks, in the winter, his father had now and then brought home from the market some chunks of chewy, salty stuff that was called meat. Doon had been astonished when he was told it was made from animals and had been saddened as well; the animals were new and fascinating creatures to him, and it was hard to accept that they were killed for food.

Now, watching the Troggs turn the lamb into meat, he had to press his hands against his mouth to keep from making a sound.

While Trogg was cutting up the lamb, Yorick and Kanza heaved the sacks out of the wagon and opened them. Inside were a lot of potatoes with dirt still on them; a few big, flabby cabbages; and several smaller sacks that Yorick peered into, announcing the contents of each: “Dried corn. Some kind of beans. Some kind of grain. Ewww! Mushrooms.”

Kanza held up a small rag bundle. “This was on top of the rest,” she said. “It’s tied in a knot.”

“Well,
untie
it, picklenose,” said Trogg, who was busy sticking the lamb’s body onto the skewer over the fire.

Kanza opened the bundle. “A rock,” she said. “We have enough rocks, if you ask me.”

But something fluttered out—a scrap of paper. Kanza stooped to pick it up. She squinted at it. “It’s a picture,” she said. “Look, Pa.”

Trogg came over to see. So did Minny, hugging herself with her skinny arms as she passed Doon. Yorick peered over Kanza’s shoulder, and Doon, too, clanked over to see.

“There’s words on it,” said Yorick.

“Someone else must have written them for her,” Trogg said. “Strange. Why would she want
words
? Who would be up there anyway?”

“So what does it mean, Pa?” asked Kanza.

Trogg took the candle from his cap and held it near the paper. “It means,” he said. Then he was silent for a while. “It means she is going away.”

“Oh, alas!” cried Minny. “Leaving us? For good?”

“Well, who knows?” Trogg said. “Looks like it, though. She’s waving.”

“But what about the words, Pa?” asked Kanza.

“Pass it over to him,” Trogg said, nodding toward Doon. “He likes to waste his time with words.”

Kanza handed Doon the paper. Silently, he read the message.

“So?” said Kanza. “What does it say?”

With an effort, Doon kept himself from smiling. He could see that Trogg was listening, though he was pretending not to, so he had to think of something fast. He frowned over the words, as if he was having trouble making them out. The curly bits of the drawing were clearly sheep. The person who was dropping supplies from up above must be a shepherd. It did look as if the shepherd was waving goodbye. He thought of making up something that might help him, such as, RELEASE THAT BOY IMMEDIATELY! Or GET OUT! BANDITS COMING! But he had to make the words go with the picture, or they wouldn’t believe him. Best to play it safe, he finally decided. “It says, ‘Goodbye! I’m leaving. No more from me.’”

Minny wailed.

“Don’t be an idiot,” Trogg said. “Who cares? We’ve got enough for a long time. Don’t forget what we found the other day.”

“Oh, yes,” said Minny, cheering up.

“What did you find?” asked Doon.

“A little hole-in-the-wall shop over that way,” said Trogg, waving a hand.

“No sign on it or anything,” put in Kanza.

“Nothing in front at all. Shelves empty. But the back room was absolutely crammed with good stuff,” Trogg said. “
Someone
was hoarding.”

“Oh,” said Doon, filing this information away in his mind. “Excellent.”

All this time, the lamb roasted over the fire, and a smell that Doon found part sickening and part delicious wafted toward him. At last Trogg and Minny took the brown and glistening hulk down from its stick, and Trogg set upon it again with a knife, carving it into chunks, which were snatched up with great gusto by his family and bitten and gnawed until nothing was left but bones. They threw the bones in the fire and wiped their greasy faces on their sleeves.

Doon ate the meat, too. He was very hungry, but still he took the hot chunk from Trogg with two fingers only, like something dangerous or repulsive. It had a rubbery texture and a greasy taste. He ate every bite.

CHAPTER 13
_____________

The Diamond

The Trogg family sat around the fire for quite a while after dinner. Their full bellies made them jolly in a rough sort of way, and they burped and chortled and told jokes that made no sense to Doon. Trogg launched into a lecture about the nature of the universe, on which subject he considered himself an expert. He said it was a perfect sphere, like a bubble, with the earth exactly in the center. The sky was exactly a hundred miles up, he said, and the stars were lit by electricity. “You probably don’t know this,” he remarked with a nod at Doon, “but sometimes a new star shows up. I have seen such a one recently myself—a greenish star that moves.”