The Thief and the Beanstalk (Further Tales Adventures) (7 page)

Even the sharp-eyed Squint wouldn’t see him if he left this way. With luck, he could be miles away before Finch knew he was gone. Despite the warning he received the night before, Nick was sure Finch could never find him. How would he even know where to look?

Nick draped a leg over the windowsill, but then he stopped to think.

Why not steal the hen?

He looked at the bird. There was the ultimate prize, the endless source of wealth that spawned all the splendor around him, even the fortress itself. It would not be long before the golden eggs in his pockets were spent
and gone. But if he made off with the hen, then one day he’d be as wealthy as Jack himself. It was the permanent solution to his poverty.

Nick returned to the easel and picked up the smallest drop cloth. It was made of a thick fabric, so he thought it might adequately muffle the squawk of the hen. He could throw the cloth over the bird, pull the edges together and carry it like a sack. Then he would be out the window, down the wall and into the woods in a minute, running where neither Jack nor Finch would find him. Yes, it was risky, but imagine if he succeeded!

He held the cloth up with both hands and walked lightly toward the bird. When he was close enough, he tossed the cloth over its body and scooped it up.

The bird did not wake. Nor did it move. He uncovered the hen to look closer. He was holding a dry, stuffed animal forever frozen in that sleeping pose.

“It died thirty years ago, boy,” said a voice from the other end of the room. Nick snapped his head around to look. Jack was standing at the door. The little girl from the bedroom was behind him, peeking around the old man’s side. And a powerful-looking young man, one of Jack’s guards, was halfway down the gallery, charging fast.

With a shout, Nick tossed the hen in the air over the man’s head. The startled guard skidded to a stop and caught the bird. Nick used that moment to run for the nearest window. He jumped for the opening, but he’d forgotten the heavy eggs in his pockets and fell short.
Before he could scramble completely out, the man grabbed him by the heels and hauled him in, kicking and struggling.

Jack walked slowly down the long room with the little girl tagging along. As the old man walked, he used a candle to light a series of torches on the walls. Soon the room was filled with their flickering glow.

Nick gave up resisting. He stared at the floor with his chest hitching as the guard reached into his pockets for the eggs, and handed them to the old man.

Jack stood before Nick. He wore a robe of shimmering silver cloth embroidered with gold. With his gray hair and long beard, he looked like a wizard.

“That’s the trouble with stolen goods, boy,” said Jack, hefting one egg in each hand. “They’re always more of a burden than you expect.” Jack turned to the young girl behind him. “Thank you, Ann. Why don’t you go back to bed now.”

The girl didn’t reply. Nick had the feeling she was looking at him. He looked up and met her accusing stare. Her expression made him blush with guilt.

“I wasn’t sleeping, you know!” she called.

“Faker!” It was the only reply Nick could think of. The man holding him started to laugh, but quickly stifled it.

“Why did you steal from us?” she asked angrily.

“Because I’ve got nothing, and you’ve got everything!”

“That doesn’t make it right!”

“But it’s right for me to starve?”

The girl didn’t know how to respond to that. She just said “Humph!” and stormed away. Jack watched her go, then bent to pick up the stuffed hen that the guard had placed on the floor. He brushed the ruffled feathers, put it back in the nest, and returned the eggs to the hen’s side. He spoke as he arranged the objects.

“She lived a long, long time, as hens go. But I guess even magic birds don’t live forever. I had her preserved so I could always remember her.”

Jack turned to look Nick in the eye. It was a penetrating, unsettling stare. “She’s full of sawdust now. Do you know what the man said was inside that bird when he opened her up?”

Nick shook his head.

“Nothing. Nothing out of the ordinary, that is. She was just like a regular hen. So how, I wondered, could she lay eggs of solid gold?” The old man paused, letting Nick think about it.

“And I could never figure it out. But people are like that too, you know. If you were to cut them open, you couldn’t tell one man’s guts and bones from another’s. But some people produce wondrous things from what’s inside. And some of us are thieves.”

“It
is
true,” whispered Nick. “The story. You and the beanstalk.”

Jack looked at Nick for a long time. A new expression came to the old man’s face, as if he recognized something familiar in the little thief before him. Nick saw lines of
sadness in that face that looked as if they were engraved a long, long time before.

“What’s your name?” Jack asked.

“Nick,” he answered quietly.

“What’s the rest of it?”

“That’s all. Just Nick.”

“Tell me then, Nick. How did you get in here?”

“Up the vines.” Nick didn’t see any reason to lie.

“So you climbed up here. A poor little boy. To steal my treasure,” Jack said. Even Nick understood how those words echoed another story from so many years before.

The old man kept staring, nodding his head. He seemed to be making a decision. Then he did something totally unexpected.

“Thank you, Roland,” he said to the man who had captured Nick. “That will be all for tonight”

Roland looked at Jack with raised eyebrows. “You want me to leave?”

“Yes. You may go,” said Jack.

Roland opened his mouth to protest, but saw the serious look on the old man’s face. “Yes, Master Jack. I’ll be awake if you need me.”

“Thank you, Roland.”

Roland walked to the door and took one last worried look back at his master.

“Close the door, please, Roland,” said Jack. The door swung shut, and only Nick and the old man were left in the gallery.

The old man bent to whisper to the young thief. “Are you alone?”

Nick swallowed hard over a lump in his throat. “Yes,” he said, and as the words came out he knew they were true. He wasn’t going back to Finch and the band of thieves. He was on his own.

“It’s not just my gold you’re after, is it?” said Jack, stepping closer.

“No,” Nick said, mouthing the word more than speaking it aloud.

“What, then?”

“I wanted to know….”

Jacks eyes, wrinkled all around, narrowed until they were nearly closed. “And what if it was true, Nick the Thief? What if you had been me, sitting there?” He pointed at a painting of himself as a boy, sitting as if knocked to the ground, and staring at the awesome beanstalk that towered into the heavens. “Would you have climbed it? Would you have dared?”

There was a long silence. Nick stared at the painting, wondering,
Would I
? And he could feel the old man’s gaze upon him.

Jack stepped toward the painting and slid his hand behind one side of the gilded frame.
I could run for the window right now
, Nick thought. The old man was making it easy to escape. But now, Nick realized, he needed to know the truth.

There was the click of a latch, then Jack swung the entire painting away from the wall like a door, revealing a dark space behind it.

Without a word, Jack stepped into that darkness. His candle shed a shrinking rectangle of light around him as he moved through a hidden passageway. Nick followed, putting a hand out to each wall to guide him. The walls were cool and wet at his fingertips. Before him, the old man abruptly turned to the right and disappeared. When Nick reached the corner, he saw Jack standing in a small chamber.

There was a harp leaning against one wall. Large and luminous, it seemed to be made of some material that was half glass and half gold. On one side, its frame was in the shape of a lovely woman with diamond eyes.

“When I first brought her down, Nick, she would sing for you. You just had to ask. Or you could look in her eyes and
want
her to sing, and it would happen. The music went into your heart, and it was so beautiful you could never describe it.

“But she doesn’t sing anymore. Hasn’t for many years. In time, her magic—her life—just faded away, like the hen’s.”

Jack was quiet for a while. Then he spoke again. “But the harp is not what I brought you here to see.”

There was also a plain wooden table in that room, with a simple box resting on it. The old man put
the candle beside the box and removed the lid.

Nick wasn’t close enough to see the bottom, so he stepped forward. Inside was a leather pouch. The old man turned the pouch upside down, and three beans spilled out into the box, milky green in colon. He laid the pouch on the table.

“This is why I brought you. Watch them,” said Jack. He blew out the candle. Immediately Nick could see a faint green light emanating from the beans. The sight amazed and confused him. If Jack used his beans long ago to grow the magic beanstalk, where did these come from?

“It was the night after the beanstalk fell,” said the old man, anticipating Nick’s question. “A single stem grew from where the plant had been rooted. It just came up, right before my eyes. Within a minute, it had a flower, and then a pod. These seeds were inside the pod. Until this moment, nobody else in the world knew about them but me.”

“Can I touch one?” asked Nick. Jack did not reply. Nick picked up a bean and held it close to his eye. It glowed from within. It looked like a tiny point of green starlight was inside, with even tinier points of light circling it, and even tinier points circling those.

“Why does it glow like that?” asked Nick. Again, the old man did not reply. “Hello?” said Nick. He turned around and reached into the darkness where the old man was just standing.
Jack was gone
.

Nick was afraid. Without the candle, the only things he could see were those beans. One glimmered in his hand, and the other two stared at him from the box like a pair of cat’s eyes. He picked them up and held all three in his palm. They seemed to glow a little brighter together. Nick even thought he could feel a strange energy, a sort of tingle, passing into his palm and through his wrist.

Nick groped for the pouch on the table and found it. Holding the beans in front of him, using their meager glow to light the way, he made his way carefully out of the room. Once he turned the corner into the passageway, the light from the gallery made the going easier. He half expected to be seized when he entered the big room, but it was deserted. The old man was nowhere in sight.

“You want me to steal them, don’t you?” he said aloud. Once again no answer came. Nick stuffed the beans into the pouch and put the long loop of cord around his neck.

“I will then, you crazy old fool!” He climbed onto the ledge of the window, took one last look for the old man in the gallery, and vanished into the night.

Jack stepped out from the shadows of the passageway. In the darkness, the boy had walked right by him.

‘Am I mad?” he asked aloud.
Letting the boy walk out like that?
Of course he was. But the burden was growing
every day. And just when it seemed he would be crushed at last under its weight, the little thief appeared.

How strange it was, to meet this boy. Like flying back through time and meeting himself.

But no, not himself—not exactly. There was more to this one, something different. You could see it in his eyes when you looked past the desperation and fear.

“Go on, boy,” he said. “Go up.”
And I will wait for you below. So you can tell me what you’ve seen. And then I’ll know at last
.

What became of her
.

Finch twisted the point of his knife into the bark of a tree. “What the devil is keeping that brat? We should be inside by now!”

“Having trouble with the door, maybe. Or he’s caught,” said Squint.

“Shut up and keep your eyes on that fortress,” muttered Finch, stabbing at the tree.

“I’m only trying to—” Squint broke off in the middle of his response. “Someone is coming through the woods”

Metal sang as the entire band brandished their swords and daggers. They stood poised to attack as the footsteps grew louder and then relaxed as a familiar figure came into view. It was Marlowe, the one Finch sent to distract the sentry.

“He’s run off!” Marlowe said, panting.

Finch grabbed Marlowe by the front of the shirt and shook him. “The boy? You mean Nick?”

Marlowe nodded and continued, watching the knife
in Finch’s hand. “I did as you told me, Finch. Then I was on my way here when I saw him run across the field. You couldn’t have seen him from this spot, but I did. I tried to catch him but the little bugger was too quick. By the time I got to where he went into the forest, there was no sign of him.”

With a snarl, Finch shoved Marlowe into a tree. Marlowe fell to the ground in a painful heap. Nobody stepped forward to help him up.

Finch tucked the knife away and put both hands to his face, trying to think. His plan, his dream, was disintegrating—because of that boy. When he lowered his hands, his jaw was shaking.

“He’s betrayed me.” The words barely escaped through Finch’s clenched teeth. “He found a prize in Jack’s fortress and wants it for himself. But we’ll find him. And we’ll make him sorry.”

“He … he went east, through the forest,” Marlowe said meekly, still lying on the ground.

“East. That’s a start.” Finch closed his eyes and tried to let his instincts guide him as they had so well before.
If I were that little rat, where would I run?

Nick stood on top of the ridge. Below him was the abandoned farm where he first met Finch. It had taken a while to find it again, but he was here at last, only a few minutes before sunrise.

Moving carefully, he went down the slope, grateful for
the growing light of dawn, and reached the bottom without slipping on the loose stones. He walked to the center of the farm and sat on the stump beside the buried ax to rest.

Nick pulled the leather pouch from inside his shirt, leaving the strap looped around his neck. He poked two fingers into the mouth of the pouch and pried it open. Turning the pouch over, he let the three beans tumble into his open palm. He brought his hand up to his face to examine them more carefully. Now that they were out in the daylight, even this weak morning light, their glow was no longer visible. He covered the palm with his other hand, forming a dark cave for the beans, and peeked inside between his thumbs. Once again, he saw those shimmering green lights.