Eight Days of Luke (16 page)

David could not help thinking she could have chosen a more tactful subject. He was pulling himself together to explain that he had had to feed the mutton to the ravens, when something black beat the air beside his ear and he felt a sudden weight on his shoulder. Very startled, he ducked away sideways. The raven, perhaps to keep its balance, or maybe as an affectionate gesture, seized David's ear in its beak. It pinched nearly as hard as Cousin Ronald.

“What do you want?” David said, half laughing and half annoyed.

The raven let go of his ear in order to speak. “Have you any more meat?” it said.

David was struck by a sudden splendid idea. “Quick!” he said excitedly. “Has either of you anything it can eat?”

They looked a little stunned. Then Astrid picked up her handbag. “Yes. Wait a minute.” She scrabbled through the seventy useless objects, and the seventy-first was a packet of cheese-biscuits. David tore it open and fed the biscuits one by one into the raven's ready beak.

“There,” he said at last. “That's all. Now can you do me a favor?”

The bird was leaning out from David's shoulder in order to see his face. “Of course,” it said and, no doubt as a gesture of gratitude, tried to take David's nose in its beak.

David clapped his hand over his nose in the nick of time. “Well, you said to ask you if I needed to know anything,” he said, “and I do need to. Where do I start looking for this thing Luke hid?”

“Oh,” said the bird. “That's a difficult one.” Gravely it stepped from David's shoulder on to the back of his deck chair in order to think about it. “If I were you,” it said finally, “I should ask the three Knowing Ones under the tree.”

“How do I find them?” said David.

The raven thought again, making nibbling noises with its beak and raking at its sheeny head with its gray claws. “I can't explain,” it said at last. David's heart sank. “The only thing I can think of,” said the raven, “is for you to follow me and I'll lead you to it. Do you want to go now?”

“Yes please!” said David, and jumped up so quickly that he nearly knocked the raven off the chair. “Can we follow you in the car?”

“If you want to,” said the raven, shaking its disordered tail feathers.

“Come on then!” David said excitedly to Luke and Astrid.

They got up, but slowly. “What has it told you?” said Luke.

“What on earth did it say?” said Astrid.

David was exasperated to find that neither of them could understand the raven. “Oh, it—get in the car and follow it and I'll tell you as we go,” he said.

They hurried to the garage. Astrid's car keys were the seventy-fourth thing in her bag. It came on to drizzle again while she was searching for them, but the raven obligingly waited on the garage roof until they were ready. Once the Mini was in the road, it flew steadily ahead toward the center of Ashbury.

“Don't lose sight of it,” said Astrid. “I can't watch it and drive too. Where are we going?”

“To find the three Knowing Ones under the tree,” said David. “That's what it said.”

“Of course!” said Luke. “I should have thought of that. But they won't tell you if they can help it. I wish I could come with you.”

“A fine time to say you can't come!” said Astrid, going so fast round a corner that David and Luke were thrown against the windows. “Sorry. David, can't you make that bird understand that I have to slow down for corners?” The raven was keeping up its steady pace, flapping along the center of the street, obviously quite unaware that cars could not do the same.

“I'll come as near as I dare,” Luke protested, as soon as they were driving straight up the main road. “But they know me, and David won't get anywhere if I'm with him. They're three old women, David, and they're all blind, except for one eye that they share between them. Does that put any ideas into your head?” he asked, with a smile that showed he was nearly himself again. “You'll have to force them to tell you what you want to know, you see.”

David smiled too. “Yes. I've read a story about that.”

“It's not exactly a story,” said Luke. “It happened. Twice. You'll be lucky to get away with it for a third time. But then I think you are lucky, if you can understand the ravens. Most people can't.”

Astrid stamped on her brakes and said a word that would have turned Uncle Bernard very frail indeed. The traffic lights in front of them were red, but the raven, quite unaware of this, was flapping steadily off into the distance. “Get out and shout or we'll lose it,” said Astrid.

David opened his door and scrambled out into the rain, but, before he could begin shouting, the raven came wheeling inquiringly back.

“Can't you jump over?” it called.

“No,” David called upward. “We'll have to wait.” A number of people crossing the road looked at him as if he were mad.

Rather grudgingly, the raven waited for them in some overhead wires. David could not get it to see the point of traffic lights. Each time they stopped, he was afraid they had lost it.

At the Wednesday Hill lights, Astrid became really puzzled. “Where does it think it's going?” she said. “If there's a tree on Wednesday Hill, I've yet to see it.”

“Ah, but it won't
be
here exactly,” said Luke. “I think it's going to the nearest way through.”

“If you said that again in Greek, I might understand you,” said Astrid.

The raven flapped steadily up crowded Wednesday Hill and then veered off into a side street which climbed to the very top of the hill. There were no trees there either. At the end of the street was a large shabby red-brick house with green railings in front. The raven perched on these railings. When Astrid drew up and David wound down his window, it said:

“It's in this house. You have to go downstairs, and it's the third door on the left. Can you find it now?”

“I think so,” said David, very much dismayed. “Thanks.”

“Good-bye then,” said the bird and flew away over the roof of the house.

David told the others what it had said. “And I don't know what to do,” he said. “I can't just walk into the house and ask them for their tree, can I?”

“Don't look so glum. We'll think of something,” said Astrid cheerfully, collecting her bag and getting out. “Drat this rain on my hair! We'll say we've come about the drains. Luke'll think of something, won't you, Luke?” Luke nodded, quite as cheerfully, and seemed to have no doubt that he would.

But Luke had no need to think of anything. The door was opened by Alan.

“Oh, hallo,” he said, recognizing David and Luke. “We weren't going to play cricket today because of this rain. Want to come in?”

David, delighted with this piece of luck, led the way indoors into a shabby hall paved with green linoleum. A row of four tubby little girls came out of a room and stared at them.

Alan said, in a resigned way: “Those are my sisters.”

“How do you do?” Astrid said to them. They stared at her.

Then a woman who was plainly Alan's mother came out of the room behind the little girls, shunting the whole row of them forward like railway trucks. “Oh, good morning,” she said to Astrid. “Have you come to look at the rooms?”

“That's right,” said Astrid, with great presence of mind, long before David had gathered what Alan's mother could be talking about. “Would it be a nuisance if I were to look round them now?”

“Not at all,” said Alan's mother. “They're upstairs. Would you like to come up and look?”

“I think my nephew would rather talk to your son,” said Astrid.

“Of course,” said Alan's mother. “Alan, you take him downstairs and show him your things. What about you?” she asked Luke.

“I'll look at the rooms,” said Luke. With a wink at David, he followed Astrid and Alan's mother up the broad bare stairs. Alan's mother was saying things like: “I hope you don't mind the top of the house,” and “We're in a bit of a mess just now.”

David, feeling extremely foolish, went with Alan down some steep stairs at the back of the hall and fell over Alan's cricket bat at the bottom.

“Oh. Sorry,” said Alan. He was feeling shy of David and did not know what to say.

“That's all right,” said David, quite as awkwardly. It was a lucky fall. As he picked himself up, David noticed a door on the left at the bottom of the stairs which he would certainly have missed otherwise. That made one door. He followed Alan into a long basement room opposite and behind him, to his embarrassment, he heard the row of little girls trooping down the stairs after them.

“Don't mind them,” said Alan. “What shall we do?”

The end wall of the basement was on David's left. In the middle of it was a fireplace and, on either side of the fireplace, was a cupboard built into the wall. That meant that the far cupboard was the third door on the left. Since there seemed nothing else to be done, David walked over to it. “Do you mind if I look in here?” he said, feeling an awful fool.

“It's only a cupboard,” said Alan.

Feeling sillier than ever, David opened it. True enough, it was a cupboard, full of shelves. Halfheartedly David gave the nearest shelf a push. It moved backward under his hand and, with it, the other shelves and the back wall of the cupboard. He pushed again. The whole wall, shelves and all, swung backward like another door, letting in a shaft of clear, steady light, not quite like sunlight.

“I never knew it did that!” Alan said, looking over David's shoulder. “Shall we go through?”

“Yes,” said David. “I've got to go anyway.”

He stepped through the cupboard, and Alan followed him. Neither of them said anything when they were through. They looked round, looked up, and then looked at one another's awestruck faces.

It was the biggest tree imaginable, or more than that. Its giant roots rose above their heads, far above, like the rafters of a monstrous barn. Beyond them, they could see the huge twisted trunk of the tree, going up and up and up, higher than any mountain David could think of; and beyond that, so high that drifting clouds and distance made it hard to see, if they lifted their heads right back, they could just pick out the great shadowy spread of the leaves and branches—or perhaps guess at them more than see them. A tiny black speck was floating up there. David thought it could be the raven, but it was too far off for him to be sure.

After a moment to take it all in, he went forward under the roots and Alan kept close beside him. Still neither of them said a word. But it occurred to both of them at once to look round to see how they were going to get back to the basement. They saw a vast plain of grass, vanishing into blue distance. But, about twenty yards from them, the open door stood on its own in the middle of nothing, like a piece of stage scenery. They could see the gray light from the basement between the shelves. As they looked, first one of the little girls, then another, came wonderingly through the door, until they were all four standing in a row, staring.

Alan's face bunched up in annoyance. Then he shrugged. He and David turned and went cautiously round the nearest massive root.

Round the other side was like a rough and ready workshop. Near the root, almost in front of the boys, there was a well, very full of dark water, so that it almost brimmed over. They could see that it was very deep, because they could just pick out dim lines of stonework, going down and down and down. An old woman was rinsing wool at the well, wringing it out with strong, knotty hands. Alan stopped, with a gasp, and then relaxed as he realized she was blind. Her eyes were wrinkled slits. A second old woman sat on a root-stump behind her with a tall thing David thought might be a spindle. Wondering, they watched her set it going round, pulling, twiddling, waiting until there was sufficient tension, and then take wool from the head of it and feel it out into a growing thread. She was blind, too. The third old woman was moving about behind them. She was taking threads of spun wool and hanging them over a root which stretched across the space like a gnarled beam. Every so often, one thread slipped off the beam, and she caught it, wound it neatly on a wooden bobbin, and stacked it in a recess under another root. Sometimes she pulled at a thread and, if it did not come down at once, she took a pair of scissors from her pocket and cut it. Then she wound it up. Some of the threads were bright colors, but most of them were the yellowish white of undyed wool.

The old woman at the well remarked: “There are strangers near.”

“Well, it was today we were expecting them, wasn't it?” the spinning-woman answered in a matter of fact way. “Don't tell them anything.”

“Of course not, dear,” said the washing-woman.

“They're only children,” the old woman at the beam said. “Six of them.” As she had not turned round to look, David could not think how she knew. But he realized she must be the one with the eye. He felt rather helpless. If she knew so much without looking, he could not see himself ever taking her by surprise.