Howl's Moving Castle (43 page)

An irritable blue wisp came out of the bottle bouncing at his waist. “Must you
bump
so?” it said.

“Yes,” panted Abdullah. “The man you chose to help me needs
my
help instead.”

“Huh!” said the genie. “I understand you now. Nothing will stop you taking a romantic view of life. You’ll
be wanting
shining armor for your next wish.”

The soldier was sauntering quite slowly. Abdullah closed the gap between them and entered the wood not far behind. But the road here wound back and forth among the trees to make an easier climb, so that Abdullah lost sight of the soldier from then on, until he limped around a final corner and saw him only a few yards ahead. That happened to be the very moment when the louts chose to make their attack.

Two of them sprang from one side of the road upon the soldier’s back. The two who jumped from the other side rushed him from in front. There was a moment or so of horrid drubbing and struggling. Abdullah hastened to help, though he hastened somewhat hesitantly because he had never hit anyone in his life.

While he approached, a whole set of miracles seemed to happen. The two fellows on the soldier’s back went sailing away in opposite directions, to either side of the road, where one of them hit his head on a tree and did not trouble anyone again, while the other collapsed in a sprawl. Of the two facing the soldier, one received almost at once an interesting injury, which he doubled up to contemplate. The other, to Abdullah’s considerable astonishment, rose into the air and actually, for a brief instant, became draped over the branch of a tree. From there he fell with a crash and went to sleep in the road.

At this point, the doubled-up young man undoubled himself and went for the soldier with a long, narrow knife. The soldier seized the wrist of the hand that held the knife. There was a moment of grunting deadlock, which Abdullah found he had every faith would soon be resolved in favor of the soldier. He was just thinking that his concern about this soldier had been completely unnecessary, when the fellow sprawled in the road behind the soldier suddenly unsprawled himself and lunged at the soldier’s back with another long, thin knife.

Quickly Abdullah did what was needful. He stepped up and clouted the young man over the head with the genie bottle. “
Ouch
!” cried the genie. And the fellow dropped like a fallen oak tree.

At the sound the soldier swung around from apparently tying knots in the other young man. Abdullah stepped back hurriedly. He did not like the speed with which the soldier turned or the way he held his hands, with the fingers tightly together, like two blunt but murderous weapons.

“I heard them planning to kill you, valiant veteran,” he explained quickly, “and hurried to warn or help.”

He found the soldier’s eyes fixed on his, very blue but no longer at all innocent. In fact, they were eyes that would have counted as shrewd even in the Bazaar at Zanzib. They seemed to sum Abdullah up in every possible way. Luckily they seemed satisfied with what they saw. The soldier said, “Thanks, then,” and turned to kick the head of the young man he had been tying into knots. He stopped moving, too, making the full set.

“Perhaps,” suggested Abdullah, “we should report this to a constable.”

“What for?” asked the soldier. He bent down and, to Abdullah’s slight surprise, made a swift and expert search of the pockets of the young man whose head he had just kicked. The result of the search was quite a large handful of coppers, which the soldier stowed in his own pouch, looking satisfied. “Rotten knife, though,” he said, snapping it in two. “Since you’re here, why don’t you search the one you clobbered, while I do the other two? Yours looks worth a silver or so.”

“You mean,” Abdullah said doubtfully, “that the custom of this country permits us to rob the robbers?”

“It’s no custom I ever heard of,” the soldier said calmly, “but it’s what I aim to do all the same. Why do you think I was so careful to flash my gold about at the inn? There’s always a bad’un or so who thinks a stupid old soldier worth mugging. Nearly all of them carry cash.”

He stepped across the road and began to search the young man who had fallen out of the tree. After hesitating a moment, Abdullah bent to the unpleasing task of searching the one he had felled with the bottle. He found himself revising his opinion of this soldier. Apart from anything else, a man who could confidently take on four attackers at once was someone who was better as a friend than an enemy. And the pockets of the unconscious youth did indeed contain three pieces of silver. There was also the knife. Abdullah tried breaking it on the road as the soldier had done with the other knife.

“Ah, no,” said the soldier. “That one’s a good knife. You hang on to it.”

“Truthfully I have had no experience,” Abdullah said, holding it out to the soldier. “I am a man of peace.”

“Then you won’t get far in Ingary,” said the soldier. “Keep it, and use it for cutting your meat if you’d rather. I’ve got six more knives better than that in my pack, all off different ruffians. Keep the silver, too—though from the way you didn’t get interested when I talked of my gold, I guess you’re quite well off, aren’t you?”

Truly a shrewd and observant man, Abdullah thought, pocketing the silver. “I am not so well off that I could not do with more,” he said prudently. Then, feeling that he was entering properly into the spirit of things, he removed the young man’s boot-laces and used them to tie the genie bottle more securely to his belt. The young man stirred and groaned as he did so.

“Waking up.
We’d best be off,” said the soldier. “They’ll twist it around to
we
attacked
them
when they wake up. And seeing this is their village and we’re both foreigners, they’re the ones who’ll get believed. I’m going to cut off across the hills. If you’ll take my advice, you’ll do likewise.”

“I would, most gentle fighting man, feel honored if I could accompany you,” Abdullah said.

“I don’t mind,” said the soldier. “It’ll make a change to have company I don’t have to lie to.” He picked up his pack and his hat— both of which he seemed to have had time to stow tidily behind a tree before the fighting began—and led the way into the woods.

They climbed steadily among the trees for some time. The soldier made Abdullah feel woefully unfit. He strode as lightly and easily as if the way were downhill. Abdullah limped after. His left foot felt raw.

At length the soldier stopped and waited for him in an upland dell. “That fancy boot hurting you?” he asked. “Sit on that rock and take it off.” He unslung his pack as he spoke. “I’ve got some kind of unusual first-aid kit in here,” he said. “Picked it up on the battlefield, I think. Found it somewhere in Strangia, anyway.”

Abdullah sat down and wrestled off his boot. The relief it gave him to have it off was quickly canceled when he looked at his foot. It
was
raw. The soldier grunted and slapped some kind of white dressing on it, which clung without needing to be tied on. Abdullah yelped. Then blissful coolness spread from the dressing. “Is this some kind of magic?” he asked.

“Probably,” the soldier said. “I think those Ingary wizards gave these packs to their whole army. Put the boot on. You’ll be able to walk now. We’ve got to be far away before those boys’ dads start looking for us on horseback.”

Abdullah trod cautiously into his boot. The dressing must have been magic. His foot seemed as good as new. He was almost able to keep up with the soldier—
which
was just as well, for the soldier marched onward and upward until Abdullah felt they had gone as far as he had walked in the desert yesterday. From time to time Abdullah could not help glancing nervously behind in case horses were now pursuing them. He told himself it made a change from camels, although it would be nice not to have someone chasing him for once.

Thinking about it, he saw that even in the Bazaar his father’s first wife’s relatives had been pursuing him ever since his father died. He was annoyed with himself for not having seen this before.

Meanwhile, they had climbed so high that the wood was giving way to wiry shrubs among rocks, As evening drew on, they were walking simply among rocks, somewhere near the top of a range of mountains, where only a few small, strong-smelling bushes grew, clinging to crevices. This was another sort of desert, Abdullah thought, while the soldier led the way along a narrow sort of ravine between high rocks. It did not look like a place where there was any chance of finding supper.

Some way along the ravine the soldier stopped and took off his pack. “Take care of this for a moment,” he said. “There looks to be a cave of sorts up the cliff this side. I’ll pop up and see if it’s a good place to spend the night.”

There did seem to be a dark opening in the rocks some way above their heads when Abdullah wearily looked up. He did not fancy sleeping in it. It looked cold and hard. But it was probably better than just lying down on the rock, he thought, as he ruefully watched the soldier swing easily up the cliff and arrive at the hole.

There was a noise like a mad metal pulley wheel.

Abdullah saw the soldier reel back from the cave with one hand clapped to his face and almost fall backward down the cliff. He saved himself somehow and came sliding and cursing down the rocks in a storm of rubble.

“Wild animal in there!” he gasped. “Let’s move on.” He was bleeding quite badly from eight long scratches. Four of them started on his forehead, crossed his hand, and went on down his cheek to his chin. The other four had torn his sleeve open and scored his arm from wrist to elbow. It looked as if he had got his hand to his face only just in time to avoid losing an eye. He was so shaken that Abdullah had to pick up his hat and his pack and guide him on down the ravine—which he did rather hurriedly. Any animal that could get the better of this soldier was an animal Abdullah did not want to meet.

The ravine ended after another hundred yards. And it ended in the perfect camping place. They were now on the other side of the mountains with a wide view over the lands beyond, all golden and green and hazy in the westering sun. The ravine stopped in a broad floor of rock sloping gently up to what was almost another cave, where the rocks above hung over the slanting floor. Better still, there was a small stony stream babbling down the mountain just beyond.

Perfect though this was, Abdullah had no wish to stop anywhere so near that wild animal in the cave. But the soldier insisted. The scratches were hurting him. He threw himself down on the sloping rock and fetched out some kind of salve from the wizardly first-aid kit. “Light a fire,” he said as he smeared the stuff on his wounds. “Wild animals are scared of fire.”

Abdullah gave in and scrambled about, tearing up strong-smelling shrubs to burn. An eagle or something had nested in the crags above long ago. The old nest gave Abdullah armloads of twigs and quite a few dry branches, so that he soon had quite a stack of firewood. When the soldier had finished smearing himself with the salve, he brought out a tinderbox and lit a small fire halfway down the sloping rock. It crackled and leaped most cheerfully. The smoke, smelling rather like the incense Abdullah used to burn in his booth, drifted out from the end of the ravine and spread against the beginnings of a glorious sunset. If this really scared the beast in the cave off, Abdullah thought, it would be almost perfect here. Only
almost
perfect, because of course, there was nothing to eat for miles. Abdullah sighed.

The soldier produced a metal can from his pack.
“Like to fill that with water?
Unless,” he said, eyeing the genie bottle tied to Abdullah’s belt, “you’ve got something stronger in that flask of yours.”

“Alas, no,” Abdullah said. “It is merely an heirloom—rare fogged glass from Singispat—which I carry for sentimental reasons.” He had no intention of letting someone as dishonest as the
soldier know
about the genie.

“Pity,” said the soldier. “Fetch us water then, and I’ll get on with cooking us some supper.”

This made the place almost nearly perfect. Abdullah went leaping down to the stream with a will. When he came back, he found the soldier had brought out a saucepan and was emptying packets of dried meat and dried peas into it. He added the water and a couple of mysterious cubes and set it to boil on the fire. In a remarkably short time it had turned into a thick stew.
And smelled delicious.

“More wizard’s stuff?” Abdullah asked as the soldier shared half the stew onto a tin plate and passed it to him.

“I think so,” said the soldier. “I picked it up off the battlefield.” He took the saucepan to eat from
himself
and found a couple of spoons. They sat eating companionably with the fire crackling between them, while the sky turned slowly pink and crimson and gold, and the lands below became blue. “Not used to roughing it, are you?” the soldier remarked. “Good clothes, fancy boots, you have, but they’ve seen a bit of wear and tear lately by the looks of them. And by your talk and your sunburn, you come from quite a way south of Ingary, don’t you?”

“All that is true, O most acutely observant campaigner,” Abdullah said cagily. “And of you all I know is that you come from Strangia and are most oddly proceeding through this land, encouraging persons to rob you by flourishing the coins of your bounty—”

“Bounty
be
damned!” the soldier interrupted angrily. “Not one penny did I get from either Strangia or Ingary! I sweated my guts out in those wars—we all did—and at the end of it they say, ‘Right, lads, that’s it, it’s peacetime now!’ and turn us all out to starve. So I say to myself, ‘Right indeed!
Someone
owes me for all the work I’ve done, and I reckon it’s the folk of Ingary!
They
were the ones who brought wizards in and cheated their way to victory!’ So I set off to
earn
my bounty off them, the way you saw me doing it today. You may call it a scam if you like, but you saw me; you judge me. I only take money off those who up and try to rob
me
!”