The Diamond of Darkhold - 4 (3 page)

“In winter,” Doctor Hester had said to her one recent evening when Lina wanted to draw but they couldn’t spare a candle, “we live half our lives in darkness.” More than half, Lina had thought. The days were short in winter. Clouds often covered the sun. And the darkness followed you into the house and lurked in corners and up near the ceiling, everywhere the glow of candles and hearthfires didn’t reach.

Lina knew it didn’t make sense to miss Ember; and yet Ember’s dangers were at least familiar. Here they were new and strange. You could be frozen in a snowstorm, blistered by poison oak, attacked by bandits (she’d never seen these, but someone had told her about them), bitten by snakes, or eaten by wild animals. Now there was lightning to add to the list. “Why
are
there so many hard and dangerous things in the world?” Lina once asked Doctor Hester, but the doctor only shrugged.

“It gives us useful work,” she said. “There are always going to be people who need help.”

But on a night like this, with the sky flaming and roaring and the rain battering down, Lina didn’t want to think about useful work. She pulled Poppy close against her. Somewhere far away, she heard a high, eerie howl. Was it the wind? Was it a wanderer lost in the storm? She tugged the covers up over her ears. She felt surrounded by a darkness that was different from the darkness of Ember but just as frightening.

CHAPTER 2
__________

The Roamer

In the morning, Lina woke early, pulled aside the curtain by her bed, and saw that the storm had passed. Her spirits rose. The roamer would come! “Wake up, Poppy,” she said, nudging her little sister. “We’re going out this morning.”

“Nuh-uh,” said Poppy into her pillow.

“Yes!” said Lina. “It’s going to be exciting! Come on.” She got Poppy up and dressed her, and by the time they were downstairs, the rest of the household was up, too.

Mrs. Murdo stirred a pot of corn mush in the kitchen. “Maybe this roamer will have some dried mushrooms,” she said. “That would make a nice change. Or some barley. Or walnuts.”

“Or just about
anything
different,” said Lina, who spent way too much time helping Mrs. Murdo figure out how to make two potatoes feed five people and inventing endless dishes made from corn mush.

“Or some of that willow bark tincture for pain,” said Doctor Hester, who was stumbling around blearily, looking for a bag of herbs she’d left somewhere the evening before.

“Yes,” said Loris Harrow with a rueful grin. “Could’ve used that last night.”

“Jam!” shouted Torren. “If he has jam, let’s get lots of it. I hate eating this icky mush without jam.”

They had a hurried breakfast, Doon’s father spooning up his mush awkwardly with his left hand, since his right was encased in a bulky bandage. Doon looked as if he hadn’t slept much, Lina thought. There were shadows under his eyes.

Getting ready to go out took forever. Poppy spilled a big blob of mush down her front and had to be dressed all over again. Doctor Hester couldn’t find her scarf. Torren was rooting around in his box of treasures, looking for something he said was extremely important. Finally, Doon caught Lina’s eye and sent her a questioning look. She nodded. “Doon and I will just go on ahead,” she said. “Okay?”

Mrs. Murdo waved a hand at them. “Yes, yes, go on.”

So the two of them ran out into the windy morning. They headed down the river road and into the muddy streets of the town, where people were streaming toward the plaza to see the roamer.

A roamer was a trader who traveled among the far-flung settlements and into the ruined places to collect goods to trade. The approach of a roamer was always exciting, even at times like these, when people had very little to offer in exchange for whatever goods he might have. Roamers brought news from other villages—crops might be having an especially good or bad year, or sickness might be rampaging, or rivers flooding, or celebrations planned. News came as well from the mountains and from the empty territories that lay between settlements. Roamers could tell people if ice had formed on the lakes, if the wild mushrooms were plentiful, or if there were rumors of bandits. At the very least, an arrival from elsewhere made for a change.

“Let’s get up close,” Lina said. They edged around the side of the plaza and found a place near the strip of dead brown grass beside the river.

Lina scanned the crowd. Somehow they all looked smaller than they had in the summer, as if they’d been shrunken and withered by the cold. They wrapped their arms tightly across their bodies and drew their shoulders up close to their necks. Their mouths were pinched, their eyes narrow and darting, as if on the alert for the next bad thing that might happen. Lina knew she looked that way, too. She had noticed in the mirror that the bones of her face looked sharper.

She saw Mary Waters, one of the town leaders, gazing at the assembled people with serious eyes, like a mother worried about her children. She spotted her friend Lizzie Bisco standing up on a bench to see out over people’s heads. Lizzie had been ill; she was mostly recovered, but her red hair looked dull and tangled, and her face thin. She saw Kenny Parton waving at Doon and making his way toward them; he was a shy, quiet boy who seemed to amuse himself mostly by wandering around noticing things. He had become a friend of Doon’s toward the end of the summer, when something he’d noticed had given Doon an important bit of information about a treacherous young man named Tick. A few minutes later, Torren came running into the plaza like mad, holding something in front of him in both hands. Behind him, Mrs. Murdo bustled along, carrying a basket of dried garlic.

They waited. People talked in low voices, shivering, breathing clouds in the cold air. They turned up their collars against the knife-edged wind that whistled around the corners of the shops; they pulled their hats and scarves over their ears. A great many of them coughed and wiped runny noses on their sleeves; the cold and damp had spread illness through the town, and illness took a harsh toll on people who were weak to begin with from having too little to eat. Three people, so far, had died of fevers the doctor couldn’t cure. Lina had watched through the back window of the house as their wooden coffins—two big ones and one very small one—had been carried toward the town’s cemetery.

Finally, a creaking and clanking signaled that the roamer was near. Lina stood on tiptoe, trying to see. But what appeared around the corner of the town hall was not quite what she had expected. For one thing, the roamer was a woman—a short, stout, ruddy-faced woman with hair like broom bristles, dusty yellow, chopped off roughly just below her ears. Her clothes were tattered and grimy, hardly more than rags stitched crudely together, lashed around with straps and cords from which hung a couple of knives and a battered tin bottle and a pair of scissors. She walked ahead of her wagon, carrying a long stick in one hand.

The wagon was covered with an odd tent made of patches of different colors. All the patches were faded and dirty, but still the tent had a dull shine, like a cracked old raincoat. As its owner did, the wagon had things hanging off it—pots and pans, cloth sacks and leather pouches, coils of rope, buckets. A few sheep shambled along behind, not white and fluffy but gray as dishrags.

The animal pulling the wagon was a kind Lina had never seen before. It was much more slender than an ox—probably too slender, since its ribs showed in ridges along its sides. It had long thin legs, a curtain of hair on its neck, and ears that pointed upward. It turned its long face to look at the crowd.

“Hey, a horse,” said Kenny Parton, who was standing with Lina and Doon. “We hardly ever get to see them.”

She didn’t know why, but Lina loved that horse as soon as she saw it. She had no idea what horses were like. Maybe they were terrible, savage animals. This one certainly looked strong enough to give a person a deadly kick; maybe it would bite. It threw its head up all of a sudden and made a noise, and she saw its rows of teeth. But somehow she loved it anyway.

The roamer had halted her wagon and was starting to speak. “Come in close!” she cried. “Gather round! I have things to sell. High-quality, unusual things! Bargain prices!”

People pushed up closer.

“Look at my fine sheep!” the roamer called. “I’m selling just one today.” She turned around and hustled behind the sheep, shooing them forward. “Go on, lambies,” she said, nudging their rear ends with her stick. The sheep skittered forward, bleating. “See how fat they are? See how healthy? Great for wool, great for tallow, great for stew!”

Even Lina, who was no judge of animals, could tell that these sheep were not especially fine. In fact, they looked rather ill. Their wool was matted, and their legs were dark with mud.

“Who’ll buy a sheep?” the roamer cried. “I’ll sell one for five bags of corn or four bags of beans. Make me an offer!”

No one spoke up. Sparks didn’t have any bags of beans or corn to spare.

The roamer scowled. “Come on!” she yelled. “There’s nothing wrong with ’em! You’d be a little grubby, too, if you’d been up in the mountains half the winter. Give ’em a good wash and they’ll be just fine.”

Still no offers came from the crowd.

So the roamer shrugged angrily and reached into the back of her wagon. She brought out some bags and boxes. “All right,” she said. “Other items of interest. Best offer accepted. Edibles especially favored. Also candles.” One by one, she held them up.

There was a rusted bucket, a handful of old coins, a few straps and belts, a thick brown glass bottle. . . . Hattie Carranza, standing next to Lina, sighed and shook her head. “This is the most pathetic batch of junk I’ve ever seen,” she said.

A few of the things found takers. Martha Parton offered a small jar of squash pickles for a battered cooking pot; old Ferny Joe traded a sack of dried prunes for a carved walking stick. When the roamer held up a tiny plastic figurine—it seemed to be a little man with big muscles—Torren piped up with an offer for it, saying he had something extremely old and extremely special, a real remote with fourteen buttons. But the roamer just flapped her hand, dismissing him. “Edibles, I said. Can’t eat that useless thing.”

Torren frowned furiously. The remote was one of his treasures. He also had toy versions of a tank, a motorcycle, and an elephant; he had a nonworking flashlight; and—best of all—he had forty-eight real light bulbs that his brother Caspar had brought him from his roamings. He’d even seen one of them lit up once, when Doon connected it to the little generator he’d made. His light bulbs were his favorite treasure. He wasn’t about to give
them
up. But he’d thought for sure he’d be able to buy something with the remote, which he didn’t care that much about, because he didn’t really know what it was.

Soon no more offers came from the villagers. People began to drift away, disappointed. The roamer, seeing this, banged her stick on the wheel of her wagon and raised her voice. “News!” she cried. “I’ve got two pieces of news. You can have ’em for cheap.”

Of course, everyone was interested in news. Usually roamers told the news for free, but this one clearly wasn’t giving anything away. Mary Waters stepped forward and told her she could have five candles for her news.

“All right!” the roamer cried.

Everyone grew quiet.

“First thing is,” said the roamer, “there’s a pack of wolves in the area. I’ve seen the big birds circling. So keep a good watch on your sheep and goats.”

People frowned and murmured to each other about flocks and fences. Lina turned to Kenny. “Are wolves big birds?” she asked him.

“Nope,” he said. “They’re dogs, sort of, only more fierce. They howl. It’s like they sing together. In hard winters, they come in closer to where people live and they kill animals. People, too, sometimes. Then the birds come in later to pick over what’s left.”

With a shiver, Lina added wolves to her ever-growing list of the world’s dangers.

“Second thing is,” the roamer was saying, jabbing a finger at the sky, “a new star is up there. It moves, is the odd thing about it. I’ve seen it myself.”

The villagers murmured a bit about this. Lina heard a couple of people saying they’d seen the same thing. “It’s not right,” someone said. “Stars shouldn’t move.”

The roamer started putting her things back into their bags and boxes.

“I know how to make a wolf-scaring whistle,” Kenny said to Doon. “Want me to show you?”

But Doon didn’t answer. Lina saw that he was staring at something the roamer hadn’t offered for sale. It lay near the rear wheel of her wagon. It looked to her like a flopped-open book lying on its face.

The rest of the crowd left, and Kenny wandered off, too. Doon beckoned Lina to come with him and stepped up to the roamer. “What’s that?” he asked, pointing to the book.

She glanced back. “Oh, that,” she said. “I use it for my fires.”

“What are you asking for it?” Doon said.

She turned from her task of bundling and boxing. “You
want
it?” A gleam appeared in her eye. “Of course, it might be very valuable,” she said. “Ancient as it is. Discovered high up in the mountains, under unusual circumstances.”

“Oh, I don’t think it’s valuable,” said Doon. “I just happen to be a book collector. I could pay . . . um . . . let me see. I don’t have anything with me right now,” he said. “But I could get . . . I could get some . . .” He hesitated, thinking, eyeing the tattered book longingly.