The House of Power Page 2

  Edgar ran to the tree and examined the mark he’d left there, hiding the sling back in his pocket as he went. He found the black fig and put it in the side pocket of his pants, for though he had a dozen more hidden in the grove, most of the fallen figs were taken by those in the village.

  Edgar sometimes thought he’d like to demonstrate his target shooting with the other boys who worked in the grove, but he didn’t spend a lot of time with them. The others had families in the village, and when the work was finished, they were quick to go, leaving Edgar by himself when night fell on the grove. After a while it was as though Edgar had become invisible to the people around him. He would have liked to make more friends, but he worried that what he did at night would be discovered.

  An hour later Edgar had crossed through the grove to the other side, making his way alone to a very remote area of the cliff wall separating Tabletop from the Highlands. It was a quiet place away from the grove, the village, and the waterfall. The hour was getting late, and Edgar walked, touching the wall of the cliff as he went, his calloused hand sliding along the uneven surface in jumps and starts. For years Edgar had been coming here to practice with his sling while nobody was watching. Night after night, every night, Edgar had come here for another reason as well. He was searching for an object—one that was hidden—and finding it meant climbing the cliff wall, something he was forbidden to do.

  At this hour in Atherton the cliffs were hidden in a cloak of grey light. It would last for many hours, this nearly night, and it would conceal Edgar as he went about his business. Guards walked near the foot of the cliff at night and looked for mischief, but Edgar was an expert at moving about unnoticed. The people of the Highlands had strictly prohibited climbing—especially near the waterfalls—and there would be terrible trouble if Edgar’s secret were found out. Rumors floated around that if anyone were caught climbing, both legs would be broken, or the culprit would be thrown off the edge of the world into the Flatlands.

  It didn’t take long for Edgar to move fifty feet up the wall, scurrying like a spider across route after route high above the ground. The cliff was perfectly vertical, but it was filled with crags that were not difficult for Edgar to hold. He was helped by the dull light of evening, which allowed Edgar to see the stone surface before him. Light crept around the edges of the world of Atherton as it turned away from the sun, and total darkness came only briefly in the deepest part of the night.

  Edgar climbed higher still, his body perched a hundred feet above the ground and no rope to catch him if he fell. He moved across to an area he’d never been to, and he tried to remember.

  Edgar was raised as an orchard boy, but he hadn’t always been alone in the world. He had a fractured memory of an earlier time, a time before the grove. He had a father, this much he knew. But Edgar was eleven now, and each year the memories grew fainter. All of what remained in his memory was focused on one exchange with a man. He had been here—at the cliffs—as a little boy of three or four when the words were spoken. The man was on one knee looking into Edgar’s eyes. There was no face in Edgar’s memory—only the soft hazel eyes, a smell of embers in the air, and the words he wouldn’t let go:

  “Do you see this rock wall, little Edgar?”

  “I see it.”

  “Remember this place, won’t you?”

  “I will.”

  “I’ve hidden something way up there, in the rocks, where no one can find it.”

  “Way up there?”

  “Yes, Edgar, way up there.”

  “What did you hide?”

  “It will come to you, if you wait for it. Look for Atherton.”

  “But what did you hide?”

  Every year Edgar remembered a little less even as he played the scene again and again in his mind. One thing he was sure of—it was shortly after this memory that Edgar found himself in the care of Mr. Ratikan.

  It will come to you, if you wait for it. Look for Atherton. For years he’d pondered the meaning of that statement as he moved about on the face of the cliff. The older he grew, the more confusing the words became, and he began to wonder if he’d remembered it right. Look for Atherton. He was in Atherton—or so he thought—and he could only take its meaning to be that he should look everywhere. It was not a useful bit of instruction.

  But we come upon Edgar’s story at this moment with good reason. On that very night Edgar climbed higher then he’d climbed before to places he’d never been. He climbed desperately, for trouble with Mr. Ratikan was growing more frequent, and the boy wondered if he might soon be caught. His fingers pried into every crack and crevice in the rocks as he went, until finally, a thousand nights of searching gone by, it happened.

  Two hundred feet above the ground with darkness closing in around him, Edgar found something.

  CHAPTER

  3

  RULES MADE FOR BREAKING

  Deep night was approaching and only a hush of light remained. Climbing down would be even more treacherous than usual. Edgar was shaking—not with fright or cold but with excitement. He had always been a steady boy, and it was unsettling to feel his legs tremble.

  Edgar had found a tiny, cavelike opening the size of his own outstretched hand. At first he had veered away from it, fearing that some unknown creature would dart out, grab him by the arm, and never let go. But even in the dim light Edgar could see that he had found what he’d been looking for.

  Just below the hole there was a symbol etched in the rock, as if someone had come with a sharp object and hastily carved the marking into the cliff. Edgar supposed that if he could stand outside of Atherton and look at it from a distance, it would look very much like the symbol before him. Look for Atherton. At last he had found what the man in his memory had left for him. He shivered with anticipation.

  Edgar put his hand inside the hole and found that it wasn’t very deep. His arm was only in to the elbow and already he touched rough stone. He felt all around, holding on with his other arm so he wouldn’t fall, and he found that the space curved downward.

  A chill ran through him as he thought once more about something alive in the hole. Just because a secret had been left there didn’t mean it couldn’t be used as a home for a boy-eating monster. Something with sharp teeth and claws. He felt around cautiously, slowly moving his hand from side to side, but there was nothing.

  He shifted, and with an extra thrust of his shoulder, managed to maneuver his arm all the way into the space. Now the tip of his fingers touched something different. It was not stone; it was softer. As he fidgeted with his fingers the object moved back and forth under his touch. He hoped it wasn’t alive. Edgar fumbled for what seemed like an eternity as he tried to get his fingers around the hidden item.

  He risked letting go of the cliff with his other hand and rose up on his toes, forcing his arm into the hole until his cheek smashed up against the cliff. This turned out to be far enough. At last he had a grip on the mysterious thing he’d been hunting for for years, and pulled it out.

  He was at once overjoyed and completely devastated. It was a beautiful item, leathery and brown with paper inside. It was a book. The book didn’t have very many pages, but it was full of words that broke Edgar’s heart, not for the things they said of honesty or nostalgia or sadness. The words broke his heart because Edgar could not read, and neither could anyone else who lived in Tabletop.

  Weeks passed and Edgar did not return to the cliff. It was the first time he could remember staying away for more than a day or two. But he could not be consoled. Though he was young, it seemed to him that his life’s work—the work of learning to climb and finding what was left for him—had come to a crashing and painful end.

  Day after day he brooded over the book he’d found. At night when everyone was gone from the grove he would flip through the pages in the waning light, trying to understand. Not only was the book full of nothing but words, but they were written in a messy hand. Whoever had written it was either in a hurry or hadn’t learned to write ver
y well.

  How could this man have left something so useless? Edgar had worked so hard and taken such risks, only to find an awful truth in the end—the treasure he sought was out of reach in a way that no amount of climbing could overcome.

  Edgar fretted endlessly over what to do with the book. The rules of Tabletop were clear, and Edgar had heard them many times:

  1: IF YOU SEND FOOD TO THE HIGHLANDS, THEY WILL SEND YOU WATER.

  2: DON’T WASTE WATER.

  3: IT IS FORBIDDEN TO CLIMB OR GO NEAR THE CLIFFS.

  4: IF YOU FIND A BOOK, GIVE IT TO ONE OF THE GUARDS TO SEND IT UP TO THE HIGHLANDS IMMEDIATELY. DON’T BURN IT OR DESTROY IT AND DON’T KEEP IT. DON’T LOOK AT ITS PAGES. THERE ARE PEOPLE IN TABLETOP WHO WILL TELL US IF YOU DO.

  Edgar had often wondered about the last rule. How would a book arrive in Tabletop to begin with? Nobody in the world of Atherton could read, apart from the people who lived in the Highlands. It made him wonder if he had been the only person looking for the book he’d found hidden in the cliff. He supposed, on thinking it through, that someone might walk along the edge of the Highlands above and accidentally drop one into the sky, where it would flutter and fall like a bird with a broken wing, the pages ripping as it came. Or, for reasons Edgar could only guess at, perhaps someone would smuggle a book down in one of the baskets.

  For as long as Edgar could remember, there had been ropes and baskets hanging down from the Highlands at intervals around the cliffs. The people of Tabletop filled the baskets with figs, mutton, rabbit, and wool. The guards signaled the Highlands by tugging on a rope, and the baskets were pulled into the air. But why would anyone from above hide a book in the cliff?

  Edgar finally decided to hide the book in the grove. First he counted the trees along one row until he had gone through every finger and every toe. He dug a narrow hole, wrapped the book in leaves, and dropped it inside. Then he covered the opening with a rock he could barely lift. The next day he would do the same, counting fingers and toes as he passed trees in another direction until he arrived at the base of a tree and buried the book once more. He was so very frightened of losing the book or of someone finding it that he thought of nothing else.

  “Quit your sulking, you foolish boy!” Mr. Ratikan roared whenever he saw Edgar deep in thought, moving listlessly through the grove. As a rule Edgar produced more work in an hour than almost anyone else could achieve in two, but now he had turned sluggish and inattentive, unable to focus on the tasks put before him. A good worker gone bad enraged Mr. Ratikan, and he constantly criticized the boy’s effort, fearing retribution from Lord Phineus if work in the grove moved too slowly.

  Once in a great while, when the rulers of the Highlands were not pleased with the goods they’d been sent, someone from the Highlands—often Lord Phineus himself—would visit in one of the large baskets. Lord Phineus wouldn’t come all the way down, but he did come far enough that everyone who gathered around could hear his grim voice, and usually what he came to say wasn’t very nice: “You’re not working fast enough!” or “Not enough rabbit!” or “Where are the figs you promised us?” In every case the punishment was the same: “There will be less water for a while, until things improve.”

  Edgar wondered if he might meet Lord Phineus someday, and it was this thought one evening that finally broke Edgar’s dark mood. He sat up and looked at the book in his hand, and his thoughts became words in the grove.

  “If I took this little book to the Highlands, I wonder if I could find someone who would read it to me?”

  It was an outrageous thought, and yet Edgar stewed on it. The baskets weren’t a realistic option, since they were guarded night and day. But why couldn’t he climb all the way to the top? It would be ten times higher than he’d ever climbed before, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t do it. If he were caught, they would probably throw him over the edge of the world. But wasn’t there a chance that someone up there would help him? He didn’t care if they locked him up or turned him into a slave or threw him to his death. He would be happy to give up his life in the grove in order to hear just a few of the words from this treasure he had spent his life looking for.

  He buried the book once more, then sat with his back against a fig tree, staring off into the grove. Edgar’s mind drifted to the cliffs, and he wondered if he possessed enough skill to climb all the way to the top, to a place he was forbidden to enter.

  CHAPTER

  4

  CHANGE BEGINS

  The next morning Edgar began work early in a part of the grove where the trees were beginning to sprout figs. His day would be spent pulling together the tiny vines that drooped from the limbs and tying them into bundles where they would hang heavily from the tree like clusters of tiny green eggs. A few weeks after the figs were tied together Edgar would return and pull the hard, black figs from their vines, releasing the rest from the string.

  The monotony of tying bundles of figs together helped Edgar think clearly, for his mind was sharper when his hands were busy at repetitive tasks. He would need to find a way to leave the grove early in order to make his escape to the Highlands, and this would mean missing dinner. But there was only one way he could miss dinner without stirring up suspicion about where he’d gone: He would need to get into some trouble so that Mr. Ratikan would take his dinner away from him. For once Edgar wanted to get caught doing something he shouldn’t be doing.

  He rolled this idea over in his mind most of the day as he pulled string after string from his belt and tied the green figs into bundles. By the time Edgar pulled the last string from his belt, he had decided what to do.

  It was mid-afternoon and he walked the short distance to the old grove where the dying trees were stripped and gutted before turning poisonous. This was an odd place, not like the rest of the grove, in which trees had come to the very end of their short lives. Many of the trees still stood awaiting their doom, but plenty of limbs had already been torn off and trunks uprooted. The place had a chilling sense of bones in a field strewn everywhere while the remaining trees sadly looked on, unable to run away.

  Mr. Ratikan was there, off at the far end, waving his walking stick and speaking to a group of workers who stood around a fallen tree. Edgar was supposed to meet Mr. Ratikan here when he’d finished with the tying so that more work could be assigned, but instead Edgar picked up the largest fallen limb he could carry and set his plan in motion.

  He spied two old trees still standing near one another, climbed up one of them while dragging the limb behind him, and then dropped the long limb across to the other tree where it stuck firmly in the branches. The limb was about six feet off the ground. It didn’t take very long for Mr. Ratikan to notice Edgar in the tree, getting ready to walk across the limb.

  “What are you doing there, boy?” Mr. Ratikan screamed, marching toward Edgar, his pinched face turning red. “Get out of that tree!”

  He turned to the other workers, who were curiously watching the commotion. “Get back to work gutting those limbs!”

  Edgar could see that Mr. Ratikan was in an even fouler mood than usual, and began to wonder if maybe this hadn’t been such a good idea after all. It crossed his mind to jump out of the tree and run for his life, but Mr. Ratikan would have everyone looking for him if he did. And so as Mr. Ratikan approached, Edgar took a deep breath, smiled, and placed one foot on the limb he’d set between the trees.

  “I just want to see if I can walk across it,” said Edgar. “It won’t take long.”

  “Get down from there, you idiot!”

  Edgar took another step out onto the limb.

  “What about a wager?” asked Edgar.

  “You stupid boy!” screamed Mr. Ratikan. He could see Edgar had gotten his spirit back, and it infuriated him.

  “If I fall, you can keep my dinner tonight,” said Edgar.

  “You’ll be getting no dinner either way if you stay up there any longer.”

  It was about ten feet to the other side. Edgar wasn’t entire
ly sure he could make it all the way across. He moved out onto the unsteady limb and felt it bow beneath his weight. Though it wobbled back and forth, Edgar walked steadily to the middle. Mr. Ratikan jabbed the limb with his walking stick, and it swayed violently. When Edgar still didn’t fall, Mr. Ratikan started swinging the stick at his shins. But Edgar nimbly jumped and dodged his way across, and Mr. Ratikan never did get a clean blow at his feet.

  Once Edgar reached the other side, he came down from the tree and stood grinning in the grass.

  “I told you I could do it!”

  Mr. Ratikan was not amused. “No dinner, and no water until morning. If I see you near my house begging for food, you can skip breakfast as well! How does that suit you?”

  Mr. Ratikan had turned to go when the ground began to shake as it had before. It was more pronounced this time, or so it seemed within the confines of the old part of the grove. The trees were not healthy, and several toppled loudly to the ground. When the rumbling stopped, Edgar looked at Mr. Rati kan as though he thought maybe the man knew why the ground shook so.

  “What are you looking at? Get back to the field and tie bundles until dark. And don’t come near my house until tomorrow!”

  Mr. Ratikan stumbled hastily away toward the workers, ordering them to meet him at the fallen trees and begin cutting them open. Though nothing was said, there was a sense that many of the workers were frightened by the trembling of the ground and the newly fallen trees. But Mr. Ratikan was in a tirade and would not let them talk amongst themselves.

  Edgar had a mixed-up feeling in his stomach as he went back in the direction from which he’d come. He was hungry and thirsty with a promise of fulfilling neither before him. It made him wonder if he would have enough energy to climb all the way to the top of the cliff. And why did the ground keep shaking as it did? It seemed to be getting worse. Edgar was anxious as he thought of what might happen if the movement returned while he was climbing as far into the sky as the eye could see.