A Gypsy Song (The Eye of the Crystal Ball - The Wolfboy Chronicles) (11 page)

“We have been sleeping in the Desman’s small cave.”

“Is that what they are? Desmans?”

“Yes. They are Cantabrian Desman. A very rare and almost extinct animal with great healing powers. They must have seen us being taken away by the spider-witch and when she left the web to go hunting, they came to get us. They probably had help from their friends that live all over this place to carry us here. I can’t see how else they could have done it.”

“And what about my eyes?”

“They probably lifted the spell. Desmans are magical creatures. A little weird but a big help.”

Just as he said that, the two desmans stuck their heads out of the entrance to their cave. They stared at Manolo and Sara and shook their heads.

“Why, why, why would they be talking about us in such a manner?”

“Yes, why, why, why would they do such a thing?”

Sara laughed and looked at Manolo but he had already gotten up from the grass and was packing his bag.

11

ABIGAIL THE SNAIL

They stayed with
the desmans for the night and moved on the next morning. The desmans packed a lot of food and herbs for them for the trip. As the time came to say goodbye, Sara kissed them both on their cute noses. They looked a little sheepish afterwards and stared at each other while shaking their heads.

“Now why, why, why would she do such a thing?” Sara heard them say as they waved goodbye.

”Why, why, why, would she do that?” the other one replied.

Manolo whistled as he and Sara walked along the mountain stream. Sara enjoyed his happy mood and soon she herself was whistling along with him.

“Where are we going now?” she asked when he suddenly stopped.

Manolo looked up at the sky.

“I have made us a new friend. I found him while you were sleeping.” He pointed up in the sky. “We are following that cloud. It has promised to lead us.”

Sara looked up and saw a small black cloud in the middle of all the white ones. It seemed to be smiling at her, she thought, but that had to be nonsense, because clouds had no faces let alone a mouth. Sara looked again and it winked at her.

“What is that?”

“It is a leading-cloud. It will tell us where to go. We have to follow it the rest of the way. When it moves, we move, when it stops we stop.”

“That sounds simple enough,” Sara said and looked up again. Suddenly the cloud started moving faster and Manolo began to run.

“Come on,” he yelled. “We have to keep up with it.”

They followed the cloud for hours, sometimes it moved slowly and sometimes very fast. Sara had the suspicion it was playing with them. It had that cheeky look on its face like that of a naughty child.

But Manolo followed it, and so did she.

Later that afternoon, Sara was tired and wanted to rest, so she stopped and sat down on the ground.

“You can’t do that now,” Manolo said. “There is no time. The cloud has already moved on and if we lose its track we are lost.”

“But I am so tired. We haven’t had anything to eat since this morning. Can’t we just sit still for a little while and then catch up with it?”

“No! This cloud wants us to do whatever it tells us to. It is the only way to find the Sensisaron and The Eye of the Crystal Ball. That is what you want, right?”

Sara sighed and got to her feet again.

“Of course it is.”

“Great. We have no time to waste.”

Quickly Sara took out a piece of bread that the desmans had given them and she ate while they walked. The cloud was nice to them for awhile and slowed down so she could eat.

Later, they both were worn out and needed badly to take a break. But the cloud just winked at them and kept on going.

Sara looked at a tree she thought she had seen before since it had a distinctive look, like it had a funny face. Then she saw a rock she could have sworn she saw earlier that same day.

She told Manolo.

“I think we have been here before,” she said.

“Nonsense, it just looks all alike,” he said.

They walked for a little longer and then she saw a small pond that she was certain she had seen before.

“We are walking in circles,” she said. “We passed that pond two hours ago.”

“Hmmm…” Manolo grumbled. “Magic clouds can get a little mischievous if they want.”

“So you think it might be teasing us?”

She looked up at the cloud and saw it smile widely. Then it speeded up and they started to run to keep up.

“Yes, I am afraid so,” Manolo said.

“So what do we do?”

“We play along.”

“What? Why?”

“Because it has to lead us in the right direction at some point. It is bound to, it is its task and it has to fulfill it. A leading-cloud has to help anyone who asks it for direction.”

“So what you are saying is that we have to do everything it says until it decides to finally fulfill its task?”

“Yes.”

Manolo was breathing heavily now. He, too, was getting exhausted.

“Even though we don’t know when that is going to be?”

“Yes. It is our only hope.”

Finally the cloud slowed down and stopped. Manolo and Sara threw themselves onto the ground and caught their breath. Then Manolo hurried and got food and water out for them to eat. When they were done they looked at the cloud above them with great anticipation. But nothing happened.

“Maybe he wants us to camp for the night here?” Sara asked after an hour of silence from the cloud.

“Maybe you are right,” Manolo said. “The sun is almost setting and we need to get some sleep.”

He took out their blankets and made a bed of branches and pine needles for her.

“But what if the cloud moves while we are sleeping?” Sara said.

“Then we will have to follow it.”

Sara looked up at the cloud. As the sun went down and it got darker the cloud became lighter, almost white, and it lit up in the sky.

“We have to take turns to sleep,” Manolo said.

Sara nodded.

“You will go first,” Manolo said.

And so she did. She put her head on the moist forest soil and fell immediately into a deep sleep.

When Manolo woke her up, the cloud still hadn’t moved. Manolo lay down on the ground and fell into a deep sleep while Sara watched the cloud above her. Everything was so quiet. An owl was making a noise from a tree somewhere but other than that there was nothing. It was a night of a full moon and she enjoyed staring at this big white planet in the sky dreaming about the day she would hold her little brother in her arms again and he would smile at her. Sara sat there quietly for a long time and let her mind drift off.

Until she heard something.

Like a howling. Sara got up from the ground she had been sitting on and looked around her. It sounded like a wolf, she thought. A wolf howling at the moon.

The rest of the night Sara was alert and watched every move of the forest and its animals. She looked after the sleeping Manolo, keeping an eye on the cloud in the sky as she looked out for animal movements. By the time Manolo woke up, she was tired and asked to get half an hour of sleep more. Manolo agreed to that since the cloud hadn’t moved yet. Just before she dozed off Sara told Manolo about the wolf she had heard, and he promised her to keep an eye out for it.

Two hours later Sara woke up. It was bright daylight. She sat up, Manolo was still sitting at his spot. The cloud, now black, had not yet moved. It had turned black again.

“Are we leaving soon?” she asked while packing the blanket in Manolo’s bag.

“Don’t know,” he answered.

Sara ate and began to feel strong again. She took a quick swim in a small lake close by, and when she came back both Manolo and the cloud were in the same place as when she left them.

She sat next to him and stared at the cloud in the blue sky. It wasn’t smiling or even winking as it had been the day before. Sara wondered if it had all been something she had imagined. It didn’t even look like it had a face any longer.

“Maybe it is the wrong cloud,” she said.

Manolo scraped the ground with a stick.

”No. This is the one,” he said.

“So it is being mischievous again?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

 Since they couldn’t quite do anything about it, they decided to keep waiting for the cloud to move again. It was their only guidance so it wasn’t like they had any choice.

Sara killed the time by making drawings in the soft soil with a pointy stick she found. She made a picture of a beautiful horse, and she thought for a while about their beautiful stallion that they had to let go of in the singing cave. It sure would have helped them a lot to have had a horse on the rest of the trip. Sara was tired of walking, tired of putting her fate at the mercy of a mischievous black cloud.

She looked up once again. She felt like yelling at it, waking it up and getting it to move. So she did.

“Hey cloud!” she yelled. “Is it going to be today or what?”

But nothing happened.

They waited like that for hours and hours, and as the afternoon came, the cloud still showed no sign whatsoever that it was about to move.

Sara stood up again.

“I say we just start walking,” she said. “Maybe we can find the path on our own without the cloud.”

Manolo stood up as well. He sighed and put a hand on her shoulder.

“We need patience, that is what we need. Just sit down and rest,” he said.

But as he opened his mouth to speak more, Sara started jumping and yelling pointing to the sky.

“The cloud, the cloud! It is moving!”

They both looked up and saw the cloud suddenly move very fast across the sky.

Manolo took Sara by the hand and they started to follow it again.

After a while, they arrived at a small road that they followed until it ended at a mountainside. It just stopped and they couldn’t go any further, although it seemed as if the road continued on the other side of the wall. Manolo felt the mountainside while Sara stared at the cloud. It kept on moving and stopped at the top of the mountain where it seemed to be waiting for them.

“Do you think we need to climb the mountain?” Sara asked.

Manolo kept feeling the mountainside with his hands.

“No. I think this is a way in. We need to go in the mountain.”

“So you think this is like a door or a gate? But how are we going to open it and go in?”

Manolo shook his head.

“I honestly don’t know.”

Hardly had he said the words before Sara saw something. She stepped closer to the mountain and dusted dirt away with her hand.

“Look. It is an inscription,” she said.

Manolo stepped up next to her.

“What does it say?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know that language.”

Manolo looked at it for a while.

“It is Romani. The language of our ancestors.”

“Do you know how to read it?”

“I know a little bit.”

“Give it a try, then.”

Manolo stood in front of the inscription for a long time, mumbling before he finally said:

“It seems that it is an entrance to a chamber. My guess is that there is something in there that we need to get for later on in our quest. The good spirits probably sent us the cloud to guide us to this place.”

“But how do we get in there?”

“We need a key of some sort. I think it says that we need a rhyme.”

“And how do we get that? Does it say?”

“We need to find someone called Abigail.”

When they left, the cloud was still hanging over the mountaintop. They looked at each other and decided that they could only hope that it would still be there when they returned.

They walked across the valley where they had spotted a small village build on the side of a mountain. They found a narrow road that led them into the village, which consisted of only eight houses on each side of the road,  made of clay and straw The village seemed empty. Not a face to be seen. They went to the first house on the road and knocked on the wooden door. Nothing happened. The house had no windows so they couldn’t look inside to see if anyone was there but just hadn’t heard them. They tried the next house and the next one again but had the same result. All eight houses and only one result.

No one opened their door.

“It seems like the village is empty,” Manolo said and looked at Sara.

“But how are we going to find Abigail, then?” she asked.

 “We have to keep on looking,” Manolo said. He pointed at what looked like an old monastery located on a cliff a little higher up the mountain. “Maybe the nuns up there know something.”

They climbed the mountain following a small path of gravel and got to the monastery on the cliff. It, too, seemed abandoned. The gravel path was overgrown with weeds, and as they walked closer, Sara and Manolo could tell that most of the monastery was in ruins. The roof had almost completely collapsed and only the front was still standing.

It looked like it happened a long time ago, Sara thought to herself. The place was all overgrown with weeds and wild flowers. Like a graveyard, she thought. It was as if nature slowly and patiently stitched a delicate bandage to cover the wounds made by man.

The broken windows, the peeling walls and the weeds that reached into every crack and fracture of the walls, it all gave off a depressing sense of isolation and abandonment. But just as they were about to give up on finding anyone here, they heard a voice from the back of the monastery, an area where the roof was intact.

“What are you doing out here?” the voice said.

They turned and saw an old woman. Her dress was torn and worn out, her skin pale and wrinkled.

“Come in before you are seen,” she said and showed them a door leading inside the monastery.

Inside, eight small women and six men greeted them with much cheering. They poured water in cups and gave them fish and bread to eat.

“Where do you come from?” a woman asked. “It has been several years since we last had contact with the outside world.”