The Search for Delicious Read online

  “And now,” said the King to the assembled company, “before this boy starts out to poll the people, I want to make one thing quite clear. All of you here at the castle are going to stay here at the castle. There’ll be no running ahead to buy up votes for this or that. We’ll all stay here quietly for the four weeks and we’ll talk of other things.”

  “That’s right,” said the Prime Minister. “That’s the only way to handle it. Good luck, Gaylen, and I’ll send my cockatoo after you with the news each Wednesday and Saturday.”

  “You’re off then,” said the King, and he gave Marrow a slap. The horse went booming over the drawbridge and everybody cheered. They went on cheering until horse and rider had disappeared over a grassy hill and down through a stand of hornbeams, where the first road led to the first town. It all seemed very like a holiday and Gaylen, bouncing up and down on Marrow’s broad back, was excited and happy. To ride out on a strong horse and to see the kingdom—this was very fine, indeed.

  “You’ve lived too long here with me in the castle,” the Prime Minister had said to him earlier that morning. “It will be good for you to go about and see something of what the world is really like while you’re still young enough not to get discouraged.”

  Gaylen had gazed wide-eyed through the tower window at the broad land stretching away toward its ring of mountains through the young green mists of early spring. “I don’t see why I should get discouraged,” he had answered. “After all, I’m twelve years old. I know what the world is like and I can take care of myself.”

  “Yes, I suppose you can,” said the Prime Minister, laying his arm gently about the boy’s shoulders and peering out beside him. “Well, well, perhaps I’m only being gloomy. I suppose I’m getting old.” He had brightened then and rumpled Gaylen’s hair. “You’ll have splendid adventures, boy. Let’s go and get you ready.”

  And now here he was, jogging briskly along in the golden morning sun, proud and straight in the saddle, ready for anything, he told himself, and hopeful for much. He reached happily into his saddlebag and took out one of the King’s apples. But when he bit into it, his teeth struck painfully on something very hard. He drew back sharply and peered at the apple. A portion of the skin had been peeled back and someone had cut out a bit of the fruit and forced in a walnut. “Hemlock,” he said to himself. “Hemlock did that.” He stared at the apple for a moment and a shivery feeling twinkled down his spine. Then he threw the apple as far as he could into the underbrush and spurred Marrow forward. “Silly,” he said to himself, and he began to whistle a little tune. The tune was merry and the morning was sweet and soon the apple and its burden were far from his mind.

  It was noon when Gaylen rode into the first town. The streets were noisy with people going about their usual business, but when they saw Gaylen and the royal draperies on the horse, they left what they were doing and followed along behind him in a buzz of curiosity. Gaylen rode straight to the square in the center of town and cried out, as he had been told to do, “Gather round! Gather round! I’m here on the King’s business!” In no time at all, the entire population of the town had crowded into the square and the Mayor himself was elbowing his way through to where Gaylen sat on his horse. There was a considerable racket, what with everyone shoving and laughing, but the Mayor climbed up on the well that stood there and raised his hand.

  “This uproar is downright disgraceful!” he bellowed. “Everyone be quiet or you’ll all go to jail!”

  In the hush that followed, Gaylen read the proclamation in a loud, clear voice:

  Let it be known that every single creature in my kingdom who is capable of speech shall register with my messenger the following information: name, age, home, and the food he or she honestly believes to be the most delicious of all foods.

  Gaylen rolled up the proclamation and added, “Now, if you’ll all just form into a long line, we’ll get on with the listing,” and he took the large notebook and his pen and ink out of the saddlebag.

  The people began happily jostling one another into a sort of line. Since there were nearly two hundred present, counting the children, there was a great deal of confusion. But this was not the worst of it, for of course the people got to discussing the proclamation and it wasn’t two minutes before they began arguing. Gaylen had barely registered three names when a scuffle broke out somewhere in the middle of the line—a scuffle which rapidly became a fist fight, a fist fight which immediately developed into a general free-for-all. The whole square had suddenly become one big grappling mass of people, all throwing things and punching one another and falling down and tearing one another’s clothes and yelling things like “Melons!” and “Pork!” and “Raisin cake!” The Mayor, who was still standing on the well beside Gaylen and the horse, tried to salvage a shred of order, but his yells only added to the general din. At last he climbed up behind Gaylen and shouted into his ear, “Come on! I’ll have to call out the Guard.”

  Marrow carried them off through the square, dodging flying vegetables and trying not to step on anybody. They stopped on a side street before a little building where a sign said MAYOR in large letters. “Just a minute while I call out the Guard,” said the Mayor, and he drew a deep breath. Then he bellowed at the top of his lungs: “GUARD! I say, GUARD!”

  In response to this ear-splitting summons, a soldier in a battered leather jerkin and helmet appeared at the door. He carried a long spear, around the point of which had been tied a small pillow.

  “What’s the pillow for?” asked Gaylen.

  “Well, we don’t want to hurt anyone, you know,” said the Mayor. “Now then, go up there and calm everybody down,” he said to the soldier, “and tell them all to come in here one by one. Tell them it’s the King’s command.”

  The soldier trudged off and the Mayor took Gaylen into his office. “It makes me feel a whole lot better, having a Guard to call out at a time like this,” he said, sinking into his chair behind a large table. “But it’s most upsetting, to say the least. What on earth does the King want to go and stir up a lot of trouble for?”

  “Well, you see,” said Gaylen, “the Prime Minister is writing a dictionary and he’s having a hard time with a definition for Delicious. That’s all it is. I can’t see why everyone gets so excited about it.”

  “Oh, people enjoy getting excited, you know,” said the Mayor. “But just the same, it’s different this time. There’s something in the air. I had a report this morning that there’s a fellow riding about talking against the King. I hope he doesn’t try to come here. By George, I do. It’s possible that, on the whole, part of it could be an overall undercurrent of dissatisfaction. If the King lies down on the job, the people will stand to gain a loss of confidence in him. Mark my words, in the end it will be the beginning of trouble!” And he sighed and gazed out the window.

  Gaylen thought he understood what the Mayor was trying to say. His thoughts turned to the brawling people in the square beyond, whose shouts and cries could still be heard, and he was reminded suddenly of the walnut in the King’s apple. The morning’s holiday mood was gone and in its place was a vague uneasiness, like the feeling you get when you run down the road to overtake a friend and find, when he turns to meet you, that it isn’t a friend at all but a stranger.

  It was three days before everyone in the town had been registered, and when the job was finished, Gaylen turned over the pages of the notebook and sighed. If the poll continued like this, he said to himself, the Prime Minister would have to leave out Delicious whether he would or no, for so far no two votes agreed, and some of them were very complicated. The only mention of apples, for instance, came in the form of a vote for apple tarts, but apple tarts baked with nutmeg, not cinnamon, and, even then, really delicious only when served with sharp yellow cheese. You couldn’t put a definition like that into a dictionary.

  He put the notebook away in his saddlebag and crossed from the office to the Mayor’s house, where for the last time he would spend the night. He was glad to be fi
nished with polling the town, but the evenings had been fine, for the Mayor had a little daughter named Medley and every night he told her stories. Gaylen had sat two evenings, his eyes as wide as Medley’s, while the Mayor wove tales of wise fish and heroes, elusive white roebucks and castles of the dead, long and remarkable tales that left you breathless; but he tried not to let the Mayor see how eagerly he listened. After all, he was nearly grown. Still, stories like these were never heard in the castle unless a passing minstrel stopped to sing. He loved them, marveled at them, half believed them. And wanted to believe them altogether.

  “What shall it be tonight, Medley?” asked the Mayor that evening after supper. “Dwarfs? Or mermaids?”

  “Please, Papa,” she said, climbing up beside him, “tell us a story about the woldweller.”

  “Us?”

  “Yes, Gaylen and me. He likes the stories, too.”

  “What’s a woldweller?” asked Gaylen quickly, frowning at Medley and hoping the Mayor wouldn’t make a pointed remark.

  “Dear me!” said the Mayor. “A great boy like you and you don’t know about woldwellers? Well, then. A woldweller, so the legend goes, is a creature who lives all alone up in a tree in the forest. A little inmate of the great outdoors, you might say. He is very, very old and very, very wise and he answers questions. You have to get lost, they say, to find him. You creep along through the overhanging underbrush. Somehow he knows you’re coming to see him. And sure enough, you’re going to see him, for suddenly—BAM! There he is. You ask, he answers. Downright uplifting!”

  Medley clapped her hands. “Will you go and ask him what he picks for Delicious?” she said to Gaylen.

  “That’s a good idea,” said the Mayor, chuckling.

  “The King did tell me I was to ask everybody,” said Gaylen. “Do you think I could find him, Medley?”

  “Oh, yes! It’s easy!” she said eagerly. “I found him all by myself last summer and I wasn’t even looking for him.”

  “Here there, Medley, you mustn’t tell stories,” said the Mayor, still chuckling.

  “But I did, Papa!” she insisted. “That day when we were playing hide-and-seek and I went too far into the forest. Don’t you remember? I saw the woldweller while I was lost. He had a rabbit tied to his belt and he was climbing up a tree.”

  The Mayor stopped chuckling. “Medley,” he said severely, “you know very well that a woldweller is just something in a story. Nobody lives for hundreds of years up in a tree! We’ll have to stop telling fairytales if you’re going to start believing them.” And he sent her off to bed.

  “Children get ideas into their heads sometimes,” said the Mayor when Medley was gone. He lit his pipe and settled back in his chair. “Of course, you’re only a child yourself, really.”

  “Oh, no,” Gaylen protested. “I’m twelve years old.”

  “Oh,” said the Mayor. He puffed away at his pipe and then he said, “There was a time, I understand, when people really believed in things like woldwellers and dwarfs and the rest. Very little insight in their outlook. But of course we’re much too advanced for that sort of thing these days. We’ve overcome the underlying superstitions.” And he blew a smoke ring and looked very pleased with himself.

  “It’s true, just the same,” said Medley to Gaylen the next morning. “I saw that woldweller just as clear as clear.”

  “If he’s really there, he’ll have to be found and registered,” said Gaylen. “I have to go through the forest anyway to get to the next town. I’ll look for him.”

  “Come back some day,” whispered Medley close to his ear so that her father wouldn’t hear, “and tell me what he chose for Delicious.”

  When Gaylen was ready to leave, the Mayor took him aside for a moment. “See here,” he said seriously. “If I were you, I’d be on the lookout for this fellow who’s going about talking against the King. I don’t know who he is, but I was told he rides a big gray horse and looks very troublesome.”

  But Gaylen knew at once. The stranger on the big gray horse was Hemlock.

  Gaylen rode out of the town soon after, into a morning that was hung with clouds and threatened rain. No one said goodbye except the Mayor and Medley. A few of the townspeople were gathered at the well, standing about in silence. But as Gaylen and Marrow clopped by, one old man with a little pig under his arm leaped up and screeched, “HAM!” The horse shied sideways in surprise and bounded off across the square. When he was calmed again to a walk, Gaylen turned around for a last look. He saw that two of the women were trying to dump the old man into the well, while a third had hold of his arm and was trying to pull him out again. None of them looked as if they were enjoying it. And the little pig stood squealing on the cobblestones.

  The forest toward which Gaylen turned his horse rose green and silent just across the meadows beyond the town. He was halfway there and wondering how soon the rain would begin when, with a great flapping and squawking, the cockatoo dropped suddenly out of the heavy sky and landed on his shoulder in a graceless splash of feathers. It clung there, rocking dizzily for a moment, and Gaylen found breath enough to gasp, “For the love of Hector… !” before he remembered that it was Wednesday and time for news from the castle. He lifted the bird down from his shoulder and gently removed the folded paper tied to its leg. On the paper was written:

  Everyone here keeping his temper pretty well. The King gave a party on Monday with a minstrel to sing, and to avoid arguments he made everyone bring his own supper in a basket. But there is something strange—Hemlock has disappeared altogether. We searched his rooms and found nothing but a note which said, “No use to search—there’s nothing to find. Divide one by two and three will come to the fore.” I don’t like it. I am well and hope you are the same.

  The P.M.

  As well as he could, what with holding on to the bird at the same time, Gaylen turned the paper over and wrote on the other side:

  Have registered the first town. Everyone fought about it and there are no two votes alike. Hemlock is riding about talking against the King. Thank you, I am very well.

  Vaungaylen

  He tied the paper to the cockatoo’s leg and she flew off with a relieved squawk. Gaylen sat watching her disappear into the dark clouds that were nudging each other down the sky. “I wonder what Hemlock is trying to do,” he said to himself. “It can’t be simply that he’s angry at the King for not having nuts at dinner.” But he urged Marrow forward out of a clump of clover and turned again to his mission.

  By the time he had reached the first oaks and beeches of the forest and was passing in among them, the rain had begun to fall. It splopped and plipped on the leaves over his head, while here and there occasional drops that found their way down through the branches fell like small stars to hang trembling in his hair or the horse’s mane. But the deeper he went into the forest, the thicker became the roof of leaves over his head, and even though he could hear the first growls of thunder promising a heavy storm, he stayed dry as the grass on the forest floor. There were low branches now, waiting to catch at his hair if he kept his high perch, so he climbed down from the saddle and he and Marrow went side by side in a very companionable manner, listening to the rain. Gaylen was not at all worried about losing his way, in spite of the fact that there was no path, and he had stopped worrying about Hemlock. As a matter of fact, he was thinking about the woldweller.

  There was a lovely greenish glow in the forest, a glow pierced everywhere by tree trunks like fingers thrust into an aquarium full of tinted water; and Gaylen slipped between them like a small fish. With the trees all around him and the rain dancing on the leaves high over his head, he felt as if he were going deeper and deeper into a world that existed tranquil and quite separate from the one he had left behind. He had just decided that the woldweller must surely be real when he came smack up against the most enormous tree trunk of all and a voice croaked down at him from somewhere overhead:

  “Stop where you are, boy, and look around! You’ve stumbled ri
ght into the exact and precise center of the forest and that doesn’t happen once in a hundred years.”

  Gaylen was not surprised at all when he heard the voice. He tied his horse to a nearby sapling and stood looking up at the branches of the huge oak. He couldn’t see anything but a dense mass of leaves. After a moment the leaves trembled and the voice called, “Stand back! I’m coming down.” The end of a long, frayed rope appeared and dropped to the ground. There was another, wilder disturbance among the leaves and at last a figure emerged, climbing cautiously down the rope.

  The woldweller was a very, very old man. He was wrapped in rough cloth that exactly matched the bark of the tree, and about his waist, hung from a twiny sort of belt, were a number of objects—a saucepan, a wooden fork, and various other things—which clanked and rattled as he descended. His hair hung gray and tangled and so long that, as he came lower, Gaylen saw it was his hair he had tied about his middle for a belt, not a piece of twine at all.

  “You’re the woldweller!” said Gaylen.

  The old man reached the ground and turned to look up at him. He was small and his face was as dry and wrinkled as a walnut shell. “I’m a woldweller. There’s one in every forest, you know. I’m nine hundred years old,” he said, and then added anxiously, “Do you believe that?”

  “Yes, I do,” said Gaylen, for the woldweller certainly looked as if he were nine hundred years old. His eyes were so hung about with wrinkles and folds that they looked like two bright little pins pressed into a prune.