Chapter 3: Valdoyzahost

As this party of five glided down the river, short and tall, so-called “river-rats” and confused girls, Wynn was paying attention to as much as possible all at once.  Every direction she looked from her seat in the pount, green, comfy, bumpety hills rose up like pillows.  The mist in the air made everything indistinct and hazy only a hundred feet away.  Now and then, a cute red tile roof would poke up through the brush.  She liked the quaintness of it all. 

And the fog makes everything seem downright enchanted.

The waterway began to curve to the right around a steep yellow cliff, and then, just past it, a stone dock appeared out of the mist; it sat at the bottom of a steep hill lined with a sort of metal track that ran up and into the fog-banks.  

As they pulled up, Lina shivered. The mildewed, wet feeling to the air and the general stillness all around them made her feel uneasy. She wondered what sort of train could go up such a steep hill.

“All out and good tides and good tidings!” cried Tomtom.  “4 faivalas, please.”  Coins were produced from pockets – “1 tenala and thank you, Alex, 2 faivalas makes 20, there you are, my cabbage”, chirped Daffna.  Alexander looked at the girls.  “It makes nothing, girls. We’ll pay it this time.  Once you two get a-counts and get to work, you’ll be able to pay us back wholly quick.”  

Accounts?  Work?  Oh dear, thought Wynn. But she was distracted by the clanking and whirring she heard. 

“Behold, the Foon,” announced Alex. Coming down the hill was something like a combination of a big wicker basket, a cuckoo clock, and a train. It was attached on the top to big ropes coming down the hill that were keeping it upright, and on the bottom were wheels with notches in them that fit into cogs in the track below.  The track moved with the basket, carrying it down to rest at the end of the dock.

“Strange name,” said Lina.  “The inventor named it,” replied Alex. “I’m sure you’ll meet Otto up in the Eagle’s Nest soon enough – a refugee scientist from the Morning Star, we took him in, poor thing.”

Waving goodbye to Tomtom as he pushed off from the dock, the four of them jumped into the basket, which had six seats inside.  Daffna reached out the window up and tugged sharply three times on one of the ropes, and after a short pause, the basket took off with a jerk, bouncing with the click-kerchunk of the cogs and notches, and swaying back and forth, buoyed one way and another by the ropes pulling and going slack. 

“What a lovely boat ride that was”, she said. “You know, we normally go home up the town-side of the mountain, but Alex wanted some time to compose some verses, and I thought a river trip would be nice, and besides we hadn’t seen Tomtom in ages. Lucky for you we were heading this way!”

After about five minutes, the track came to an end.  Here, the notches let go, and surprise! The ropes swung their basket up into the air!, and carried them along, slowly winding their way around the hill, hanging from poles set deep in the ground.  Wynn and Lina began to realize just how big the hill might be.  Lina’s ears popped, and she asked, “Why don’t you just drive up in a bus or something?  I think it is faster than the basket.”

Alex and Daffna looked at her blankly. “Do what in a which?”

“You know, drive up, in a car or a bus, you know…”  Lina trailed off as she realized they didn’t know what she was talking about.

“Dear child, are you speaking your in-home language?  I can’t understand a word, I’m afraid.” Daffna shook her head.

Wynn tried to be helpful.  “A car is like a wagon that rolls without needing an animal to pull it!” she offered.

Alex laughed but at the same time sounded like he was clearing his throat.  

“Just imagine! Asking an animal to do that sort of heavy work for you!  How barbaric.  Like enslaving the very birds of the air so you could fly about on their backs!  Humph!”

Wynn, crestfallen, decided to keep quiet.

As the basket continued to swing upward, the crest of the warrior hill became visible across the river valley; in the middle stood a broad, stubby fortress, surrounded by a large, open meadow that in turn was fenced in with narrow fortified stone walls.  The clouds were starting to thin, but the visibility still wasn’t great.  

“We have a far better view than the Shaft-hill does”, boasted Daffy.  Suddenly, they burst through a fog-bank…into sunlight!  Lina sighed in relief.  Wynn started to look around.  Hills, hills everywhere, each with a settlement on top, like islands in an ocean of mist surrounding them that rose like smoke from the valleys below.  Far, far in the distance loomed long rows of dark mountains that must be humongous, thought Wynn, if they dwarf the hills we’re in the middle of.  Wow.

Alexander sighed in appreciation.  “But hello! And so you two can see the lay of the land, two times lucky!  You see what those monster worms did to the land of the Bor, so many ages ago – piled and wrinkled up all the earth into these hills and mountains, they did, do the story goes.”  Wynn glanced at him to see if he was joking, but he seemed completely wrapped up in what he was saying.  Too weird.  Monster earthworms? But that was my idea...

He continued.  “Thanks to them, it’s hard to get going anywhere without going up and down and up and down, and the hills trap the wet and the fog in the valley labyrinths.  Just one more reason to stay put in Waldoyzahost as much as possible – too much labor to get anywhere else.” 

Wynn noticed that Alex said that word much the way that Wynn’s mum said the word “mice”, and Wynn’s mum absolutely hated, loathed, despised mice.

The basket now creaked to a stop in a hollow of the hill.  Standing beside a sign that said Middlepoint were some quite short people carrying dustbrooms, wearing cloaks with enormous hoods, and holding scarves in front of their mouths. Alex and Daffy both immediately rummaged around to make room for them, but somehow also completely ignored them at the same time. Wynn soon stopped noticing that they were even there.

Moving a little more slowly now, the basket finally reached the top of the hill.  The ropes led to a row of three wheels attached to what looked like stationary bikes, the kind you’d see in a fitness studio.  The riders were out of breath, white-faced, pudgy youngish adults all wearing dusty black, pedaling more slowly now that the basket had almost arrived.  As Wynn and Lina stepped out of the basket, all three pedalers hopped gratefully off the bikes and immediately lit up their pipes. 

Lina whispered to Ann, “does everybody smokes here?  Yecch!” 

Wynn nodded slowly as Lina rolled her eyes.  Hopefully no one would expect them to smoke pipes just because they were going to stay there for a bit. 

“Young teachers always get the worst duty shifts,” Daffy said, pointing towards the ex-bicyclists.  One of them called out to them as they passed – “Thanks for all coming up together– it means we get off early from hill-hauling!”

Daffna and Alex led Wynn and Lina up a curving path. Lina saw that the hooded little people followed, deftly sweeping the path clean of stray leaves and dirt with one hand and holding onto their hoods with the other, keeping their scarves in front of their faces. The path was lined with gardens and fields that were dotted with sprigs of yellow mustard flowers and grazing cows (and presumably also cowpies hidden by the mustard flowers).  The sky was open and sunny.  Ann could see why people lived on the tops of the hills, as she turned around and looked back at the banks of fog that made it seem like they were standing on a tabletop.

“Hurry up, Ann – you’re such a dream-head!  Come on!” called Lina impatiently.

Alex gestured with a wide sweep of both hands at what lay ahead, and announced: 

“Welcome Newsies to the Hoo, Lina and Wynn!” 

There ahead of them stood clusters of bumpy yellow apartment houses that seemed to be made of the same material as the cliffs. Each window, each building, each open space was a little different.  Some residents had put little glass blocks in their walls to catch the light; others had bubble windows; still others had rectangular balconies of every possible color; and then, where the streets opened up and got wider, there were sculptures standing in the middle of plazas, and one alley that seemed to be full of...polka-dot and striped umbrellas? AND EVERYWHERE PEOPLE STANDING, LOUNGING, SITTING, READING, CHATTING, PLAYING INSTRUMENTS...finish this paragraph...

And in the windows, and the streets, and the plazas, people were now looking in Wynn and Lina’s direction and waving hello and calling “Welcome!”  Pretty soon, it seemed like everyone was chatting about them - Ann heard “Newsies” among the burbling hum of conversation.  The multi-level houses were very close together and leaned in toward each other, making talking to the neighbours pretty easy and gradually turning the path into a corridor with yellow stone walls and a ceiling made of sky.

They emerged from this little canyon into a marketplace?  A plaza?  A party?  A little of all three?  The open space ahead of them was more or less a giant circle paved with stone with a huge stone fountain in the middle.  All sorts of tables stood around and people sat on every sittable inch of every surface.  They were sitting on tables playing cards, sitting in chairs drinking beer and coffee, sitting on the ground playing guitar, sitting by the fountain splashing their feet in the water.

“Is this a reveling?” asked Lina. “It looks pretty good to me.”

Alex laughed.  “Oh! This is just an ordinary day in the ValdoyzaHub.  Wait until you see a real revel – now that is really something!”

Daffna bustled.  “Come, my crunchy radishes!  Let’s get you settled.  Frederic!” she called to a man sitting on a table with a violin in his hand.  “I’ve got some Newsies here!  Have you somewhere to stuff them, somewhere a little quiet, perhaps, as they’re first young?”

“Sure! In the Tower, third floor, there are inside rooms, right cozy.  Come with!”

And just like that, off they went with Frederic to the Tower.