Bell Mountain (The Bell Mountain Series) Read Online Free Page B

said. “Everything outside the stockade is dangerous, to hear Van tell it.” And he told her about Van’s trip to Caristun. That story seemed to get under her skin.
    “It reminds me of something else I’ve heard about,” she said. “The last time my father was in Obann City, just before the winter, there was a reciter from the Temple who’d gone all balmy in the head. He was marching up and down the street in a filthy robe, with ashes on his head, yelling at the top of his lungs about the wrath of God and the world coming to an end. Everybody dropped what they were doing to listen to him. You couldn’t help but listen, my father said. He said it was like having icicles grow down your back. Until finally a couple of guards from the Temple came and hauled him off, and that was that. The First Prester really doesn’t like that kind of talk, my father says. He wouldn’t be surprised if they put that reciter in a dungeon and cut his tongue out.”
    Jack tried to imagine Ashrof doing a thing like that, but couldn’t.
    “I wonder what made him do it,” he said.
    “Who knows? My father said a lot of the people on the street nodded their heads, agreeing with the madman. Well, that’s Obann for you, he says.”
    Ellayne leaned across the table. “After I heard you and Ashrof talking, and thought about it all day,” she said, “I remembered that man.
    “What if it was true—what he said, about God being angry and the world coming to an end? And what if there really is a bell on the mountain? What if God’s been waiting all this time for someone to ring it? If I were God and if there was a bell that people were supposed to ring so I would hear it, I guess I’d be pretty mad if they never rang it, not once. Do you see?”
    Jack nodded. He did see, or at least he saw dimly. “It’d be like forgetting God, wouldn’t it?” he said. “No wonder He’s angry.”
    “That’s why I came here!” Ellayne said. “I had to find out if you were really going to try to ring the bell. Because if you are, I’m coming with you.”
    It took a moment for that to sink in. Jack thought he’d never heard anything so outrageous in his whole life.
    “You must be crazier than I thought!” he said. “Why under the sky would I want to take you with me? A girl! I suppose you’d climb the mountain in that dress and in those shiny shoes!”
    She smacked her palms on the table, making it jump.
    “You really are the most ignorant boy I’ve ever met!” she said. “I’d wear boys’ clothes, stupid! And boots. And I’d have you cut off my hair so I could be disguised as another boy. Nobody but you would know the difference.
    “And anyhow, I’ve got something you don’t have and that we’ll need if we’re going to get anywhere.”
    “Oh! And what’s that?” Jack sneered.
    Ellayne grinned at him.
    “Money!” she said.
     

CHAPTER 6
How to Have Adventures
    In all his life Jack had never been more than a mile or two away from his hometown and had never been taught about maps or geography. He could see the mountain from his own backyard. All he had to do, he thought, was to keep on walking toward it until he got there, and then somehow climb it. He thought it might take a day or two to get there and maybe another day for the climb. Had he been left alone to act on such notions, he surely would have come to grief.
    “You’re lucky I came along. You don’t know anything,” Ellayne said, when they met in secret the next day. The first thing they decided to do was to keep it secret that they knew each other. Neither Ellayne’s parents nor Van would have dreamed of letting them play together—not that they were playing. This was serious business. So today they met in Van’s tack shed, Jack having hung a rag from the doorpost to let Ellayne know Van wasn’t home.
    “There aren’t any roads to Bell Mountain,” she told him. “The only people who ever get close to the mountain are loggers, and they float everything up