فصل 29

29.

In Which There Is a Story with a Volcano in It

It is not an ordinary volcano, you know. It was made thousands and thousands of years ago by a witch.

Which witch? Oh, I don’t know. Not the Witch we’ve got, surely. She is old, but she is not that old. Of course I don’t know how old she is. No one does. And no one has seen her. I hear she looks like a young girl sometimes and an old woman sometimes and a grown lady other times. It all depends.

The volcano has dragons in it. Or it did. Time was that there were dragons all over creation, but now no one has seen them in an Age. Maybe longer.

How should I know what happened to them? Maybe the Witch got them. Maybe she ate them. She is always hungry, you know. The Witch is, I mean. Let that keep you in your bed at night.

Every time the volcano erupts it is larger, angrier, more ferocious. Time was, it was no bigger than an ant’s hill. Then it was the size of a house. Now it’s bigger than the forest. And one day, it will envelop the whole world, you see if it won’t.

The last time the volcano erupted, it was the Witch that caused it. You don’t believe me? Oh, it’s as true as you’re standing here. In those days the forest was safe. There were no pitfalls or poisonous vents. Nothing burned. And there were villages dotting this way and that through the forest. Villages that collected mushrooms. Villages that traded in honey. Villages that made beautiful sculptures out of clay and hardened them with fire. And they were all connected by trails and small roads that crossed and crisscrossed the forest like a spider’s web.

But the Witch. She hates happiness. She hates it all. So she brought her army of dragons into the belly of the mountain.

“Heave!” she shouted at the dragons. And they heaved fire into the heart of the volcano. “Heave!” she shouted again.

And the dragons were afraid. Dragons, if you must know, are wicked creatures—full of violence and duplicity and deceit. Still, the deceit of a dragon was nothing in the face of the wickedness of the Witch.

“Please,” the dragons cried, shivering in the heat. “Please stop this. You’ll destroy the world.”

“What care have I for the world?” The Witch laughed. “The world never cared for me at all. If I want it to burn, well then, it will burn.”

And the dragons had no choice. They heaved and heaved until they were nothing more than ash and embers and smoke. They heaved until the volcano burst into the sky, raining destruction across every forest, every farm, every meadow. Even the Bog was undone.

And the volcano’s eruption would have destroyed everything, if it hadn’t been for the brave little wizard. He walked into the volcano and—well, I’m not entirely clear what he did, but he stopped it right up, and saved the world. He died doing it, poor thing. Pity he didn’t kill the Witch, but nobody’s perfect. Despite everything, we must thank him for what he’s done.

But the volcano never really went out. The wizard stopped it up, but it went underground. And it leaks its fury into the water pools and the mud vats and the noxious vents. It poisons the Bog. It contaminates the water. It is the reason why our children go hungry and our grandmothers wither and our crops are so often doomed to fail. It is the reason we cannot ever leave this place and there is no use trying.

But no matter. One day it will erupt again. And then we will be out of our misery.