The Thunder King (Bell Mountain) Read Online Free Page B

babyblossoms, daisies, and bluebells. “But the barns and farmhouses look sad. Where did all the people go?”
    “To Obann,” Martis said, “to hide behind the walls and to other towns farther west.”
    But Jack had something else on his mind. “I’ve been thinking and thinking,” he said, “about those scrolls.” He meant the ones they’d found in the cellar of the First Temple, in the ruins of Old Obann. “I can’t see why God had King Ozias write them, and then keep them hidden for all those years and years with no one to read them.”
    “Two thousand years,” Martis put in.
    “But why write them if no one’s going to read them?” Jack said.
    “Obst is going to read them,” Ellayne said. “That’s why God sent us to find them in the first place. And we did it!”
    “I just wonder what it’s all about. I wonder what the scrolls really say. That scholar of yours, Martis—the one who tried to steal them from us—said he couldn’t understand them. What if no one can understand them?”
    Hiking over the plains all day, talking made the time pass faster, and they did a lot of it. Martis had never done so much talking in his life. He wouldn’t have believed it possible to have such talks with children. Idiot, he chided himself: whatever gave you the idea that children couldn’t talk? It was certainly more pleasurable than talking with Lord Reesh, who only told you what he thought you needed to know.
    “You’re asking the wrong man, Jack,” he said. “I grew up on the city streets—what could I know of Scripture? And then I went into the service of the Temple, where nobody believes the Scriptures. I don’t think many of them even believe in God.”
    “But it’s the Temple!” cried Ellayne. “What are they all doing there, if they don’t believe in God?”
    “That’s the Temple,” Martis said. “Anyhow, we’re taking these Scriptures to people who will believe in them. That’s an errand I can believe in.”
     

     
    They did not know that Cardigal had fallen, nor that Caristun, to the north beside the river, and Caryllick, to the south, had stood off terrible attacks. These would have fallen, too, had the enemy stayed longer. But now the Thunder King’s mardars were abandoning lesser projects and driving all the armies on to Obann. By keeping to the middle of the plain, Jack and his friends stayed clear of those armies.
    Martis estimated they were halfway to Lintum Forest. “We’d be there by now if we had another horse,” he said.
    As the end of the day drew near, they saw something that surprised them, a little wisp of smoke rising in the distance. Martis made the children dismount.
    “Stay here,” he said. “I’ll go on ahead and see what that is.”
    “It’s dangerous,” Ellayne said.
    “More dangerous not to know.” Martis swung into the saddle and trotted off. Jack and Ellayne sat down by Ham. Wytt climbed up on top of the donkey’s pack and sniffed the air.
    “What’s out there, Wytt?” Jack asked.
    Wytt chattered: one man with a little fire, he reported. He didn’t seem agitated. “If he’s not scared, then I won’t be,” Jack said. “I’m hungry, though. Wish we had some chicken!”
    “You’ve gotten skinnier,” Ellayne said. “Or maybe taller.”
    “Taller? Do you think so?”
    “Boys do grow.”
    Jack thought it over. Had they really been wandering around so long that he’d had time to grow? At least six months, he thought. It seemed an age ago that he’d been living in a little house in Ninneburky with Van, his stepfather. Van used to say Jack was small for his age—which never stopped him from working Jack like a slave.
    “I wonder what they’re doing back home,” he said. They knew, of course, that Ninneburky had miraculously survived a savage attack by a Heathen army from the north, that Ellayne’s father, Chief Councilor Roshay Bault, had organized the defense. But people got killed even in successful battles. Jack wondered if anyone