Free The Witch of Clatteringshaws by Joan Aiken Page B

“
Lives of the Saints
. The Wends and theDanes are all very keen on saints. This will tell you about Saint Arfish and Saint Ardust and Saint Arling. May come in handy. Mind you keep in touch by pigeon mail.”
    “Don’t keep your supper for breakfast. You may die before dawn,” said the parrot. “The third hour rings the bell.”
    “Shut up!”
    The train gave a warning whistle. Half the English army was piled on it. Legs and arms stuck out of windows. The other half of the army was on an extra train following behind. They had been issued crossbows, arbalests, and cheese sandwiches. The entire army only numbered two thousand men, and their equipment was sadly out of date. Simon could only hope that the Wendish army was equally behind the times.
    “Where do Wends come from?” he asked Rodney Firebrace when the door of their compartment had been slammed and the train was gathering speed.
    “Eastern Saxony somewhere, I believe. Lusatia. They sail from the port of Lubeck.”
    “What language do they speak?”
    “Wendish.”
    “Oh.”
    Discouraged, Simon applied himself to the lives of the saints. One chapter was headed “Famous Last Words.” Many saints, it appeared, had said very important things as they lay dying, delivered prophecies or given good advice. Three of them had left instructions that their last words were to be written down, then kept secret for a number of years—Saint Arfish for three years, Saint Ardust for nine, Saint Arling for twenty-one.
    “Those terms must be over by now, at least the first two. I wonder what they said?” Simon murmured. “Was it so important?”
    “Who said what?” Rodney had returned to the crossword puzzle in his newspaper. “Greer’s gringo—a light-footed lady—who could that be?”
    “The saints—Saint Arfish, Saint Ardust, Saint Arling—I wonder what their last words were? What would you say if you were dying?”
    “ ‘Speech by rote,’ ” mumbled Rodney, absorbed in his puzzle.
    “Parrot-talk?” Simon suggested.
    “Never buy secondhand time,” remarked the parrot. “The second hand travels faster than the hour hand.”
    “Quiet, Wiggonholt!”
    “Cousin Sam and Cousin Malise got into bad trouble about Saint Arling,” said Rodney after he had filled in a couple more words.
    “How come?”
    “The saint was on his deathbed in a theological college. In the town of Clarion Wells. All the college students were on a rotation to sit by his bed and note down his last words, whatever they were. But Father Sam—he was Brother Sam then, of course—wanted to go fishing, so he did an exchange with Cousin Malise—she took his place at the bedside. And then she—for some reason—ran out of the bedroom into the street—something she heard or saw through the window distracted her—and when she came back the worst had happened—the old boy had handed in his tickets. So Sam and Malise were both dismissed from the seminary in disgrace with severepenalties. But Sam’s penalty was lighter because he had left someone in charge. So he was allowed back after a year in a grotto. But Malise …”
    “That’s odd. I wonder what the last words were? Maybe he never said anything. That reminds me of something that once happened to me—a long time ago—in a wet-country town—come to think, I believe it
was
Clarion Wells—”
    “Well—we’ll never know what the man said.” Rodney rubbed the parrot’s head.
    “Never climb, never fall. First’s the worst, second well reckoned, third is the luckiest of all!”
    “Oh, shut your beak, Wiggonholt. So that,” Rodney went on, “is why Malise keeps writing to Sam—she feels bad because she let him down. But somebody else has been writing letters from Caledonia, some people called McClan—to Lady Titania Plantagenet—claiming to be descended from Canute and Aelfred the Great and Brutus of Troy.”
    “What a lot of direct descent. Why not throw in King Solomon and Attila the Hun? Still,” said Simon,