Bell Mountain (The Bell Mountain Series) Read Online Free PDF Page A

and down the river. With all the time they lose hauling things around the shallow places, it takes a week.
    “Besides, you don’t go straight up the mountain. You can’t. When you can’t go by the river anymore, there are the foothills, and they’re all in thick forest. No roads there! Before you got anywhere near the mountain, you’d first have to get through the forest.”
    “How do you know so much about it?” Jack said.
    “My father has money in logging. My brother Dib has been all the way up the river several times. They talk about it over supper.”
    “Oh.”
    “But we can’t go up the river, anyhow,” Ellayne said. “Sooner or later my father will know I’ve run away, and Van’ll know you’re gone, and they’ll come looking for us. Father will turn out the militia. If we go up the river, someone’s bound to see us and we’ll probably be caught. So we have to find another way.”
    “Van won’t bother to come after me,” Jack said.
    “They’ll figure it out that we’re together. My father’s not stupid. He’ll be after both of us.”
    “So which way should we go, then?”
    Long ago in Obann there used to be roads to take people almost anywhere they wished to go and books that listed all the towns along the roads and the distances between them. There were no such books anymore; the cities listed in them were ruins, and time had erased most of the roads. As for maps, no one between the mountains and the sea had made a map in hundreds of years. Neither Jack nor Ellayne had ever seen one. So although Ellayne knew much more than Jack, she didn’t know much.
    “We’ll have to go by a roundabout way,” she said. “We’ll either have to go north of the river, or south.”
    “We’d meet too many people going north,” Jack said. He knew from Van that the lands between the Imperial River and the Chariot River were full of farmers and herdsmen, with loggers in Oziah’s Wood and some villages too small to have stockades.
    “South’s better,” Ellayne agreed. “If we can get to Lintum Forest without being stopped, we’ll have a good chance of going all the way.”
    “Lintum Forest—King Ozias was born there!” Jack said. “I forgot that. Well, that is the way we ought to go! It’s King Ozias’ bell we want to find. It’ll bring us good luck to go through Lintum Forest. How far is it?”
    Ellayne didn’t know. Her brothers never went there. “There are outlaws in it,” she said. “I’ve heard that much.”
    “If there are outlaws there, that means it’s a good place to go to avoid getting caught.”
     

     
    The next day they met, Ellayne brought along a bulky package that turned out to be a book—the first one Jack had ever seen, not counting the books at the chamber house. Thanks to Ashrof’s teaching, he was able to read the letters burned onto the leather cover.
    “ The Mem … Mem-o-ire of Abombalbap ,” he read. “What in the blazes is that?”
    “It’s a book about how to have adventures,” Ellayne said. “My father used to read this to me at bedtime, and now I can read it for myself, so he gave it to me. My mother doesn’t think these are the right kind of stories for girls.”
    “How can this help us?”
    “Abombalbap was the rightful heir to a castle long ago. His stepmother wanted to kill him when he was still a baby, so she gave him to a shepherd to feed to the wolves. But the shepherd kept him alive instead, and raised him. When he was old enough, he traveled all around having adventures until he found out who he really was and got his castle back.”
    Jack had never heard of anything like that. “What’s a castle?” he said.
    “It’s a place sort of like the Prester’s Palace in Obann. It has high walls and towers and a moat around it. There used to be lots of castles in the old days.
    “Abombalbap had adventures with bandits, and Heathen raiders, and robber lords, giants, dwarfs, magicians—and he always came out on top. The book tells you how