Beguilers Read Free Page B

for a while, the sides of the pool are sheer, more frightening than when the pool is full because they go down for such a long way before they reach the water. And a long way afterwards as well, people say. Huge leather buckets on thick ropes are lowered down the sides. The ropes are slung over a frame made of stout timber, which is designed so that when the buckets are pulled by the oxen to the top, they tilt and pour their contents into the series of ditches and aqueducts that run down towards the village pond.
    From there, in the cool of evening, the water has to be carried by yak or donkey or bucket-pole to the fields, some of which are nearly a mile from the houses. The whole village is involved in that part of the operation. Even the smallest child is busy, watering the crops with a small jug, until every plant that we own has been given enough to keep it alive. And the whole process goes on, every second or third day, for as long as the drought lasts. In a bad year, that could be weeks.
    But the strange thing is that no matter how much water we draw from the drowning pool it is never empty. My father says that you wouldn’t empty it in a hundred years. He says it is bottomless.
    And now the beguilers were leading me towards it.

CHAPTER THREE
    I KNEW THAT I was being lured but I wasn’t mesmerised, or at least I believed that I wasn’t. I was sure that I could stop as soon as I wanted to and turn back. But at least one of the things we had been told about the beguilers was true; they were the most beautiful creatures I had ever seen. Even as I followed them I was beginning to get whisperings of what was to become the first Great Intention of my life.
    They were quite some distance ahead of me and I couldn’t see them clearly, just their shapes in the night sky, their oval bodies and long, flowing tails. I was careful, as careful as I’ve ever been, keeping my eyes more often on the ground than on the strange activity in the sky. I knew the area well. There was a sort of rough track that led out of the puffberry bushes and on to the scrubby hill that sloped up towards where the lake was. Sometimes the older boys and girls gave Intentions to bring the herd there to graze the razor grass and goat-cabbage. It was a long time since man or beast had been lost to the lake, but I knew that parents were worried all the same, and in the loneliness up there that night I had more understanding of why. Taking my eyes from the moving lights that were guiding me, I cut across the steep and bumpy scrubland until I found the herders’ path, and once I had reached it I resolved not to leave it.
    The beguilers seemed to be made of light but, strangely, they cast none out around them. The moon was my only torch and I was lucky that it was bright enough for my needs that night. I stayed on the track even when the beguilers veered away and approached the lake from the top end where the side of the mountain slopes steeply down and drops into the hole. That was the most dangerous part, I knew. Even the most courageous youths didn’t venture up there. One slip and you’d had it, rolling down the hill-side and straight into mid-air above the dark water. I stayed on course and stopped at the top of the path near the ox-byre. Then I lay down on my belly and crawled to the edge. Below me the sides of the pool were sheer and the lake was black, as though the water was so dark that it couldn’t reflect the moonlight at all but could go on absorbing it for ever and ever. I had balanced myself so that if I slipped at all it would be backwards, but even so I held tight to a stalk of goat-cabbage with each hand. The beguilers were gathered together at the top end of the lake. They were hovering above the water and moving around in an aimless sort of circular dance the way nippers do, dipping now and then to touch the water as if they were fishing for something. What was strange though, a bit creepy, was that even though they appeared to touch