Diana Wynne Jones’s Fantastical Journeys Collection. Diana Wynne Jones

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      “What valuables?” I said, looking around the bare stone room. We never knew the answer to that one, but, as I said, we were not badly treated. Supper was delivered to the room and it was a truly delicious fish stew. There were tastes in it that I had never met before.

      While I was bullying Aunt Beck to eat it, Ogo said to Lew-Laws, “What are these lovely flavours? I remember something like this from Logra.”

      Lew-Laws sighed. “Herbs,” he said. “I hate them. They grow the things down south where they grow the vines and the olives and things. I wish they’d never been invented.”

      Lew-Laws was like that all the time. A wet week. Nothing pleased him. By bedtime, I was truly depressed. I could not see our mission succeeding. I could not see any way Aunt Beck could be cured. “Take your stockings off, Beck!” I shouted at her, and I saw myself shouting at her like this for the rest of both our lives.

      It was like that again in the morning. I shouted my aunt into her clothes and we went back to the bare stone room to find Lew-Laws making faces as he drank some kind of hot herb tea that went with the bread for breakfast. When Ivar and Ogo had come yawning in, Lew-Laws sighed and said, “High Holy Gronn needs to see you. The gods alone know why. I am to take you to The Singing as soon as you have eaten. For my sins.”

      “Are you very sinful?” Ogo asked, mock innocently. Ivar tried not to laugh.

      Before Lew-Laws could answer, Aunt Beck said, “Where’s my porridge? I can’t start the day with bread.”

      “Ah,” Lew-Laws said. “If I knew where to find porridge in Gallis, I would be a happy man, my good woman.”

      “No, really? A happy man?” Ivar said.

      Lew-Laws pretended not to hear. “Bread,” he said, “is what we eat here, woman. It’s stale of course, but that is what there is.”

      “Eat it, Beck,” I said. “You’ll be hungry if you don’t.”

      “Then I need butter,” my aunt said. “And honey.”

      Finn came in at this point with Green Greet on his shoulder. “Green Greet will eat the bread for you,” he said. “They’ve no seeds of any kind for him in the kitchen. No nuts either. And did you know,” he asked Lew-Laws, “that some great beast got into the kitchen in the night and ate all the fish stew in the cauldron?”

      Plug-Ugly, I thought. Oh dear.

      Lew-Laws sighed. “It is not my place,” he said, “to criticise the gods, if they choose to deny us fish for breakfast—”

      “Where’s my butter?” said Aunt Beck.

      “Did the beast eat all the butter too?” Ogo asked.

      “Butter is always scarce,” Lew-Laws began dismally. “I haven’t had butter since—” He was interrupted by a cross-looking serving man arriving with a bowl of oil – olive oil, he told me – to dip the bread in. This was just as well. Ivar choked trying not to laugh at Lew-Laws incessant moaning and Ogo had to hammer him on the back. I would have been quite as bad, except that I was busy dipping bread for Aunt Beck and trying to persuade her that it was quite as good as porridge. She did eat some. What she left, Green Greet pecked up with enthusiasm.

      Half an hour later, we were on the road. Moe seemed none the worse for her night in the gatehouse and trotted along with a will. Ivar drove. Lew-Laws sat behind him, leaning over his shoulder to tell him the way. Aunt Beck sat upright behind Lew-Laws and the rest of us walked. It was a lovely, warm, sunlit day and we went by a route where waterfalls sparkled down beneath stately trees. I felt almost cheerful, despite the fact that we were going to meet someone who was obviously an important priest.

      After a while, we came out beside a long valley with a blue lake winding through it. There were islands in the lake, each one with its own little forest. As we looked, a shower of rain drifted across the end of the lake like the white ghost of a cloud. It was so beautiful that I started listening. And, sure enough, the thread of song came distantly from somewhere.

      “Do they really need a bard to make this place more beautiful?” Ogo said.

      “Of course they do,” Lew-Laws answered him. “There is mining at that end of the lake, and quarrying. Most unsightly.”

      “And we can’t have that,” Ivar said.

      “Necessary evils,” Lew-Laws said, not realising Ivar was mocking him. “Gallis is an ugly place. All mountains. Almost nowhere is flat. Take this right turn of the road now.”

      That turn led us around the skirts of a mountain and then out above another valley. This one was wide and flat and green with a long white building in the mid-distance, where people in bardic blue were flocking about.

      “This place is flat,” Ivar said. “Does that please you better?”

      Lew-Laws sighed. “Not really. The ground is nothing but marsh in winter. The wind cuts through like a knife.”

      “But it’s dry now,” Ivar said, “and there’s only a breeze.”

      “A man can catch his death, standing out there in the rain,” Lew-Laws answered glumly. “They sing in all weathers. Draw the cart on to the grass here. We have to wait, no doubt for hours.”

      “Man of Ballykerry,” Green Greet said suddenly.

      Finn chuckled as the cart went bumping across the turf. “The man of Ballykerry,” he said to Ogo and me, “was said never to be happy unless he was miserable and even then he was not content.”

      Ogo laughed. I tried to, but I was suddenly struggling with strong homesickness. There were high gorse bushes growing all around and the smell of their flowers seemed to hit me to the heart. I longed so to be on Skarr and smell the gorse there that I could have cried. Lew-Laws directed Ivar to put the cart beside a big clump of several gorse bushes. For the next hour or so the smell seemed to fill my mind until I could think of almost nothing else.

      Meanwhile, below in the valley a bell rang out from the white building. There were three silvery clangs and then, as the sound went shimmering away into silence, people came swarming out from the white building. Some formed up into groups, large and small. About half were in bardic blue. Others wore a pale blue-green. Others again wore clothes of all colours and they quietly spread themselves out along the edges of the green space as spectators. When everyone was in place, priests in grey came out of the building in a solemn procession. They stopped by the first group. One of the priests waved and that group burst into song.

      They sounded quite beautiful, fifty or so voices in harmony, but, when the priests moved on to the next group and this lot sang the same song, I began to lose interest. By the fourth group, I was trying not to yawn.

      “Tell those people to stop that noise,” Aunt Beck said. “They’re giving me a headache.”

      Moe must have felt the same. As the fifth group began the song, she threw up her head and gave a mighty “Hee-squeak-haw!”

      The song stopped. Everyone down in the field turned to look at us.

      “Hee-scream-haw!” Moe went, louder than ever.

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