Black Pearls - Louise Hawes [19]
When we caught up to the piper, he had marched the children through the open fields and into the foothills of the mountains. He put down his pipe to survey the line of young ones still snaking its way out of town. I, too, turned to see them, and the sight took my breath away. I had not realized how many children lived in Hameln, but here they all were! It looked like an army, like the children's crusade that had gone to fight the infidels when my grandfather was a boy. Granddad had loved to tell how the children across Germany and France dropped their milk pails and hoes to take up swords and shields.
There were no swords in the ranks that filled the winding road from Hameln, but surely that small army marched with as good a will. On sturdy legs, they came hurrying to join us, and those who were too young to walk were carried by those who were not. I could have varnished a dozen chests in the time it took them to move to our position in the foothills. When they had, a great hush fell over them all as the piper raised his hand to speak.
I pulled the cart as close as I could, and by picking up a few of the children who had crept nearer still, we were able at last to be no more than a few yards from the man who had saved Hameln from the rats. He was not dressed in the gay costume he had worn before; instead, he was clad in green, like a hunter. He sported no cap, but wore a cape with a great clasp that gleamed in the sun. "Kinder," he said. Children. "Your parents are in church. They seem to believe they need not live a holy life so long as they bend their knees at mass." His smile, like a mischievous child's, belied his harsh words. "But I bear you no ill will on their behalf. In fact, I hope to spare you the hardships that have fixed themselves like barnacles to the souls of your elders."
He finished speaking, then took up his pipe and played a short tune. His music was no longer faint, but as clear as if I had leaned over a tumbling falls and was letting the roar fill my ears. I wasn't sure what the piper's words meant, but his music made a picture in my head. I saw deep woods broken by a single ray of sun piercing it from overhead. A bird, like the ones on my crutch, flew out of a tree and called to me.
Then the music stopped and the piper spoke again. "Love and song are your birthrights," he told us. "Like good Moses, I have come to lead you out from this hard Egypt to a place where you shall have both." He lifted his pipe once more to his lips and, though I cannot say how, played a chain of notes that sounded like laughter. For a dizzy moment, time melted away and I was holding my mother's skirts, smiling into her surprise. Toads in our cake, Emmett? What will Papa say?
As I listened, the music turned slower, sadder. Now—perhaps it was in the way the piper rolled his fingertips across the stops—the notes sounded like sighs. Their softness made me think of Mother again, but this time I remembered her voice, how it was thin as a whisper in those last, lost days: And where will I get fur?
"In the place I am taking you, lambkins," the Piper told us, putting aside his pipe for the third time, "it is always spring, and buds are forever new. Nothing grows old and sour. No one is cold or hungry or lame." At this last, a few young ones turned to look at me, but I did not mind being singled out. It felt almost like an honor, as if my bad leg had earned me this moment.
When the rat-catcher ended his speech and headed up the steep wall of rock ahead of us, his tune changed again. It trickled from his pipe like a sweet May drink that made us want more with every sip.
I do not know what the others on the path below us heard in that song, but I know each child in our cart found something different in the ditty. One boy laughed like a yipping pup, shouting that it announced a holiday for apprentices; another said the tune would take us to the other side of the mountains, where a great ship with a crew of child sailors lay in port; poor Gretchen insisted the