Peter & Max - Bill Willingham [11]
Some time passed before anyone noticed that Max was missing too.
Max, it turned out, hadn’t been napping up on top of the baggage or in the driver’s bench. He was nowhere to be seen. This wasn’t immediate cause for alarm. The caravan moved so slowly that many times one or more of the family would step down along the road to stretch his legs, walking beside the wagon, or wander off on some brief side trip, knowing he could easily catch up again. More than once the two brothers, back when they still enjoyed each other’s company, spied a nice pond to swim in, or a creek promising fish, and spent entire afternoons letting the caravan get far ahead. But they always managed to catch up again by dinnertime.
“I didn’t notice when he’d left us,” Bonny Lumpen said.
“Nothing’s amiss. He’ll turn up soon enough,” Johannes said, though Beatrice couldn’t help but show a mother’s worry.
Her worry was misplaced though, because in little time at all, Max came trotting down the dirt road, excitedly waving his hand, where he carried something the others couldn’t see at this distance. Max was tall and lanky and so skinny that concerned farm wives and town wives all along their travels constantly tried to feed him back into good health. Max didn’t much mind the attention, possibly because it was his alone and something he didn’t have to share with his little brother, who was also slim, but not alarmingly so. And he didn’t mind the food. Max could eat like a horse, after having eaten a horse. But no matter how much he put away, he never added an inch of girth. He had a mop of tangled hair on his head, which was brown, like all of the Pipers, but a lighter shade than Peter’s very dark brown hair. Max was barefoot. He wore bright red pants and a yellow shirt of good linen. Over that he wore a forest green tunic that was elaborately decorated with gold stitching. These were his performance clothes, which he liked to wear at all times, unlike Peter who couldn’t wait to get out of his gaudy show dress, once a night’s playing was done. “I like bright colors,” was all that Max said one day when Peter had asked him about it. This annoyed Johannes and Beatrice no end, arguing as they often did that his good clothes, which were terribly expensive, would last much longer if he didn’t wear them so often. But Max was impervious to their logic. He’d always select his performance clothes to wear, unless and until specifically ordered out of them. And then he’d put them on again as soon as he determined the term covered by that order had probably expired. By contrast, Peter preferred simple brown homespun, which is what he was wearing today.
Max dashed between the twin stone gateway pillars that marked the entrance to Peep lands and ran up the dirt driveway, bordered by twin rows of juniper trees. He was still carrying whatever it was he so earnestly wanted the others to see.
“Look what I found!” he shouted as he ran. “Stuck in a tree! I saw it from our wagon!” When he’d reached the others, quite out of breath by that time, he held out his discovery for all to examine. It was an arrowhead made out of iron or steel, and still attached to a few inches of broken off yew-wood shaft. The arrowhead was dark, almost black, and wickedly barbed. The bit of wood extending from it was painted dark red. Alternating bands of black and ocher thread attached the barbed head to the rest of it.
“It was stuck in a tree, but I still saw it!” Max said again, when some of his wind had returned. “Have you ever seen anything like it before?”
“Actually, no,” Radulf Peep said, taking it from Max and examining it more closely. “Its markings aren’t familiar to me. Not the signature of any huntsman I know around here. It almost looks foreign. Where did you find it?”
“About two miles up the road,” Max said.
“Hmm, that’s on my land,