The road to Bellweather appeared behind the bakery at ten past seven. The sign said Bellweather was to the left, which meant the sign was wrong or the bakery had moved. Pela had been inside buying a roll. She was reasonably sure about the bakery.
“That’s new,” said the baker, looking out over her shoulder.
“The road?”
“The sign.”
Rain drew a bright yellow track across the yard. Beyond the wall it climbed over an empty field and disappeared among the trees. It had no stones on dry days. In rain it was as firm as a street, although every traveler understood that the street might lead somewhere else in the next storm. The council called it a highway. Pela, who delivered its parcels, called it a suggestion.
She had a coil of blue rope in her cart, wrapped in brown cloth and addressed to the bell keeper in Bellweather. The old rope was worn thin. When the rain began to ease, the bell keeper rang the town bell so anyone on the road would know how far they had to go. He could still pull the old rope if he was careful, but he had asked for a replacement before someone tested his luck.
Pela took her roll and stepped into the rain. At the signpost, she turned right. The baker called after her.
“It says left.”
“So does every sign in an argument.”
The first mile was familiar: three low hills, a gate with no fence, and an orchard where each tree bore small candles instead of fruit. The candles burned only in the rain. A family of orchard workers was collecting them in baskets lined with wet leaves. Pela bought one to carry in the cart. Its flame bent toward the rain and hissed when she put it too near her sleeve.
At the next junction there should have been a white rock, split down the middle. There was no rock. There was a pond full of glass fish, each one floating just above the water and blinking at its own reflection. The road forked around the pond. On a board nailed to a pear tree someone had painted BELLWEATHER, with an arrow pointing toward the fish.
Pela stopped. The board was the sign from behind the bakery. She recognized a scorch mark below the last letter, where a lantern had struck it in spring. Either someone had carried the board here or the tree had.
“Excuse me,” she said to the pear tree. “Were you at the bakery an hour ago?”
It shook its branches. That might have been wind. It had also rained hard enough to make the tree’s roots visible above the wet ground, and there were furrows behind it that looked remarkably like footprints.
A child in a red coat appeared from the fish pond path. He was holding a school slate over his head. “Do you know where Bellweather is?”
“I know where it was yesterday.” Pela looked past him. “Are you alone?”
“No. Miss Orla said not to leave the others, so I came as far as I could see them.” He pointed to a small roof across the pond. Four more children and a woman were sheltering beneath it. “We followed the sign.”
Pela parked the cart against the tree. “That was a mistake by the sign.”
“Miss Orla said that too, but she used a different word.”
The path around the pond led to a little town built on stilts. The glass fish wandered through its streets at head height, nosing at shop windows. One was large enough to carry a cat, though the cats of that town seemed too sensible to try. Under the roof, Miss Orla had laid out a packet of biscuits and was counting her students every time one shifted position.
“Five,” she said when Pela arrived. “I had five when we left. I intend to have five when we get back.”
“You’ll have six,” said the boy in the red coat.
“Pela isn’t enrolled.” Miss Orla brushed water from her spectacles. “Are you taking the road to Bellweather?”
“That’s the plan. I brought the bell rope.”
Miss Orla stood. “We heard the bell earlier. Then it stopped.”
The rain on the roof had softened to a patter. Through the glass fish Pela could see the yellow road paling at its edges. A rain road would hold for a while after the clouds passed, but not long enough to argue with a tree. They could wait for the next storm in the fish town. It had a bakery, a guesthouse, and a council that probably knew what to do with unexpected school parties. But the next rain might come tomorrow or next week, and nobody in Bellweather knew where this party had gone.
“Let’s go now,” Pela said. “Slow enough to stay together.”
One child raised her hand. “We aren’t in class.”
“A good point. Go now, please.”
They crossed the pond path in a line. The red-coated boy kept looking back at a fish that followed him. Another child, a girl with two missing front teeth, had filled her pockets with flat blue stones. Miss Orla made her leave all but one. The girl protested that the stones were a scientific collection. Miss Orla said scientific collections still had to fit in one’s own coat.
At the walking pear tree, the sign had turned again. It now pointed over the nearest hill. Pela knew better than to treat the arrow as a promise, but the other fork looked no more familiar. The white rock was missing from both.
“Which way did you come from?” she asked.
“The sign,” said the red-coated boy.
“Before the sign.”
The children tried to remember. Someone had seen candle trees. Someone else had seen a gate. That described half the roads near Bellweather. Miss Orla said they had crossed a little wooden bridge, then admitted that the bridge might have been a bench with water under it.
The girl with the blue stone said, “The rain was going up.”
Pela turned to her. “Where?”
“By the white rock. It was going up for a bit, on the left side. I told Bram, but he was looking at his shoes.”
“I was watching where I stepped,” said Bram, who had the red coat.
There were places where rain struck warm ground and rose back in a fine mist. The white rock had always stood next to one of them. Pela had never used it as a marker because it seemed too ordinary to put on a map. She pulled her cart around the left fork and found the mist beyond a stand of dark pines. There was the split rock, wet and white, almost hidden by grass.
“That,” she told the girl, “was better than the sign.”
The girl tucked the blue stone into her pocket with an expression of professional satisfaction. Miss Orla counted everyone again.
Past the rock, the road ran straight for a time, then narrowed. The orchard candles had gone out. Pela’s candle still burned inside its wet leaves. She held it low so the children could see the yellow at their feet. When the rain stopped entirely, the track began to lose color behind them. The fish town disappeared into the trees, as if the whole place had stepped aside.
“Will we be stuck?” Bram asked.
“We could be,” Pela said. “Keep walking with me.”
She had no useful speech to make. She could hear six pairs of shoes and her cart wheel, which squeaked on every third turn. Ahead, another sound carried through the cooling air: a bell, faint and uneven. The old rope was still holding.
They reached Bellweather’s gate with yellow dust fading from their boots. The bell keeper stood in his tower window, hauling on the frayed rope with both hands. He rang once more when he saw them, then stopped and came down to open the gate. Pela handed him the new coil. He looked at the children, counted them without meaning to, and took the rope as though it were heavier than it was.
That evening the council asked Pela to revise the route notes. She drew the orchard, the pond, the split rock, and the patch of upward rain. She wrote Do not trust a sign nailed to a walking tree in letters large enough to survive copying. Under observed by, she put the name of the girl with the blue stone. The girl insisted Bram’s name go in too, because he had been watching the ground when no one else was.
The council secretary read the page and said, “Could you make us a map that stays correct?”
“If I could,” Pela said, “I would charge you more.”
She sent in her bill the next morning. It listed the rope, the delivery, one candle, and a suggested purchase of signposts that could be lifted out of the ground when the trees got restless. The council paid the first three items. A week later, a new sign appeared by the bakery on a post set in a stone bucket. When the next rain came, the pear tree walked past it without so much as a backward glance.
Loading comments…