Legend of the Three Moons by Patricia Bernard Page B

enough to worry about? How will we feed him?'
    `He hunts rats and rabbits and he's a great watchdog. He knew I was being followed before I did.'
    This last bit of information swayed Lyla who within minutes of her brother leaving for the village had felt guilty at not being the one to go as she was the eldest. With her usual `give in' shrug she cut off a piece of meat and held it out to Nutty. `So where does Edith the oracle live?'
    `In a cemetery at the end of Marsh Pond Lane, which crosses the road that goes to a city called Belem. The innkeeper says ghosts and spirit-dogs guard the tombstones and Nutty trembled all over when I asked him about Edith.'
    Nutty growled a warning.
    `Someone is coming!' hissed Lem shoving the food back into the sack. `We have to get out of here!'
    They snatched up their bags and weapons and raced out of the barn and into the wheat stubble where, lying flat, they waited. A few seconds later two men slipped inside the barn.
    It's the innkeeper Petrie Wartstoe and his rude son,' whispered Lem. `Let's go.'
    They avoided the inn and most of the dwellings, and were soon through and out of Wartstoe Village. They peeked through the window of the last hovel and saw a weeping woman sitting at an empty table with three hungry-eyed children staring at her.
    `Nutty told me that the farmers pay three-quarters of their harvest to General Tulga's Raiders, which doesn't leave them enough to eat,' Lem explained.
    They were twenty paces beyond the cottage when Lyla stopped, took a cheese out of the food sack and handed it to Chad.
    `Run back, knock on the woman's door, and leave it on her doorstep. Don't let her see you.'
    Chad grinned and did as he was told. He caught them up as they reached the cross roads of Marsh Pond Lane and Belem Road.
    His sister and cousins were staring at a large cage hanging from a tree that grew in the centre of the crossroads. Inside was a pile of bones and a skull.
    `Nutty says the bones belong to a farmer who couldn't pay his taxes. He also says we're being followed.'
    With the food sack swinging between them, Celeste and Lyla raced down the spiralling mist-filled lane with the boys on their heels. Nutty growled again and Lem hissed that two men were gaining on them, so they ducked down behind a boulder and a dead tree and waited.
    As the mist thinned, then swirled and thickened again around them they caught a glimpse of two hunched figures wearing wide brimmed hats and long coats, skulking along the lane.
    `Belem merchants,' breathed Lem.
    Huddled together for security and warmth they waited behind the tree to see if the men would return. Around them echoed the usual hoots and screeches of the nocturnal hunters and the squeaks, squeals and gurgles of their little victims.
    The damp night air was suddenly pierced by a blood-curdling baying followed by screams of terror. Moments later, the two Belemites raced back the way they'd come. Behind them galloped a pack of gaping-jawed, red-eyed dogs.
    Again the children waited. This time to make sure that the frightening dogs didn't return. When they didn't, Lem wrapped a lump of greasy meat and a loaf of bread in a cloth, and Lyla hid the sack between the tree and rock.
    They set off again creeping along the lane until they reached a stone wall, behind which stood rows of crooked gravestones. Many were decorated with statues of stone angels, stone urns pouring out stone water and stone harps being played by suspended stone hands.
    `Creepy,' whispered Swift, moving closer to Lyla.
    `There is nothing to be scared of,' said Chad, who'd boasted, as they crept through the fog, that he was not afraid of ghosts or spirit dogs, even if everyone else was. He marched boldly up to the wrought iron gate but just as he lifted its latch out from behind the gravestones leapt a pack of snarling dogs. They crashed against the gate sending Chad stumbling backwards. `What a racket,' Lem said, tucking a whimpering Nutty inside his cape. `It's just as well the