Chapter 11: Death Mountain
I do like a tasty stone soup.
Of course, stone soup with cabbage—
That's hard to beat.
~"The Story of Stone Soup"
The afternoon drifted by in a haze of renewed vigor brought on by Zelda's letter. Link's anxiety left him almost instantly, and before he knew it, he had covered most of the distance to Kakariko Village. Navi respected his silence this time, knowing he needed it more than anything else.
"I want you to know that I have faith in you." No one except Saria and the Great Deku Tree had said anything like that before. That the princess had written it on instinct, with only a dream and Impa's observations in the square to convince her, touched him more than he cared to admit just then.
A stairway had been cut into the side of the cliff ahead of them, the same cliff that had blocked their view of the village earlier. Even now, they saw no other sign of human habitation, since the stairway veered sharply to the right, around a corner, preventing them from seeing the top of it.
Link tiptoed up the first few stairs, then scolded himself. He would be far less likely to draw unwanted attention if he relaxed. Anyone who lived in Kakariko would be able to tell he was a stranger, but that need not lead to suspicion. What could they suspect him of?
In the distance, he heard a low creaking noise, hammers pounding, chickens clucking, and children laughing. He felt himself warming to the village even before he saw it.
When he finally mounted the last step, he couldn't help but smile at the sight of it all. Kakariko Village nestled in a valley in the shadow of the mountain. Houses huddled close for protection, but not too close for privacy. Other stairways, perfect for young boys or girls to race on, led to different levels of the village; most of the houses stood on small plateaus raised from the valley floor.
It would have been a perfect place to play hide-and-seek, something he had often done with Saria in the forest.
A scream ripped his attention from more peaceful thoughts and raised his eyes to the western quarter of the village, where Impa had told him to look for the road to Goron City. A woman stood at the top of a stairway flailing her arms, her face pale and her hair bedraggled. Other villagers peeked out of windows and open doorways in the direction of the scream, but few moved to investigate at first.
"Now how are we going to get through without being noticed?" Navi held onto the straps of the pack on Link's back containing Impa's provisions.
"Maybe we should see what's going on," Link said.
"What could happen in a place like this?"
"I don't know." Link swallowed to keep the sick feeling in his stomach from growing.
It wasn't difficult to avoid notice on his way to the scene of the disturbance. Link joined a growing crowd of children, adults, and stray animals streaming to the western quarter and clogging the stairways.
Murmurs passed from one person to another. Those nearest the woman who had screamed had stopped and were staring at something on the ground.
Ignoring the chance he might draw attention, Link crawled through the forest of legs on the stairway in the western quarter and broke free from the crowd.
A man lay on his stomach with his arms splayed out in front of him. In one hand, he had been holding a spear, but the only part of it left was the shaft. The point had been torn away and driven through the chain mail protecting his back. His helmet had been thrown aside, too far to have simply rolled there on its own.
Sir Cahus. Link unconsciously fingered the letter from Zelda, the one she had intended him to present to the Knight guarding the road to Goron City. There would be no need for that letter now.
"Stay back!"
A redheaded girl stooped over the Knight's body, attempting to address the wound in his back. She seemed vaguely familiar, and when she turned to face the crowd, Link recognized her as the young woman in the square of Hyrule Castle Town who had been selling milk and other farm goods to the crowd. Though hardly older than him, she worked as if she had been around wounds before.
"Can I help?" Link knelt at her side.
She glanced at him, first with irritation, then with surprise. "You again. Link, isn't it? What are you doing here?"
"I was…" He hesitated before deciding that the girl probably didn't care one way or the other. "I was looking for the road to Goron City."
"Well, you found it." She nudged him aside. "And to answer your question, if you want to help, you can find my dad."
"Malon!" A man in dirty blue overalls pushed through the gawkers. Seeing Link, he paused. "Say, young fellow. You look—"
"Dad!"
"Sorry, hon." The man turned his attention to the Knight.
"Hey," Navi whispered. "Isn't he—?"
Link nodded. He had recognized the man, too; Impa had named him Talon, the owner of Lon Lon Ranch, the previous evening at the castle.
"What do we do now?" Navi had crept onto his shoulder, in plain view, but Link didn't scold her, since everyone's focus was on the Knight.
"He's gone," Talon said. "You've done everything you can."
Malon pounded bloody fists against her knees, staining her dress. "No!"
Link's mind wandered from the question of the man's condition to the circumstances of his murder. At the same time, he allowed his eyes to wander along the ground surrounding the body until they fell on a scrap of cloth lying in the grass.
A scrap of red cloth.
He felt a chill wrack his spine. The cloth could have come from any number of objects, it was so small, but the first one Link thought of was a cape. Ganondorf.
If his guess at the murderer's identity was correct, had the cloth—and the body, for that matter—been left as a warning? Zelda had been certain the Gerudo king remained unaware of their plans to precede him to the Sacred Realm, but someone had killed Cahus. That it had happened here, where the path leading to Goron City and the second Spiritual Stone began, could scarcely be called a coincidence.
"We should go," said Navi.
Link winced. The weight of the pack on his shoulders had been burdensome, but now it seemed heavier than ever.
The crowd, seeing there was little to see and less to be done, slowly began to disperse. Many lingered, some wept. Others simply shook their heads. Few offered to help with the body.
No one noticed the boy in green and his fairy slipping away except Malon, and by the time she realized they had gone, it was too late to stop them. While her father and some of the men from the village carried the body of Cahus, Knight of Hyrule, to a nobler resting place, her eyes meandered along the road to Goron City, the road that wound its way up Death Mountain.
The contrast between the mountain and Hyrule Field could not have been greater. Mostly, the vegetation here consisted of a few prickly shrubs embedded in cracks along a rough path of stone. Red pumice crunched under Link's boots as his knees pumped with the strain of the uphill climb.
A handful of pebbles cascaded from somewhere above, matting his hair with dust and rock. Up ahead, the path made a sharp turn, curving around the mountain like the coils of a dragon. Unfortunately, since Link was on the east side of the mountain, twilight had already begun to darken his path, as the peak stood between him and the setting sun.
"Listen," Navi said. "Maybe we should stop here for the night."
"You're the one who said we should leave the village," said Link. "How long have we been walking?"
"Long enough to get away from anyone who might be curious about you."
Link mumbled a half-hearted protest, but after examining the steepness of the cliffs and the sharpness of the rocks, he dropped his leather pack against the nearest crag and sat down to rest.
He had just finished munching on a strip of dried beef and begun to doze off when an inhuman screech echoed from the cliffs, breaking his slumber. He had just enough time to open his eyes before a scaled body battered him to the ground. Four hard suction cups pinched his stomach, tearing scraps of his tunic and leaving welts on his flesh when the spider leapt away to join three of its companions that had landed on nearby boulders.
Link grimaced, ignoring the dirt clinging to his welts. Backing up, he stood and faced the spiders as they hopped just beyond his reach, surrounding him. Their blue scales glittered in the light of a full moon.
There was little time for strategy. One by one, they flew at him, and Link simply reacted by instinct, dipping beneath the spiders where he could and jabbing at their undersides as they passed over. He caught one in the leg after several tries, staining his sword with black blood. But the others were quick to press in, giving him little time to take advantage of the injury.
"Look out!"
Navi's warning sent him into a roll. The spider missed his head by inches, but a suction cup on one leg whisked away his hat, along with several strands of his hair. Crying out, Link charged the nearest spider and lunged with his sword tip forward. When the target jumped, he jumped with it, ripping its guts out with one clean sweep.
The other spiders pounced on Link. One slapped his leg with a suction cup and took away a round patch of skin. Another went for his knee, but Link's Deku Shield deflected it into the cliff wall. The third, when it came in at his back, met only the point of the sword, which poked in through its stomach and out through its back, its legs splaying to either side of Link's body as it pushed him down.
More unearthly cries bounced along the ravine. Link, sure that other spiders had joined the mêlée, kicked the dead spider off his blade with both feet and leapt to a standing position.
"That was close!" said Navi.
Link nodded, finding what was left of the last two spiders beneath a boulder. On impulse, he dropped his weapons and threw his weight into the boulder.
Suddenly, a mist exploded across the path, hitting him in the face. Too stunned to move, he locked his gaze on the boulder as it sprouted legs and arms, pushing itself up to full height. The creature's head tapered to a slight point, and the earth tones of its body blended perfectly with the terrain, especially at its back, a shell that looked like a miniature mountain range with very sharp peaks.
"Bless you," said Navi.
The boulder creature fixed two beady eyes on Link and Navi. Its expression was unreadable.
"Hello," said Link.
The creature remained silent at first, but then it picked up a severed spider leg, plucked Link's hat from the ground, and offered him both with the same blank expression.
Link took the hat and placed it back on his head, ignoring the spider leg. "Thank you."
The creature's eyes grew hard, an obvious sign of anger. "You are not hungry?"
Link made a face. "Not for that."
The beady eyes relaxed. "Truly? Then I will eat it." Dangling the spider leg over its mouth, the creature dropped it in and began to chew.
Turning aside to avoid showing his nausea, Link reached for his shield and strapped it onto his back, then picked up his sword and lowered his head as he marched past the snacking creature.
"Wait," it said. "Where are you going?"
"To Goron City."
"How will you reach it without food?"
Link frowned. "I have food. It's…" His voice trailed off, and he realized he had lost track of his leather pack in the battle.
Scraps of leather littered the trail. Behind him, beside him, in every direction in a ten-foot radius, lay apples shredded by suction cups, squashed bread and cheese, and beef marinated in spider guts. Zelda's letters were among the few items left intact. Link moved to retrieve them immediately.
"I will lead you to the city," said the creature, "if you will share this with me." Snapping another spider leg in half, it gave one part to Link and chomped the other between its teeth.
Link stared, ready to vomit. His heart beat faster as he raised it to his lips with shaking hands. He opened his mouth. His teeth came down, stopping right before they touched the leg. His gaze had met the creature's again. This time, the beady orbs were brimming with laughter.
"Oh, stop it!" the creature exclaimed, slapping a palm on its knee.
The leg slipped from Link's fingers. "You were joking?"
The creature clutched at its stomach with both hands, rolling onto its shell and kicking its feet in the air as it chuckled.
Link shot a longing glance at his sword before planting his attention back on the creature. "Do all Gorons have your sense of humor?"
"How did you know I was a Goron?" the creature said, sitting up.
Link eyed the dead spiders. "I've heard of your people's appetite for…strange foods."
"This?" The Goron held up one of the carcasses. "We never eat Tektites unless we have to."
"What do you normally eat?"
"Rocks."
Link pointed to the mountain's peak. "This mountain must have billions of rocks. How could you possibly be forced to eat a Tektite?"
"That one is a long story."
"I'd like to know."
The Goron sighed. "Come, then. I will lead you to the city, and we will talk."