Howl’s Moving Castle

The street was full of people looking upward. No one had time to notice things like horses coming out of houses. Sophie and Michael looked too, and found a huge cloud boiling and twisting just above the chimney tops. It was black and rotating on itself violently. White flashes that were not quite like light stabbed through the murk of it. But almost as soon as Michael and Sophie arrived, the clot of magic took on the shape of a misty bundle of fighting snakes. Then it tore in two with a noise like an enormous cat fight. One part sped yowling across the roofs and out to sea, and the second went screaming after it.

Some people retreated indoors then. Sophie and Michael joined the rush of braver people down the sloping lanes to the dockside. There everyone seemed to think the best view was to be had along the curve of the harbor wall. Sophie hobbled to get out along it too, but there was no need to go beyond the shelter of the harbor master’s hut. Two clouds were hanging in the air, some way out to sea, on the other side of the harbor wall, the only two clouds in the calm blue sky. It was quite easy to see them. I was equally easy to see the dark patch of storm raging on the sea between the clouds, flinging up great, white-topped waves. There was an unfortunate ship caught in that storm. Its masts were beating back and forth. They could see spouts of water hitting it on all sides. The crew were desperately trying to take in the sails, but one at least had torn to flying gray rags.

“Can’t they have a care for that ship!” someone said indignantly.

Then the wind and the waves from the storm hit the harbor wall. White water lashed over and the brave persons out on the wall came crowding hurriedly back to the quayside, where the moored ships were heaving and grinding in their moorings. Among all this was a great deal of screaming in high, singing voices. Sophie put her face out into the wind beyond the hut, where the screaming came from, and discovered that the raging magic had disturbed more than the sea and the wretched ship. A number of wet, slithery-looking ladies with flying green-brown hair were dragging themselves up onto the harbor wall, screaming and holding long wet arms out to more screaming ladies tossing in the waves. Every one of them had a fishtail instead of legs.

“Confound it!” said Sophie. “The mermaids from the curse!” that meant only two more impossible things to come true now.

She looked up at the two clouds. Howl was kneeling on the lefthand one, much larger and nearer than she would have expected. He was still dressed in black. Typically enough, he was staring over his shoulder at the frantic mermaids. He was not looking at them as if he remembered they were part of the curse at all.

“Keep your mind on the Witch!” the horse beside Sophie yelled.

The Witch sprang into being, standing on the righthand cloud, in a whirl of flame-colored robe and streaming red hair, with her arms raised to invoke further magic. As Howl turned and looked at her, her arms came down. Howl’s cloud erupted into a fountain of rose-colored flame. Heat from it swept across the harbor, and the stones of the wall steamed.

“It’s all right!” gasped the horse.

Howl was on the tossing, nearly sinking ship below. He was a tiny black figure, leaning against the bucking mainmast. He let the Witch know she had missed by waving at her cheekily. The Witch saw him the instant he waved. Cloud, Witch, and all at once became a savagely swooping red bird, diving at the ship.

The ship vanished. The mermaids sang a doleful scream. There was nothing but sulkily tossing water where the ship had been. But the huge diving bird was going too fast to stop. It plunged into the sea with a huge splash.

Everyone on the quayside cheered. “I knew that wasn’t a real ship really!” someone behind Sophie said.

“Yes, it must have been an illusion,” the horse said wisely. “It was too small.”

As proof that the ship had been much nearer than it looked, the waves from the splash reached the harbor wall before Michael had stopped speaking. A twenty-foot green hill of water rode smoothly sideways across it, sweeping the screaming mermaids into the harbor, rolling every moored ship violently sideways, and thudding in swirls round the harbor master’s hut. An arm came out of the side of the horse and hauled Sophie back toward the quay. Sophie gasped and stumbled in knee-high gray water. The dog-man bounded beside them, soaked to the ears.

They had just reached the quay, and the boats in the harbor had all just rolled upright, when a second mountain of water rolled over the harbor wall. Out of its smooth side burst a monster. It was a long, black, clawed thing, half cat, half sea lion, and it came racing down the wall toward the quay. Another burst out of the wave as it smashed into the harbor, long and low too, but scalier, and came racing after the first monster.