Skrimsli, page 13
It was probably against all Yuderan law to undress an unconscious queen. But Kal did it. Unwinding the layers of silk was easy compared with removing the tight-fitting uniform of the guard. Then Kal rewound the silken layers around the dead guard. Kal silently apologised to the dead woman but somehow knew that she would be pleased that even in death she was protecting her mistress. It was too difficult to get the tight-fitting uniform on the insensible Najma. Instead, Kal put it on and dressed the Palatine in the blue-and-gold circus costume. Luckily it was loose, or it would never have fitted the larger, stronger Najma. The guard’s boots were far too big for Kal, so they were tied to Kal’s belt. One of the knives was tucked back into its place on the guard’s uniform. Kal kept the other. It was a good knife.
At last, Kal lifted Najma to her feet and, somehow, got her onto Zait’s back. She came round a little and stared in confusion into Kal’s face. How much did she remember? Kal could only hope nothing at all, but the Palatine was conscious enough to hold the makeshift reins that Kal had fashioned from a length of rope.
Kal dragged the bodyguard in the Palatine’s clothes to the edge of the water as if she had just washed up. A twiggy branch brushed away the traces of the fire and the marks of feet and hooves. As the mist over the river swirled and the sun came over the horizon in a pale haze, they turned from the flood and headed north.
Fate was offering a second chance, and Kal resolved to be worthy of it. To keep the Palatine safe; perhaps find the courage to go back to Erem, to find Havvity; perhaps, even, tell the truth and stop the war.
15
Owl
Learning the Story
For a dog small enough to fit in a top hat, Blit had very wolfish habits. The flood had taken many small animals by surprise and Blit was happy to make their drowned bodies her dinner. On the third day of their journey, when Owl had eaten nothing but the last crumbs of the cake they had found, he envied her. How hungry would he have to be for semi-decayed rat to seem appetising?
The river, having been in such a tearing hurry to get back to the sea after its long absence, had slowed. Mostly it now confined itself once again within its banks. It wound its way through the land, turning east, then west, then east again. Owl followed its course, knowing that this was the only route the great fish could have taken. Perhaps, he thought, they were going as slowly as he and Blit and were right there, in the green depths. He stared down and down through the water but could make out nothing but his own reflection, or that of the sky and clouds.
They had been covering great distances for two beings with quite small legs and at the end of each day had been so exhausted that they had slept pretty much where they fell. But yesterday, clouds had threatened more rain, so Owl had been glad to find a large, empty barrel, which the flood had carried onto the bank. He had rolled it a little further from the water, into the shelter of a tree, crawled inside and fallen asleep, with Blit curled on his chest.
The barrel had been used to store brandy so that Owl and Blit breathed the fumes all night and slept rather too soundly. Only when Owl felt something tickling his feet did he wake. He sat up suddenly, banged his head and lay down again. Blit woke up too and, rather embarrassed that her ‘wolf senses’ hadn’t alerted her to danger, she began to bark very loudly.
The someone who had tickled his feet could be heard giggling outside. Owl pushed the furious Blit out of the barrel and wriggled after her. There, standing with hands on skinny hips and dressed in a pair of shorts and vest that might once have been red, was a small, very dirty child.
Blit stopped barking and sniffed suspiciously at the child’s dusty feet, while she stared at Owl with solemn wide eyes. Owl had seen children many times, during his years in the circus. They often pointed at him, laughed or jeered. But sometimes, not very often, one of them smiled. And that’s what this child did now. She smiled and her eyes danced, and her finger beckoned. Then, with another giggle, she turned and ran.
Owl’s heart sank. She had smiled but she was just running away from him. He had seen fear before in children’s faces when they saw him. He sighed and began to turn back to the barrel, but Blit was barking at him. She barged into his head, her she-wolf fur bristling, her tail wagging.
Follow! Follow! Blit announced. Play! Come on!
The child, although small, had ordinary child-length legs and could run faster than Owl could ever hope to do. But Blit was speedy and could keep up. Within moments, both dog and child had vanished ahead into dappled green shadows.
The bank of the river was clothed in trees here but there was a well-worn path that wound between them. Owl hoped there was not more than one path. He was feeling a bit faint with hunger and didn’t want to have to walk up and down several different paths to find Blit and the child again. He remembered something else he knew about children: they usually had parents with them. And parents often had food. The thought of a meal that wasn’t dead rat made him move a little faster.
The path wound like the river, left, right, left again, but suddenly the trees ended and Owl found he had walked out into a sunlit yard of beaten earth. Before him was a long low building with mud walls and a roof made of thatch and solars. A woman sat on the roof fixing a solar that had come loose, helped by a bigger child. A small flock of birds, with bright-blue wings and yellow beaks, sat along the ridge of the roof as if in conversation with the larger child. They flew off when they saw Owl.
The three humans were all very alike: skinny, dirty, with long hair and dressed in shorts and vests. Smoke snaked from a chimney into the sky and the most delicious smell came out through the doorway of the building. Blit and the smallest child seemed to have got over the difficult start to their relationship as Blit had rolled over in the dust to have her tummy rubbed.
Some wolf! Owl thought.
But the woman on the roof seemed convinced.
‘Your wolf?’ she asked in Nordsky as she slithered down the roof to land as nimbly as an acrobat on the ground. Owl shook his head, then found his voice.
‘She is her own self. Not a belonging,’ he replied.
No one seemed to mind that his voice was just a squeak.
The larger child dropped to the ground too, smiling.
‘That’s what she told us,’ he said, nodding towards Blit.
The woman smiled again.
‘You look hungry,’ she said, ‘and we are about to have our breakfast. Want some?’
A voice from inside the hut called out, ‘Fooood.’
And a fourth human, a large man, also in a pair of almost worn-out shorts, emerged from the door, with a steaming pot and four bowls on a tray. He smiled too and spoke to the smallest.
‘Get another bowl, will you, there’s good girl!’
The tray was placed on the floor and the family sat around it, including Owl and Blit in their circle. Carefully, the man ladled the food out of the pot, dividing it meticulously between the five bowls. The rest of the family watched him with such silent concentration that Owl guessed they must be almost as hungry as he was. Was it right to take some of their food? He wasn’t sure.
‘You look worried, little friend,’ the woman said. ‘What is it?’
Owl’s mouth opened and for a few moments nothing came out, but no one seemed to mind that either.
‘I am taking your breakfast,’ he squeaked.
To Owl’s enormous confusion the littlest child put her arms around him and gave him a hug.
‘Don’t worry!’ the man told him. ‘We like sharing.’ With that, he placed the pot on its side so that Blit could lick every morsel that remained stuck to the bottom.
‘Eat up, little wolf,’ he said.
After breakfast the family told him their names. Map was the father, Ead the mother. The children, both girls, were Moss – the larger – and Nettle – the smaller. Nettle brought Owl a bit of the plant for which she was named. She grasped its toothed leaves without flinching even though, as she told him, it was ‘a stinger’.
‘It’s home for lots of wigglies,’ she explained. ‘They’s buttlebyes presently.’
Owl had no idea what ‘wigglies’ or ‘buttlebyes’ were, but Nettle seemed very proud of them, so he smiled and nodded. No one asked him anything about himself. This was good because he felt like an escaped prisoner and feared that someone might be on his trail. He certainly didn’t want to talk about the cub. Or even think about him.
The family accepted Owl as they accepted the sunlight and the rain. They simply folded him into their life without comment. They gave Owl a place to sleep in the bit of loft above one end of the kitchen where they stored dried vegetables, strung from the beams like necklaces. They fed him, chatted to him, and set him to work alongside them. It was so easy that within a day Owl could almost forget that he had ever had another life.
Blit too fitted into the family as easily as the silliest pup. She trotted round in the children’s footsteps wagging her tail and hardly ever came to Owl’s head as a wolf. She soon earned the family’s approval by chasing any rats that found their way uninvited into the food stores and was allowed to eat scraps and curl up by the stove at night.
Owl found it was true that the family liked sharing. They shared their house with many creatures who came to visit. Birds dropped out of the sky to settle on a shoulder, exchange a greeting, accept a gift of bread. Squirrels, martens and little grey forest foxes came too, usually at dusk or dawn. It was never spoken of. It was just a part of life for this family, who all had the gift of Listening. Unlike Owl, who could only hear animals who decided to talk to him, all members of the family could hear the thoughts of their animal visitors. Through that, they worked out what each one needed – food, shelter, healing, rest. With some visitors, Owl could see that the communication went further and ran both ways as it had done with himself and the cub and did, at least a little, with Blit.
Sometimes, watching Ead or Map with a squirrel or a finch, Owl was overwhelmed by missing Skrimsli. Then he would take himself off and walk down the winding path to the riverbank and stare at the dark water. Often he saw floating rafts of tree trunks, being guided downstream by black boats which all carried the same red symbol that he had seen on the uniforms of the guards in the circus: the Earth with a human hand closing around it, the insignia of the Automators. How were they here too? He tried to count the logs in each huge raft but there were far, far too many. Could any forest be left if so many trees had been cut? That was another thing he didn’t want to think of. On days when the dead trees were passing, he didn’t stay by the river but walked back and started to do whatever task he had abandoned.
Once, he asked Ead about the tree trunks. She shook her head sadly.
‘They started passing two, maybe three years ago. The river was clogged with them. Huge mother trees that must have been growing for a thousand years.’ She spoke as if the trees were her kin and Owl feared he had asked something too upsetting.
‘When the river dried, we thought that would put a stop to it. How else could you move such giants but by water?’ Ead went on. ‘But it seems they are cutting down the forest once again.’
‘Why?’ Owl asked.
Ead shook her head.
‘They want a railway right across the Sand Sea to the south. The trees are for the iron rails to rest on. They burn more trees to make the iron too. Don’t ask me why. It’s wickedness in my eyes. But what can we do about it?’
They didn’t talk about the floating trees again. It was sad, but where was the help for it? And there was so much work to do that no one had time for anything else. The long drought, when the river had almost vanished, meant that, now it was back, they must grow as much food as possible, in case the drought came again.
Owl knew nothing about seeds and soil and gardens. He was astonished when Moss gave him a handful of little dried things that looked like nail clippings and told him they would grow into food.
‘But how?’ Owl asked, staring at the wizened brown grains in his palm.
‘Water and sunlight,’ Moss laughed, ‘that’s all it takes, and digging of course. Lots of digging!’
Digging was hard. Owl couldn’t manage a big spade, but the little one that Map gave him worked fine. Every bit of Owl’s body hurt after his first day at it. But he got stronger very fast and began to enjoy the rhythm of turning over the sods and mixing in the smelly brown stuff that Nettle brought in her little barrow.
‘It was poo!’ Nettle explained. ‘Now it’s compit.’ Owl decided it was best not to know any more than that.
After a week or so of digging, mixing in ‘compit’ and poking the weird little seed things into holes and grooves in the earth, Ead announced that the garden was ready. When rain began to fall at the end of the last day of planting, the whole family shrieked in delight. Nettle grabbed Owl’s hand and led him and the rest of the family in a wild dance around the garden. They twirled and laughed until they were all soaked to the skin and had squidgy mud squeezing between their toes. Blit barked excitedly and her wolf-self appeared in Owl’s mind.
You humans are crazy! she said, then wagged her tail. But good.
Afterwards, they sat wrapped in blankets round the stove while their clothes steamed on the washing line strung from the eaves. Nettle climbed into her mother’s lap.
‘Story!’ she said. ‘STORY!’
Ead smiled. ‘One story, then bedtime!’
Nettle nodded solemnly and Moss snuggled close to Map. Everyone smiled and sat quiet. Whatever ‘story’ was, it was something good. Blit jumped into Owl’s lap and curled up too.
Ead began.
‘This is a story my granny told me, and her granny told her. It comes from the big green forest where she was born, where the river starts its journey to our land.’
Ead’s eyes caught the firelight and her voice had wrapped around them all, drawing a veil between them and the dark and rain. Now all there was in the world were the flickering flames, Ead’s voice and their eager faces. Owl felt a tingle go right up his back and down again.
‘Once,’ Ead said, ‘there was a man who lived in a forest by a river. One day he looked at his own reflection in its water.
‘I am beautiful, he said to himself, but I could be more beautiful. Then someone would surely love me.’
Owl could not imagine looking at his own reflection and thinking that it was beautiful. But he felt sorry for the man, who wanted to be loved; Owl knew about that alright!
Ead continued. ‘So the man took the wings of the bees and he twined them into his hair…’
Owl imagined the glistening wings, tangled in the man’s hair. That would look beautiful, but what about the poor bees? Owl didn’t like this man very much.
‘Then he looked once more at his reflection.
‘Goodness! he said, I am very beautiful, but…’
Ead paused here and the children joined in.
‘I could be more beautiful. Then someone would surely love me.’ Moss and Nettle chorused.
For a moment Owl was puzzled. How did the girls know what to say? Then he realised that this story was something that the children had heard time after time. It was like the words in Owl’s own heart about the keepers of the forest.
‘So, the man took the claws of the bear,’ Ead said, ‘and made a necklace for himself and looked at his reflection once again.’
Here Map spoke the man’s words.
‘I am very, very beautiful, but I could be more beautiful still. Then someone would surely love me.’
The words filled Owl’s mind with pictures, feelings, questions. How would anyone take a bear’s claws? What terrible longing would drive a person to do something so dangerous and so cruel? He stared at Ead, his eyes wide.
‘Shall I go on?’ Ead asked.
‘Yes! Yes, please!’ Owl cried, rather louder than he had planned.
‘Have you heard this story before, Owl?’ Moss asked.
‘Never!’ Owl said. ‘Never!’
‘Oh, Owl,’ Ead exclaimed. ‘I am honoured to be the first to tell it to you.’
Nettle was impatient. ‘Come on!’ she said. ‘More story!’
‘So, where was I?’
Nettle took her thumb from her mouth. ‘He’s got the bear claws in a necklace.’
‘Oh, yes! That’s where I was.’
Nettle removed her thumb again. ‘And he’s looked at his ’flection and says…’
‘I am very…’ Moss began.
‘…very beautiful,’ Map concluded.
Ead smiled and took up the story again.
‘But, thought the man, I could be more beautiful still, and then someone will surely love me. So, he took the stripes of the tiger and spread them all over his skin.’
Owl’s heart turned over in his chest. He thought of the pattern of black and flame on the cub’s head. How many times had he stroked it, since those very first days when Skrimsli was a helpless kitten, whose eyes were yet to open. Those stripes, so beautiful. If you took them, you’d be taking the very essence of the tiger! That was in a way what Kobret had tried to do, to take Skrimsli’s stripes away. But he had not succeeded!
‘Now, when the man tried to look at his reflection,’ Ead said, ‘the water in the river was gone. It had dried up to a trickle and the forest around him was dying. So, when the woman came along, the man said, The river has dried up and I cannot see my reflection. Will you tell me how very, very, very, very beautiful I am.
‘But the woman told him no such thing.
‘I can tell you how very, very, very foolish you are, she said. What will we eat if the forest is dead? Where will we live? I must speak to Owl, to help me sort out all this mess you made.
‘When Owl heard of man’s foolishness, she sighed. She went to the last pool in the river where water still remained, and she spoke to Sturgeon. Then Owl flapped her wings and Sturgeon thrashed her tail and together they made a storm and a flood that filled up the river. The water washed the bees’ wings from man’s hair, and the bear claws from his neck and the tiger stripes from his body and put them back where they belonged.
