Chapter 23 #3
Sorry, she said.
Storm, I said, putting my best calming Cat-voice on. It’s fine, you’ll be fine, but you have to move now. I can’t come and get you because I’m big and the bridge doesn’t need more weight on it. OK? You’ve got to move gently to the steps.
The bridge creaked, as if to underline my words. She flinched and gripped harder on to the railing, her other hand still high in the sky and holding the empty nest, as if her priority was to keep it aloft where it would be safe.
Storm, I said in my most calm voice. You can put the nest down. Just start moving to the steps, slow and gentle. Like Grandmothers Footsteps—
What? she said. Grandmother’s what?
It was a game we used to play, I said, Doesn’t matter. Move like you’re creeping up on a deer and it hasn’t seen you yet.
She swallowed and nodded.
OK, she said. OK I can do that.
She put the nest down on the railing, but the tilt was too much, and she flinched as it tumbled off and fell softly into the greenery below.
Sorry. Shit. It was a magpie, wasn’t it? she said after a short beat. I was just, I wanted to show you—
She swallowed and suddenly looked very young.
Could have been a crow, I lied. Don’t worry about it. Move slowly now.
She nodded and began to edge gingerly towards the steps.
I couldn’t help looking at the yolk and the blood dripping off the branch. She caught me at it.
Bad luck, she said.
No such thing, I said – and at the time I wasn’t lying because as I said, I didn’t have the sense to believe that there actually was such a thing, but I may have said it a little too quickly.
I just gave her another encouraging smile to keep her moving towards the relative safety of the steps.
Just a good lesson, I said. Don’t disturb things unless you need to eat. And listen to me when I say things are dangerous.
Storm came down the tipped zigzag of steps just as shaken as the footbridge. She stepped on to the platform and slumped, all the tension going out of her body.
I’m OK, she said. I really am sorry, Mouse. And I wish I hadn’t broken that egg.
She looked up at me. Her eyes were wet now.
I just wanted to show you how blue and perfect it was in its bed of feathers. I wish I hadn’t touched it, she said.
Since I wasn’t going to let her hear me say I wished that too, I didn’t say anything.
Instead, I went and got food from the packs and we sat on the moss-cushioned top of a wall eating in a silence that I guess was companionable enough for both of us.
We drank some water and split an apple, and then picked up our stuff.
I’ll get the goat, she said. My turn.
Which was her way of saying sorry. There was nothing bad about Storm, not underneath.
All the stuff on top was like a kind of protection.
Like armour. That’s what I now know. And given what had happened to her in her life before she and Freya came into ours, her need for armour was understandable.
Looking back, Cat and I getting irritated by it is the thing I question.
They had the right. So maybe we should have been bigger about it.
Not that being bigger would necessarily have changed anything.
It’s just that the thought is like a barb that hooks out of my memory just enough to snag all the regrets I have about what happened and stop them getting swept away in the flow of time.
I shouldn’t have let her take charge of the goat, even if it was her kind of apology.
I let her do it because firstly, though younger than me, she wasn’t a fool, like Cat said, and mainly because I thought letting her do it would make her feel better about what had happened.
And in that – and I hope only that – Freya was right: I was too soft.
I should have been thinking about the reason we needed more goats and the fact that this goat was our best shot at getting them.
I should have been harder and kept it close.
I should have been the one making sure it was safe.
About three hours later we had been slowed by a thick patch of close-grown pine woodland that had enveloped the railway as it passed through it and had come out into the sunlight to find we had missed the track in pushing through it.
We emerged scratched and hot and almost as irritated as the goat.
Luckily we could see the telltale wall of broadleaf trees snaking away from us about half a mile away, so we hadn’t gone too far astray from the railway that must have swung abruptly in a broad curve that had left us so far adrift.
The distance wasn’t a problem as the ground was scrubby grass and yellow gorse that filled the air with its special smell that always reminded me of food rather than flowers, but I can’t say what food unless it was what Cat called johnnycakes when she made them, with honey and the wild wheat we gathered in the autumn.
It was a baked, sweet smell and it cheered me up to walk through it thinking of home.
Not quite enough to feel completely great when we came to the obstacle between us and the railway line.
It was a canal and though it was so choked with weed and debris that there was no problem pulling our way across it, it was still wet and uncomfortable to ford, especially as we had to swim the goat across, and goats like swimming about as much as they like co-operating on anything.
Luckily the sun was still high and there was a bank of soft grass beneath a ragged line of willows, so we decided to rest and dry out for an hour.
It was mid-afternoon, so we had some more food to keep us going through the rest of the light before sunset.
Storm said she’d hobble the goat, so I took off my wet clothes and stretched them and myself out in the sun to dry off.
The last thing I remember hearing was the goat bell tinkling as Storm took it and the hobbles out of the pack, and then I made the mistake of falling asleep.
There was no tinkling bell to greet me when I woke.
Nor was there any goat. There was just Storm running back and forth across the heathland in the distance, every now and then stopping to stare at what I first took for a wood, but later realised was the outskirts of the town we were aiming for.
There was a jerky, panicked look to her movements and I rolled up on my feet to see more.
Her pack and stuff were still on the ground near me, so she clearly wasn’t running away, but suddenly she dropped flat on the ground and was very still.
I had been about to shout at her to get her attention, but the sight of her sudden movement stopped it half way up my throat. Instinctively I too dropped low and scanned the surrounding countryside. Nothing moved.
Without taking my eyes off Storm I tugged on my trousers and shrugged into the rest of my clothes.
Then I put on my boots quickly and grabbed her pack and bow as well as mine and the boar spear and started towards her, half running, half crouching.
Something had scared her, that was clear.
I lost a boot about halfway there and tumbled to the ground in a clatter of bows and packs.
That was a lesson, and the last time I ever did anything without lacing my boots first, no matter how urgent things seemed.
Storm turned at the noise and looked at me in horror.
She made furiously urgent gestures with her hands, miming to be quiet, and not move and stay down.
I took the bows and the arrows and the boar spear and sprinted towards her, keeping low.
Still! she hissed as I slid in beside her, in the cover of a gorse bush. They’ll see you!
Who? I said, scanning the overgrown edge of the town, now close enough to see where the gardens had turned into rhododendron forest, interspersed with tall trees that now towered over and often through the roofless houses whose gardens they had once adorned.
I don’t know, she said. But I saw them, I’m sure I did.
Somehow that relaxed me.
What did you see? I said. And where’s the goat?
I fell asleep, she said. When I woke the dumb goat was nowhere to be seen, so I went to look for him, and then I saw them.
What do they look like? I said.
I don’t know, she said.
But you saw them, I said.
I saw them moving in the trees, she said. It was the movement I saw. Big things moving in the shadows.
Big things moving in the shadows? I said. Could be anything.
I was more worried about big animals. Wolves or whatever had shredded the bark on that tree Cat and I had come across.
The thing that made tearing marks higher than my head.
The truth is I thought it was most likely a herd of deer that she’d seen.
I knew the probability of it being people was so distant that I could ignore it pretty safely.
At that stage I had seen no one in my whole life, and then abruptly in half a year I’d met one, killed him, saved two and hidden in my tank from a fourth that might or might not be connected to the one I had killed.
It just didn’t seem probable that I’d be seeing any new people for a long time, if ever. The world was after all empty.
It was Russians, she said. I think they were on horses.
You saw horses? I said.
There was a pause.
Maybe, she said. Under the branches over there, I saw legs. Four-legged legs.
Deer have four legs, I said.
It was people. On horses. I am sure, she said. It’s dangerous, and you not believing me makes it more dangerous. Mouse! We need to be really, really careful.
We need to find the goat, I said, feeling exhausted all of a sudden. Not be frightened of the wildlife just going about its business. Now be really quiet and we will see if you can hear its bell.