Chapter 25 #3
Of course he may mend his boat, but you burned all his charts, said Scar Girl. So he might never find us again, even if the wants to.
He could get new charts, said Bear Shirt.
Maybe, said Scar Girl. But they don’t grow on trees.
I told him about the map room, said Bear Shirt.
What map room? said Scar Girl.
The one in the big library, said Bear Shirt. In Glasgow. The one Mum and Dad once camped out in. I always wanted to go there and see all the books, bring home a boatload.
Must be lots of libraries in Glasgow, said Scar Girl. It’s a big, big city and what hasn’t fallen down will have likely rotted or burned. So don’t get your hopes up.
Who’s hoping? said Bear Shirt, who suddenly sounded both very young and equally much as if they were getting their hopes up.
But Dad said the big library in Glasgow looks like they took books so seriously that they built them all a palace to live in, a palace with a big dome on top and it sits beside a deep cut full of old roads, right in the middle of the city, so he might have a chance of finding it. Us too.
And we are going to this Glaz-go too? said Grey Hair.
It’s where they got the boats in the first place, said Bear Shirt. My father said they had plenty to choose from, broken boats to cobble together a good one from. We’ll have the same luck. And we’ll be much closer to Mingulay.
If we can find Glasgow, snorted Scar Girl. If we’re not just wandering around lost…
We’re not lost, said Bear Shirt. We’re heading north.
I knew where Glasgow was. It was on the M-way map in the building below the tower.
I’d traced my finger along the blue line of the M-way many times, thinking about all the names on the road and where it led.
Glasgow was easy. It was where the M-way went.
Somehow I wanted to shout out and tell them, which would have been stupid and reckless, and all those other bad things but…
I liked them. Or if not like, something else equally dangerous. Like trust.
Crouched unseen above the three of them sitting round that friendly campfire, eavesdropping on their conversation was exciting and fascinating to me who had only seen three other grown people in my whole life, but it was also something else, something so unexpected that I had no armour against it: It was familiar.
I think that was what disarmed me enough to drop my guard when I should have been doing everything in my power to keep it up.
Because I did drop it a little, just enough to let in possible futures that I had not really thought about until then. Not consciously.
The familiarity wasn’t with something I’d experienced in the real world.
Obviously, it wasn’t that. But it was still something I had experienced, and experienced really deeply.
It was something I had encountered only in a story, a series of images and feelings that I’d made in my head, maybe having made the images in my head is what made them so strong and known.
I’d crouched beside the small hero of the story and looked down on a lonely fire in the night just like this one, a fire where three strangers like these were talking and arguing, except the ones in the story weren’t like Bear Shirt and Scar Girl and Grey Hair, they were called Bill and Tom and Bert and despite having human names they were trolls.
The story was one Cat had read me, and though trolls and dwarves and wizards are made up things, I believed everything about them while her voice spun that story into my head by the light of our own firesides.
I loved it, and the little hero Bilbo, and I used to make her read the favourite bits again and again until I knew them by heart.
And Bilbo trying to pickpocket the trolls was one of those bits.
The glow of the fire on the trees around the people below me was just what I’d imagined.
And it wasn’t that I felt like a hobbit – which is what the Bilbo was, it was that I felt I was in a story, maybe the first time I’d felt that.
With just Cat and me there wasn’t enough for a story.
It was just us. But now I realised I was having an adventure.
More than that even, I was going to have a story to bring home to Cat.
And maybe because I was thinking of myself as if I was seeing me from the outside, because I was seeing myself as part of a tale I would tell, I let that guard down, which let all those imagined futures slide in.
Because stories are slippery and dangerous things.
I didn’t know that then, but I do now. It’s knowledge that cost me a lot to learn.
So I never forget it. Stories don’t just let you make worlds in your own head.
If you’re not careful they can break worlds too, because they can distract you from what’s real, from what’s actually happening right in front of you.
Or at your back.
I felt the prick of something sharp against my Adam’s apple an instant before a hand clamped over my mouth to stifle the grunt of surprise trying to leap out of it.