Make More Noise!

by Emma Carroll

  “I threw it,” said a voice, and Alba jumped, nearly losing her grip on the branch below. She spun round and saw a boy sitting nearby. It was obvious why she had not noticed him before. His dark-brown hair was strewn with leaves and his face streaked with precious dirt. He looked like an extension of the tree itself.

  Before she could say anything else, he threw another of the seeds upwards, and Alba watched as it danced down, spinning in a tight circle. “Haven’t you ever seen a seed before?”

  “Not an ash one,” said Alba. “I’m from Willow.”

  “Really?” said the boy. “Thought I hadn’t seen you around before. But you’re not ugly—” He broke off and blushed. “I mean. You’re not not ugly. You’re not anything that I noticed, but my teachers said you’re all warty and snarly and weeping.”

  “And my teachers said you’re all two feet tall with sharp grey teeth. I think they might have lied to us.”

  “Unless you’re lying.” He frowned at her and cocked his head, sending a few leaves tumbling from his hair. “How did you get here?”

  Alba took a deep breath, feeling her heart knocking its hollow drum against her chest. “The clouds brought me.”

  The boy frowned at her. But then he looked behind her, at the cluster of clouds, and nodded. “All right. What’s your name?”

  Relief flooded her as the clouds sang in her ears. He’s the one! “Alba. What’s yours?”

  “Ask. Why’d you come here?”

  And Alba told him about the clouds speaking to her, and the truth of the treelands, and the witch’s broken heart. Ask listened silently, the dark-brown pools of his eyes widening.

  “And so I need you to come with me,” finished Alba breathlessly. “To the other trees. And when we have one person from each, the witch’s heart will be mended and the oceans will stop rising.”

  “How?” said Ask, and while Alba was relieved he had questioned none of her tale, her relief faded when she realised she didn’t have the answer.

  “How?” she asked the clouds.

  You’ll know, green-hearted girl.

  “You can’t expect me to come with you if you don’t know how to fix it,” said Ask fairly. “What would be the point?”

  Alba was saved from making up an answer by a squawk from the lower branches. “There! There’s the Willow-spy!”

  She felt a tug on her leg as, through the leaves, came the woman whose soup she’d spilled, together with several other Ashfolk, one of whom had her leg in a vice-like grip. She wrenched herself free and backed away to the end of the branch.

  “I’m no spy,” she said. “Leave me alone!”

  But the Ashfolk advanced, and Alba knew she was out of time. The clouds rushed forwards in a sharp blast of icy air, and the Ashfolk paused just long enough for Alba to lock eyes with the Ash-boy.

  “Come with me!” she cried, and threw herself backwards. The clouds hurried to catch her, and a moment later she felt a thump beside her. The people above were leaning over the branches, gesticulating wildly. She turned to see Ask, face pale at his own bravery, lying in the white beside her.

  “This… is…” He trailed off.

  Alba grinned. “Hold on.”

  Oak, here we come, murmured the cloud, and bore them away.

  Alba had learned her lesson – no more grown-ups. She was beginning to understand what green-hearted meant: while the children they collected did not actually have green hearts or hair, they were exactly as a tree was when it was first planted – strong though it was small, adaptable to weather and weeds and doubt. On Oak they found a girl called Querc with no voice and an open heart. On Birch there were twins, Silver and Sylvia, who were expert liars and believed difficult truths better than easy ones. On Cedar they found a boy named Ceylon, who believed in his heart straightaway, but whose head took some convincing.

  Every day the sea rose a little higher. It was a dozen raincycles since Alba had left – she was halfway to her thirteenth sproutday – and the water was swallowing the mushroom field on Willow. And now there was danger of a different sort: after Alba’s escape with Ask, envoys from the ash tree were sent to warn the other trees about her.

  “A Willow-spy has taken one of our own. We saw her spirit him away in a flying willoweave basket.” For this is what they thought the clouds were. “We come to warn you, and to ask for your aid in recovering our lost sapling.”

  Soon the message spread that other saplings were missing from other trees. The residents of Apple and Walnut went on high alert, keeping their saplings cupped into the centremost points of the trees. The clouds saw the preparations and passed along the message to Alba.

  “How will we get in?” said Alba, explaining to the others. But Silver and Sylvia only smiled and said in unison, “Let us go.”

  So a plan was formed: the clouds increased their downpour over Walnut until everyone, saplings included, retreated to the lower branches. They drifted Silver and Sylvia in on a separate little cloud during the confusion of the storm, and the twins lied their way down the tree until they fell in with the drenched saplings. Once there, they did what they had never done before: told the truth. Soon the cloud that carried them was zooming back with an extra passenger, a girl called Fen who had always wanted to leave her treeland and meet other treeple.

  They had been lucky thus far, but as they closed in on Apple, the treeple had developed a way of communicating with smoke and fire, and knew what to look out for. As the group of saplings approached, they readied themselves. An Applechild named Pip saw the preparations and, never one to ignore a fuss, concealed himself nearby.

  When Alba saw the wide branch at the top of Apple, cleared of leaves and spiky twigs, and seeming perfect for landing a cloud, she knew something was wrong, especially after the difficulty at Walnut.

  “It looks like a trap,” she said, scanning the surrounding boughs. “Perhaps we should wait a while.”

  “Don’t be silly,” said Ask. “Take good luck where you find it.”

  “What do you think?” Alba asked the clouds, but they were distracted by the vessels crossing the ocean and had not seen what lay in wait. We are too close to turn back now.

  But as soon as the children alighted on the landing branch, the ground beneath them turned into the bodies and grabbing hands of the Apple Corps. The cloudmates were no match for the highly trained soldiers in their uniforms of bark, and though the clouds raged and made fog of everything, Alba could only struggle helplessly as a hand clapped a cloth coated in a sleeping poison over her mouth.

  A smaller hand grabbed at her, and Alba looked down to see an Applechild trying to free her. Pip grappled with the Apple Corps soldier with all his tiny might, but the man swatted him aside and another soldier picked him up. Not recognising he was an Applechild, the soldier drugged him too. Alba felt her lungs burn for a moment, and then she fell into a deep, dark sleep.

  When she awoke she felt thirstier than she ever had in her life. The ground seemed to rise and fall beneath her feet, just as it did on the cloud, but it felt solid, like wood. The clouds rushed forwards anxiously and coated her dry tongue, as Alba looked down to see bark shackles on her wrists and feet.

  “Clear, please,” she asked the clouds, and when they parted she saw her cloudmates similarly tied at points around a vessel of pale applewood. The Applechild who had tried to help her was there too. Two Apple Corps soldiers stood keeping watch as others rowed. Alba gasped. They were on the ocean.

  “Where are you taking us?” she said, and a sour-faced soldier turned towards her. In his hand he held a knotted whip formed of apple stems.

  “Back where you came from,” he sneered. “We’re returning all of you to your treelands. And when we get to Willow, we will punish the Willowfolk for your crimes.”

  “Tell ’em, Smith,” crowed another soldier.

  Alba felt her body fill with sorrow. She had failed, and her home would be punished for it.

  “What crimes?” said Silver and Sylvia.

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nbsp; “Kidnap and lies. We know you’ve been telling tales about the witch. That one told us your ridiculous tale about hearts and crying.”

  Smith gestured to Fen, who was crumpled in her shackles. Alba’s sadness turned to anger. What had they done to her?

  “She’s been telling the truth,” said Ask desperately. “We weren’t kidnapped, we followed her!”

  “Do you need to be punished also?” Smith took a threatening step towards her friend, raising his whip as if to strike.

  “No!” Now Alba’s anger grew. She felt it from the tips of her toes to the ends of her hair. She looked down and saw her skin was glowing green, and her chest felt as hot as fire. Suddenly a spike of lightning thrust down and struck, right next to the sour-faced soldier.

  “What the—” he yelled, and reared back. There was a small smoking hole beside him. The rest of the Apple Corps rose to their feet, abandoning their oars.

  Alba looked at her hands, her feet, placed her shackled hand over her frantically beating heart. “I didn’t… I didn’t mean to—”

  But Smith lifted her roughly to her feet. “What trick was that,” he asked. “Are there more Willow-spies about?”

  But Alba finally understood what she was, and what to do. “No, it was me.” She pulled her arm free. “I’m a weather witch.”

  The clouds rumbled their joy. You are, you are!

  Smith spat on the ground by her feet. “You’re a mad girl and I’m not wasting my time on you. You’re stinking spies, all of you.” He reeled round. “Throw them over!”

  Alba felt a desperate, wrenching force rip through her as the Apple Corps surrounded her cloudmates. Her shackles fell away like smoke and she gasped. It was as if the clouds held their breath with her, and as she exhaled they rushed down so fast it was as if the sky was falling. High above, more clouds rained and thundered, and the ocean rose and rose. On the treelands, the treeple rushed for the uppermost branches.

  The vessel was thrown this way and that, but the clouds kept Alba upright as she leaned over Smith, who clung to the mast, illuminated by her ghostly green light. She bent down low over him and said in a voice like rain, “Now do you believe me?”

  It didn’t matter if Smith did or did not. Because Pip the Applechild had heard her story, seen the storm be conjured, and he raised his piping voice high above the thunder of the sky and sea and said joyfully, fearfully, “Yes!”

  The moment he said this, the rain stopped. Not just lightened, but stopped. The silence was so sudden and so complete it felt deafening. No one living had ever heard the sound of no rain.

  And then, somewhere deep below the vessel, where the tree roots reached for miles across the seabed towards each other and intertwined, a chasm opened. The vessel was caught in a great swirling whirlpool that began to suck the water away.

  “What’s happening?” cried Alba. You did it, said the clouds. You fixed her heart. You are her heart.

  Alba clung to Ask, who clung to Silver, who clung to Pip, who clung to Sylvia, and on and on as they were thrown this way and that, until finally something caught them and lifted them clear of the draining ocean. The clouds came and carried the children down to the ground.

  Alba felt the clouds clearing and tried desperately to hold them close to her. Don’t worry, they said. We’ll be back to fill the lakes.

  “But what will I do without you? I don’t want to be alone.”

  Ask heard her words, saw her eyes filling with tears and the disappearing clouds, and guessed they were going away. He slipped his hand into hers. “You won’t be alone.”

  At the seven corners of the fading ocean, the treelanders watched until all that was left of the sea were two great lakes. Far-off cities gleamed in the newly revealed sunshine. From all of it rose a steam, lifting like a tide.

  For the first time in their lives, the treeple climbed down from the trees and walked across the once-oceanbed from the seven corners of their world. They met in the middle, blinking and sunburned, where an undrowned city waited. And caught on the highest building was an applewood vessel with Apple Corps soldiers calling down to be rescued.

  Nearby was a small knot of children, one from each tree, all tangled up as tree roots in a hug. And at the centre was a green-hearted girl, mourning for the clouds. She didn’t cry though; she knew better than to start that again.

  The cloth spread on the tray. The milk in the jug. The cups on the saucers.

  A heap of snow-white sugar cubes in the basin. Beside them, the silver tongs – designed for lifting a single cube delicately, because a lady doesn’t shovel in a heaping spoon of sugar, not like in the kitchen at home. Butter in a little dish, and scones on a plate – but not too many, because that wouldn’t be ladylike either. It feels like forever since dinnertime and looking at them makes Eveline’s mouth water.

  Two silver teaspoons, side by side. Eveline takes them carefully out of the velvet-lined box they’re kept in. They’re real silver: smooth and heavy in her hands. Now, they’d be worth a bob or two, she imagines Ada whispering in her head. But Eveline doesn’t allow herself to think things like that. She’s not one of those maids who’d slip a silver spoon up her sleeve or into her apron pocket. She’s a good girl. Steady, reliable. A hard worker. The sort you can trust.

  She warms the teapot, just the way the mistress likes it. It’s the new china today: white with a narrow edge of green, and a green and purple picture of an angel with wings, blowing a trumpet. The mistress bought the tea set last week at the WSPU shop on the Charing Cross Road. Eveline knows that “WSPU” stands for the Women’s Social and Political Union. Ada says they want ladies to be able to vote just like men do, though what an angel with a trumpet’s got to do with that, Eveline can’t imagine.

  The tea set cost ten shillings and six, a good bit more than Eveline will get in her pay packet at the end of the week. The mistress is awfully proud of it. She can’t wait to show it off to Miss Wilcox, though Eveline thinks it’s not half as pretty as the old set with dainty pink flowers and a gilt rim. Purple and green don’t really go together, at least Eveline doesn’t think so.

  She spoons strawberry jam carefully into the cut-glass dish. Funny to think this might be a jar that Ada filled at the jam factory. Ada took her there once, to show off where she works: a big, noisy place of rattling machinery, the girls crowded together, shouting out to each other or singing music-hall songs in loud voices. A world away from this quiet kitchen: it’s Cook’s half-day off, so there’s no one here but herself, the ticking of the kitchen clock, the kettle singing on the range. She wouldn’t swap it for the heat and noise of the factory, no matter what Ada says.

  “You’d not catch me skivvying for anyone! I dunno how you can bear it,” Ada had declared when Eveline had first started work. “All that bowing and scraping! Yes, ma’am, no, ma’am, three bags full, ma’am. Having to keep your mouth shut all the time! It’d drive me batty.”

  Ma had laughed at her. “You couldn’t keep your mouth shut for a minute if you tried, Ada. You make more noise than a church bell!” She’d touched Eveline’s cheek. “But my Evvy’s a good girl. She’s got herself a good place.”

  Eveline has always known she’d go into service. “Get your feet under somebody else’s table – that’s the way to do it,” Da always says. But the thing is, she always imagined she’d have her feet under a nicer table than this one, in the dingy basement kitchen of a tall grey house on a grey London street. She thought she’d work in a grand country manor, like the place Ma and Da met when they were young. In a place like that there’d be other people to talk to – scullery-maids and footmen and bootboys – not like here, where there’s no one else but cross old Cook, always complaining about her feet hurting or because the fishmonger’s sent the wrong kind of kippers again.

  In a better place than this, Eveline would be a proper under-housemaid with a fluffy feather duster and a lace-trimmed apron, and long streamers on her cap, and maybe one day she’d climb up through the ranks and become a
head housemaid. Here, she’s a maid-of-all-work. Some days it really does feel like all the work too, when she’s up before six to air the rooms and light the range, sweep the fireplaces and fill the coal-scuttles, brush the boots and lug the hot water upstairs – all before she’s had so much as a bite of her own breakfast. Though at least here, she’s close to home, which means that on her half-day off she can go and see Ma and Da, and Ada, and the little ones.

  But when she does go home, Ada makes fun of her print dress and laughs at her cap and apron. “The badges of servitude”, she calls them. Ada turns up her nose at the idea of being anyone’s servant. “Cleaning out someone else’s drain-holes and scrubbing their floors? No thanks!” But Ada’s like that. If you say right, she’ll say left. She talks back to Ma and Da something terrible, and at school she used to cheek the teacher until Eveline was so embarrassed she wanted to hide her face behind her slate. She’d been secretly glad when Ada was thirteen and left school, and she had the classroom to herself.

  Eveline loved school. She still thinks about it all the time: the neat rows of wooden desks; the smoky smell of the stove; playing skipping games in the playground. Mr Stephenson, their teacher, would pace up and down at the front, reading them the exciting bits of Oliver Twist out loud, or telling them stories from history. “Good work, Eveline,” he’d say, about a composition she’d written or a map she’d drawn. She’d been the best in the class at arithmetic and spelling, and sometimes Mr Stephenson let her borrow books to take home – Alice in Wonderland and Black Beauty or a book of fairy-tales with a blue cover. Once she started reading it was hard to stop. She’d want to keep on going all night, but Ma would say she’d ruin her eyes and insist she blew out her candle. The closest Eveline ever gets to a book now is when she dusts them in the mistress’s sitting room, where they’re kept in a cabinet, behind glass doors.

  Ada, on the other hand, has never been interested in books. Not history, nor geography, nor arithmetic either. She couldn’t wait to leave school, but she’d flatly refused the place as a between-maid that Ma had gone to such trouble to find her. “I want my independence, I do. I’m going to be a factory-girl,” she’d said, and marched off with her friends to the jam factory.