Elisha hadn’t told Toby about the episode when she had stamped on the prisoner’s foot. She knew that he would shoulder all the blame himself, so she had decided to keep quiet about it. When he saw Toby, the man cowered at the back of his cage. Toby thought about the fire. There were a thousand prisoners like this one in Tumble. Hundreds of innocent men and a few reckless small-time crooks. They were all going to be burned alive.
The mistletoe ball was at risk of turning into a fireball. Should a thousand prisoners be burned at the stake just so two can be saved?
Toby kicked the lock to the cell. It held firm. He shook the bars as much as he could, to the horror of the prisoner, who probably thought this was one of those night-time visits, when the guards slipped into the prisoners’ cells to torture them. Toby hurled himself against the door. Nothing.
Then he heard stampeding feet approaching. The mistletoe branch was narrow. They were bound to catch him.
He flattened himself, his back to the cell bars. A group of five or six guards rushed past. They didn’t even see him. They were running towards the centre of Tumble where the red glow from the fire lit up the night.
Toby started breathing again. His back was still up against the cage. He hadn’t been noticed. He could pause for a moment to think things over.
Just then, a hand whipped out from behind Toby, pinning him in a violent neck-lock. The prisoner had slipped his arms between the bars and was strangling him. His blood-streaked hand was going to kill Toby any moment now.
“Fire!” said the prisoner. “I can smell fire. We’re all going to die. I know about the Final Plan. But at least there’ll be one guard who dies with us!”
Toby couldn’t utter a word. With his throat being squeezed, all he could do was let out a barely audible groan. He had been mistaken for a guard. How could he let the prisoner know that he was on his side? He was going to die, strangled by an imprisoned ally. In a desperate gesture, Toby got the big key to cell 001 out of his pocket and threw it a little way off. The prisoner loosened his grip on his neck slightly, but Toby still couldn’t make a sound.
By throwing the key, he had become indispensable to his attacker. It looked just like all the other keys in the prison, so it would surely open this cell too. If the prisoner wanted to get out, he needed Toby alive to bring him the key that was glinting in the moonlight three paces from the cage.
Now, the prisoner’s grip loosened enough for Toby to take a big breath. After a few seconds, Toby was able to say, “I am on your side. I’m here to free some prisoners.”
“I know the Final Plan,” the man repeated. “I used to clean Alzan’s house. I’ve heard everything. Don’t try pulling a fast one on me.”
This was the second time he had mentioned this “Final Plan”. Toby did his best to speak calmly.
“I don’t know anything about the Final Plan. I don’t know what it is. I’m organising my parents’ escape.”
The hand relaxed a bit more over Toby’s throat.
“Your parents?”
“Sim and Maya Lolness.”
The man let go and stepped back. Toby was free.
“You’re the Lolness son?”
“Yes,” said Toby, turning round. “Do you know my parents?”
“I’ve heard about them…”
There was a moment’s silence. The man was looking down. Toby ran to fetch the key and hurried to the door.
“I don’t think this is the right key. All the locks are different. What is the Final Plan?”
Toby was frantically trying to turn the key in the lock.
“In the event of a fire,” the man replied, “they’ll abandon all the prisoners. They’ll leave Tumble to burn. But there’s something I should tell you, little one…”
“What about the Tree? What if the fire spreads to the Tree?”
“It won’t spread. Listen to me…”
Toby took the key out of the lock.
It wasn’t the right one. The door remained depressingly locked.
“I’m sorry,” said Toby. “It doesn’t fit. Why do you say the fire won’t spread?”
A brief silence.
“If they can’t stop the fire, the orders are to cut the link with our mistletoe ball,” the prisoner declared without faltering.
Toby had put the key back in his pocket. With the oxygen returning to his brain, his thinking was back up to speed.
“Is there a reservoir in the prison?”
“The prisoners only get to drink the rainwater that runs down the bark. But there’s a cistern above Alzan’s house.”
Toby was already running towards the heart of Tumble, in the opposite direction from cell 001.
“Wait!” the man called out.
But Toby had disappeared.
The Alzan home was deserted. There wasn’t a single guard left in the central knot. They’d even managed to take the director with them, half suffocated from three attempts to rescue his dreadful daughter. Gus Alzan was a thug and a torturer with all the makings of an assassin, but he was also a brave father who loved his daughter to distraction. The mystery of paternal love had revealed that the governor did have another side after all. He had returned empty-handed, coughing, sobbing and blinded by the smoke.
It didn’t take Toby long to find the cistern. It was enormous, intended to supply the entire prison, but Gus had decreed that prisoners could make do with the water streaming over the flooded floors of their cells.
With one kick, Toby managed to make the first stopper pop out of the reservoir. Then he dealt with the rest. The water came gushing out in a torrent. Toby stayed perched on top of the cistern. When the deluge reached the first flames, there was a great hissing followed by a dense cloud of smoke. The water vapour spread in foggy patches across the whole prison. The fire appeared to be dying down, but the racket was still deafening. The cries of prisoners still held captive added to the commotion.
Toby found his way back, picking up the path again that led directly to the high-security zone. Despite the smoke, he recognised the cell belonging to the prisoner with the wounded hand.
“The fire will be put out!” Toby called out. “There’s nothing more I can do. I’m going to take care of my parents. Goodbye!”
“Wait! Ever since I learned who you were, I’ve been wanting to tell you something. Your parents…”
Toby couldn’t catch the end of his sentence. The other prisoners were shouting from every direction.
“What?” asked Toby.
The man repeated what he’d said. This time, Toby heard him perfectly well, but he wouldn’t let the words enter his head. Every pulse in his body was trying to slow their journey so they wouldn’t reach Toby’s heart. The man said them one last time, however, and they pierced Toby’s gut like arrows.
“Your parents are already dead.”
Those were the words the man had been repeating.
Toby went right up close to the prisoner.
The boy’s arms hung down limply by his sides. He couldn’t hear the crowd any more. Just the broken voice of this man.
“Your parents were executed back in the winter. I heard Mitch and Alzan talking about it. They pretended they were at Tumble in order to draw you here, so they’d be able to capture you. Don’t trust anybody. Get out. Right now. They want you. And only you.”
Toby stepped back, astonished.
“They’re hiring the worst vermin to get you,” the prisoner added.
He held up his bleeding hand.
“There’s a kid called Bubble … she trampled on my hand with her heel. She did it in cold blood, for no reason.”
“Liar!” Toby shouted. “You’re all liars! You’re lying!”
And he ran off into the thick white smoke.
Elisha saw them, he kept telling himself over and over again. Elisha saw them. He was making headway through the fog, using the same tactics as he would in a lichen forest. Elisha told me she saw them. She touched them. He was counting down the cells in the hig
h-security zone. 009 … 008…
But that man’s hand was crushed. How am I meant to believe Elisha did that? Who could have done such a thing?
He was dripping with tears and sweat. His vision was blurred. 004 … 003 … 002…
Toby stopped in front of cell 001. He took the key in his hands again. He went over to the lock. The sound of shouting in the distance was muffled by the water vapour. He put the key in the lock, but before he had turned it, the door swung half open. The cell hadn’t been locked. He pushed the door with his shoulder.
Sitting on the bench, in the pale light of an oil lamp, was a couple with their backs to him. They were in chains. Alive! A lump formed in Toby’s throat. He walked towards them.
Toby didn’t notice as somebody stepped out of the shadows until they’d leapt on him, pinning him to the ground.
But nothing could stop Toby now that he was just a step away from his parents. He was seized by a violent frenzy. In a split-second, he had turned the situation round. Drawing on all his thirteen-year-old strength, he held his adversary by the hair, just above the ground, ready to smash his head open.
“Toby…”
The man had called him by his name. Toby dragged the face towards the light.
“Lex.”
It was Lex Olmech. The son of the millers from the Low Branches.
Nothing made sense to Toby any more. But he tightened his grip.
“Are you working for this filth too? Like your parents?”
“No,” answered Lex. “I’m not working for anybody. I know what my parents did to you. I’m ashamed of them. But I’m their son and it’s my duty to free them.”
“Free them?”
“They’ve been prisoners for seven months now. Because of the business at the mill – they’ll die for it. I’ve been planning their escape all this time. I’m almost there. Let me finish.”
Toby realised it had taken him seven days to get to the same point. In this tiny cell, right at the bottom of the impenetrable fortress.
“Where are they? What are you doing in this cell?”
“There they are,” said Lex.
The man and the woman on the bench turned their heads.
It was the Olmechs. Or what was left of them.
Two bony faces with translucent skin, ravaged by hunger, fear and remorse.
Toby let go of Lex’s head and slid down the length of the cell wall. There was a long silence.
“My parents? Where are my parents?” a faint voice asked.
Nobody dared answer.
“Sim and Maya Lolness,” said Toby, spelling it out. “My parents. My father is fairly tall; when he laughs it’s like sparks flying… My whole head fits in his hands. One night, he gave me a star. It’s called Altair.”
“We know who they are, Toby,” said Mr Olmech gently.
Toby didn’t know what he was saying any more.
“My mother is smaller. She smells of leaf bread rolled in pollen. My mother only sings when she’s alone. So the best way to hear her is to say something like, ‘I’m just going to pop out!’ but then stay, with your ear glued to the door. She sings…”
Great big tears were rolling down his cheeks.
“My parents. You’d recognise them from the way they look at each other. You’d recognise them in a crowd of a thousand people…”
Mrs Olmech whispered, “I’d better tell you: we were made to stand in for them right from the start. They put a sign with Lolness on it over the door. But I don’t think, my little Toby … I don’t think…”
Her voice sounded more compassionate now. Adversity had worn it down, until all that was left was the taut threat of truth. She took a deep breath.
“I don’t think you should look for your parents any more.”
Toby left the cell.
On his way out, he tossed the key to Lex. It was also the key to the chains that bound the Olmech parents. Lex had managed to break open the door with a stick, but the chains had resisted. He thanked Toby and rushed over to set his parents free.
Toby walked along a path that glistened with dew. The mist was thinning, revealing another dawn. A gentle light was breaking over the mistletoe leaves, in waves of orange and red.
People with sad hearts should be banned from seeing sunrises.
With each step, Toby told himself that the end of this mistletoe branch would be the end of his life.
He was inconsolable. His parents were dead. The only glimmer or scrap of life he might have had left was Elisha, but she had betrayed him at least twice. She had pretended his parents were still alive, and then she had abandoned him in the wax coffin. As for the cruelty of the trampled hand… There was too much evidence against her.
Toby was choking with sadness. Elisha – his last link with life had just snapped.
That was when he heard the bird.
If he hadn’t heard the squawking above him, this might be a very different story. He carried on to the edge of the mistletoe ball and came out by a large translucent fruit, big as a moon and made pink by the dawn. The bird drew near. Toby watched it swooping in the air. It was a sparrow, his father’s favourite bird.
Toby had always been frightened of birds. The only book he could never bring himself to open was his father’s volume on the brown-capped sparrow, a slim tome, full of terrifying pictures.
But at this dawn, Toby was no longer frightened. He carried on standing in front of the ripe fruit, then, like a worm, he did a full-body dive through the soft, fleshy white window. With both arms, he managed to cling on to a sort of fruit pip that he found in the middle. He stayed there, huddled in the belly of the berry. And it was there that he said farewell to the world.
A moment later, without even stopping to land, the sparrow grabbed the milky fruit.
25
Somewhere Else
When Professor Lolness was a child, there was an old and abandoned mistletoe ball called Saipur in the Far Northern Branches, the region where he lived. A small inn had been built there many years earlier. People from the neighbouring branches would visit for short holidays, because the air in Saipur was said to be purer.
But a sudden incident forced the tourists out. It was a tragedy that made headline news. A sparrow had swallowed a whole family: the Astona parents and their two children.
The inn at Saipur was closed down, and many tears were shed. A few days later, however, the entire Astona family was discovered safe and sound at the other end of the Tree. Nobody ever found out what had happened to them. The family members themselves couldn’t remember a thing.
Eventually, people forgot about Saipur.
Young Sim Lolness wasn’t too keen on adventures, neither was his friend Zef Clarac. But there was a third group member – El Blue, Leo’s father. El Blue was barely nine years old, but he seized every chance to risk his life, which was why he had dragged Zef and Sim into the mazes of Saipur, and it became their kingdom.
The three young boys spent their free time in the mistletoe ball. Their parents thought they were visiting an old professor who helped them with their homework. In the evenings, when they went home, all three of them showed off their exercise books covered in expert handwriting.
Their homework had been done to perfection. Professor Bickfort was clearly a wonderful teacher. Young Zef talked to his parents at length about old Bickfort, who stroked his moustache and called them by their surnames: Clarac, Blue and Lolness. Now that Bickfort was retired, what he liked doing best – according to Zef – was helping children get a head start. He only had one rule: he didn’t want to hear his students talking about their parents. Zef imitated Bickfort’s gruff voice: “Parents, huh, I’ve seen too many of them in my life! If I ever see one again, I’ll turn them into grasshopper pâté.” Zef’s parents trembled when they heard these words. He already knew how to impress his audience.
Plenty of parents were keen for their children to attend these study days with Bickfort. But the three boys explained that unfortunately the o
ld man wasn’t taking on any new students.
On their days off, Zef and El Blue would arrive at Saipur by nine o’clock and give their exercise books to Sim, who took barely an hour to do the homework for all three of them.
There had never been anyone called Professor Bickfort living in the Tree.
By ten o’clock, the homework was done and the day belonged to them. Clarac daydreamed, Blue played with his boomerang, and Sim observed the world, making painstaking progress with the files he was beginning to put together.
Sometimes, El Blue led his two friends to watch gigantic birds gobbling the mistletoe berries. Sim and Zef kept their distance. But it was on one such occasion that Sim discovered the brown-capped sparrow, which is a bird with a stain on its head that looks like a beret.
In the course of those Bickfort Days, Sim, aged nine and a half, wrote an illustrated essay called “The Sparrow With a Beret”. He always kept that first essay, and from then on he always wore a beret.
The sparrows, which were much smaller than thrushes, never ate the fruit straightaway; they carried it off in their beaks and disappeared. All of Sim’s work was concerned with what the sparrows did with the fruit they carried off. By doing so, perhaps he would come to an understanding of what had happened to the Astona family…
It was several weeks before he dared to go up to one of the big white fruity spheres and measure it. After lots of calculations, one thing was clear – the sparrow was incapable of eating the fruit whole. Its beak was too small to swallow the hard part of the fruit, that long pip in the middle wrapped in soft flesh. This conclusion gave the budding researcher plenty of food for thought.
Sim was already obsessed with finding out whether life existed beyond the Tree. In order to nibble away skillfully at the fruit without swallowing the pip, surely the sparrow would have to land somewhere. And since Sim had never seen sparrows perched in the Tree, then where did they land?
Sim developed his theory of the perch during those Bickfort Days. He didn’t dare suggest the idea that there might be other Trees at this stage in his career, so he talked about “perches” instead. In the conclusion to his book on the brown-capped sparrow, he stated that somewhere in the universe, beyond the Tree, other perches did exist.
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