A Whisper of Horses

by Zillah Bethell

THE DREAM

  YOU SEE, I hadn’t told the Professor about Miss Caritas. I hadn’t told him about finding the telebracelet. I kept it all inside as a secret. A great fat squirmy sort of secret that nibbled away at me like rust on a bucket. The afternoon with Miss Caritas had turned my mind tipsy-topsy and I started wondering about the point of it all. The Pbs and Cus—worker bees and soldier bees making sweet glue honey for the Au queen bees to stick their world together. Was it right? Was it wrong? Was that the way the system should work or not? If I could go back to that afternoon with Miss Caritas, and if she would ask me that same question again, would I still say no? Didn’t every Pb and Cu—deep inside their hearts—want to be an Au? My mind was too loud, and for a few days I questioned everything that previously I’d known to be true. The Professor saw that something was wrong, so he watched me and waited, saying nothing, letting me sift my feelings myself.

  And then I had the dream and I knew what I needed to do.

  In the dream, Mama was holding my hand. She was well again, like in the old days when walking was easy for her and we could go up to the lotments together. Her face was smoother than I’d ever known it, her hair longer and darker than it had ever been when she was alive, her blue eyes shining. She danced over the streets with rinky-dink steps and sang songs—beautiful songs—made up of words and music I swear I’d never heard before. And her dress. It was like something from Miss Caritas’s wardrobe. A slinky cream robe that seemed to flow in the breeze and rustle against her skin.

  She pulled me along beside her as we skipped over bridges and down long tunnels. We skipped along the bankment and past the Serpentine. We skipped from the first slice of daylight until the last crack of blackness filled the sky. And I felt so happy to be with her again.

  Then suddenly she stopped and, turning to me, put a finger to her lips.

  “Sssh.” Then the finger moved out in front of her and pointed at something.

  It was a wall. A long, high stone wall.

  Mama leaned in close until her breath was nothing between her mouth and my ear. And she whispered.

  “Outside.”

  Outside.

  I awoke with my sheets half chopped out of my bed and onto the floor, my head dripping with wet. My body seemed to be making itself spring up and I found myself standing despite my legs being tiredly weak. It took me a few seconds to not fall over.

  Outside.

  I went over to the chester drawers and pulled out the map before stretching it onto the bed. My fingers wiggled along the strange lines and bumps before patting the horse at the end of the paper.

  I was meant to meet Miss Caritas, I thought to myself. It was all meant to be. Mama’s final words to me—“Outside.” Finding the telebracelet. Meeting Miss Caritas. The map. It was all meant to happen. Like a story unfolding itself.

  And then I knew.

  I had to find the horses.

  chapter 9

  NIMBUS’S PROMISE

  “IT’S A MAP.” Professor Nimbus stood over the paper. “Where did you get it?”

  It was the following evening and I’d tapped on the Professor’s door a little after he’d taken his supper. The curtains were pulled over the window and the oil lamps were busy casting shadows all about the room. He ushered me in and I spread the map open on the desk with the leathery top.

  “It’s Mama’s,” I said. “I found it among her things … It shows where the horses are.” I hurried him on, keen to get to the crutch of the matter. “In Whales. There are horses still alive in Whales.”

  “Horses? Alive?” He looked at me again. “No. No, that’s not possible. The Gases killed them all off. There are no more horses.”

  I took a deep breath. “How do you know?”

  “What?”

  “How do you know there are no more horses?”

  “Because…” He stumbled. “Because there just aren’t.” He looked confused. “Are there?”

  “You’ve never seen one in Lahn Dan, Professor. That’s all you can really say. But you’ve never been outside Lahn Dan. And outside Lahn Dan is the rest of the world.” I stared at him. “You tell me to think, Professor. And I’m thinking as hard as I ever can right now. How do we know that everything outside of Lahn Dan is dead? How do we know?” Nimbus sat down in his armchair and turned his head to the wall, his fingers stroking his chin. “Because the Minister tells us?” I went on. “The Minister and all the Ministers before him? Is that how we know?” I knelt beside the Professor’s chair and said, in a voice that was low enough to show how serious I was, “I want to find out for myself.”

  The Professor gave a little sigh. “You want to leave Lahn Dan?”

  I nodded.

  “There … have been others.” Nimbus smiled a softening sort of smile. “Others who have tried to escape over the Emm Twenty-five Wall. The Minister didn’t look too kindly upon them.” He eased himself up out of the chair with a creaky, cracky old-man noise. “Those caught trying to escape are sent to Two Swords. No exceptions. They are frozen to death.”

  Two Swords was a name that overfilled all Lahn Daners with fear. Anyone caught committing a crime against the State and the Minister would be whippled away to Two Swords where some clever type of freezing would happen. Then their bodies would be put on display in the main building as a warning to others. Children would be taken there and made to file past the lifeless criminals. Parents would point and tut and tell any child that they thought might be getting a bit too excitable for their own good that if they carried on the way they were that they might well end up stuck for eternity in Two Swords. It was usually enough to calm them down.

  “I still want to try,” I said. “If I don’t try then I’ll never know, and if I never know then I’ll be all crumpled up until the day I die. I think the person who drew this map tried. And I think they found out the truth.” I picked up the map and handed it back to the Professor. “Professor,” I asked, pointing to the signature, “who is Shy?”

  The Professor took the map from me and studied it hard. “No,” he mumbled to himself. His face reminded me of Miss Caritas’s when she saw the name. “Can it really be true?”

  “Professor?”

  There was a long silence as he twisted the tiny sheet of paper around in his hands and looked it all over. He was shaking his head. It was as if he’d forgotten I was in the same room. “I don’t believe it. I simply can’t believe it.”

  “What can’t you believe?” My voice was trembling. “Professor. Who’s Shy?”

  He looked at me with sad eyes and took a deep breath before he spoke. “She was an Au girl who disappeared. One night, many, many years ago.”

  “Disappeared?”

  “Yes. Along with a Cu boy whose name I can’t remember. I assumed—well, everyone assumed that something terrible had happened to them—an accident in a derelict building or some such. That kind of thing used to happen a lot back then.” The Professor frowned. “Then years after—when you were nothing more than a baby—your mother told me something…”

  “What?”

  He shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “That she believed Shy was still alive.”

  “Alive?”

  “Yes. And living outside Lahn Dan.”

  A hundred questions whizzed through my mind. “But how would Mama know about that? It doesn’t make sense.”

  “When your mother told me, I flicked the idea away like a firefly—talk like that could get you into trouble, you know. The Secret Police were everywhere in those days. Listening. So I never found out anything else about it. I shut my eyes and my ears to the idea. Stupidly. But”—Professor Nimbus held the map out to me—“looking at this, I can only guess that somehow she did get out and managed to smuggle the map back to your mother.”

  I was confused. “But why would she send it to Mama?”

  The Professor smiled. “Because Shy was your mother’s best friend.”

  The blood was pumping loudly around my ears. I leaned myself against th
e edge of the Professor’s table. “They couldn’t have been friends. Mama was a Pb and you said Shy was an Au. It’s impossible.”

  “These things happen. It was very much frowned upon, as I remember it. Very much frowned upon. But these things do happen.” The Professor leaned his elbow up against the mantelpiece and looked around the room at the shaky flickers over the walls. He stayed that way for a minute or two, not saying a single lonely word. Then he made a sudden sucking noise and jolted himself back to life.

  “Supposing,” he started, “the Minister’s Police Force don’t catch you and you manage to get outside of Lahn Dan. What will you do if it quickly becomes apparent that the map is a lie? That there is nothing—no people, no trees, no birds, no horses. Nothing at all in the outside world? What would you do then?”

  I grinned. “That’s obvious. I’d get back in again.”

  “But what if you couldn’t?” His eyes went all dead duck serious again. “What if there was no way back in?”

  I stood as tall as I could. I wanted to make it clear that I knew what I was doing and that I wasn’t a tiny screaming baby anymore. I was old enough to make my own decisions. Mama would have understood. “If that happened”—I glared at Professor Nimbus—“then at least I would know that I’d tried. And trying is the most important thing.”

  “Even if it gets you killed?”

  I thought about it for a moment before nodding my head. “Even if it gets me killed.”

  Nimbus sighed again and wandered over to the desk. He held the map up to the light, squeezing up his eyes to examine it. “The house with a star over it.” He turned the paper around so I could see. “Do you know what that means?”

  I shook my head.

  “Well, I do. Back in the early days of the Ministry, people opposed to its creation would put a star above their door to show that anyone in trouble could go there and hide. A safe house, if you like. Somewhere to meet like-minded people. Somewhere to go.” He paused and seemed to smile to himself. “Of course, this is all academic. Nobody could ever get over the Emm Twenty-five Wall nowadays. It is too thick and too high. Any gateway built into it would be manned day and night by the police. It’s impossible. Utterly impossible.”

  I reached up and pulled gently down on the map so that I could see the Professor’s face. “Yes. But I know of a way.”

  * * *

  The next day, as I was getting myself ready for the early morning storytelling slot, Professor Nimbus knocked on my door and came into my room. His hands were a bit twitchy and a couple of times he tried straightening out the creases in his long, graying greatcoat with his palms.

  “I’ve been thinking, Serendipity. In fact, I was up most of the night thinking. Before your mother passed across, I made a promise to her. I said that I would look after you and make sure you were as safe as you could possibly be.” He tried to disguise his twitchyness then by ramming his hands deep into his coat pockets. “It’s a promise I fully intend to keep. Wherever it may take me.”

  His eyes flashed over the room as he pulled his coat together and perched himself on the edge of my bed. “There is something … I’ve not told you, Serendipity. Something important that I’ve avoided telling you now for a number of weeks.”

  I stopped what I was doing and turned to look at him. “Yes?”

  “I’ve not told you because I thought I could prevent it. I thought … hoped … it would all come to nothing. The powers that be can sometimes be talked out of making these ridiculous decisions. I’ve made personal appeals at the Party headquarters themselves, I’ll have you know. Made numerous requests for that particular rule to be reconsidered.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  He ignored me. “But no. Sadly not. The Party are keen to push ahead with it regardless. Why, I’ve no idea. I fail to see what it is they hope to achieve from doing such a thing.”

  “What?”

  He looked at me with the miserable eyes that his face wore now and then, and sighed. “The Ministry has decided that all orphaned children need to be accounted for.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “What it means, my dear, is that orphans are no longer to be allowed to live with other people. They are to be housed in special homes and looked after by state-appointed carers.”

  “So … I wouldn’t be able to live here with you?”

  “No.”

  “Where would I live?” I asked, my entire body suddenly feeling overwhelmed by a sort of exhaustion.

  “They are building homes. Not nice homes, I’m afraid. They look more like prisons. In fact”—he gave another sigh—“I think they probably are.”

  I stood there for a minute or so taking it all in. First Mama dies, and now I was to be snatched away from the Professor by nothing more than some mad idea that somebody had whizzed up from skinny air. Life always found new ways to confuse you, I thought.

  “So”—the Professor skipped to his feet—“if you still wish to try to get outside of Lahn Dan and find the horses—real or not—I shan’t stop you. In fact, I’m going to come with you. You see, I really don’t want to see you carted away to some unnecessary jail, and I’m not too sure I want to stay in a city that hides its future hopes behind bars. So, if you don’t mind, my dear, I shall accompany you. We shall make the journey together. Yes?”

  Before I had time to reply, Nimbus had spun around and was making his way out through the door. “Pack your bag,” he muttered. “There is little time to lose. We leave tonight.”

  chapter 10

  THORNTON HEEF

  GOING THROUGH THE drawer full of Mama’s stuff was difficult. My bag was only teensy and I had to be very selective about what I was going to take with me. Whatever happened, I doubted that I would return here. I had a lot of her clothes and pieces of plastic jewelry filling up the drawer so I got it all out and went through it bit by bit, laying everything out on the bed. In the end I pushed one of her headscarves—the long purply one with the yellowy flowers on it—and a rose brooch, which she liked to wear on her days off the lotments, into the bottom of my bag.

  The Professor helped me to write Gry’s and Bracken’s names on bits of paper and I left them on the landing outside my room with the two pairs of old shoes that Mama gave me in the months before she went. Sometime over the next few days they would start to wonder where I had got to, and they would come around to see if I was okey-dokey. They would find the shoes and realize that I’d left them as gifts for them both. Parting gifts. They wouldn’t know where I’d gone of course, but I couldn’t tell them. It would be far too dangerous.

  * * *

  We set off late in the afternoon. Me with my bag dangling over my shoulder and the Professor with a tatty old rucksack strapped to his stooped back, woody old stick for walking in his hand. He said that it might take us a couple of days to get to the wall going south, so we would have to crash out in empty houses along the way.

  Lahn Dan was full of empty houses. Before the Gases, it was filled to the broom with people. The roads were chocker with modpods and bikes, trams and buses. All the houses were lived in. Nowadays, though, only Pbs with handcarts, Aus with modpods and the Minister’s Police Force used the roads, and most of the houses were left all alone, cold and silent. There weren’t enough people to live in them all. In the old days, Professor Nimbus says, men and women from other places would come and take pictures of Lahn Dan—all the buildings and the parks. They’d grin themselves silly and stick their tongues out and ask passersby to take a picture for them. I’ve seen a photograph like that in the Professor’s collection. They’d buy cards and T-shirts with Lahn Dany things on. Then they’d go back home and show all their family where they’d been and what they’d done and the things they’d bought and the family would be jealous and want to go there for themselves.

  But that was a long time ago. Lahn Dan was a different place now.

  After a couple of hours walking, I could feel my heavy feet dragging; the Professor was slo
wing to a dribble. We’d managed to get as far as Thornton Heef before the Bat Shriek sirens started their usual screechy thing. That meant we needed to get inside fast.

  “Quick.” Nimbus sped up once again. “Down here.”

  We sidled off down a side street with a long line of stuck-together brown houses. None of them looked lived in. Nobody was around. The Professor took us down a small alleyway to the rear of the houses and pushed open the gate of one. At the back door he tried the handle, but it was jammed shut. Locked tight.

  “Blast!”

  We tried a couple more of the houses before finally—thankfully—falling into one whose door hadn’t been locked.

  It was dark and musty smelling. Like the dust had been gathering itself up for many, many years and waiting for this moment to tickle someone’s nostrils. And it was cold. Terribly cold. I thanked the God Man that I’d packed my floppy, sloppy brown jumper, and dug it out of my bag.

  Strange how much space people had in the old days. Nimbus walked through what must have been a kitchen, through a long room with a table, to what would once have been called the sitting room. He pulled the curtains together and, perching his wizardly old legs on the edge of a soft, fluffy chair, lit his oil lamp and adjusted it so that we could see the darkness retreating into the corners of the room.

  “Have you brought your dinner pills?”

  “Er…” I reached into my bag to get them.

  “Don’t worry.” He popped open his own rucksack. “Save them up. We’re going to need them at some point. But tonight”—his hand pulled something out from his bag with a ta-da—“we’ll eat real food.”

  In his hand was a small loaf of bread.

  “Bread?”

  “And…” Another dip into the bag. “Honey!”

  “Where did you get that?”

  “Old Tumbril spares a bit of a pot every now and then. He’s a good man, old Tumbril. A good sort.” The Professor took his knife and sliced up the bread.

  “You didn’t tell him where we were going, did you?”

  “No. No. Don’t worry. Everybody thinks we’re off on a story-finding mission around Lahn Dan.” He levered some of the honey out of the jar and onto the bread. I grabbed it and gobbled gutsily. “The Minister’s office has given me five days’ leave.” He took a bite of his own honeyfied bread. “Not that I’m going to be back in five days, of course.” He gave a snorting laugh and some wet crumbs shot out of his mouth and onto the floor. “Oh. Excuse me. With any luck we’ll be well on our way to Whales by then. Well on the way.”