A Whisper of Horses

by Zillah Bethell

  “I’m staying here.”

  “Why?”

  “I haven’t come all this way to be scared off by a hunk of metal, Tab. Besides,” I whispered, “this place is on the map and I want to know why.”

  The creature stood dead still and silent for a while, the only sounds coming from its robotic insides. After a while, it started talking again, this time with much less aggression and certainty in its voice. “GO ON … SHOO … CLEAR OFF.”

  “I’ve told you, no.” I stood my ground. “I’m not leaving until I’ve seen the Wizard.”

  The robot seemed to sigh. “YOU ARE VERY IRRITATING, YOU KNOW. VERY IRRITATING. USUALLY THE CHILDREN WHO COME UP HERE AND ANNOY ME RUN OFF. SCARED. PETRIFIED, USUALLY. THEY DON’T TEND TO COME BACK. THEY LEAVE ME ALONE IN PEACE—WHICH IS HOW I LIKE IT. BUT YOU…” It sighed again. “YOU ARE VERY, VERY IRRITATING. WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?”

  “Well, firstly I would like to talk to you in person. Not through this … thing, here.”

  “THIS THING HAS A NAME, YOU KNOW. HE TOOK ME YEARS TO BUILD AND REQUIRES A LOT OF LOOKING AFTER. I HAVE TO DISMANTLE THE JOINTS AND LUBRICATE EVERY COUPLE OF MONTHS OR SO, AND WITH THE WET WEATHER UP HERE THE RUBBER SEALS HAVE TO BE REFRESHED MUCH MORE OFTEN THAN I WOULD LIKE.”

  “What’s goin on?” Tab muttered behind me.

  “So what is this thing’s name?” I asked, still staring into the robot’s eyes.

  “BRAN.”

  “Bran?”

  “IT STANDS FOR ‘BIOMECHANICAL ROBOTIC’—WAIT A MINUTE. I’LL COME OUT AND—

  “—talk to you. Take this silly thing off my head.” One of the doors to one of the houses had opened up and a smallish man wearing a strange wiry sort of helmet and holding a bulky metal box had walked out into the street. He fiddled with the straps around his chin and pulled the helmet off the top of his head. “That’s better. As I was saying, it stands for ‘Biomechanical Robotic Anti-Nuisance Device.’”

  “Er … That’s BRAND, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, it is. But I prefer BRAN. He was a king.”

  * * *

  “Why should I help you?” The Wizard sat in his armchair and watched us. “I fail to see a reason why I should help you.”

  Tab and I were scrunched up on the sofa opposite him, Mouse on the floor between us.

  “Um…” Tab’s eyes rolled around the room looking for a reason. “Because … it’s a … nice thing to do?”

  “Nice? Huh. Such a meaningless word. Nice.”

  He wasn’t what you would think a wizard would be like. He was gray and thin with hopeless, floppy hair and what appeared to be luggage stored under his eyes. And he was a miseryguts. Definitely a miseryguts.

  Oh, and he didn’t have a big pointy hat and a wand.

  “You really a wizard?” Tab asked expectantly. “A real, proper wizard?”

  “Of course I am,” the Wizard spat. “You saw BRAN out there, didn’t you? You saw how magical I’d made him.”

  “Yeah, but … but you didn’t make him from magic, did ya? Not real magic.” Tab was grinning like he’d worked out the big joke and was wanting to be let in on it.

  “Depends on your interpretation of magic.” A flash of hurt shone in the Wizard’s face. “If you want me to levitate right now, I wouldn’t be able to. No one would be able to. But give me a couple of days in my workshop and I’d work something out.”

  “Levi…?”

  “Sir,” I started, deciding to be a little more polite than I’d just been on the pavement outside. “Sir, Tab’s ankle is hurting badly and he’s slowing us down. We were hoping that you would help us. We still have a long way to go and—”

  “Where are you going exactly?”

  “As far as we can. Until the land stops at the sea.”

  “You are heading west?”

  “Yes.”

  “Pembrokeshire, then. And why”—he intertwined his fingers and goggled over them at us—“are you going to Pembrokeshire? What is it that Pembrokeshire holds to make you walk so far that your ankles and knees and thighs are worth damaging?”

  “We’re looking for horses, sir.”

  “Horses, eh?” He straightened himself in his chair.

  “Yes. Horses. Not that we’ve seen any so far. We were told that there were still horses in Whales, but we’ve seen nothing yet. I’m starting to wonder…” My voice trailed off the path.

  “Yes?”

  I coughed. “I’m starting to wonder if the stories I’d heard aren’t true. That there really aren’t any horses anymore. That horses don’t exist.”

  The Wizard pulled himself forward and gripped his knees with his hands.

  “Oh, they exist, alright.”

  “What?”

  “Horses most definitely exist.”

  I think I sat there with my mouth all sort of O’d.

  “How … how do you know?”

  “I’ve seen them.”

  “Where? When?”

  “Many years ago. In Pembrokeshire, funnily enough. Back then I wasn’t such a recluse. I traveled around Britain. The two of us did. We worked our way up to where Scotland once sat and down the east coast of England. Then we headed west, crossed the Severn Bridge and pushed on until—as you said—the land stopped at the sea. We spent weeks investigating and documenting the flora and fauna that still existed. That was when we saw them.”

  I couldn’t trust my ears.

  “Really?”

  “Oh yes. Running wild. A whole cloud of them galloping past in the distance, over some dirty fields and into a wood. Only lasted a few seconds, but we saw them.”

  “But, if it was only for a few seconds, and it was far away … perhaps you were mistaken? Perhaps they weren’t horses at all.”

  “No,” he said. “They were horses.”

  I could barely tin my excitement. “There were two of you? You said there were two of you?”

  “Hmm.” His mouth twitched and twittered and his fingers leant across to the coffee table before us. On the table sat little toys—tiny robots not unlike BRAN outside. He flicked the back of one of them and it started walking across the table, dials and gears whizzing and whirring as it went. After a couple of seconds it stopped, did a backwards somersault and then hopped on one leg before coming to a halt.

  “Wow. Cool.” Tab laughed. “S’cool.”

  “Tell me”—the Wizard had managed to gain control of his twitching, twittering mouth—“where are you both from?”

  “Lahn Dan.”

  He leaned forward in his chair, suddenly very interested. “Lahn Dan, eh?” I noticed that he said it the same way I did. “So how did you find out about the horses in West Wales? I really wouldn’t have thought that people in Lahn Dan would be aware of such things.”

  “A map.” My hands dug deep down into the bottom of my rucksack where I’d shoved it roughly not an hour before. “I was given it by … someone I knew.” I found the curled, battered sheet of paper and pulled it out. Squatting alongside the Wizard, I unraveled it and showed him. “This is Lahn Dan. That’s the road we’ve been following.” I pointed. “The H H Bridge.” And finally, “The horses.” I handed the map over to the Wizard and he silently took it from me. “And I think the place with the star … I think that’s here, isn’t it?”

  He sat there for quite a while, just staring and running his fingers over the crinkled piece of paper, not saying anything. Then I noticed that his hands were shaking and a single, lonely little tear ran down his face and dripped onto the parchment.

  “Sir?”

  The Wizard pointed to where Shy’s signature sat.

  “Come with me. Both of you. There’s something I think you should see.”

  We went out through the kitchen, through the garden, across a stony lane to a field directly behind the house.

  “There.”

  A headstone jutted out from the earth, rough and coarsely chiseled. On it were the words:

  SHY ELINORE

  The most beautiful wo
man that ever graced the universe

  “We met under a shower of bird-notes”

  “Shy?” I sucked in air almost too quickly to say the word.

  Tab stubbed his finger towards the stone. “She drew the map?”

  “Yes. A long, long time ago.”

  We all just stood there not saying anything for ages, the sparrows and blue tits in the trees singing away above us like an orchestra filling the gaps in the sky.

  “‘We met under a shower of bird-notes’?”

  “It’s from a poem she loved. About growing old and accepting one’s fate.”

  I looked around. The hill behind the field was rich and green and squeezed full of life. Trees were thick with leaves and the air hung heavy with the scent of creation. I thought I saw squirrels and rabbits, and butterflies danced around each other like petals in the breeze. Bees buzzed past and small white flowers sacrificed themselves under our feet. There was not even a hint of Lahn Dan violet in the sky.

  The Wizard eventually turned to me. “What is your name?”

  “Serendipity, sir.”

  He smiled an enormous smile.

  “Of course it is. Of course it is.”

  * * *

  The Wizard wrapped a large bandage soaked in herbs around Tab’s leg. Round and round it went, up and down, until there was only a little bandage left with which to tie a knot.

  “Ow! Not too tight.”

  “It has to be fairly tight. It won’t work otherwise.”

  “But me leg’ll drop off.”

  The Wizard looked up at him with a bit of a pitying face.

  “Your leg will not drop off. Trust me.”

  Tab wriggled about a bit on the sofa while the Wizard pulled it even tighter whilst telling us all about himself and Shy.

  “I was a Cu in Lahn Dan. I used to invent things. Modpods, telebracelets, announcement monitors, you know? That sort of thing.”

  “You invented modpods?” Tab momentarily forgot about the bandage being pulled tightly around his ankle. “Whoa! Cool.”

  “Well … improved upon the old concepts of vehicular travel, I suppose. Made them better.”

  “Cool.”

  “All those little and not-so-little things that kept the Aus entertained and their lives running as smoothly as possible. It was a tedious and thankless task, to be honest. No one really cares about the builders of such things. As long as their monitors are plugged in and working, anyone could have made them. But then I met Shy.”

  “An Au?” I asked.

  “Yes, she was an Au. But a different sort of Au. She understood that for the world to work properly everyone has to interact and get on with everyone else. It was no good building walls or glass towers to keep everyone apart. Bringing people together was much more important.”

  “She knew my mother, did you know?”

  The Wizard turned and burned a look straight into my face. “Oh, we both knew Oleander.”

  I thought back to what the Professor had once told me. “How did you know her? Is it true? Were they both best friends? Even though Mama was a Pb and Shy was an Au?”

  He nodded. “They were the greatest of friends. The thickest of friends. Of course, this rather upended the apple cart. It was not allowed. The social conventions were being tossed aside and many of the Aus spurned Shy over it. There was one older Au in particular who desperately tried to befriend Shy and turn her against Oleander. It didn’t work, of course.”

  A sudden flash of a face in my head. A face jolted into shock after seeing the map. A plan being quickly formed in her mind.

  “Miss Caritas.”

  The Wizard looked surprised. “You know her?”

  “Well…” I told him about my meeting with Miss Caritas. From the moment I saw the telebracelet on the ground, through the dresses she let me try on, all the way to how she betrayed the Professor and me at the Emm Twenty-five.

  The Wizard snorted to himself. “As soon as she worked out who you were, she was going to try and trap you. No doubt about it. You see, Caritas was bitterly jealous of your mother. Bitterly jealous. For a number of reasons.”

  “OOOwwwww, me ankle!” Tab cried out in pain again.

  “I really wish you’d stop screeching like that,” the Wizard huffed, deliberately pulling the bandage just that little bit tighter. “You sound like a buzzard making off with its prey.”

  He adjusted some of the wrapping before patting Tab gently on the leg and handing him one of his boots. Tab forced it on over the white legging before standing up and trying it out, walking over to the window and back again. “S’alright. I think. S’alright.”

  “You need to keep the wrappings on for at least two days. Give the herbs a chance to work.”

  Tab nodded.

  I bit my bottom lip in frustration. I was desperate to find out about Mama and Miss Caritas, but I knew I had to stay calm and wait for the Wizard to tell me when he was ready. Mama always got annoyed with me when I rushed her. I could almost imagine her saying—as she often did—“Possess your singular soul in patience, Dipity.”

  * * *

  The Wizard gave us soup for lunch. A strangely rich, red tomato soup that peppered the tongue as you fed it between your lips. As we slurped and dribbled, the Wizard talked to us about this, that and a bit of the other.

  “Before the Gases,” he said, stopping then to spoon some of the hot liquid into his mouth, “people had stopped walking. They had forgotten how to walk. They drove in their cars from their homes to their places of work, and then drove in their cars from their places of work to their homes once again. They lost all contact with the outside world. The outside world was just a tunnel through which to get from A to B. Changes in the weather passed them by; the rain was something to hate—something unreal to them. Dirt was something dirty. They liked their lives all clean and antiseptic. In the evenings they plugged themselves into the wall and did pointless things with each other. They lived through technology that none of them understood. Before the Gases, people had stopped being organic, breathing, moving creatures, and had become static, unthinking, blinkered automata. A bit like BRAN. Only more stupid.”

  The Wizard tossed Mouse a hunk of bread. “They sent messages to friends they didn’t have and told perfect strangers the detail of their lives. Everyone was simply pretending to everyone else. The truth was just a matter of opinion, and opinions could change on a rolling pin.” He reached across the table and took another slice of bread for himself. “And then the wars happened. The Gases came and all technology ground to a halt. The people who knew what to do with it died and everybody else fluffed about, waiting for it to be turned back on. Except it didn’t. And nobody knew what to do. So they fought amongst themselves until they too died out. And here we are today. An empty world with empty hopes.” He dunked the bread into the remains of the glowing red soup. “Which makes your plight all the more honorable. Reminds me of Shy and myself.”

  We finished our meal in silence before I sat back in my chair and asked the question that was burning my mind.

  “Why did my mama have the map, sir? I don’t understand why or how she had the map. It doesn’t make sense to me.”

  The Wizard sighed, his eyes dancing about, trying to piece the pieces of the story together. “When we left—Shy and I—it was in a hurry. She had no time to tell Oleander. And over the years—the years of traveling—it ate away at Shy. She was actually quite a delicate creature, you know?” He smiled to himself. “That was when she decided to go back into Lahn Dan.”

  “Go back in?” I asked, a tad dumbfoundled.

  “Yes. To see if she could help Oleander escape too.”

  “But how could you get back into Lahn Dan?”

  “With the help of smugglers, of course.” The Wizard looked over at Tab, and straightaway we both realized that he knew exactly what Tab was. “Smugglers know all the ins and outs and ups and downs of Lahn Dan. So we employed their help.”

  “Musta charged you an awful lot.”
Tab grinned.

  The Wizard laughed. “Lots. So we got in late one night and Shy went to the Lahn Dan High to see Oleander. Only…”

  “Yes?” I was sitting on the edge of the chair now.

  “Only, she had a baby. She had you.”

  My heart was clanging in my chest.

  “Oleander was overwhelmed at seeing Shy. Ecstatic. They both were. But she couldn’t leave. She had you to take care of, Serendipity, and risking capture … well, it just wasn’t worth it. So Shy scribbled down the map on a piece of ripped-up paper and told her to hide it away so that nobody could find it. And if one day she felt the time was right to find a way out of the city walls then…” The Wizard paused. “Well, obviously that eventually fell to you.” He stared hard at me. “You know, you rather remind me of Oleander. A flaming fire in your eyes.”

  So Mama was supposed to be the one to escape, but she gave up her freedom for me. My beautiful mama. Sacrificing any life she may have had for me. Just thinking about this, just hearing about her again, made me feel as if she was in the room with us and I wanted to reach out and hold her one more time.

  * * *

  We stayed two nights with the Wizard. He let us sleep in his spare bedroom and told us things that he’d learned from his travels—like how the men in Scotland used to dance over swords and hurl lumps of wood at each other, and how the people in the borderlands would roll big round cheeses down hills and chase after them. Strange, unbelievable facts that he swore were the truth. He also told me tiny little things about Shy and Mama. Little things like the games they played and the stories they’d make up. For the first time since she died, I felt close to my mama.

  On the second day, while the Wizard hunched over the dining table and tinkered with one of his tiny metal machines, I brought up another subject that had been pestering my brain.

  “I was wondering,” I started. “Did you ever … meet my father?”

  The Wizard stopped what he was doing and turned to face me. “Did your mother tell you anything about your father?” His eyes were doubtful and questioning. “What did she tell you?”

  “Nothing,” I replied honestly. “She never told me anything.”

  “And why was that, do you think?”

  I looked around the rickety clutterbuck room that desperately needed dusting. “Because she thought we could manage without him—because she thought we were better off without him. We could live our lives alone and we didn’t need him.”