“Myrtle, what is that?”
“Good grief!” exclaimed the hare, standing on her hind legs to look more closely. She sniffed the air, and her eyes grew wide.
The pelicans swooped abruptly higher, now almost level with the place where the girl and the leveret stood. Their wingbeats were laboured. The round thing they carried came into clear focus. It seemed to glow the colour of gold. It had strange, spindled legs, a glass door, and an open viewing hatch, out of which a boy with very pale hair peered, looking astonished. At his ankles, a small furred form with long ears peeked tentatively. Comfrey let out a shriek of surprise.
“Mallow!” cried Myrtle, keening.
At the sound of his name called out from far below in a voice he had known since birth, Mallow leaped up to the edge of the open hatch. Tin had to grab hold of him to keep the leveret from jumping out into the cold morning air. The white pelicans veered lower, towards the top of a squat fir tree.
“It’s my sister Myrtle! Let me go, let me go!” said Mallow, squirming and kicking his strong legs into Tin’s stomach.
Just as the white pelicans placed the Fiddleback in the top bows of the tree, thinking they were doing Tin and Mallow the honour of a comfortable perch, which any bird would prefer to the ground, Mallow took a flying leap out of the hatch, landing with a small groan some two metres below. Shaking himself, he sprang away down the grassy scrubbrush hill to a narrow dirt path.
Tin craned his head out of the Fiddleback’s hatch and watched Mallow take flying bounds down the trail towards the other hare, who was also leaping with excitement. The white pelicans were already far away overhead, soaring out once more over the ocean. Even so, Tin raised a hand to wave his thanks, and the motion dislodged the Fiddleback from the tree. It hit the ground hard and rolled to a stop against a lupine bush.
Tin groaned, rubbing the side of his arm, and sat upright again. He leaned out of the door gingerly. On the path, Mallow and Myrtle were touching noses. For several minutes they stood still together, silent, whiskers moving. Mallow then groomed tenderly at the place along his sister’s neck that had been burned by the Fire Hawk.
“How extraordinary…” Tin breathed. He felt a lump in his throat, a sweetness and a sadness together in his chest at the sight of the two siblings reunited. He thought of Seb, so far away now in the City with Thornton and the Mycelium, and the feeling got worse. They’d never been apart for more than an afternoon since Tin could remember. He clambered out through the little side door and sat down in the wet green grass of the hillside, trying to ignore the thought of his friend.
Instead, Tin looked around, and the beauty of the place overtook him. The sun had risen only an hour before, and was now turning the dew on the grass to a golden mist. The most extraordinary thing, he found, after several stunned minutes of staring, was the ground. At the break of dawn up in the sky with the pelicans, the world below had appeared to be a sea of rippled valleys and hills of green and darker green, and unbelievably lovely to Tin after twelve years of nothing but stone and cement. Now, the dewy grass soaked the seat of his trousers – a new pair from Thornton, baggy and patchwork. Under his hands the dirt was cold but somehow soft. It smelled sweet and musky and alive and so good that Tin’s mouth watered. He lay down on his back and stared for several moments at the base of a lupine bush, thinking of plants and roots and how all along, his whole life, this place had been here, under a big sky and big winds, more beautiful than anything he could have dreamed. An unfamiliar calm stole across his mind; a stillness he had never known before.
He heard a scraping noise near his ear, the grind of little teeth, and then the face of a gopher popped up from a hole, harvesting grasses right by Tin’s ear. The boy yelled in alarm, and rolled clumsily upright.
In his reverie of grass and slope and dirt and sky, Tin had momentarily forgotten all about Mallow, and the incredible appearance of his sister Myrtle. Nothing seemed impossible in a place like this. The two leverets were now a metre away on the path, staring at him. Standing between them was a girl, eyes light green against dark skin. He had never seen anyone like her before, and yet she looked oddly familiar. The expression on her face was one that Tin could only interpret as a kind of amused disdain.
“Never seen a gopher before?” she quipped, not knowing what else to say to this oddly dressed boy who seemed to have fallen from the sky.
“A gopher? Um, no, never,” stuttered Tin, shrugging. “At least not for real.”
Comfrey stared more closely at him, taking in his curls, which had been blown in every direction by the last few windy moments of the pelican flight, his odd, tattered canvas shoes with rubber soles, his sturdy canvas work coat, his paleness – there was almost no colour to his skin at all.
“Where did you come from, anyway?” she said.
“The moon, of course!” chimed Mallow, sarcastic, standing up for his young friend.
“I thought I missed you, but maybe I was wrong,” Myrtle muttered, kicking her brother sideways.
“What?” Comfrey looked back and forth between the two leverets, then at the pale boy again. She’d been so caught up in all the excitement that only now did the strangeness of the situation truly hit her.
They had come down from the sky, in something that looked like a giant glowing spider. First the Fire Hawk, the vision in the feather, the quest for the Elk of Milk and Gold laid upon her, and now this! Really, it was all a bit much to absorb in a single morning.
“Are you from the stars? Or a ghost? Is that why you’re so pale? And why’ve you got that big spider skeleton thing there?” she asked, trying to sound nonchalant.
Now Tin laughed. “Might as well have been the moon. But no. I’m from the Fifth Cloister of Grace and Progress.” When Comfrey only continued to stare at him, her mouth partly open, he hastily continued. “In the City. It all sounds like a mouthful of nonsense, saying it here. Mallow’s from, well, I don’t know where he’s from. He was dropped in the Cloister in the rain by an owl. My name’s Tin.”
The boy, trying to be polite, held out his hand, but Comfrey only glared back. Now she really felt ill. She swallowed hard and sat down on the hillside next to the boy, thinking of the City, and her father. Weren’t City people evil? He smelled a bit strange, like mildew, but his smile and his outstretched hand were honest.
“Are you a…a Wild Folk?” the boy said into the silence.
At this Comfrey snorted. A giggle escaped her.
“Me? A Wild Folk? Myrtle, am I sprouting fur? Of course not, silly. I’m only a Country girl. You’re not really from the City, are you? You can’t be. Nobody is from the City. Not here.”
“Well, I am,” he repeated, studying her face. Now she looked frightened. “What’s your name?” he added, trying to sound friendly.
Comfrey eyed him. She felt distant from herself; the edges of her world shivered and moved. Was he a spy? Perhaps they were trained to seem nice, to look eager and young.
“Comfrey,” she replied in a strained voice. Myrtle sidled towards the girl and let her run her hands over her long ears. Comfrey looked down, startled at the leveret’s sudden presence. Was it Myrtle? Or the other leveret? They looked so similar, though after a moment’s study Comfrey saw that the other hare had a patch of white on his chest where Myrtle had none, and that she boasted one across her nose. “Hang on,” the girl cried. “How come you’ve got Myrtle’s brother with you, anyway? And what on earth were you doing up there in the sky?”
“It’s Mallow, if you don’t mind,” interrupted the leveret before Tin could stammer out a reply. “Didn’t Myrtle tell you she had a twin, and that we were both sent by the Greentwins?” Mallow glanced at his sister with big light eyes. Had she been so swept up in her new adventure she’d forgotten to mention him? Had she made a new friend so fast?
“Of course I did,” said Myrtle, nosing at her brother’s flank. “Only we’re in just a bit over our ears at the moment. Understandably the girl may have forgotten.”
“Do these terrifying burn-marks have anything to do with it?” Mallow asked sympathetically, eyeing his sister’s singed fur. “We’re not exactly in a good way ourselves.”
“Well then,” Myrtle retorted with mock good cheer. “We’ll make a merry lot. We are travelling north to take the feather of the Fire Hawk to the Elk of Milk and Gold, right under the noses of the Grizzly-witches.”
“The what?” sputtered Mallow. The white patch of fur on his chest quivered. “How did you manage all that so quickly, Myrtle?”
“It was mostly my doing,” interjected Comfrey, feeling a little bit protective of the feather and her part in it all. “The Fire Hawk is dying. That’s why he dropped a feather. And I picked it up. That only happens at the end of the world, you know. Well, that’s what the Basket-witches told me. They have reason to believe that the threat will come from the City, as it always has. From your people,” she said, glaring at Tin, “I don’t know when, or how. Only that what I saw in the feather meant the – the destruction of the Wild Folk… Maybe you are the beginning of all that, maybe you are their messenger, their spy!”
“How dare you—” began Mallow, but Tin had already jumped to his feet in anger.
“You are no better than we are,” he cried, “assuming all City people are bad, just like I was taught that all Country people were diseased savages. Well, I know more about City greed than you ever could, and therefore hate it more than you ever could either. And I came here sent by the Mycelium to take my Fiddleback to the Wild Folk, away from the Brothers.” He gestured back towards his eight-legged vehicle. “I know about the danger too. And I know about the Elk of Milk and Gold! Maybe even more than you do.”
“I highly doubt it,” snapped Comfrey. How dare he, and a City boy at that! What could he possibly know that she didn’t already? Although, she reflected, she hardly knew anything about the Elk. This made her more angry than before. As for just who these Mycelium were, she didn’t feel like asking, and revealing her ignorance on the subject. “And they’re after that thing?” she continued, pointing at the Fiddleback. “You’re bringing more City people behind you?” Her nostrils flared as her voice rose in anger. “How dare you come here! And how dare you help him!” She glared at Mallow. The hare leaped protectively onto Tin’s lap. “You can’t just come here with that contraption, whatever it is, and leave us all with the consequences!” Comfrey’s cheeks were red with heat. She wasn’t used to speaking to anyone so harshly. But this was all too strange and frightening.
The intensity of her anger silenced Tin completely for a moment. The thought of the Brothers invading the Country had been abstractly horrifying in the underground, with Thornton and Beatrix and Anders. Now he was here with this fierce Country girl berating him, glaring at him with sharp and intelligent eyes, and the sickening reality of what the Brothers were planning hit him. She looked so capable with her black messy braids heavy to her ribs, her dirty green wool dress and deerskin boots, and she was frowning at him, her thick dark brows furrowed.
There was a glow of strength about her that he’d never seen in a City person. All his life he’d been told that Country people were diseased and malformed, and here Comfrey was, rosy and dark with good health. And he couldn’t shake the strange familiarity of her face. How could she possibly look familiar? Suddenly, he felt the full weight of the Brothers’ plan. He felt the full gravity of the long story that Thornton had told them – Thornton, who was from this place. Why had he ever left the Country? But as the boy absently smelled a handful of grass and soil he felt that he knew the answer: you would only ever leave this place to protect it, even if it meant you might die trying to save it. Tin felt, in a small but growing way, like he might understand after all, just from breathing the salty air, just from landing in the boughs of a tree – a real, live fir tree! – and seeing a wild little gopher rustle up through the dirt. Just for this, Tin thought, I might die too. Just for the feeling of aliveness in my lungs. I would die too, rather than let it fall into the hands of the City and become another wasteland.
Comfrey, more irritated than ever that the boy hadn’t replied to her at all but had instead gone vacant, staring at the trees, spat, “Didn’t your mother teach you better?”
“I don’t have a mother,” Tin retorted, coming back to himself. “Or a father, for that matter. And this is not a thing. It’s a creation. I helped ferry a very special spider out of the City in it. Not to mention…well, never mind. You probably wouldn’t care anyway.” With that he stalked back uphill and began unfurling the legs of the Fiddleback, brushing bits of grass and fir needles off the leather compartment, leaving Comfrey where she stood, scowling at him.
“Wouldn’t care about what?” she ventured, curious despite herself.
Tin studied her. An ocean wind was whipping at her black hair, loosing more of it from the braids. He looked away and pulled the Fiddleback upright. The gold wheels glinted in the sun. Comfrey couldn’t help but notice the odd beauty of the round seat-compartment suspended between those eight graceful legs. It really did look like a spider.
Tin crouched down to examine the engine and the golden silk, and to check on the little spider and her eggs.
“She’s gone!”
“Who’s gone?”
Comfrey hurried over to look, her curiosity overcoming both her fear and her pride.
“The fiddleback, the little spider! She wove all this golden thread for me in return for getting her and her children out of the City. I was her ticket. And she was mine.” Tin wished he could have said a proper thank you, or goodbye, even if the spider wouldn’t have understood. He wondered where she had scuttled off to so quickly, if she’d had somewhere very specific all along that she wanted to reach, perhaps to lay down her egg sac. He hoped she hadn’t been pecked up by one of the raucous blue birds he now saw bobbing and cawing from a branch.
There was such a wistful, innocent look of wonder and sadness mingled on the boy’s face that Comfrey couldn’t help but soften, just a little.
“You really made this whole thing?” she whispered, staring at Tin’s skinny hands. “And…what kind of spider is it that makes golden thread? I’ve never heard of such a thing.” She felt suddenly ashamed that she had behaved so haughtily towards Tin. He couldn’t be all bad if a spider had been willing to spin silk for him.
“That’s just it,” said Tin. “I don’t know. I don’t think she was any ordinary spider. But that’s only the beginning.” He turned to Mallow, who was sniffing at the fiddleback’s abandoned tunnel. “Come on, Mallow, let’s show them,” the boy whispered. “Stand back, you two!” he added, getting to his feet and waving for Comfrey and Myrtle to move.
“Stand back?” Comfrey said, raising an eyebrow.
“Boys!” huffed Myrtle, turning away to nose at a patch of wild radish with feigned indifference. But she kept one sharp eye on Tin as he climbed into the Fiddleback. When Mallow leaped up beside him, Myrtle watched with both eyes. When the vehicle flashed to life, every bit of it suddenly suffused with gold, the leveret bounded right into Comfrey’s arms with surprise. For a long moment the two stood, transfixed, as the golden Fiddleback wheeled and turned, flashing sunlight, looking very alive indeed.
“How does it do that?” Comfrey asked when she could find her voice. Tin could see that she was dazzled, and it made him feel glad and warm inside. Finally, something she didn’t claim to understand! But…what should he tell her? He didn’t really understand it himself, and this business of stargold inside his blood, and the Wild Folk, whose blood was all stargold, confused and frightened him. Then he remembered that Comfrey had said something about a feather, and the Elk of Milk and Gold. He looked at Myrtle, and at Mallow, and back at Comfrey, and suddenly the incredible serendipity of the situation tolled through him. It made his ears ring.
“It runs on stargold,” he said at last. “The stuff the Brothers have been after for the last two hundred years, the stuff they tore out of Farallone for five hundred years in the time Befo
re. I don’t understand it, but it runs on me, and Mallow – and probably Myrtle, and…maybe you too. See, this man – the leader of the Mycelium in the City, the underground resistance – he told us a story. It was about the Elk of Milk and Gold and how at the time of the Collapse, in order to protect Farallone and the last of the stargold that the Brothers had been mining, she made the Wild Folk out of it. Their blood is all stargold! That’s what he said. And that some of that stargold got into people and into animals too, just a little bit. I think maybe you and I should go to the Elk together. It seems like we are meant to. My Fiddleback—”
“Their blood,” interrupted Comfrey, her face drawn and dark, “is stargold? The Wild Folk. Tell me, Tin, is it really? Stargold, the kind the Elk made the world from?”
“Yes,” replied the boy. “Yes, the last stargold of Farallone. That’s where the Elk hid all that was left, and if it is destroyed then all of Farallone will die.”
“But that’s exactly what I saw,” Comfrey whispered. “In the feather, the Fire Hawk’s feather. Wild Folk cut open by men in metal, and all across the ground this shining golden blood that seeped and seeped and the men were like demons leaping on it, scooping it up… And your Fiddleback has something to do with all this? It…detects stargold and comes to life? Isn’t that very dangerous, in the wrong hands? What if they follow you, isn’t it like bait?”
“Yes, but the Brothers have no idea where I am,” Tin said. “They’ll never think I came out here, and so far. Anyway that’s the whole point, I’m trying to get the Fiddleback away from the Brothers and to the Wild Folk. To – to keep it safe, and hidden.” His voice became strained. He hated the idea of giving the Fiddleback away, of never getting to ride in it or see it flash golden again, and the warmth that gold suffused him with.
The Wild Folk Page 13
