Beyond the Stars

by Sarah Webb

  “He knew he was dying, and he asked me to write to you, so that you would hear what he had to say at the end of his life. He was proud to have served with his friends, but was very sorry for leaving you and his brother. He asked me to tell you that he loved you both, and he hoped that you would think well of him for becoming a soldier. But he begged you to ensure that Charley did not enlist, for death feeds in this place, and no mother should have to lose two sons to this accursed war.

  “I apologise for the lateness of this letter, but I was hospitalised for some time with my own wounds, and have only recently recovered enough to write to you. Mrs Burn, I might never know if you will believe this, for William and I fought on opposite sides of this conflict. But though I only knew him for a short time, I want to assure you that I stayed with him until the end, and that he died with a friend at his side. I offer my deepest sympathies for your loss. Oberleutnant Karl Ehrlichmann.”

  Charley was crying as he read the last few lines. Mick squeezed his hand, but Charley felt the weakness in his friend’s grip and looked down to see Mick’s eyes were becoming glassy and unfocused.

  “That’s terrible, Charley,” Mick said in a slurred voice. “It’s horrible.”

  “The first of July,” Charley said, wiping his eyes with a filthy hand. “That was the first day of the Somme. He was reported missing in action the next day. Mam got the telegram to say he was missing nearly a week later. But he was already gone, Mick. Will was dead before I even enlisted.”

  There was no answer. Mick had passed out. He was alive, but his breathing was growing ever more ragged.

  “Ah, no, Mick,” Charley moaned fearfully. “Not you too.”

  He ground his teeth together, listening to the explosions that were mashing up no-man’s-land. In amidst the dull thuds of the shelling, there was the tat-tat-tat of the German machine guns. The only way to the British lines for help was through all that. Assuming he could carry his friend that far. He shook his head in resignation. Stuffing the letter back into his pocket, he stood up, grimacing at the pain in his ankle. He looked around the dug-out. It was littered with various pieces of German kit. He and Mick were both completely coated in the grey-brown mud of the battlefield, their rifles were out in the trench somewhere, and he was missing his helmet. Mick had lost his helmet too.

  Charley undid his webbing belts, throwing off anything that wasn’t essential. It was all too heavy. He did the same with Mick’s. He picked up two German helmets. Strapping one on Mick’s head, he donned the other one, and then hauled his friend’s slumped weight up on to his shoulders. As he emerged from the dug-out into the trench, the noise of the shelling grew louder. From the sounds of it, everything from no-man’s-land to the furthest British trenches was taking a pounding. Machine guns hammered bullets through the smoke as the Germans tried to finish off any British troops who might still be out there.

  Staggering up the ramp of snow-covered earth, he looked to the right, towards his own lines, being pulverised by the artillery barrage. Then he turned to the left and carried his friend towards the ripping sound of the machine guns in the second row of German trenches. Up above ground, the crashing, cutting sounds of war were all around him. He kept his head down and kept hobbling forward, enduring the pain of his injured ankle. He heard shouting, warning cries, harsh yells in that metallic German accent. He kept his head down and kept walking, kept hoping. He still heard the machine guns, but there were no bullets passing close to him any more. Perhaps it had worked. When he finally reached the next German trench, he was exhausted, the muscles of his ankle, legs and back burning with pain. He collapsed just short of the edge, with Mick’s limp, heavy body falling next to him.

  In dazed confusion, he felt rough hands grab him and drag him over the edge. For the second time that day, he fell into an enemy trench, but this time there was someone there waiting. He was winded by the impact of hitting the ground.

  Struggling to breathe, he tried to roll over. He saw mud-caked boots in front of his face and raised his head to find a circle of grimy, unshaven German soldiers standing over him.

  “He’s dying,” Charley croaked. “Do you … do you speak any English? My mate’s going to die if you don’t help him. Please. I know what I am to you. I’ll surrender to you if it’ll save him. I know what I’m asking … but … Will you help him?”

  They stared down at him with eyes as cold as the frozen ground he’d just crossed, saying nothing. These men, who had every reason to hate him, looked at each other as if deciding what to do with him. Charley craned his neck to see other soldiers on a ladder above him, hauling Mick in. They were pulling forcefully on him as if he was resisting them. One of them pulled a bayonet from his belt and reached up …

  “No!” Charley gasped, reaching up, but he was pushed back down by hands and boots. There was nothing he could do.

  A German in an officer’s uniform crouched down next to him, tilting his head to bring his face closer to Charley’s. He looked haggard, tired; a young man with an old man’s face.

  “You walked with him into the machine guns for this?” he said, gesturing at the wounded man.

  The soldier on the ladder cut something free from Mick’s sleeve and Mick screamed out … then jerked free – he’d been caught on something, some wire perhaps. Charley watched as these hard-eyed men lowered his friend gently to the ground.

  The officer crouching next to Charley shook his head and a smile of disbelief spread across his features. “You’re either a fool or a madman. But yes, my mad friend. Yes. We’ll help you.”

  Siobhán Parkinson has been writing books for children for twenty years and was Ireland’s first Laureate na nÓg, Children’s Laureate. Apart from being an award-winning author and illustrator, she is also a publisher and translator of children’s books. When she isn’t writing, she likes to cook, eat, drink, sleep, sing and learn languages. Siobhán lives in Dublin with her husband, who is a wood turner, and without her grown-up son, who does mysterious things with words in England.

  Olwyn Whelan is a children’s book illustrator living in Dublin with her husband and two children. She has been shortlisted twice for the Children’s Books Ireland Award for children’s books. Her latest book is Spellbound, written by Ireland’s first Children’s Laureate, Siobhán Parkinson.

  Someone had dressed the icicles. Well, decorated them anyway, with ribbony wisps of fabric, so that it looked as if small colonies of fairies had taken up residence in the trees.

  The children came rushing out of school, delighted with the snowy park. It was thigh high on the littlest ones, and had drifted deep in corners. The playground was locked, though. ‘Health and safety’ a hurried note flapping on the bars of the gate announced gloomily. But the children didn’t really mind. All the swings and slides had grown a thick white fur, like static polar bears – only more glistening – and anyway the icy paths were far more inviting than playground slides.

  The sky bent low and purplish over the park, but there would be light enough to play by for an hour or two yet, the biggest children informed the youngest ones, who wondered how it was that larger people always seemed to know so much: they could even tell the future, it seemed.

  It was one of the very smallest children, though, who first noticed the fairies in the trees.

  “Look,” he said, pointing a small damp finger up into the air – and if you are an older child, which you must be if you can read this, you have probably noticed that the fingers of much younger children usually are rather damp, though there really is no very good reason why they should be, but there you go, life is full of mysteries.

  “Fairies,” announced the small child, quite matter-of-factly, as if that was an interesting enough sort of discovery, but after all only to be expected when the weather turned cold. For all he knew – he never had experienced snow before – fairies were part of the package, like frost patterns on the windscreens and water you could walk on.

  “Don’t be silly,” the older childre
n said (practising for being grown-ups), for they had experienced snowy weather before and knew that fairies were not a weather phenomenon.

  “No, wait, he’s right,” said a middling-sized child (who happened to be the small boy’s sister, and knew he didn’t say silly things – or not much). She was looking where the small boy was pointing. Brian was his name, but unfortunately he was usually referred to as Brain at school. “There really are fairies.”

  “Ice fairies,” Brain – I mean Brian – explained.

  Then all the children looked up into the trees, and, sure enough, remarkably, every tree, it appeared, was populated by ice fairies. Not even the eldest children, and one or two of them might have been as old as ten – which is double digits, and thus in a different category entirely – not even they could deny that there were indeed fairies in the trees in the park where they played every afternoon and where a fairy had never before been encountered. This was very strange. It might even be a matter that would eventually have to be referred to the grown-ups.

  There was a hurried consultation among the double-digit children. The question was this: should they climb up on each other’s shoulders and make a human pyramid so the top child could reach the fairies? Bartholomew was for the human pyramid. He’d seen it in books, and he’d always wanted to do it, but he’d never been able to get his friends to cooperate. Here was the perfect opportunity. But Leonora (Brain’s sister) said, very sensibly for a child still only in the single digits, that a human pyramid was a dangerous enough prospect in good weather, but could only end in broken noses and sprained ankles at the very LEAST, she warned, in a very double-digit kind of way, “in these conditions”.

  “What are conditions?” asked Brain, sucking his finger.

  “Weather,” said Petronella. “Bad weather.”

  So then there was an argument about whether snow constituted bad or good weather.

  “Good for sliding,” said Bartholomew.

  “Good for snowflakes,” added Petronella, who never could be consistent.

  “Good for snowballs,” Brain chipped in, taking his finger out of his mouth for a brief moment.

  “Bad for driving,” observed Petronella, remembering which side she was supposed to be on.

  “Bad for feet,” said Leonora.

  “Feet?” asked several people.

  “They get cold,” explained Leonora, “and wet.”

  “Bad for fingers,” added Brain, looking at his as if he thought they might freeze up at any moment.

  The children’s conversation about the nature of snowy weather meandered on. But of course they weren’t sitting round a table having this discussion. They were sliding up and down the park paths. They were chucking snowballs at each other and even, in one very sad case, stuffing handfuls of snow down the neck of Brain’s jumper. Some of them were standing in the middle of the snow-carpeted lawn with upturned faces and open mouths, hoping it would snow right on to their tongues. Leonora and Petronella were building an igloo behind a tree. Or at least, they were having a civilised discussion about the best way to build an igloo, which comes to much the same thing.

  So busy were the children that they forgot all about the ice fairies and they did not notice how the afternoon light thickened and thickened and the purplish sky turned deep, dark grey and silently, silently, the great black cloud over the world started to flake, astonishingly, into large white butterflies and drift, drift, drift, down into the mouths of the most patient of the waiting-on-the-lawn-with-upturned-faces children, until someone, possibly Petronella, suddenly announced, as if it were the most unexpected turn of events, “It’s snowing!” and the children threw their caps in the air – those who had caps, but they mostly had hoods, so it was not exactly a storm of caps – and whooped and cheered and danced.

  And as the snowflakes fell and fell and fell, the ice fairies hung silently in the trees, their ribbony clothes flittering softly around them, until at last the children’s feet and fingers were too cold and it was time to go home to get warm, and they all turned tail and ran out of the park – all except Brian, who had stopped to say goodbye to the ice fairies. Just then the park attendant came clanging by with his closing-time bell, and nobody noticed as an old man wearing a bowler hat and a grey waistcoat shuffled off a park bench and made for the gates of the park. Nobody saw him raising his hat to the park attendant as he went through the gate – not Brian, who was still staring up at the ice fairies, not even the park attendant, who was looking in the opposite direction just at that particular moment – and nobody noticed a trail of golden ribbon that dangled from the old man’s pocket as he made his way home.

  Brian raised his small damp hand and waggled his fingers at the fairies. “Good night,” he whispered into the dusk, and then he turned and ran off after his friends.

  Competition winner Emma Brade is fourteen and lives in Ormskirk, Lancashire. She loves art, reading, music and writing. She has previously had some poetry published but this is the first time one of her short stories has ever made it into a book. Since Emma wants to be an author when she’s older she was very delighted to have won – though also a little shocked!

  Niamh Sharkey is a picture-book maker based in Dublin. Her books have won numerous awards, including the Mother Goose Award and the CBI/Bisto Book of the Year Award. Her books have also been translated into over twenty languages. Niamh was Ireland’s second Children’s Laureate.

  “Be brave for me. I know you can do it. You just have to believe, that’s all.”

  Ruka opened her eyes. She hung on to her brother’s words, just in case they grew wings and fluttered away from her memory. As she lay in bed, she imagined they were written on the ceiling; stuffed inside the blanket that kept her warm; whispered by the chilly, morning wind. “Be brave for me. I know you can do it.”

  It had been almost a year since Rowan Brown had disappeared. To Ruka, he was more than an older brother; he was her best friend and her only ally. She could still remember his smiling face, the stories he would tell her when she was bored and the warm hugs he would give her whenever she cried. But one day, he went out hunting in the woods and never came back. The whole village had tried looking for him, but he was nowhere to be found.

  Ruka sighed and rolled over, away from the sunlight that was streaming through the crack in the curtains. Maybe she could have just five more minutes of sleep …

  “Ruka? Are you up yet?” her mother’s voice called softly through the door. When there was no reply, even more light flooded into the room and a gentle hand shook the girl fully awake.

  “Come on now Ruka,” her mother smiled. “Today’s an important day!”

  Of course, Ruka remembered. Today was extremely important. Today, every ten-year-old child in the village would finally be allowed to show off their magical powers, so that they could begin training as young sorcerers. There was just one problem. Ruka didn’t seem to have any magic. She was the only person her age without powers. Every day she had lived with nasty smiles and snotty remarks. How could she possibly face the other children again knowing that she was … different?

  “Be brave for me.”

  Remembering those words one last time, Ruka swam her way up from the sea of sleep and allowed her mother to help her get ready.

  A cold wind bit the cloaks of the children as they waited for their names to be called. The season was still young, so the final leaves had not yet drifted to the ground. Foreheads were creased. Stomachs were knotted. Tension filled the air.

  A group of noble sorcerers watched over the exam, frantically making notes as each pupil stepped into the centre of the courtyard and presented the magic they had learnt so far. Tiny explosions filled the area with colour, a small patch of flowers appeared in mid-air, twigs and rocks floated all by themselves and many more wondrous spells and charms were examined. But then, it was Ruka’s turn.

  “Ruka Brown!” one of the sorcerers chirped. A few snickers washed across the crowd as she stepped forward. The boys nudg
ed each other and the girls began giggling. All Ruka wanted to do was crawl back into bed and let the covers swallow her up.

  “Now dear,” the sorcerer forced a smile before turning a page in his notebook. “Show us what you can do.”

  For a moment, Ruka just stood there in the empty space with the icy breeze stinging her hot cheeks. She didn’t know what to do. There was nothing she could do. But she had to try.

  She took a deep breath and closed her eyes. Placing one foot forward, she thrust her arms out in front of her. Hoping that nobody would notice she was shaking, she spread out her fingers and searched deep inside her heart for something, anything, which would create a magic spell. Suddenly, Ruka felt a tingling in her hands. A wave of excitement flowed through her. Was this it? The tingling got stronger and for the first time in her life, Ruka felt that she could be just like everyone else. She could learn all of these amazing spells and charms alongside other young sorcerers – all of them would become her friends – and she would never be teased for being weak or powerless again. All she had to do was concentrate.

  A chill bloomed in the tips of her fingers. “It must be magic,” she whispered. “It has to be!”

  Ruka could feel this new strength flowing through her. Any minute now something incredible would happen! With all her heart, she pushed forward; every thought filled with new hope. Ruka gasped and opened her eyes!

  Nothing. Not one ounce of magic.

  She glanced at the examiner sorcerers. Some were shaking their heads, others were frowning. All of them were disappointed.

  Ruka felt like a stone had been dropped into her stomach. The strength she had felt only moments ago had vanished. She didn’t need anyone to tell her that she had failed.

  A voice called out from the crowd of other ten-year-olds. “Wow, what a loser!” It was one of the meaner boys, laughing at her. The others followed suit and Ruka knew her face was going redder by the second. Aphra, a tall girl with a long nose swaggered over and jabbed her in the back. “Why can’t you use magic, Loser Brown?” she grinned.