by Anna Dale
‘No, not exactly,’ said Athene, refusing to let go of her brother’s hand.
‘I ought to take you straight to Lodestar,’ threatened Tippitilda, glaring furiously at Athene. ‘Didn’t I just hear you plotting to escape? By rights, that kind of talk deserves the harshest kind of punishment.’
‘You mean the Coop, don’t you?’ said Athene, her heart plummeting.
‘Well … perhaps,’ said Tippitilda edgily, distracted by the fresh surge of tears that were streaming down Zach’s face. ‘Must I attend to him again?’ she complained, taking out a handkerchief and soaking up Zach’s tears with it. ‘I told you not to make him cry, didn’t I? Otters are such emotional creatures.’ Having wiped Zach’s face, Tippitilda smoothed his hair and gave the weariest of sighs.
These gestures of kindness made up Athene’s mind for her. Tippitilda might be a Low Gloam but she had demonstrated that she had a tender heart. Counting on the fact that Tippitilda would not want to cause Zach any more distress, she took a deep breath and admitted to the woman that she and Zach were brother and sister.
‘You’re an otter too?’ said Tippitilda, not quite catching on.
‘Of course I’m not an otter!’ said Athene. ‘I’m a Glare. We both are.’
Her confession came as a terrible shock to Tippitilda, who gasped and stumbled backwards. ‘It’s not true! You can’t be Glare!’ she said, steadying herself on her desk. ‘What a wicked girl you are to tell such lies.’
‘It’s the truth!’ said Athene. She squeezed her brother’s hand. ‘You tell her, Zach. You’re not an otter are you?’
Zach shook his head.
Tippitilda shook her head, too, several times and rather more violently. ‘No, no, no!’ she said. ‘You’re talking utter nonsense. Glare are enormous, ugly monsters with jagged teeth and nasty staring eyes and if you’re stupid enough to stumble into one, it’ll make a terrible screeching noise, which will be the last sound you’ll ever hear because right after that it will strike you dead.’
‘I’ve never heard such a load of old hooey,’ Athene said with disdain. ‘Glare aren’t like that at all! Who told you that rubbish about us? It’s really quite hurtful to be thought of in that way. We are Glare, truly, but we’re not horrid; we’re nice.’
Tippitilda eyed them suspiciously. ‘You’re telling fibs,’ she said.
‘Look,’ said Athene, her patience wearing thin, ‘I can understand that you might have trouble believing that I’m a Glare – after all my Gloam disguise is pretty good – but how can you possibly think that my brother is an otter? Isn’t it obvious that he’s a little boy?’
Tippitilda looked uncomfortable. ‘It was Rickit and Nark who found him. They were the ones who said he was an otter, but I wasn’t totally sure. I’d never seen anything like him in my life – and he wouldn’t give me a single hint. Just cried and cried and refused to speak. We’ve heard talk of the sorts of creatures that live Above. I thought he might be a polecat, but Rickit and Nark reckoned that they knew best. They said he must be an animal that lived in water because of his wet fur.’
‘His fur?’ said Athene in a puzzled voice. ‘I think you mean his hair.’
‘I mean his fur,’ said Tippitilda, frowning. ‘What else would you call that thick pelt?’
Athene looked at her brother. The only parts of him that weren’t covered up by clothes were his face, his hands and feet and none of these were especially hairy. Athene was stumped for a moment or two until she realised the cause of the confusion.
‘Oh, you are funny!’ she said, attempting to stifle her laughter. ‘You must mean Zach’s pyjamas. I suppose they do feel sort of furry. They’re made from a soft material. It’s called flannelette.’
‘Pyjamas?’ Tippitilda said with a frown. It was obvious that she did not possess a pair herself. ‘I see. He’s not an otter, then,’ she said. ‘Nark and Rickit were wrong.’
‘Completely and utterly,’ Athene said, ‘but it’s an easy mistake to make, if you’ve never seen an otter face to face, I suppose.’ This was a generous thing for Athene to say seeing as she knew quite well that otters and boys bore no resemblance to each other whatsoever. ‘You know what, Tippitilda,’ she went on, feeling rather sorry for the clueless Low Gloam woman, ‘if you lived Above you’d meet otters and lots of other animals besides: deer with big horns called antlers and huge, lumbering cows and pigs with turned-up snouts and funny, curly tails and black-faced sheep and shaggy-haired goats – and more birds and insects than you could imagine. There are hundreds of wonderful creatures Above. It’s such an awful shame that you’re stuck underground.’
‘On the contrary,’ said Tippitilda, ‘it is a privilege to live Below.’ She spoke in a strange, dull way as if she were repeating something that had been learned by heart. ‘We are fortunate Gloam. We are protected from all the perils and hazards that plague the upper world. Below is happiness and harmony. Above is devastation and disaster.’
‘Who told you that?’ Athene said with a disrespectful snort.
‘Lodestar, of course,’ answered Tippitilda.
‘Oh, her,’ said Athene, sneering up her nose. ‘She acts like a great big know-it-all. I take it she’s the one who fed you all that rubbish about the Glare? Poisonous old witch! I’ve got a good mind to tell her how completely deluded she is …’
‘No!’ Tippitilda said. ‘You don’t understand. Our present chief is not the one who introduced us to those ideals. It is the teachings of Lodestar the Ninth that we adhere to.’
‘Lodestar the Ninth?’ said Athene. ‘Wasn’t he that crazy, bearded guy who danced around in the nude?’
Tippitilda clicked her tongue against her teeth. She did not seem to approve of Athene’s irreverent description of her tribe’s long-dead chief, but nevertheless she nodded.
‘How disappointing,’ Athene said with genuine regret. ‘I thought he sounded kind of fun.’
‘It was Lodestar the Ninth who fought off an attack by the Glare at the Battle of Barnyard Bedlam almost a hundred years ago,’ Tippitilda told her.
‘The Battle of what?’ said Athene, trying not to laugh. ‘I’ve certainly never heard of it! Are you sure it really happened?’
‘Of course!’ Tippitilda said, sounding hurt. ‘The Glare used terrible weapons against us. Our chief has a collection of them in the Sanctum. I’m sure she’ll show you them if you ask her nicely.’
‘I don’t think she will,’ said Athene, biting her lip. ‘Lodestar and I didn’t exactly hit it off when we met today.’
‘Then, if you don’t believe me, take a look at this,’ urged Tippitilda, unfastening the old, oval locket from around her neck. ‘This is a trophy from the battle. My great-great-grandfather, Ragabash, seized it from one of the Glare’s most fearsome warriors.’
‘Let’s see,’ said Athene, snatching the locket eagerly.
She slid her thumbnail into the slender groove of the locket and, with a good deal of effort, prised it open. Inside the case were two photographic portraits, bleached with age. At first, she believed that they were of the same young woman for the faces in both pictures had identical bucked teeth and widely spaced eyes. Then Athene noticed that one of them had a nose that was a little more crooked than the other’s. It seemed as though they were two different women who shared very similar features. They were too close in age to be mother and daughter and Athene made up her mind that they must be cousins or – more than likely – sisters.
‘I didn’t know you could open it up,’ said Tippitilda in astonishment. She peered over Athene’s shoulder at the photographs of the women. ‘Ugh! Repellent, aren’t they?’ she said.
‘I wouldn’t go that far,’ said Athene, ‘though they’re not exactly beautiful, it’s true. They’re probably relations of the Glare warrior. He must have loved them very much to wear their pictures around his neck.’ She scrutinised the photographs. The women looked no older than twenty-five and their hair was piled upon their heads in a very old-fashioned style. Athene
looked at their pictures for a long moment. ‘It’s weird,’ she said, ‘but I can’t help feeling that I’ve seen them somewhere before.’
‘I don’t think that’s likely,’ said Tippitilda, taking back the locket and re-fastening it around her neck.
Although Athene did her best, she could not quite persuade Tippitilda that life Above was a more attractive prospect than life Below. However, the Low Gloam woman did seem to come around to the idea that Zach and Athene might possibly belong to a breed of Glare that was smaller, better-looking and much more friendly than the Glare that her tribe had encountered in the past. They both agreed that no one else should be told that Athene and her brother were Glare, because it would cause aggravation and it might also result in a long stretch in the Coop for all three of them (Tippitilda was bound to get punished as well because she had harboured a Glare). On the subject of where Zach would be safest, Tippitilda was in favour of keeping him with her in her house in the Digs, well away from prying eyes. She suggested that Athene should come to the Stints in the early evening with a handcart. When no one was looking they would stow Zach inside it and wheel him to Tippitilda’s home.
‘What stopped you from doing that before?’ said Athene, with an arm around her brother who had fallen asleep against her shoulder. ‘I can’t really understand why you’ve kept him in a cupboard all this time.’
‘I wouldn’t have got very far,’ said Tippitilda. ‘I’m a Low Gloam of high repute and we simply don’t do manual labour. If I’d been seen pushing a handcart, I would have been stopped and questioned, and the otter … I mean … your brother … would have been discovered straight away.’
‘Oh,’ said Athene less brazenly. ‘I see.’
At first, Athene was reluctant to go along with Tippitilda’s plan. She did not want to let her brother out of her sight and Zach seemed just as unwilling to be separated from Athene. However, in the end, she was forced to concede that Zach would be far more comfortable and a lot more secure in the Digs than he would be in the poky little hole where she lived.
Explaining the situation to him was not an easy task. Zach got quite panicky and clung to her so tightly that she doubted whether she and Tippitilda would be strong enough to loosen his grip. He seemed to get a good deal calmer after she had popped two Goggle Drops into his eyes and poured a share of her Drops into one of Tippitilda’s empty ink bottles for Zach to keep. She told him that she would see him in a few hours’ time and promised faithfully to come and visit him every single day. Finally, with Tippitilda’s help, she gave her brother a much needed wash, using buckets of water from the laundry room and afterwards they took a pair of trousers and a pullover from a sweet-smelling pile of freshly laundered clothes and dressed him like a Gloam.
Athene waited until Zach had fallen asleep again before she left. It made her smile to see her brother curled up peacefully in a nest of pillows in the cupboard, his hair clean and shiny and his face tear-free. She and Tippitilda tiptoed from the chamber and talked for a few minutes in the tunnel outside. Despite their differing outlooks they were starting to warm to each other.
‘I’ll see you this evening!’ said Athene, and spread her hand over her mouth to smother a mighty yawn.
‘Don’t forget your ink for Lodestar!’ Tippitilda reminded her. She produced a bottle of ink from her desk and pressed it into Athene’s hand.
Of the few Low Gloam who were still awake and alert enough to notice Athene passing by, none guessed that she was nearly dead on her feet. ‘I’m on an errand for Lodestar,’ she said in a voice that warned them not to try to stop her. ‘Tippitilda will vouch for me,’ she told them as she scurried by. ‘Ask her if you like.’ It was the excitement of finding Zach that gave Athene the energy to rush home at such an impressive speed. She could not wait to share her tremendous news with Huffkin and Humdudgeon.
Athene approached the Low Gloam sentries who had let her leave the Squattings and flaunted her bottle of ink at them. The sentries accused Athene of taking far longer than necessary to carry out such a simple task, but contented themselves with calling her an idler and a slowcoach and did not dish out any punishment. Shrugging off their insults, Athene entered the Squattings and arrived at her hole within a few minutes. She expected to find her friends fast asleep, but when she stepped into the tiny chamber, she discovered Huffkin, sitting despairingly on her own, with her curly-haired head in her hands.
‘You’ll never guess what’s happened!’ said Athene, far too full of her own glad tidings to take in the fact that something was wrong. ‘I’ve found him! Isn’t it wonderful? My brother! Down here after all! It was a stroke of luck, really. I didn’t know that he was there – in the Stints. Tippitilda’s been taking care of him all this time and we never suspected a thing. It’s mad, isn’t it? Can you believe she thought he was an otter? They’re a barmy lot these Low Gloam, aren’t they? Oh, I’m so relieved, aren’t you?’
Grinning widely, Athene stooped to shake Huffkin’s shoulders and to push the Gloam’s hands away from her face.
‘Gosh!’ said Athene, her smile disappearing. ‘Not you as well, Huffkin! What on earth are you crying for? Things are looking up! Didn’t you hear what I just said?’
‘Doesn’t matter,’ said Huffkin in between a few gulps and sniffs. ‘It’s no good. It’s all no good.’
‘What isn’t any good? You’re not making a scrap of sense!’ Athene didn’t mean to be impatient with her friend, but she had been so looking forward to telling the two Gloam about her brother, Zach. To be greeted by such glumness and indifference was a major disappointment.
‘He lied!’ wailed Huffkin, clutching Athene and staring at her with wild-eyed anguish. ‘He made it up. All of it – and we’ll never get out of here. NEVER!’ The rest of her outpouring of woe was lost in a series of hiccups and intensive, non-stop sobbing.
‘Good grief!’ said Athene, patting her hysterical friend on the back. She hadn’t expected to have to comfort two overwrought people in the same evening.
‘Where’s Humdudgeon?’ said Athene gently. ‘Did you two have an argument?’
‘He stormed off – and good riddance,’ answered Huffkin bitterly. ‘I never want to see him again!’
Athene was desperate to find out what had happened between the two Gloam while she had been absent. She was tempted to go in search of Humdudgeon, but didn’t feel she could leave poor Huffkin in such a frenzied state. Fortunately, Coney the rabbit provided the answer by poking his inquisitive nose inside their hole and asking in a sleepy voice what all the commotion was about.
‘It’s Huffkin. She’s upset,’ Athene told the rabbit. ‘I don’t suppose you’d be kind enough to look after her, would you? I’ve got to nip out for a bit. I shan’t be very long.’
Without giving Coney a chance to refuse her request, Athene hugged Huffkin and, getting wearily to her feet, she set off to find Humdudgeon.
He had not gone far. She heard him muttering to himself moments before she found him. He had hidden himself away in a roughly dug, deserted hole, which was barely big enough to contain an adult badger. Somehow or other, Humdudgeon had squashed his body inside. He had folded himself up as neatly as a deckchair with his knees pressing against his chin and his hands clasping his ankles. Athene couldn’t tell, at first, whether he looked downcast because he was feeling sad or just uncomfortable.
‘Hello, Humdudgeon!’ Athene said, crouching down and beaming at him.
He turned his face away from her (with difficulty, for there was very little room in which to move).
‘What are you doing in there?’ Athene said, trying to keep her voice light and cheerful. ‘Isn’t it awfully painful to sit scrunched up like that? You’re more squished than a sardine!’
‘Mind your own business,’ Humdudgeon said rudely, still refusing to look at her. ‘Now, go away, please. I want to be left alone.’
It was the touch of her hand that caused him to break down. Athene was nonplussed. All she had done was give his arm a
gentle squeeze. ‘Heavens! Not more tears!’ she mumbled to herself. Humdudgeon wept noisily, his shoulders shaking.
‘Don’t be kind to me!’ he pleaded. ‘I can’t bear it!’
‘How silly you are!’ said Athene. ‘Of course I’m going to be kind to you. We’re friends, aren’t we? Being nice to each other is what friends do!’
Humdudgeon squirmed around in the tiny, cramped space and after several attempts, managed to get his handkerchief out of his pocket and wipe his runny nose. ‘You won’t want to be my friend when I tell you what I’ve done!’ he said, and a fresh bout of sobbing ensued.
‘I think you’d better get it off your chest,’ said Athene. ‘Surely, whatever you’ve done can’t be as bad as you’re making out.’
‘It is, though. It is! You see, I lied,’ said Humdudgeon, widening his pearly eyes and staring with terror at Athene as tears continued to cascade down his face. ‘Would you like to know how I really hurt my leg?’ he said. ‘I was chased – not by Low Gloam – but by big hairless things. They burst out of some bushes and came galumphing after me. I dashed away as fast as I could. You see, I got it in my mind that they were Gloam-eating monsters! I fell down a dozen times, tore my clothes, gashed open my leg and ended up in a ditch. Then, what do you think happened? Instead of pouncing on me and ripping me apart, my pursuers ran right past me. It was then that I saw what they really were. Not monsters at all – but hogs!’
‘Hogs?’ said Athene. Something stirred in her memory. She recalled Jonnie Stirrup showing her his Gloucester Old Spot pigs at Freshwater Farmhouse. Athene remembered being told that all three pigs had got out of their sty, one evening, and, like escaped convicts, they had gone on the run. The next morning, Jonnie’s pigs had been found several miles away, making an awful mess of some lady’s garden.
‘I think I know who those hogs belonged to,’ Athene said with an eager grin. ‘Their names weren’t Flute, Stout and Starveling, by any chance?’
‘How should I know?’ Humdudgeon answered irritably. ‘They didn’t have collars and name tags, did they?’
