by Anna Dale
‘Don’t move a muscle,’ she said. ‘We’re almost there.’
The guards were used to seeing Athene come and go, and they barely gave her a second glance as she knocked on the front door. As usual, Lodestar’s servant, Dimpsy, answered it.
‘So far, so good,’ Athene whispered as she followed Dimpsy down the entrance hall and through several rooms until they arrived at the study. She set her rucksack gently on the floor and sat down at the desk where she always did her writing. The quill and inkpot, a fresh wad of paper and the old, tattered history book had been laid out on the desk so that she could start work straight away.
‘I’ll be in the scullery, if you want anything,’ said Dimpsy, lingering in the doorway. ‘My mistress has asked me to get on with some polishing.’
‘What do you have to polish?’ asked Athene. She wanted to know how long Dimpsy’s chore was likely to take. Their scheme would be ruined if Dimpsy were to catch them breaking into Lodestar’s secret room.
‘I’m to polish the weapons that were used by the Glare during the Battle of Barnyard Bedlam,’ she said.
‘Oh, yes,’ said Athene. ‘I’ve read about that. It was a bit one-sided to be called a battle, I would’ve thought. There were only two Glare against a whole tribe of Gloam.’
‘My people aren’t used to combat,’ said Dimpsy, ‘unlike the Glare, who delight in hurting others. They’re ferocious brutes. We didn’t stand a chance against them.’
Athene had to bite her tongue. She hated it when the Low Gloam made the Glare out to be such monsters. Some Glare were a bit unpleasant, she could not deny that, but most of the people that she knew were courteous and friendly and not at all inclined to start a fight.
‘If you hate the Glare so much, why do you keep their weapons?’ asked Athene boldly. ‘And why do you bother polishing them?’
‘The weapons are passed down from chief to chief,’ said Dimpsy. ‘They are part of our tribe’s history and therefore of great value to us. They serve to remind us of the Glare’s brutality and why we must always keep ourselves protected and remain below ground.’
‘I suppose you’ve got to polish those old weapons because Lodestar is too busy to do it herself?’ said Athene rather cheekily. She hoped that Dimpsy would give her a detailed answer which would tell her where Lodestar would be spending her day.
‘My mistress does not do menial tasks!’ said Dimpsy, frowning at the impertinence of Athene’s question, ‘and anyway, she’s feeling out of sorts today. She’s gone back to bed and doesn’t want to be disturbed, so get on with your writing quietly and be sure not to make any noise.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that Lodestar’s feeling poorly,’ said Athene. She did her best to look grave-faced and concerned, but inside she was feeling jubilant. Lodestar was tucked up in bed and in a short time, her servant would be occupied with polishing Glare artefacts in the scullery. The way was clear!
Although Athene was confident that she would not bump into anyone as she tiptoed through Lodestar’s house, she kept the rabbits hidden in her rucksack until the very last minute. It would not be easy to come up with a story to explain why Kit and Coney were there, should anyone happen to see them.
Fraught with nerves, Athene got confused and did not find the parlour as quickly as she had hoped. Once inside, she ran quickly over to the wall, where she had seen the door of the secret room magically materialise.
She lifted the flap of her rucksack and let the rabbits jump out.
‘Where’s the spot? Where do you want us to dig?’ they clamoured, hopping round in circles and twitching their noses, eager to get started.
Athene thought very carefully before bending down and patting a place on the lowest part of the wall.
As if they were not live rabbits at all, but clockwork ones, Kit and Coney attacked the earthen wall with their front paws and scraped away soil at a remarkably fast rate. A hole appeared very quickly and after only a few minutes, all that Athene could see of the pair were the white undersides of their tails.
She crouched tensely on the floor, keeping one eye on the rabbits’ tunnel and the other eye on the entrance to the room. Her main duty was to keep watch and she could not afford to get caught up in the excitement and forget that they might be discovered at any moment.
‘We’re through!’ came Coney’s muffled voice.
‘Great!’ said Athene softly. ‘What can you see?’
‘A table,’ said Coney, ‘and shelves with jars and pots on them. Everything is so high up!’
‘A book!’ said Athene urgently. ‘Can you see a book?’
‘No!’ answered Kit. She sounded frightened. ‘There are lots of funny smells in here – and they’re all bad smells. I don’t like this place. I think we should leave.’
‘Please look harder,’ Athene said, fearful that Kit would panic and run back through the tunnel. ‘I know it must be scary, but it’s so important to find that book!’
‘I think I see it!’ said Coney, almost breathless with excitement.
‘Can you push it through your burrow?’ Athene asked. ‘If I can just flick through it and find that spell …’
‘Not a chance!’ said Kit. ‘It’s on the table. We can only see one corner of it poking over the edge. Perhaps, if we come back tomorrow it will be in a different place. Come on, Coney, let’s go.’
‘No!’ cried Athene, rather too loudly. ‘We can’t give up just yet!’ She lurched forward on to her stomach intending to take a look through the tunnel that the rabbits had dug, when Kit shot out of it like a furry cannon ball.
‘Coney?’ called Athene, resting her head on the floor and peering into the hole. ‘Is there any possible way that you can reach that book?’
She saw him crouching next to a table leg. All of a sudden the rabbit sprang upwards, his powerful hind legs propelling him into the air and out of sight. A second later, he landed. His disappointed face told Athene all that she needed to know.
‘I touched it with my nose,’ he said despondently, ‘but all I did was push it even further on to the table top.’
Athene groaned. ‘Good try,’ she said. ‘Oh, if only this burrow was human-sized and I could manage to crawl through!’
‘I’m too tired to dig any more today,’ said Kit, flopping down on the floor.
‘I know,’ said Athene, stroking Kit’s head. ‘I didn’t mean to suggest that you should make the hole bigger … Ooh! – I’ve had an idea!’ she said suddenly. ‘There is one part of me that can get through that hole.’
Before either rabbit could ask her what she meant, Athene had stuck her left arm in the tunnel, all the way up to her shoulder. ‘If I can just grab hold of the table leg,’ she said, her fingers brushing Coney’s fur. Her nails scratched around in the dirt and then, at last, she gave a cry of delight.
‘Got it!’
The effort of stretching so far made her arm ache terribly but, ignoring the pain, she closed her fingers around the table’s narrow leg. Concentrating with all her might, she tugged it sharply towards her. There was a scraping sound and then a thud.
Athene heard Coney make a throaty sort of growl. She withdrew her arm from the tunnel and looked through. The sight that met her eyes made her heart leap with joy. Coney was hopping across the floor with slow, clumsy movements because he was having to push a book with his nose.
Seconds later, the Book of Spells was in her hands. Athene, Coney and Kit allowed themselves a moment of self-congratulation during which the three friends shook each other’s hands (or paws) with enormous glee. Then Athene opened the book’s stiff, dog-eared cover and, turning the pages slowly, she searched for the spell that was keeping them trapped underground.
‘The Confining Spell isn’t here!’ Athene said in dismay, when she had arrived at the very last page.
The rabbits expressed their astonishment.
‘What?’ said Coney. ‘Nonsense!’
‘Check again!’ urged Kit.
‘Well, I suppose I might h
ave missed it,’ Athene said worriedly.
The pages were old and mouldy and inclined to stick together and the writing was fanciful and hard to read. In places, the words were blurred and distorted where some sort of liquid had been spilled upon the pages. Athene leafed through the book with all the careful precision of a detective looking for clues. She was much more thorough than the first time she looked and still she could not put her finger on the spell.
‘It must be here!’ she said, trying her hardest to stay calm. ‘I’ll look again. I’m bound to find it this time.’ She turned to the first page and then the second and the third. ‘Spell to Cure Collywobbles … Spell to Give You Good Dreams … Spell to Loosen Tongues …’
‘Shh!’ said Coney suddenly, giving her hand a nip. ‘Somebody’s coming this way!’
Chapter Fourteen
The Truth about the
Battle of Barnyard
Bedlam
If it had been Lodestar who had entered the parlour, they would have been in trouble. The Low Gloam Chief would, undoubtedly, have headed towards her secret room and noticed the small pile of earth on the floor and the rabbit burrow behind it. She might also have spotted the toes of Athene sticking out from behind the chaise longue.
However, they were in luck, because the person that entered the room was Lodestar’s servant, Dimpsy, and she was so intent on carrying a tray filled with odd-shaped shiny things and not missing her footing and dropping the whole lot, that she did not seem to be aware that anything was amiss. Peering round the chaise longue, Athene saw Dimpsy set down her tray and start to transfer the objects to the shelves of a dresser. When she had finished, Dimpsy left the room, swinging the tea tray in one hand and humming to herself.
Athene breathed an enormous sigh of relief when Dimpsy had gone. Then she and the two rabbits crept out cautiously from where they had been hiding. Intending to retrieve the Book of Spells which she had hurriedly shoved beneath a small drop-leaf table, Athene crossed the room. However, before she reached the book, she could not resist pausing in front of the dresser and having a better look at the objects which she had glimpsed on Dimpsy’s tray.
From their gleaming, newly polished appearance, Athene guessed that they must be the weapons that had been thrown by the Glare so many years before. Viewed from a distance, she had assumed that they were daggers and hammers and spears and other objects of that sort. It came as a bit of a shock when she saw the weapons up close. They were a bizarre collection of items, to say the least – and none of them looked as if they had been designed for use on a battlefield.
There were two saucepans (both with a number of dents in them), salt and pepper shakers, fire irons (consisting of tongs, a poker and a shovel), an egg whisk, a corkscrew and a few forks with misshapen prongs. Athene was totally mystified. She stood on tiptoe to get a better look at the items displayed on the shelves.
‘How weird,’ she commented, lifting out one of the saucepans. ‘These aren’t weapons. They’re things you’d find in a kitchen.’
‘What are you doing?’ demanded Coney, frustrated by Athene’s inaction. ‘You’re wasting time! Come over here! You should be looking for the spell!’ The two rabbits had already pulled the book from its hiding place. They had nudged its cover open with their noses and were in the process of turning over the pages using the same technique. Their eagerness was admirable, but the exercise was pointless as neither of them could read.
‘I’ll be with you in a minute,’ answered Athene, examining the forks which had various marks stamped on their handles. She could not understand how the Low Gloam could believe that these kitchen implements were a haul of weapons. All the items in the dresser could be thrown, she supposed, but they weren’t the sorts of missiles that you might favour if you were really dead set on causing someone harm. No one in the history books that she’d read at school had ever been dealt a fatal blow with a pepper pot or an egg whisk. It was too mind-boggling for words.
Athene started to go over in her mind all that she had learned about the Battle of Barnyard Bedlam. As she understood it, a couple of Glare had amassed a selection of kitchen utensils and had chosen to throw them at the Low Gloam tribe (or the Lofty Gloam as they had been called then) and if her hunch was right, the battle had taken place in the barnyard at Freshwater Farm.
When had Lodestar the Ninth reigned as chief of his tribe? Athene struggled to remember what had been written in the old history book. If the current chief was Lodestar the Thirteenth then that seemed to suggest that Lodestar the Ninth would have lived around a century ago or maybe even longer than that. Who would have been in residence at Freshwater Farmhouse at that time? Jonnie’s grandfather, perhaps – or maybe his great-grandfather, Ishmael Stirrup, who had been the first in his family to live in the house.
Athene gasped. It wasn’t just an ordinary, brief intake of breath; it was a great big, convulsive, lung-busting gulp.
Two elderly ladies called Ada and Fredegond Cheese had sold Freshwater Farm to Jonnie’s ancestor, Ishmael Stirrup. Ginnie had told Athene that the old women had been frightened out of their skins by a ghostly apparition and had been so desperate to move out of their house that they had accepted an offer which was hundreds of pounds less than the house was actually worth. What if the two old ladies hadn’t seen a ghost? What if they had seen a Gloam – or even more alarming than that – an entire tribe of them?
The figure two kept cropping up in the story of the Battle of Barnyard Bedlam. There were two elderly sisters, just as there were two Glare warriors and two tiny pictures of young women with old-fashioned hairstyles in the locket that hung around Tippitilda’s neck. When Athene had opened the locket she had thought that the portraits looked familiar and at last she made the connection with the photograph of Fredegond and Ada in their dotage which she had seen hanging on the living room wall in Freshwater Farmhouse. The pictures of the Cheese sisters inside the locket were of young, slim, fresh-faced girls and by the time that the photograph in the farmhouse had been taken they had turned into peevish, portly old maids.
‘I wonder,’ muttered Athene. ‘I wonder if the Cheese sisters and the Glare warriors are one and the same. I wonder if the Battle of Barnyard Bedlam was not a battle at all.’
Twirling one of the old, twisted forks in her fingers, she tried to imagine what could have happened on that night in September a hundred years before.
Having changed into their nightgowns, the Cheese sisters had delayed going to bed. Something had drawn them to the kitchen. Had they felt like a cup of cocoa, perhaps? For whatever reason, one or other of the sisters must have glanced out of the kitchen window and seen the Gloam in the barnyard. Had the sisters really believed them to be ghosts? It was arguably more likely that the Gloam had cast a spell on the old ladies which prevented them from telling the truth about what they had seen, as had been the case with Athene. Ada and Fredegond must have been gutsy old women for, despite their fear, they had seized the nearest things to hand, rushed out into the garden and flung their possessions at the Gloam to make them go away.
It had been twilight and the two old women could not have been able to see very well and, unless they had both been fast-spin bowlers in their youth, neither would they have been particularly skilful at throwing things. Athene was not convinced that the aim of Ada and Fredegond would have been quite so accurate as the Low Gloam historian had implied. How truthful was his account of the Battle of Barnyard Bedlam? He had described the Glare as hideous, sawtoothed giants whose blood-curdling war cries were enough to make a grown Gloam faint on the spot. It was evident, from their photographs, that the two sisters were a little on the plain side, but certainly not ugly or terrifying to look at. If the historian was prone to exaggeration, then perhaps there was a lot more in the Low Gloam’s history book that wasn’t exactly true. Had there really been dozens of Gloam who had suffered appalling injuries? How much damage could you do with a salt cellar thrown in a haphazard manner?
Confident that she had
worked out what had really happened on the night of the Battle of Barnyard Bedlam, Athene felt enormously proud of herself, but before she could share her theories with the rabbits, she felt her shoulder being seized and shaken roughly. Then someone whipped the fork from her grasp. Athene was annoyed at first, but when she looked up and saw the furious face of the person who had robbed her of the piece of old cutlery, the only emotion that she felt was raw, full-blown terror. Lodestar was standing in front of her, holding the rabbits by the scruffs of their necks. The fork protruded from her other fist.
The Chief of the Low Gloam had caught them all red-handed.
Athene was aware that questions were being fired at her, but she couldn’t seem to make her mouth work in order to answer them. She felt as if her brain had floated off somewhere and left her outer shell to deal with the flack. She could see Lodestar pacing back and forth in her long-sleeved dress and fur-lined slippers, her necklace of wooden beads bouncing off her bosom. Also in Athene’s line of sight, was the brawniest of Lodestar’s guards. He had been relieved of his door duty to take charge of Coney and Kit who were wedged in the crooks of his arms, their eyes bulging with fright. They had tried to put up a struggle but, having just dug the burrow for Athene, their energy reserves were low. Now that they had exhausted themselves, they could do nothing but hang as limply as socks on a washing line, occasionally flicking their ears. Dimpsy was there too, tying her apron strings in knots and standing near the doorway looking thunderstruck. She seemed to be unable to comprehend what was unfolding in front of her eyes.
‘NEVER,’ bellowed Lodestar, ‘IN ALL MY YEARS AS CHIEF HAVE I HAD TO CONTEND WITH SUCH TREACHERY! What were you doing with my Book of Spells, hey? Explain yourself, you abominable girl!’
