The Book of Storms

by Ruth Hatfield

  He got a brief chance when a post van shot out of a side road and Apple sprang forward to escape it. For a few moments Tom couldn’t focus on anything but bringing his leaping horse under control.

  “That was you, wasn’t it?” Danny said, tucking the cat under his arm again and taking hold of the stick. “You said Apple was an idiot.”

  “I did,” agreed the piebald.

  “What’s your name? Tom said you didn’t have one, but you must, mustn’t you?”

  “Of course,” said the piebald. “I have the name my mother gave me. Shimny.”

  “Shimny?” Danny frowned. “That’s not what Tom and Sophie called you, was it?”

  “As neither of them could lay claim to being my mother, then no, it wasn’t,” said the pony. “But why the fuss about names?”

  “It’s so strange,” said Danny. “The whole thing. All these creatures … all these things that have lives and names and can talk to each other. Don’t you think that’s strange?”

  “Will it be a long journey?” asked the pony, apparently not thinking much of the oddness. “I’m rather elderly. I don’t know if you’re aware of that.”

  And then Tom came trotting back on Apple, hooves everywhere, and Danny wasn’t going to talk to his horse anymore, because he didn’t want to feel stupid in front of Tom. Except he did wonder, for a long while, why it was that some creatures seemed shocked to discover that he could talk to them, while some apparently didn’t think it was remarkable at all.

  * * *

  By the afternoon, they had run out of chocolate and were hungry again. Unfortunately, they were out on a long bridle path, well out of any village. His stomach grimacing, Tom put Apple into a smart trot and then a canter, letting her scrape along the edge of the young wheat they were next to. Danny, hand tucked into his pocket, heard it hiss like a field of adders as it was trampled. The sound made him wince, and he wanted to tell Tom to stop, but it would only have led to an argument, and he had enough to deal with trying to keep hold of two reins, a squirming cat, and a stick.

  For a long time they were both quiet, the miles disappearing beneath them with the rhythmic pounding of hooves.

  * * *

  They came to a small copse at the top of a slope, surrounded by scrubby fields. The copse was dark, but above the hum of traffic drifting up from the road below there bubbled the song of a nearby stream. The ponies ground to an exhausted halt, their ribs flapping in and out, sinking their heads to a few inches above the ground. They gasped. Danny was shocked.

  “They’re knackered. We went far too fast,” he said to Tom as both boys dismounted and Mitz collapsed into a grateful heap on the grass.

  Tom, listening to the stream, cast a quick eye back to his horses.

  “No, they’ll be fine,” he said. “Give them a few minutes. Ach, I’m starving. There’s got to be something we can eat round here.”

  Danny sat down near the ponies and watched them transform from heaving bellows into quietly dozing beasts. Their eyes trembled shut as they felt the sun on their noses and stretched out their tired limbs, each resting a hind leg. Time ticked away while Tom scrambled around the trees and undergrowth, lost in the quest for food, but tired as he was, Danny couldn’t settle himself to waiting. He was thinking too much about what he had to do and what he had to fear, although on a day like this one, with summer strong in the air and the sun promising to shine for hours to come, it was hard to properly fear anything. He held the stick in his hands and turned it over, looking at it for what seemed like the thousandth time and seeing nothing new.

  “Come on, Danny,” something whispered to him. “What are you waiting for? Don’t you know the dogs are out? Don’t you know they’re on your trail?”

  He jerked his head round to try and see what had spoken. There was nothing to be seen. All he could think was that it had sounded like the wind.

  “Dogs?” he said, trying very hard to concentrate on the voice he had just heard. “What dogs? Who are you?”

  “Do you have to ask?”

  “Yes—I can’t make out who you are. What dogs?”

  “The Dogs of War!” hissed the voice. “The Dogs of War!”

  “What are they?” said Danny, not sure if he’d heard properly.

  Somewhere in the distance, he heard a bark.

  “What are you doing, Danny? Don’t you know they’re coming? Look behind you, look behind you!”

  Dogs … dogs … why would dogs be coming…? Danny whirled around to look behind him.

  There was the copse. And way away down the hill, a black mass of racing, baying dogs. Even at this distance Danny could see that they were as big as rottweilers and bounding in great, leaping strides across the fields, over the ditches, through the streams, and up the hill toward him. He didn’t stop to count them.

  “Tom! Tom! Tom!” he cried out, jumping to his feet and running over to the edge of the trees. “Tom! Get out! There’s a pack of dogs!”

  “It’ll just be a hunt—oh, hang on, wrong time of year.… Don’t worry, I’m sure someone’s with them,” Tom called back from the darkness.

  “No, it’s just dogs! Loads of them! Come on!”

  Danny swung his schoolbag onto his back, grabbed Mitz and stuck her on his shoulder, and then took hold of the piebald’s reins and put his foot in the stirrup to mount, but Tom had loosened the girths and the saddle slipped sideways, round Shimny’s belly. The pony shifted nervously, her head high, ears stretched in the direction of the yelling dogs. Danny fumbled at the girth buckles, trying to take the saddle off, but his hands were like potatoes on the ends of his shaking arms. For a moment it seemed that he’d never undo them, but as he gave a last despairing yank, they gave way and the saddle thumped onto the ground.

  There was no time to replace it. He dragged Shimny over to a grassy ledge, scrambled up onto her back, and let her go, grabbing her mane tightly with his hands. As she began to gallop, he was thrown from side to side and his head whipped backwards, tears streaming at the stinging of the air. The cat flattened against his shoulder, pushing her head into his neck and sinking her claws so deeply into his sweater that they pierced his skin.

  Tom! Danny wanted to scream. But he’d shouted and Tom hadn’t listened, and now he was galloping away to somewhere only Shimny knew, somewhere Danny couldn’t even see anymore, and Tom was still back there in the copse with those dogs racing up the hill toward him.…

  He twisted his head around and saw Tom stepping out of the copse at the same moment that the dogs reached it. The pack split into two—half flowed on toward Danny, and half rose in a wave, knocking Tom off his feet.

  An arm flung into the air, Tom’s blond hair caught the sunlight, and then he disappeared underneath the black mass and Danny saw no more.

  * * *

  Shimny stretched every muscle and tendon in her hairy old body and tried to remember how sure-footed she had once been, how she had galloped down hills five times as steep and leapt over ditches twice as wide. She tried to pretend she was still young, tried to ignore the aching shoulders that strained as she reached forward, the joints that grated as bone scraped along bone.

  When she couldn’t ignore any longer, she clenched her teeth together and said to herself, I am not me, I am not me, I am not me, so that her chanting was in time with the beats of her four hooves and she couldn’t hear Danny sobbing on her back that he had left Tom, that Tom would be killed by those black dogs and be torn to pieces and never be seen again.

  Their own half pack of dogs was gaining on them, the barks and howls louder with every hundred yards. Where on earth had those dogs come from? But it wasn’t time to think, only to gallop.

  Shimny careered over a small stream, but Danny’s hands were tangled in her mane and his legs gripped her sides so tightly that he didn’t fall. Feeling firmer ground beneath her feet, she tried for one last effort. I must lose them now, or I never will.

  And with her last ragged scraps of energy, she held off the advance of th
e dogs for vital seconds until the edge of a wood was approaching so quickly that she barely had time to see the trees before dodging between them. Sunlight streamed through the forest canopy, lighting a path that pulled them toward a fast-flowing river.

  The horse did not hesitate to throw herself in.

  * * *

  Danny fell sideways, slipping off Shimny’s back. For a second his legs tangled with her kicking hooves; only his hands stayed attached to her, still knotted in her mane. The horse fought to pull her neck away from his weight, and his head went under the water, bubbles pouring into his nostrils.

  He choked and coughed and lashed out with his feet, trying to find the bottom, but it was deeper than he could reach.

  “Stop!” he tried to shout, but when he opened his mouth, it filled with water.

  He tried to breathe one more time, before the flood drained down to his lungs. He spat and yanked hard at his hands, using his whole strength to try and get them away. All that happened was that he pulled Shimny’s head down, and then somehow they were writhing together and his leg was over her back again and she was floating level in the water, her neck held high.

  Danny’s hands were white from the tourniquet of mane hairs. Clumsy and stiff, his hands refused to move. He gnawed at the hair with his teeth until at last it broke, and the panic of being tied to another living creature began to subside, leaving a slow fizz in his bloodstream.

  Looking around, he couldn’t see the dogs, whose baying still floated on the wind toward them. What would they do when they reached the bank? Dogs could definitely swim, although perhaps once they were in water it would be more difficult for them to bite. Even then …

  Just as Danny reached into his right pocket to check that the stick was still there, he heard the pony speak his name.

  “Yeah?” he answered. The dogs’ barks were getting louder as they neared the riverbank.

  “Ask the river to slow a bit. We’re near a corner, and I’ll be beached or drowned at the rate we’re going.”

  Danny didn’t want to slow down. They ought to put as much distance as possible between themselves and those howling, yowling dogs. But back on land, without the pony, he’d have no chance at all. He turned his attention to the river. “Sorry, river,” he asked, “can you slow down a bit? The old mare can’t swim.”

  “Yes, yes, of course!” the river said, dragging its heels along the stones of its bed so that the flow of water calmed. “Hello! Hello! The stream said you were coming! Pack of dogs just behind you, I see!”

  Danny lurched round to look at the bank they had jumped off, nearly pushing Shimny over sideways. Were the dogs following them along the river?

  It appeared not.

  “I did a bit of, ah, hydraulic engineering back there. Shallowed out so’s it’d look like you’d gone across. And they just ran straight over, away to the other side! They’re, um, not the brainiest creatures in existence and they won’t stop to ask anybeast where you’ve gone until they’re well and truly confused.”

  Danny’s hands trembled in a strange spasm. He closed his eyes and opened them again, to clear his vision.

  “Thanks,” he said to the river. “We had no chance.… They just came out of nowhere.… Tom…” But he couldn’t think about Tom, not just yet.

  “Well, shall I put you on the bank, then? I think your horse is about to have a heart attack. Don’t worry, I’ll put you back on the side you came from. Those dogs are still haring after you way out west somewhere! The other side of the bank! Hah!”

  Before Danny had a chance to answer, the river drew back and flung itself in a huge arc over the bank. Boy, horse, and cat were swept into the air in a rushing swell that slapped them down onto the earth and pounded them with an afterthought of water, pressing their limbs into the mud. It was like lying under a waterfall.

  As the river drained away, Danny lay on the riverbank, coughing. Every time he coughed, water rattled in his lungs, but he couldn’t seem to get it up to his mouth, no matter how hard he hawked. He needed to climb into a tree and hang upside down by his feet from a branch to drain it out, but he was too exhausted to do anything except let his arms sprawl out and press his cheek against the smooth earth. His legs didn’t feel like they’d ever hold him upright again.

  He ought to talk more to the river. If he was ever going to get anywhere, if he was ever going to find his parents, he had to keep asking for help. But he couldn’t even move his hand to check whether the stick was still in his pocket.

  The image of his older sister came to him. What would life have been like if Emma had been there, leading the way? She’d have been like Tom, confident and strong, sure of herself. She’d have shown Danny what to do.

  Except that hardly mattered now. Emma didn’t exist, and Tom was probably dead, lying ripped apart somewhere, his legs bleeding, his blond hair chewed off, like those pictures of mangled foxes on the animal-rights stall outside the library.

  Danny shivered and forced himself to sit up. The horse was lying on her side, her legs straight and stiff. Her rib cage was mountainous, an upturned bathtub, but it rose and fell to the rhythm of her feeble breathing. He could talk to her, now Tom wasn’t around. But she didn’t look like she’d relish a conversation.

  The stick was still in his pocket. He’d known that, really. He’d have felt its loss, like when he’d left Abel Korsakof’s without it. It wasn’t even damp: the outside world didn’t seem to touch it much.

  Mitz was a bedraggled ball of rage. She was shaking and licking, shaking and licking, in a furious attempt to dry herself. At least the river had washed off all the soot.

  “Hey, Mitz,” Danny tried softly. “Are you okay?”

  The cat gave him a filthy look. “Ask me that again,” she said, “and I’ll scratch your eyes out. Do I look okay?”

  “Better than you did. I’m sure you’ll dry and look fine,” Danny said, coughing again. His lungs hurt, as though someone had first overinflated them and then punctured them with a knitting needle. Mitz arched her back and hissed at him. Without all the fluff, her body was skinny and sharp and her eyes looked too big for her face.

  Another sound came up from the water. It was the river again, its thousand voices straining together.

  “Are you recovered?” it asked.

  “Yeah,” said Danny, although he wasn’t really. His legs were made of string, and now he’d never find the Book of Storms, without Tom. He didn’t know one end of a woodland path from another, and the map was still in his schoolbag, which he didn’t dare take off his back. Once he knew that the map had become a fistful of soggy gloop, then he’d know for certain that all was lost.

  “What were you doing, being chased by the Dogs of War?” the river asked.

  “I don’t know! I just looked around, and they were running up the hill. Who keeps that many dogs? They’re killers! They should lock them up.”

  “The Dogs of War? No one keeps them, not all together in a pack. They belong to the moon—just normal dogs, owned by people, living in houses all around the place, except when she calls them together. But she only sends them out on very special occasions. You must have done something pretty bad.”

  Danny wanted to stick up for himself one last time, although he was sure he’d stop bothering soon.

  “I haven’t done anything,” he said. “I’m only looking for my parents. And Tom came with me, and then the dogs got him, and he’s … he’s … I dunno, and Sammael’s after me. He wants something I’ve got—but he’s never even asked me for it, just keeps trying to kill me. I guess next time he’ll probably succeed. I must be running out of luck by now.”

  “Sammael?” The river bubbled deep underneath, causing the surface to shiver. “Ah, then it must have been him who asked the moon to send the dogs. He’s old friends with the moon, you know—she always owes him a favor or two. How did you come to be mixed up with him?”

  “Not my fault,” said Danny. “I just found something. He wants it a lot, I guess.”


  The river was silent for a moment. Danny couldn’t hear its normal slippery streaming sound quite so well when he was listening out for its real words.

  Eventually it said, “I did hear that he was plotting something. I mean, he’s always plotting something, but this one’s big. Something to do with humans—he wants to hurt them badly, to destroy them all, I think.”

  Danny clutched at the stick. His other hand balled into a fist. What on earth was Sammael? How could this river speak so casually of him destroying people?

  “All people?” he said. “But … why?”

  “Oh, I assume it’s because he’s tired of endlessly doing his job with no recognition or reward. He’s been doing it a long time, you know, and people have changed a lot. Perhaps he thinks they’re not as interesting as they once were—perhaps he thinks they’re not as imaginative. Whatever it is, he’s certainly angry these days. Angry at the whole lot of you, I’m sorry to say.”

  Danny wrestled with the idea of all the humans on the planet in one single blob, all looking in the same direction at Sammael, and Sammael facing them back, hating every single one.

  “But … there’re, like, seven billion of us. There’s no way anyone can destroy us all!”

  “Oh, he’s got a lot of time,” said the river. “And a lot of patience, I’d say. I’d heard he was working on something to do with storms.”

  This was way too big. All humans? Everybody? But by the way the river was talking, it was something that would take ages. Maybe years. Maybe centuries, and then Danny wouldn’t really have to worry about it at all.

  “How much time?” he asked. “I mean, will it take him, like, years?”

  “Oh, I should think so,” said the river cheerfully. “Maybe years. Maybe days. You can never be sure how fast Sammael is working. He just has to collect what he needs—he’s found out that storm taros can give him the ability to gather and control storms. It’s because of that coat, you know.”