Podkin One-Ear

by Kieran Larwood

  ‘The two types of magic,’ Brigid said. ‘Natural magic and dark, iron magic. The world is made of the two, but they balance each other out like this – always eating at each other, neither one ever winning. Least, that’s how it’s supposed to be.’

  ‘Why the two?’ Podkin asked. ‘Why can’t there just be natural magic that doesn’t want to hurt anyone?’

  In answer, Brigid went to one of her teetering shelves and took down a carving. It was of two doe rabbits, standing arm in arm. Podkin recognised one from the garland of flowers around her neck, and the little chicks and birds that peeped out from the folds of her dress: the Goddess Estra, bringer of all life.

  The other rabbit looked much more stern. She clutched a fearsome bow, and her robe was cinched around the middle by a belt made of tiny skulls.

  ‘The twin sisters,’ Brigid said, making a strange gesture in the air with her paw. ‘Estra and Nixha. Goddesses of life and death.’

  Podkin stared at the carving, running his fingers over the worked, polished wood. ‘I’ve heard of the Goddess, of course,’ he said. ‘And I think I remember learning there was someone who took you to the Land Beyond when you died. But we didn’t talk about that much, back at home.’

  ‘Most rabbits in these parts don’t.’ Brigid shook her head. ‘But dying is as much a part of life as living. Down south, in the other lands, there’s them that worship only Nixha. Funny bunch they are, my dear. I would tell you to stay clear of them, but …’

  Podkin sensed that the old rabbit was about to go off on one of her strange ramblings again, so he interrupted with another question. ‘What do the goddesses have to do with the Gorm then?’

  ‘Well,’ said Brigid, taking the statue back and setting it carefully on her shelf. ‘That there is the story at the beginning of everything.’

  ‘Will you tell it to me? Please?’

  Brigid huffed and puffed for a bit – there was nettle soup to make and a pile of acorns to shell for bread – but finally she took Podkin over to the hearth where Pook was busy playing with a heap of bones and pebbles. Paz followed too, and the pair of them sat down at Brigid’s feet, as though she was a bard telling a bedtime story.

  ‘Right then, dearies,’ said Brigid, when she was comfortable. ‘The story of the goddesses at the beginning of things, just how the old priestess at Redwater told it to me when I was a fluffy-eared kit.

  ‘It is said by some that back then the world was a dark and evil place. The whole of it: all lands, all seas, was covered by poisonous, seething metal. An evil, wicked mass of horridness that was all part of one being. Gormalech, he was named, and he had eaten whatever was here before, in his never-ending greed and gluttony.

  ‘So, there hangs our world – floating in space, all covered with nasty, living iron. And it would have stayed there too, cold and alone for all time, if it hadn’t been for the goddesses.

  ‘Sometime, goodness only knows how long ago, the goddesses stumbled upon our world and decided it was the place for them. Perhaps they could see through the swirling poison of Gormalech to what was beneath, perhaps they had known the place as it was before he got control of it. Who knows?

  ‘Anyway, they wanted to stop here, and a good job for us that they did. The only problem was: how to get rid of him that was globbing up the place with his stink and poison and nasty iron evilness?

  ‘First of all, they called to him and asked if he wouldn’t mind jiggering off somewhere else. Of course, he says “no, not for all the carrots in my back garden”, or something like that.

  ‘The next plan, then, was to challenge him to a contest. Winner takes all, sort of thing.

  ‘Estra, the Goddess, chose a game of dice. Fox Paw, she called it, and she trounced old Gormalech.

  ‘Nixha went next, and challenged the evil creature to a contest of archery and needless to say, he lost. Nobody can fire an arrow like Nixha. She never misses, as we will all find out when she comes for us, at the end of our time.

  ‘Finally, it was Gormalech’s turn. He simply wanted a fight and, being several thousand times bigger and meaner than those two dainty does, he bashed and beat them to bits.

  ‘Well, the end result of all the competing was that nobody had really won. None of them was best pleased, but they realised they had reached a stalemate. So they came to an agreement. The goddesses would rule the surface of the world, bringing life (and death) back to it, as it was before. Gormalech would go deep underground, where iron and all the other metals come from anyway, and between them they would share the place.

  ‘They called their agreement “the Balance”, and promised each other that they would abide by it. From then until the end of time.

  ‘And that is how the story goes.’ Brigid dipped a clay cup into the water bowl that sat by the fire and took a long drink. ‘Bless my ears, that’s the most I’ve spoken in decades.’

  ‘So Gormalech is the one creating the Gorm?’ Podkin said, his voice almost a whisper. ‘Because he wants the world back again, do you think? But that means the Balance is broken, because the Gorm are winning now, aren’t they?’

  ‘They are. The Balance is indeed broken, my dear. They’ve found some way to wriggle out of it. They’re growing in power. The old magic of the goddesses is under threat.’

  Podkin looked over to where Starclaw and Brigid’s sickle lay together on the kitchen bench. ‘They wanted our dagger. That’s what Scramashank was after when he killed Father. But why?’

  Brigid shrugged. ‘Spite, maybe. Or something worse. I’ve heard they want the Twelve Gifts destroyed, so that all knowledge of the gods and goddesses fades forever.’ She looked down and noticed Podkin was trembling with fear at the thought. ‘Don’t worry, little one. Magic is a balance, like I said. If it swings too much one way, just means that sometime soon it’s going to swing back the other. That’s the rules of the deal, don’t forget, and that was a deal that can never be broken.’

  Podkin thought on that for a moment, and realised it meant that the Gorm were due some revenge. Even though he was still trembling a bit, he managed a hard little smile. Looking up at his sister, he saw she was smiling too.

  *

  The children missed their parents terribly, and wished more than anything that they could just go home to find everything back the way it was. But even so, the little house in the woods had started to seem like a safe, happy place.

  It was only one day, when Paz noticed Brigid scraping the last of her dried nettle leaves from a pot to make soup, that they realised they had to move on. It wasn’t fair for the old rabbit to suddenly have to provide for three hungry mouths.

  ‘But she can find more food,’ Podkin said, when Paz mentioned it to him. ‘She’s got you to help her forage now.’

  ‘Yes, but it’s winter. And a hard one too. Have you seen how much soup Pook gets through in a day?’

  ‘But where will we go? Redwater was the only safe place we knew, and look how that turned out.’ Podkin ran his fingers over the stump where his left ear had once been.

  Paz gave his arm a squeeze. ‘Brigid will know of somewhere,’ she said.

  *

  So they asked the old rabbit that night. As it often was with her, it seemed as though she had been expecting the question.

  ‘There is a place, my dears,’ she said, with a sigh. ‘Not a nice place, or a safe one, but a place where the Gorm won’t think to look for you.’

  She told them of a town of runaways and refugees that had sprung up amongst the crumbling tombs of an ancient graveyard. An underground warren at the forest’s edge, amongst the bones and teeth of creatures long gone from the world.

  ‘Boneroot, it’s called. You’ll have to be careful there and keep your wits about you, but I promise you, there won’t be anyone turned by the Gorm. Every rabbit in the place has run away from them. All their warrens have been taken or enslaved, or just plain burnt to ash. They hate the Gorm as much as I do, and that’s a whole lot of hating.’

  There were merce
naries there, she said: soldiers you could hire to work for you. She pointed to the silver bracelet Paz wore, and the gold buckle on Podkin’s belt. ‘If you trade those precious things, you might get someone to fight on your side. Someone to protect you – maybe take you somewhere safe, off across the Eiskalt mountains, where the Gorm have never been. That’s what I’d do, if I was you.’

  Podkin listened to all this with a sad dread. The last thing he wanted was to go out into the cold, cruel outside world where bits of you got cut off and lost forever. He kept thinking Brigid would change her mind and ask them to stay … Maybe if he looked especially scared and miserable? But of course, she didn’t. She always seemed to know what was going to happen. If she thought they were leaving, that meant there was no getting out of it.

  Paz, who had spent more time with the old witch, knew a little of how Brigid could unpick and unravel threads of knowledge from the future. Was going to Boneroot something they had to do? Was it part of Podkin’s story that she kept mentioning? But if it was a good thing, then why did she sound so sad? What was going to happen to them there? The worries buzzed around her head, making it spin.

  Pook didn’t want to leave, either. He clutched a few of Brigid’s bone pieces in his paw and tried to catch hold of her cloak whenever she moved near him. Paz could see her keeping away on purpose, but reluctantly, as if it was something she had to do. How hard it must be, to know the events that had to happen for the future to unfurl just the way it should. Especially if some of those events were hard or unhappy ones. Would she be able to let them happen, no matter how much it hurt, just because they had to? Paz didn’t think she had that kind of strength. It made her admire the old rabbit even more.

  Brigid gave them directions for Boneroot, sketched in charcoal on a piece of bark. As a parting gift, she produced some winter cloaks with hoods, knitted hats and scarfs. They were all exactly the right sizes for each of them, but had been folded and put away for so long, they had to have the dust shaken off. Podkin couldn’t work out how she had done it.

  She had also made him a cloth scabbard in which he could carry Starclaw, strapped to his back and hidden away. She warned him to guard the dagger well, as it was valuable beyond any treasure, and made him promise that he would never let the Gorm touch it.

  Finally, they stood in the snow beneath the old oak tree and said their goodbyes. The little rabbits all hugged Brigid and kissed her wrinkled nose. She had tears in her eyes as she waved them off.

  As she glanced back through the trees, Paz thought that she saw the sickle on Brigid’s belt give a silver glimmer of goodbye, and Podkin, although he had no idea why, felt his magic dagger grow heavier at his side.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Boneroot

  Following Brigid’s map, the young rabbits found the Red River again and walked along to where it forked. There was a little bridge made of fallen logs lashed together, which they slipped and slid across, and then they followed the smaller branch south again. Before them lay Grimheart forest, a huge mass of trees that filled the entire horizon. The silver-grey, frosted branches were like an ocean of icy wood; the whole Gorm army could be hidden in there, or a thousand packs of hungry wolves, thirsty for blood. Robbers, bandits, murderers – Podkin’s imagination ran through them all, until he found it hard to force his feet towards it.

  Luckily, they were only going to skirt the forest itself, heading to the east and keeping to the edge of the woods where the trees were thinnest.

  Their breath steamed out in misty halos around their heads, but their cloaks and hats kept them warm. Every crunching step, every twig that snapped under their feet, they expected to see a Gorm crow burst from the trees to call its masters down on them. Their ears (or ear, in Podkin’s case) were constantly twitching as they listened for the clank of iron armour or the harsh, jagged sound of Gorm-speak.

  But either the Gorm had exhausted their search of the forest or Brigid had laid some special charm on their new cloaks. They passed undisturbed and unseen through the frozen winter trees.

  Brigid said the journey would take them at least two days and, following her advice, they stopped for the night, found a big snowdrift and scooped out a little cave inside. Pook thought it was great fun, as they all packed the snow hard to make the walls of their little burrow. He had been too small to enjoy the snow last year, and there had been so little time this winter, what with preparing for Bramblemas, and then … everything that happened after. Paz and Podkin watched him roll in the powdery snow, tasting ice crystals on his tongue and remembering snowball fights and snow burrows they had made in the winters past. How simple everything was then, and how little they had appreciated it.

  Their shelter was finished before darkness drew in. They were quite proud of their work: Podkin even built a little wooden shelf for a beeswax candle. He had great fun chopping a whole tree to pieces in the process, delighting in the way Starclaw swished through the trunk as if it was an over-boiled carrot. He might have reduced half the forest to matchwood if Paz hadn’t stopped him.

  Supper was a small meal of oatcakes and dried beetroot slices, washed down with melted snow-water. When they curled up to sleep for the night, their den was actually very snug and cosy.

  Podkin lay awake, looking out through the tunnel at the stars in the night sky. He could see the Big Radish, the Rat and the Snake: all constellations his mother had taught him as he sat on her knee, looking up at the night sky. She had been on his mind a lot lately, ever since his ear had begun to heal. Rushing to Redwater and the pain of what happened there had been so awful – only now had he started to realise that they’d no idea of what had happened to her.

  He nudged Paz awake with his foot.

  ‘What?’ she whispered. ‘Is something outside?’

  ‘No. Just the stars.’

  ‘What is it then? I’m trying to sleep.’

  ‘It’s Mother,’ said Podkin. ‘We ran off so fast, we don’t know whether she’s alive or …’ He was about to say ‘killed by the Gorm’, but it reminded him too much of that last sight of his father, facing down Scramashank with his sword drawn. He couldn’t bring himself to speak the words.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Paz. ‘I hope she’s all right, but it’s not like we can go back and check. If we do, the Gorm will take us, just like they did the Redwater children.’

  ‘If she is back there,’ Podkin continued. ‘D’you think she’ll be like Lady Russet? D’you think she’ll start working for the Gorm?’

  Paz started to laugh, but it made Pook stir from where he was snuggled against her, so she put a hand over her mouth. ‘Can you imagine Mother doing that?’

  At first Podkin was shocked. How could she laugh about it, after everything that had happened? But then he imagined his mother, the mighty Lady of Munbury, bowing down and scraping like a humble servant. It just wouldn’t be right. Podkin smiled too, then felt tears suddenly spring to his eyes. His fierce, proud mother. She had once chased the chieftain of Deepdell warren out of the longburrow for being rude to his father. Even the toughest warriors in the Munbury Guard were terrified of her and her steely glare. He gave a silent prayer to the Goddess that she was out there, somewhere, looking up at the stars, just like him.

  ‘What’s the point in loving people, Paz, if they only get taken away from you? I know we’ll never see Father again. Or Mother, probably. It hurts so much to think of it … I almost wish I’d never had parents.’

  Paz was silent for a moment before rolling closer and putting an arm around him. ‘It does hurt, Pod. It hurts more than anything in the world. I think it always will. That’s just part of our life now. But we have to be strong. That’s what Father would have wanted.’

  Podkin sighed and snuggled into his big sister. ‘I know. I was just saying.’

  ‘Besides. They aren’t really gone. They’ll always be with us. No matter what the Gorm do, we will remember them. They can’t take our memories away, can they?’

  ‘Do you still hear Fat
her’s voice sometimes? In your head?’ Podkin asked. But Paz had fallen asleep, her quiet snores blending with Pook’s in their tiny scooped-out snow burrow.

  ‘I do,’ Podkin whispered to himself. And then he buried his head in his arms and cried himself silently to sleep.

  *

  It was late afternoon on the next day when they arrived at Boneroot. Brigid had told them to look out for carved symbols on the tree trunks. A circle, like the snake picture she had shown them, marked with the Ogham symbols for b and r.

  Pook had been the first to spot one, even though he shouldn’t have had any idea what they were talking about. He had pointed to a gnarled willow trunk, shouting and cooing so much that Podkin was worried he would bring the Gorm down on them. When they finally got him to be quiet, they noticed the symbol, chopped into the bark and smeared with mud to make it look old.

  Once they’d found one, they became easier to spot, and more frequent. It was like following a treasure trail, or hunting for the little painted wooden carrots that used to be hidden in the meadow every Lupen’s Day at the start of spring.

  Next they had to look out for the stone tree that Brigid had described. Podkin thought this might be just a riddle, until he almost walked into it.

  Jutting up from a clutch of bramble bushes, the carved stone was as broad as an ancient oak. It curved at the top, and was spattered all over in crusty patches of overlapping lichen. Stepping back to look at it, Podkin realised it was actually the remains of an arched doorway.

  The rabbits stared at it for a while. It was a wonder to them why anyone would build something like this above ground, and how they had even managed to do it. The thing towered over them, sculpted so cleanly. There had been a stone fireplace in the Munbury warren, but everything else had been built out of wood, carved all over with patterns of twining leaves and the daisy that had been their tribal symbol. To make something this big out of stone would have taken such effort; and it was only part of a doorway. What had the rest of the building been like?