Chapter 79
“o what's next?” said Butterbur. “Where do you go from here?”
It was midday. The friends had slept well into the morning. Now they were finishing a very late breakfast.
“I'd like to stay awhile, if that's all right with you,” said Figgis. “I have nothing to go back to.”
“Of course,” said Butterbur. “There's always plenty of work to be done.”
“Filizar and I might return to Balaa,” said Manu, “but we need some time to think. At the moment, we're planning to go to Kessel. We could get a ship from there.”
“With his body and my brains, we'll make a great team,” said Filizar. “That mother of mine won't know what's hit her!”
“What about you, Blackeye?” said Butterbur.
“I'm going to find Mouse,” he said simply. There was a strange expression on his face. No one dared press him further.
“And what about you?” said Butterbur, turning to Snow-bone at last. “I thought you might like to stay here and work with the animals.”
“I have thought about it,” said Snowbone, “but I can't stay. Not at the moment. I'm too restless. I have to go on.”
“Do you know where you're going?” asked Figgis.
“I do,” said Snowbone, and she smiled enigmatically and said no more.
Snowbone stood in the clearing and looked at what remained of Figgis's house. Nothing much. A few charred timbers, green with moss and overgrown with nettles. Half a dozen rusty pans, buckled and bent. A ceramic sink. Bedsprings. A twisted fork.
She moved over to the fallen ashen trees. They lay where the tiddlins had placed them, side by side in neat rows. Snowbone sighed. “If only the Ancients had been watching instead of sleeping, it would never have come to this,” she said. “What a waste.”
Or was it? She couldn't escape the fact that she owed her sight to trees like these. Suddenly she felt very small and humble, and curiously cherished, as if these Ancestors were honoring her in some way. But how? They were long gone. Their souls had flown away like bumblebees, never to return. But still …
“Thank you,” she whispered. “Wherever you are.”
And the leaves on the living trees suddenly rustled, as if they were talking to one another.
The sun was setting by the time Snowbone reached the forest fringe. Its low rays filtered through the trees like an amber fan, drawing her to the sea. To the salt-charged air and the falling waves. To the fleecy foam and the endless sky.
Snowbone left the forest behind and stepped onto the black sand. That wasn't good enough; she kicked off her boots to feel the grains between her toes. She began to walk down the beach, but that wasn't enough either. Soon she was running, and the waves were rushing to greet her. Rolling in joyously, tossing their white-washed manes.
Snowbone stopped at the water's edge and stared out at the limitless ocean, breathing in great lungfuls of briny air: tasting it, savoring it, loving it. “I promised I would return,” she said, “and I have.”
She sat down on the sand and waited for the moon to rise. Slowly it came: a great silver button pinned to the cloak of the sky. Snowbone sat for hours, watching it journey across the heavens, until a band of golden light appeared at the rim of the world and the morning came.
This is such a perfect place, she thought as the sun began to ascend. I'm not going away again for a long, long time.
And she didn't. She stayed at Black Sand Bay for many moons, happily alone. And when she did eventually leave, it was for the most unexpected of reasons.
But that, my friends, is another story.
The Spell Begins
fter Tigermane had gone, Daisy and Snowdrop sat in their bleak barrack room and waited for morning. When it came, the bolts were drawn back, the slaves were summoned to work, and Daisy told the quarry master that her friend was moving on.
Dunamis stared at her like a great fat frog eyeing a worm. “When was she hurt?” he asked suspiciously.
“She wasn't,” said Daisy. “She's quite well. She's just moving on.”
The news spread like ice cracking on a pond. One of the girls … eight years old … fit and healthy … moving on! Then came the rumor of a spell. Magic words that anyone could say. You cover your eyes … cover your ears … cover your heart … and this is what you say …
By midday, the quarry was a cauldron of hot, feverish hope. Dunamis cracked his whip and spat and swore, but who was caring anymore? No one. No one! Because seventeen slaves were moving on. Escaping!
That night, Daisy said the spell. And elsewhere in the darkness, in a room hissing with whispers, seven boulder men realized they would have to escape. Really escape. They had to spread the news. If they didn't, no one beyond the quarry would ever know. Dunamis and his men would hush it up. Even if a rumor spread, the spell certainly wouldn't.
And so the next day, as the overseers struggled to cope with hundreds of slaves moving on at once, the boulder men slipped out of the quarry unseen. They began to run. And one reached a farm and one reached a plantation. One found a factory, one found a lumber mill. One found a coal mine, one found a gold mine. And one found a ship and stowed away, and carried the news to another land.
Hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands! All around the world, slaves Moved On. Their owners bought more eggs, but the spell continued to spread—dedicated bands of escaped slaves made sure of that. So the owners bided their time and waited for the ashen trees to mature. They would have a bumper sap harvest, for sure! But a strange thing happened. As the first tree was felled, the sap turned foul. It was black and greasy, stinky as beer breath, and it wouldn't heal anything, not even a cut finger.
The slave market at Barrenta Bay was rebuilt, but it fell into disrepair as trade dwindled. The town declined. The shopkeepers moved away and soon it was a ghost town. Squirrels nested in the saloons. Wild dogs roamed the streets. Crows roosted in the clock tower. Time stood still.
But not the trees.
Slaves believed in The Forest: a place of peace, where Ashenpeakers could Move On and grow old together. Did it exist? Perhaps not, but the slaves wanted it to exist. That was why, at the quarry, they loved to see their friends carried away on the wagon. It made their dreams real.
But now, with dozens of slaves moving on every day at the quarry, the wagon wasn't being used. The overseers were dumping people in a yard behind the master's cabin. Here there was neither soil nor water. The emerging ashen trees couldn't take root.
So they started to walk.
Slowly, slowly, by the light of the moon. Their skin turned to bark and their fingers sprouted leaves, but still they marched on: great armies of trees from east and west, north and south, converging in the darkness. And when they found water and shelter—in the lee of a hill, in the basin of a valley—they stopped. They sent their roots down into earth, creating an Otherworld of their own, beneath this foreign land, where their souls could dance, bright as butterflies. They spread their branches into the air above, creating vast canopies of leaves, from coast to coast across the Nova Land.
And they sent their hearts across the world, singing the news:
It's over, it's over. We're free, free, free….
Acknowledgments
A book is like a pirate ship in full sail. It's wild. Wonderful. Gloriously exciting.
The writer is the pirate captain, standing proudly on the deck, gorgeously attired in velvet and lace, with a big feather in her hat.
She isn't voyaging alone. Belowdecks, or up in the air, clinging to the rigging, there are dozens of pirates beavering away, doing all kinds of things. Without them, the ship would never even leave the harbor, never mind sail the seven seas.
And so, me hearties, love and thanks to:
Joan Slattery and Allison Wortche, my bold, adventurous Ship's Surgeons. Such steady-handed precision at sea!
Everyone at Knopf in New York. The finest crew on the Indigo Ocean.
Yvonne Hooker and the team at Puffin UK.
Swashbucklers all!
Pat White at Rogers, Coleridge & White (London), Purser and Official Port in a Storm.
Rob Soldat, Sea Sage. Never more than a wish away.
And finally, thanks to Ray. Sea Dog, Husband and Work-shy Fop.
Cat Weatherill is a performance storyteller, appearing internationally at storytelling and literature festivals, on British television and radio, and at schools throughout the United Kingdom. She grew up in Liverpool and now lives in Wales, a land of mist and magic. Snowbone is a companion novel to Barkbelly, Cat's first novel for young readers.
Peter Brown's acclaimed picture books include Chowder and Flight of the Dodo, which Publishers Weekly called “an engaging and mischievous romp that marks the start of a promising new talent.” His illustrations also appear in Barkbelly. Peter lives in Brooklyn, New York.
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2006 by Cat Weatherill
Illustrations copyright © 2007 by Peter Brown
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children's Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in different form in Great Britain by Puffin Books, a member of Penguin Group Ltd, London, in 2006.
KNOPF, BORZOI BOOKS, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
www.randomhouse.com/kids
Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at www.randomhouse.com/teachers
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Weatherill, Cat.
Snowbone / by Cat Weatherill; illustrated by Peter Brown. — 1st American ed.
p. cm.
“Originally published in Great Britain by Puffin Books in 2006.”
SUMMARY: A wooden girl and her gang of wooden friends set out on a journey to save their people from a dark destiny.
eISBN: 978-0-307-49109-1
[1. Fantasy.] I. Brown, Peter, ill. II. Title.
PZ7.W35395Sno 2007
[Fic]—dc22
2006017476
v3.0
Snowbone Page 20
