Firebirds Rising

by Sharyn November

  “Elephantiasis,” Jeremy said. Jack Smith was indeed rather fat.

  Jack Smith was convinced that he was being persecuted by a coven of witches. “It’s hard to explain—it’s so nebulous,” he said, rubbing his fat hands nervously together. “Most nights I wake up with a jump, thinking I’ve been hearing horrible strident laughter, and then I can’t get to sleep again. Or I become quite sure someone is walking softly about in the house, when I know I’m the only person there. And if I have an important speech, or an urgent journey to make, I’m sure to get ill in some way. It happens too often to be an accident. By now I feel quite awful, and I’m getting a name for being a shirker too. The Party Chairman has said hard words to me—and all the time I feel as if something malevolent is watching me and sniggering at my misfortunes.”

  “It sounds more like a curse,” Annabelle said. “What makes you think it’s witches?”

  “Stridently nebulous,” Jeremy explained to her. “Perforated herrings.”

  Jack Smith shot him an astonished look. Graeme sighed. “Jethro,” he said, “take your brother away and teach him another game, or I won’t answer for the consequences.”

  “I’ve taught him everything I can think of,” Jethro said sulkily. “I’ve even invented—Oh, all right,” he said hastily as his father started to get up. “But don’t blame me if we break something.”

  So they played cricket and Jeremy somehow bowled a ball backwards and broke the kitchen window. Jethro protested that it was not his fault. “I was only acting under orders,” he said.

  “Follow your orders out in the park next time,” Annabelle told him, “or I might be tempted to use an unkind spell on you. Look at this mess! My saucepans all full of glass!”

  “With you two about, who needs witches?” Graeme grumbled, fetching the broom. “As if we haven’t enough to do with Jack Smith’s coven.”

  By the end of that summer, Graeme and Annabelle were still nowhere near discovering Jack Smith’s witches. “They’re coming in out of the astral plane, obviously,” they kept telling each other anxiously. “We have to protect him there, as well as physically.”

  “I suspect they’re the same lot as Mrs Callaghan’s,” the other would reply. “We have to locate that coven and close it down.”

  But the witches proved to be very well hidden indeed. Graeme filled and surrounded Jack Smith’s house with every detection device he could think of, with tracers on each device to lead him to the coven. And no tracers led anywhere. Not one sniff or sound of a witch could be detected. In the end, he simply enfolded Jack Smith himself with a hundred different protections and went on looking. Jack Smith arrived, rubbing his hands and smiling, saying he felt much better now. “My dear fellow,” he said to Graeme, “the two of you are like hounds. Never let go of a scent, do you?”

  “We don’t like to leave a thing like this unsolved,” Graeme said. “Neither of us do. But you don’t need to go on paying us. It’s something we both feel we have to do.”

  “My dear fellow,” Jack Smith said. “My dear lady.”

  Things were at this stage when the boys started school again. Jethro was now in the top class, the last one before he moved up into the senior school. Every lesson seemed to start with, “You’ll be in trouble in Seniors if you don’t learn this now,” or, “Everyone in Seniors has to know this before they begin.” To a worrier like Jethro this was seriously alarming. He lay awake at night worrying about the way he was going to arrive to Seniors knowing nothing and be punished for it. And as if this was not enough, Jeremy was put in Miss Blythe’s class.

  Miss Blythe was notoriously strict. People made rude drawings of her in her tight purple sweater and big round glasses. She had a beaky nose and thin black hair that frizzed out around her angry owl-face. All the best drawings did her as an owl with thick legs and clumpy shoes and these often looked very like Miss Blythe indeed. In Miss Blythe’s class no one was allowed to talk or fool about, and they had to form up in lines before they did anything. Miss Blythe called the ones who never talked or played and who formed up in lines quickest her little flowers. The best ones were called her little daisies. You could always tell someone who had been in Miss Blythe’s class by their subdued, frightened look and by the way they sat with their hands primly folded and their feet side by side. It was said they were trying to be daisies. Jethro could not imagine Jeremy being made into a daisy. He worried about that almost as much as he worried about Seniors.

  For a fortnight nothing much seemed to happen. Then, one lunchtime, Jethro stood in the playground and watched Miss Blythe’s class come outside, walking in a line as usual. As usual, Jeremy was about halfway along the line, looking more than usually egg-shaped and angelic. Jethro paused long enough to see that Jeremy was there and turned away to his friends, who were worrying about Seniors too.

  The next moment, Jeremy came charging out of the line straight towards Jethro. He flung both arms round Jethro and butted his face into Jethro’s chest.

  “Hey!” Jethro said. “What’s up with you?”

  Jeremy said nothing. He just butted harder. People began gathering round to stare.

  “Now, look—” Jethro was beginning, when Miss Blythe came shooting out of the school and advanced on Jethro and Jeremy with big strides.

  “Jeremy Hall, ” Miss Blythe said, “did I or did I not order you to stay behind and wash your mouth out with soap?”

  Jeremy just clutched Jethro harder. Jethro realised he was supposed to protect Jeremy, although he was not sure how. He looked up at Miss Blythe. She was even more like the rude drawings than he had known. She glared like an angry owl.

  “Jeremy Hall,” said Miss Blythe, “let go at once and look at me!”

  Jethro, feeling distinctly brave, said, “What has my brother done wrong?”

  “Disobeyed me,” snapped Miss Blythe. “Went out with the others when I told him not to, and now he’s behaving like a baby! After he said such things!”

  Jeremy turned his head sideways. He said, “I only said words.”

  “Don’t you contradict me!” Miss Blythe said. “Indoors at once! Now!”

  “Shan’t,” said Jeremy, and he added, “Hendiadys.”

  Miss Blythe gasped. “What did you call me?”

  Jeremy repeated it. “Hendiadys.”

  At this Miss Blythe made a noise somewhere between a growl and a scream and seized hold of Jeremy’s arm. “For this,” she said, “you are going to come with me to the Headmaster this instant, my boy. Come along.” She pulled, irresistibly. Jeremy was forced to go where she pulled. But, since he refused to let go of Jethro, Jethro was forced to go too. Like this, watched by nearly the entire school, Jethro shuffled with Jeremy’s head in his stomach, into the school, along a corridor and to the door of the Headmaster’s study. MR GARDNER, said the notice on this door. HEADMASTER.

  Miss Blythe gave the notice an angry bang, flung the door open and dragged both boys inside. Mr Gardner looked up with a jump from his egg sandwich. Jethro could see he did not like being disturbed in the middle of his lunch. “What is this about?” he said.

  “Mr Gardner,” said Miss Blythe, “I demand that you expel this boy from the school at once!”

  “Which one?” Mr Gardner asked. “There are two of them, Miss Blythe.”

  Miss Blythe looked down and was clearly surprised to find she had brought Jethro along as well. “The small one of course,” she said. “Jeremy Hall. He does nothing but make trouble.”

  Mr Gardner looked at Jeremy. Jeremy turned his face out of Jethro’s stomach to give Mr Gardner an abnormally egg-shaped and angelic look. Mr Gardner gave the look a strong scrutiny and did not, to Jethro’s alarm, seem to be convinced by it. “He’s not a troublemaker, sir,” Jethro said. “Honestly. He’s just strange.”

  Mr Gardner looked at Jethro then. “And why are you here?” he said.

  Jethro began to feel rather like a lawyer called in when the police have just arrested a criminal. “He’s my brother, sir,�
�� he said.

  “Can’t he speak for himself, then?” Mr Gardner asked.

  “Speak? I should just think he can speak,” Miss Blythe burst out. “Do you know what this child has just called me, Mr Gardner? Hendiadys, Mr. Gardner. He said it twice too! Hendiadys.”

  A strange look came over Mr Gardner’s face. “And what, exactly, Miss Blythe,” he asked, “do you take ‘hendiadys’ to mean?”

  “Some sort of bird, I imagine,” Miss Blythe said. “It was an obvious insult anyway.”

  Jethro, feeling more like a lawyer than ever, cut in hastily, “My cli—er—brother—er, Jeremy never knows what any of his words mean, sir.”

  “Really?” said Mr Gardner. “Well, Jeremy, what does ‘hendiadys’ mean?”

  Jeremy’s eyes went round and gazed over Mr Gardner’s shoulder. He contrived to look sweetly baffled. “Mouse eggs?” he suggested.

  “Jethro,” said Mr. Gardner. “Your turn to guess now.”

  “I—er—think it could be a kind of crocodile,” Jethro guessed. He tried to ignore the venomous glare he got from Miss Blythe.

  “Do you indeed?” Mr Gardner turned and picked up the dictionary lying beside his lunch. “Let’s see what the truth of the matter is,” he said, turning pages with an expert whip-whip-whip. “Oh yes. Here we are. ‘Hendiadys, noun, a rhetorical device by which two nouns joined by a conjunction, usually and, are used instead of a noun and a modifier, as in to run with fear and haste instead of to run with fearful haste.’ Did you know that?” he asked Jeremy.

  Jeremy looked stunned and shook his head.

  “Neither did I,” admitted Mr Gardner. “But it isn’t a kind of crocodile, is it? Miss Blythe, I fail to see that a rhetorical device by which two nouns et cetera can possibly be any form of insult, quite honestly. I suspect we have a personality clash here. Jethro, take your brother home. You can have the afternoon off. Jeremy, you are suspended from school for half a day while Miss Blythe and I talk this matter over. Off you go.”

  They went, thankfully scooting under Miss Blythe’s purple arm. Before they reached the door, Miss Blythe was slapping her hand down on Mr Gardner’s desk and saying, “I don’t care what that word means, it was intended as an insult! That child is nothing but trouble. I ask them all to say what flower they’re going to be, and what does he say?”

  “I said I’d be Rhus radicans,” Jeremy said when they were outside. “That’s a flower. She made me stand out in front all morning. I don’t like her.”

  “I don’t blame you. She’s a hag,” said Jethro. “What do we tell Mum and Dad?”

  As it happened, they did not have to tell their parents anything. They arrived home to a scene of excitement. A lady called Pippa from Annabelle’s publisher was there with a briefcase stuffed with letters, contracts, forms and maps. It seemed that Hall’s Guides to Witchcraft had become so popular that Pippa was arranging for Annabelle to go on a world tour to covens and magic circles as far away as Australia to promote the latest Guide. She was to go in three weeks’ time, in order to be in New York for a Hallowe’en book-signing, and Pippa was to go with her. Such was the excitement that Jethro nearly forgot to look up Rhus radicans. When he did, he found it was poison ivy. Hm, he thought. Perhaps Jeremy does know what his words mean, after all. He thought it was lucky he had not discovered this before they were hauled in front of Mr Gardner.

  Altogether he felt a fierce mixture of relief and worry: relief that neither of his parents had asked why he and Jeremy were home so early, worry that Jeremy was in bad trouble; relief that something nice had happened for a change, worry because Mum had never been away so far or for so long before; relief that his father was taking the plan on the whole quite well—

  “Of course I can manage,” Graeme was saying, a touch irritably. “I’ve no wish to stand in your way, and Jethro is pretty sensible these days.” This brought on Jethro’s worry again as he realised he would have to look after Dad and Jeremy while Annabelle was away. “But,” Graeme continued, “if we haven’t located this coven before you leave, I can always go on looking by myself. You go and enjoy yourself. Don’t mind me.”

  While Jethro was trying to decide whether this meant he could feel relieved, Annabelle said to him, “Don’t look so worried, love. I’ll be back by Christmas.”

  “Hirsute intropic ampoules,” Jeremy said gloomily.

  Did Jeremy know what this meant? Jethro wondered. Worry came out on top. And there was always Seniors to worry about as well.

  They went back to school next day to discover that Jeremy had been transferred from Miss Blythe’s to the parallel class taught by Mr Anderson. Mr. Anderson was young and jolly. When Jethro had been in Mr Anderson’s class, he remembered, Mr Anderson’s favourite saying had been “Let’s have fun looking this up together, shall we?” He wondered if this would suit Jeremy. Or not.

  Anyway, Jeremy did not complain. Nor, more importantly, did Mr Anderson. Life rolled on quite peacefully for three weeks, until Annabelle departed for the airport in a flurry of schedules, maps and lecture notes. The house felt amazingly quiet and rather sombre almost at once. Jeremy went round saying “Calisthenic ketchup” in a small dire voice and sighing deeply. Both of them missed Annabelle badly.

  Graeme tried to make it up to them. He put in a real effort for a while. He took them to the cinema and the zoo and he provided pizza and ice-cream for every meal until, after a week or so, even Jeremy began to get tired of pizza. “Dad,” Jethro said, worrying about it, “this kind of diet is bad for you. We’ll all be overweight.”

  “Yes, but you know I can’t cook,” Graeme said. “I’m much too busy with this witch hunt to spend time in the kitchen. Bear with me. It’s only till Christmas.”

  “That’s two months, Dad,” Jethro said.

  “Proverbial bouillabaisse,” Jeremy said, and sighed deeply.

  The next day they had a cook. She was a large quiet lady called Mrs Gladd who came silently in while the boys were having breakfast. Graeme seemed as surprised as they were to see her. “I don’t do dishes,” she said, putting on an overall covered with sunflowers. “Or,” she added, tying the belt, “beds or cleaning. You might want to get someone else for that.”

  Mrs Gladd was still there when the two of them came home from school, cooking something at the stove which smelt almost heavenly. The kitchen table was spread with cakes, jam tarts and sticky buns.

  “Herbacious anthracite,” Jeremy said, sniffing deeply. “Hagiography,” he added, nodding appreciatively at the table.

  Mrs Gladd just shrugged. “Eat up,” she said.

  They did so. Everything was superb. It almost made up for the fact that Mrs Gladd was living in and had to have Jethro’s room, while Jethro moved in with Jeremy in the little room down the corridor. Graeme had to break off his witch hunt in order to heave beds about—Jethro spent several uncomfortable nights because his father had somehow twisted Jethro’s duvet inside its cover. It was like sleeping under a knotted sheep. And Jethro didn’t do beds any more than Mrs Gladd did. Even with Jeremy trying to help him he only succeeded in giving the duvet a second twist, so that he now seemed to be sleeping under a rather large python.

  But this was straightened out by the end of that week when Rosie, Josephine and Kate arrived, Rosie to wash up the stacks of plates and pans in the kitchen, and Josephine and Kate to make beds and clean the house. Consequently, when Annabelle phoned from Los Angeles that Sunday, Jethro and Graeme were able to assure her that they were doing splendidly. Jeremy said, “Curdled phlogiston,” which may or may not have meant the same thing.

  On the Monday, however, Josephine and Kate said the work was too heavy for just the two of them and were joined by Gertie, Iris, Delphine, and Doreen. As Jethro and Jeremy left for school, all six ladies were hard at work mopping floors from steaming buckets. Graeme had turned all the computers off and was composing crosswords instead. Jethro spared a worry about how Graeme was going to tell which lady was which. Nearly all of them had blonde hair
dos and smart jeans. Iris, Doreen, and Josephine wore pink sweaters and two of the others had glasses, but they were otherwise hard to tell apart. All were slim and very talkative. The house rang with happy chatter, the clanking of buckets and the drone of vacuum cleaners.

  Jethro could only spare a few seconds for Graeme’s problems, however. This week there were going to be Tests on All Subjects, and if you had bad results, your life was going to be not worth living in Seniors. He was far too nervous to think much about anything else.

  On Tuesday, three terrifying tests later, Jethro came home trying to forget the tests by wondering what cakes and fat buns Mrs Gladd had made today for tea. He found their car out on the drive in a puddle of water, surrounded by three ladies with cloths tied round their heads. Two had large sponges and the third had a hose. They were shrieking with laughter because one of them had just had her shoes hosed by mistake. Jethro thought at first this one was Rosie and that the others were probably Katie and Iris, but when he looked closely, he saw they were three quite new ladies.

  “Perspicuous colonization,” Jeremy remarked to him.

  Jethro took him along to find Graeme. Graeme’s study was knee-deep in sleeping bags. Graeme himself, already noticeably plumper from Mrs Gladd’s cooking, was sitting at a new table in the corner of the kitchen. Crossword patterns and dictionaries were heaped on the table, but Graeme was busy eating a large sticky bun. Someone had provided him with new, wider jeans and a wide bland sweater. He hardly looked like Dad any more.

  “Dad, who are the new ones washing the car?” Jethro asked.

  Graeme smiled, again quite unlike himself. “Two Kylies and a Tracy,” he said. “They do the outside work, garden, wash the windows, all that. Aren’t we lucky?”

  “Troglodytic contralto,” Jeremy said.

  “Yes, but,” Jethro said, eyeing the sheets of half-made crosswords, “can you get on with your witch hunt with all these people about?”