Hercufleas

by Sam Gayton

  ‘Whose ending do you believe?’ Hercufleas asked.

  Greta gave a short bitter laugh. ‘I don’t believe in anything.’

  Gradually the landscape changed. The lifeless Sorrows disappeared. Beyond them, the everpines grew more sparse, until the woodn’t became a featureless grey tundra. There were still brambleberries for Artifax to eat, but they were black and sour. Greta dug up particular roots, mashing them into a bitter paste for her supper, but then the trees changed and she no longer knew which ones were safe to eat.

  They were too far from home.

  Every evening Greta pricked her finger with a pin, squeezing a drop of blood into a thimble for Hercufleas to drink. It tasted more bitter each time. He felt miserable for hours afterwards. He tried drinking Artifax’s blood instead, but the morning after he woke up squatting on the ground trying to lay an egg, so he stopped.

  It grew bitterly cold. In the mornings Greta’s blanket and scarf were stiff with ice and Artifax’s feathers glittered with tiny diamonds of frost. Hercufleas woke so frozen he couldn’t move. Greta had to cup him in her hands and blow steaming breath, like a tiny sauna, until his limbs softened.

  The deeper they went into the Waste, the less Greta spoke. Silence layered over her, like ice. A scowl froze solid on her face and wouldn’t thaw.

  Hercufleas talked endlessly, trying to break through to her. She just buried her chin in her scarf and ignored him, as he chattered about his fleamily and life before the adventure. It was hard, because that had only been one day, so he kept running out of memories. But thinking back to when he was an egg, he remembered all the sounds that had passed through his shell.

  He remembered hearing Burp and Slurp sneak down to the pantry for midnight feasts. And Tittle, who liked to sing, but would only do it under the kitchen table when she thought no one was listening. Or Dot, who used to talk to him endlessly, trying to convince him that he should hatch out as a girl, not a boy.

  He missed them all. Just talking about the tall stacks of blood in the pantry or remembering the boingy-boing room seemed to make him feel warmer.

  But nothing could melt Greta. Hour after hour, she grew colder. Artifax was suffering too. Since entering the Waste, his feathers had faded from white to grey. Not even bits of sugarstick could cheer him now. He was so weak, they were barely plodding along.

  Three days from Tumber, they saw a black castle in the distance.

  ‘That’s not it,’ said Hercufleas. Miss Witz had told them the Czar’s fortress was star-shaped – the castle ahead of them was a square jumble of turrets.

  But Greta’s whoop echoed around the bleak hills, and she spurred Artifax into a gallop. ‘Shelter!’ she cried, her silence cracking at last. ‘Fires! Food! Maybe even a hot bath!’

  But the black castle was a deserted ruin. There were signs of a great battle, years past, but only vines scaled the walls now, toppling them one by one.

  ‘Hello?’ called Greta. ‘Anyone?’

  A rusty gate screeched as the wind blew it open and shut, open and shut. Entering the keep, they saw the murder-holes above their heads. This was one of the Czar’s old castles, where he stationed his armies, or perhaps imprisoned his enemies.

  ‘We can still shelter here,’ said Hercufleas. ‘Keep out of the wind.’

  But something about the place scared Artifax. Cold and shivering as he was, he wouldn’t stay inside the keep. Greta said nothing, but that night Hercufleas tasted something fresh and black in her blood. It was despair, and it filled him too.

  They began to pass more ruined castles – barbicans and kremlins and ostrogs. This was the frozen heart of Petrossia, once the centre of the Czar’s empire.

  They were so close.

  That night, out in the Waste, was the coldest yet. They huddled together – Hercufleas in Greta’s hands, and Greta under Artifax’s wing – while the boreal winds howled around them like wolves, gnawing at their bones. Above, the aurora shifted from emerald to violet to colours that have no name and cannot be seen. But neither Greta nor Hercufleas craned their heads skyward to watch, for nothing can be beautiful to those with despair in their heart.

  Next morning, drifting in the wind like ghosts, they came upon a frozen lake. It stretched in front of them like a quarry of blue marble. Greta edged Artifax across it, testing the ice with each step.

  ‘This isn’t like the Sorrows,’ she whispered. ‘Something actually lives in here. The nomads that follow the reindeer herds across the Waste must stop here – look.’

  She pointed. There were old fishing holes in the ice.

  ‘We have to catch something,’ she trembled, stiff fingers unravelling a long ball of twine from her pocket. ‘Artifax won’t survive another night on berries and roots. Not when it’s this cold.’

  Hercufleas looked at the poor bird, and saw it was true. Artifax had grown shiveringly thin, with frost dripping from his beak. Prince Xin had bred him for beauty and speed, not for weather like this.

  ‘There’s just one problem though,’ said Greta.

  ‘What?’

  ‘We need bait.’

  Why was she staring at him?

  ‘Oh no!’ He jumped backwards, waving his hands. ‘Me? Not me! Why me?’

  ‘Because you’re a fat, tasty bug,’ Greta said, grinning for the first time in ages. ‘Relax. I’ll tie you to the line, yank out any fish that bites, and cut you from its belly in a flash.’

  She actually wanted him to get swallowed whole? ‘No. No way.’ He pointed at her satchel. ‘Use a tinderfly!’

  ‘I won’t.’ Her grin dropped off her face like an icicle. ‘They’re precious.’ She scowled.

  ‘I’m precious!’

  ‘I only have five of them left.’

  ‘You only have one of me! I’m the hero!’

  ‘Prove it.’ She laid a hand on Artifax, who gave a miserable cluck and buried his head under his wing. ‘Do something heroic, something that tells me all this cold and hunger is worth it.’

  She stomped off to sharpen her axe, leaving Hercufleas staring down at the dark hole in the ice. He gulped. What might swim down there? How sharp were its teeth? He pushed the thoughts from his head. Greta was right. If he couldn’t face a fish, how would he fight Yuk?

  Hopping over to the twine, he looped it around his waist, double-treble-super-tight.

  ‘Go on then,’ he called. ‘Let’s go fishing.’

  Greta took up the line. She dangled him above the ice hole. ‘Take a deep breath,’ she said. ‘Give three tugs when you want to come up.’

  Hercufleas nodded as she lowered him down. There was a snapping sound (like when you break a biscuit in two) as he split the thin rime of ice covering the hole. Then a sploshing sound (like when you dunk a biscuit into a mug of tea) as he fell into the black depths of the lake.

  23

  It was like plunging into an alchemist’s cauldron and slowly turning to lead. There was a flash of unspeakable cold, then Hercufleas went numb. The freezing water turned his arms and legs into dead weights. His eyes were heavy but he forced them open. Bubbles escaped his lips as his jaw dropped.

  Above his head, the ice was a glowing, crystal sky. Greta’s feet were two dark smudges, like angry clouds. On either side the water stretched away to a dark blue blur, with shafts of light coming down from the other ice holes. It was still and beautiful and utterly lifeless. No fish anywhere. Perhaps this place was like the Sorrows after all.

  Hercufleas reached to tug the line so Greta could hoist him up. They’d have to find food somewhere else.

  Then something moved. He didn’t see it, just felt it. The water rippled beneath him, sending him bobbing on the line. Hercufleas glanced down into the void below. Nothing but endless black. Unease stirred in his stomach. How deep was this lake? What slithered and wriggled under his feet, out of sight?

  He bobbed again. Now he saw the dark water shifting. A long shape was swimming up from the depths. It was big. Really big. This was a bad idea. A very, very bad idea
. What if this fish liked to chew its food before it swallowed? What if it was too strong for Greta? What if it yanked too hard and the line broke?

  Bubbles flurried past him. Panic took hold. Hercufleas grasped the thread and tugged it three times. Greta yanked him out the lake. He dangled above the hole, sodden and spluttering and shivering, forcing his numb lips to speak.

  ‘F-f-f-f-f-f-f.’

  ‘What’s the matter?’ she said. ‘Out of breath? Anything down there?’

  ‘F-f-f-f-f-fi. F-f-f-f-fish.’

  Then the fish burst up from the ice hole, snapped its jaws around Hercufleas and swallowed him whole. In a whirl of slime and spit he slooshed down its throat. Halfway down, he jerked to a stop, dangling from the thread. His lifeline. Taut as a piano wire.

  Don’t break, he prayed. Please don’t break. As long as the line held, Greta could pull him out.

  Then the fish bit down on the twine and it snapped. Hercufleas fell with a splash into its belly.

  He reeked of fish guts for hours afterwards.

  ‘How about I dunk you in the lake again?’ Greta offered. ‘That’ll wash the stink off.’

  Hercufleas scowled, shuffling closer to the fire. An enormous fish steak was sizzling slowly on the embers, skin crisp and black. Artifax sat beside the fish’s skeleton, belly plump, clucking contentedly in his sleep. Hercufleas looked at the remains again. Compared to him, the fish was the size of a whale.

  ‘Lucky,’ Greta said again, staring at the skeleton. ‘It jumped out of the hole after you and landed straight on the ice, bouncing and flipping and snapping its jaws. Artifax leaped on it. Just think – if I hadn’t pulled you up when I had, you’d probably still be in its belly.’

  She chuckled. Hercufleas said nothing. He stared, shivering, into the flames.

  ‘Know something?’ said Greta, cramming flakes of charred fish into her mouth. ‘It wasn’t just luck. You were pretty heroic too.’

  Hercufleas didn’t feel heroic, although he couldn’t deny that something had changed. Later on, when he began muttering about his fleamily – trying to stop his teeth chattering – Greta actually listened. He told her the story of when Burp drank too much bat blood and spent the next week hanging upside down in the chimney, and she even laughed.

  What had changed in her? Sipping her blood that night, he figured it out. Underneath the bitterness was a hint of something sweet, like caramel.

  Greta had begun to believe in him again.

  Darkness fell quickly, but before the winds came howling down from the north, Greta rubbed Artifax’s feathers with the fish’s fat. The blubber was white and gloopy and smelled awful, but it kept the wind out and the heat in. They slept that night on the frozen lake, snug as seals.

  ‘Hercufleas, look!’

  He woke in the darkness and crawled from her pocket, rubbing his eyes. From underneath Artifax’s wing, Greta gazed up at the sky. Stars were falling upon the Waste. Bright and glittering, in their hundreds.

  ‘Shooting stars,’ Greta whispered. ‘Mama said they each bring a new hope to Earth. If you see one fall, you have to name it quick. Then that hope becomes yours to keep.’

  Hercufleas pointed. ‘That star there,’ he said, ‘hopes I never have to be fish bait ever again.’

  Greta grinned. ‘That star there hopes you stop stinking of guts.’

  ‘That star is going to be disappointed. I’m going to torment your nose until we find the Czar’s fortress.’

  She laughed. ‘Well, that star there, then? It hopes we find the fortress tomorrow. Then you can drink the Black Death and we can go home.’

  Hercufleas stopped smiling. ‘Greta,’ he whispered, ‘what does the Black Death do?’

  She looked down at him, a puzzled looked on her face. ‘It kills. Whatever it infects, which is whatever you bite. Thought you knew that.’

  He nodded. ‘I do, I do.’

  They watched the sky together.

  ‘If this was an adventure in a story, we’d be the heroes, wouldn’t we?’ Hercufleas whispered. ‘And Yuk would be the monster?’

  Greta nodded fiercely. ‘Of course!’

  ‘I thought so.’ He sighed. ‘In a story, the ones using the Black Death would be the monsters.’

  Greta plucked him up in her hand and held him close. Her odd-coloured eyes shone with starlight.

  ‘Yuk’s the one that kills,’ she told him. ‘Yuk. Not us. It’s all because of him…’

  She trailed off. Hercufleas waited. He saw her unpacking the grief from her heart, all the sorrow and hurt, arranging it into a story. Something she could bear to tell.

  There, beneath a sky of falling hopes, she told him of her parents.

  24

  They lived in a cottage where the town met the woodn’t. Coming home from school in the evening, Greta could always hear the whack-whack-whack of Mama’s axe on the stump. Like their home had its own heartbeat.

  They had a donkey called Kopotikop, a goat called Potch and a dog called Wuff. Every day he ran to Greta when she rounded the corner with her school book and satchel. Mama would be splitting kindling for the fire, her hair tied back with a scarf. Papa would be inside by the stove, making pies with plumpkin and cheese curdled from Potch’s milk.

  Greta’s job was to make the tea.

  The delicacy of Tumber is nettle tea, which other towns cannot drink because of its bitterness. But Tumber is the Town of Tears, and the folk there add a teaspoon of tears of laughter to the pot, and stir, turning the tea sweet.

  While Papa cooked and Mama chopped, they told Greta silly stories. Some were tales everyone in Petrossia knew, like ‘The Invention of Snow’, or ‘Why the Green Giants Sleep’. Others were known only by them, like ‘The Rattlesnoak called Natalya’.

  Greta listened, holding the teaspoon up to catch her happy tears, and before long she had enough to tip in with the nettles and water.

  Like everyone, they argued and bickered and infuriated each other from time to time. That is the thing about families. Like snowflakes, they are each entirely different and yet all exactly the same, and though they are innumerable upon the Earth, the loss of each one is a sorrow.

  After tea one night, Mama helped Greta tie a tinderfly to a sugarstick and they all took Wuff on a walk. The air was a cold glaucous blue, thick with the smoky smell of the town. A cinderwikk man stood on stilts, filling the street lamps with caramel and tinderflies. One flew free before he could shut the lid. Wuff and Greta chased the buzzing spark all the way to the river, over Two Tears, right to the edge of the woodn’t. There Greta stopped, but Wuff ran into the trees.

  ‘Wuff! Wuff, come back, you’re not supposed to go in there!’

  ‘That dog,’ Mama said, shaking her head. She ruffled Greta’s hair. ‘Good girl for not following him in though.’

  She stomped off to fetch him, while Papa took Greta’s hand and led her a few steps in, to show her it was safe.

  ‘See that everpine there?’ He pointed. ‘Only cut their branches, never their trunk. Evers are gentle trees. They’ve been here since the green giants planted the first forests on the Waste and turned Petrossia into a garden.’

  ‘Wuff!’ Mama called. ‘Here, boy! Time to go!’

  Greta’s eyes went wide. ‘Just like in the story?’

  Papa nodded. ‘Just like in “Why the Green Giants Sleep”. It’s a true story, that. The oldest, truest story in all Petrossia.’

  ‘Wuff! Wuuuuuff! Come on!’

  ‘And that nasty thing there?’ said Papa, reaching forward. ‘That’s a needler shrub. Pull it out, like this, before it grows too big and starts shooting its needles at the poor birds.’

  ‘Wuff!’

  ‘Papa?’ Greta asked. ‘Where’s Wuff gone?’

  Papa looked up and peered into the woodn’t. Then he looked up at Mama, and his expression changed. All the warmth went out of it.

  ‘What is it, Papa? Has Wuff got lost?’

  He didn’t answer. Suddenly his axe was in his hand.

&n
bsp; ‘Black bear?’ Greta heard him whisper.

  ‘No,’ Mama whispered back. ‘Bigger.’

  ‘You haven’t got your axe. We should run.’

  ‘Too late. It’s already seen us.’

  Greta didn’t know what they were scared of. But Papa – who’d carved Mama’s name into a rattlesnoak – was trembling. That terrified her.

  ‘Go home, Greta,’ Mama said.

  She folded her arms stubbornly. ‘I want Wuff.’

  ‘We’ll find him,’ said Papa. His voice was soft, like whenever Greta scraped her knee and he pretended it was nothing. ‘Go home and make a nice pot of nettle tea, and we’ll be back in a bit to drink it. With Wuff.’

  ‘Wuff!’ Greta called into the woodn’t.

  Mama whirled around, eyes blazing, and shoved Greta away. ‘Do what your father says. RUN!’

  And Greta ran. Across the river, up the street, beneath the moonless sky. Past Kopotikop and Potch, back into the cottage. She sat weeping into a pot of nettle tea like Papa had told her, her frightened tears turning it sour as vinegar.

  It didn’t matter. Her parents never came back to drink it.

  There was a search. The cossacks gave their huskies the scent of Mama’s scarf, but the dogs just stayed at the edge of the woodn’t, barking at the trail of broken trees that led away from the town. That’s when the hunters found the footprints in the soft mud by the river. Footprints a dozen people could lay down in.

  That was the first guzzling.

  A month later, when the moon was new and the night was darkest, the giant returned to Tumber and ripped the roofs from a whole street of houses. Mayor Klare called a meeting. All the Tumberfolk came. The cossacks wanted to take up arms and go hunt the monster. The cinderwikk men wanted to burn the whole woodn’t to the ground. Mrs Lorrenz suggested they all move to Laplönd. But Mayor Klare argued that Tumber could not save itself. Only a hero could protect it.

  That night he left for Avalon with the first of the florins.

  When someone tells you a story like that, everything changes. At the same time, it stays the same. Greta’s heart was still full of hurt. Sorrow she couldn’t let go of, and wouldn’t forgive. But now Hercufleas knew why. He understood her scowls and tears. Why she cradled the axe with the rattlesnoak handle. Why she hated being abandoned.