Scilly Seasons

by Chris Tookey

  “I don’t know about a bed,” said Mrs Scraggs, “but there’s a patch of floor over there he can sleep on, if he don’t mind the occasional cockroach.”

  “Excellent!” said Merlin, as though a cockroach-infested patch of floor in Mrs Scraggs’ kitchen was more than any mythic hero-in-the-making might reasonably desire. “You hear that, young man?”

  Wyrd nodded, shivering.

  “When will you tell me who I am, where I come from, and all that?” Wyrd asked Merlin.

  “Leave the matter with me. Do what you can to fit in. I am sure that Mrs Scraggs here will take extra-specially good care of you. I shall return.”

  “When?” asked the boy.

  “When?” repeated Merlin, as if the question had never occurred to him. “Why, in good time.”

  “Will I be safe here?” asked the boy.

  “That depends,” said Merlin, “on whether you venture outside the castle. And whether you make any mortal enemy within it.”

  Merlin waved his wand and uttered an incomprehensible sentence of gibberish.

  “That was a safety spell,” said Merlin, “and it should stay fresh for a while. As long as you stay within the castle walls, you should be perfectly safe.”

  “But how can I become a mythic hero if I never go out?” asked the boy.

  “I didn’t say you had to stay within the castle walls forever,” said Merlin, with a trace of tetchiness. “All I said was that you’ll be safe for as long as you choose to do so.”

  “How do you know?” asked Wenda.

  “Wizards just… know these things,” said Merlin airily.

  “So, what about me?” asked the little girl. “Will I be safe too?”

  “I’m afraid the safety spell was just for him,” said the wizard.

  “Why can’t I be a hero?” asked the girl. “Why does it always have to be boys?”

  “Hush, child!” whispered Mrs Scraggs.

  “There’s nothing to stop you having a try,” said Merlin gravely, “but I’m not convinced that you’re cut out for it.”

  “I’m strong,” said the girl defiantly.

  “I’m sure you are,” said Merlin, “but strength isn’t everything. You’ve said yourself that one of your legs is shorter than the other.”

  “That’s true of him as well,” said Wenda, pointing at Wyrd.

  “True,” said Merlin. “But he’s a boy and you’re a girl.”

  “That’s so unfair,” said Wenda. “I don’t want to live and die in this rotten old castle.”

  “I can assure you that you won’t,” murmured Merlin.

  “Ah!” said the small girl, triumphantly. “So, you can see into the future?”

  The magician exhaled. It was the sigh of someone who hadn’t wished to be drawn into this kind of conversation.

  “Yes,” said Merlin softly, looking into her eyes. “Sometimes I can.”

  “So, what is my fate? What is my wyrd?”

  “Hush, child,” said Mrs Scraggs, “that’s not for you to know.”

  “No, tell me!” persisted the child.

  “You really wish to know?” asked Merlin, who seemed amused rather than indignant at being cross-examined by a child of nine.

  “Yes,” said Wenda.

  Merlin hesitated.

  “By the time you are eighteen,” said Merlin, gravely, “blood and death will stain your bed, and the name of Wenda will pass from history.”

  He looked compassionately at the little girl as her lower lip trembled and she blinked back tears.

  “So… I won’t live to be as old as Mrs Scraggs?” asked the little girl.

  “No,” said Merlin, after a pause. “No, you will not. But then she is more than three hundred years old.”

  With that, Merlin waved his wand, uttered a brief incantation in some wild, foreign tongue (ancient Egyptian, if you really want to know) and vanished. Wenda burst into tears.

  “I told you not to ask,” scolded Mrs Scraggs. “There’s some things it’s better not to know.”

  “What a horrible old man!” wept Wenda.

  “That’s wizards for you,” said Mrs Scraggs, scornfully. “They barge in here and think they own the place. They reckon they can do and say whatever they want.”

  She hobbled over to her bed, picked up a spare blanket and threw it towards Wyrd.

  “Take them wet clothes off and wrap yourself up in that.”

  The boy looked doubtfully across at Wenda, who was still sobbing.

  “Don’t worry about her,” said Mrs Scraggs. “Wenda, go to bed and shut your eyes. He’s shy.”

  “I have seen a willy before,” said Wenda, indignantly.

  “And with any luck you’ll see one again,” Mrs Scraggs cackled. Such sense of humour as she had was of an earthy variety. “But not his. And not now.”

  As the boy undressed, Mrs Scraggs’ attention was caught by something silver and shiny that hung around the human boy’s neck.

  “What’s that?” she said, waddling across towards it.

  “I’m not sure,” said the boy, evasively. “I’ve heard it called a wyrd horn. Merlin gave it to me when I was young.”

  “I thought he said he’d only just met you,” said Wenda.

  “Oh, yes,” said the boy, blushing at being caught out. “Maybe I’m confused. I’m very cold and tired.”

  “Where are you from?” asked Wenda, suspiciously.

  “All that can wait until the morning,” said Mrs Scraggs. She turned to Wyrd.

  “But you’d better give me that horn for safekeeping. If you don’t, someone will only steal it.”

  There was something in her voice that told the boy that this point was not up for negotiation.

  “Where will you keep it?” asked Wyrd.

  “Never you mind,” said Mrs Scraggs. “I’ll keep it somewhere nice and safe.”

  Later that night, when she thought both children were asleep, Mrs Scraggs took the horn from under her pillow. She unscrewed her wooden leg, which was hollow, and put it inside. She looked around furtively and then screwed her leg back on again.

  Wenda, who had been watching through her eyelashes and was only pretending to be asleep, had never seen such an expression on the old woman’s face before. It was fear. But why was Mrs Scraggs so afraid? And what was making her sweat and mutter to herself? Merlin, the strange horn or Wyrd? Wenda was still pondering the question when, at long last, she fell into a deep but troubled sleep.

  6

  A Boy Called Mouse

  In which our hero fails to receive an education

  Five years later, Wyrd could not remember who had first called him Mouse. Prince Artorus, probably. Anyway, the name had stuck.

  And, of course, the name suited him. His hair was a mousy brown. He was small for a fifteen-year-old. And the place where he lived was a dark hole in the wall of an octagonal tower room of grey stone, a hundred feet above the knights’ courtyard, in the huge castle’s north-west corner.

  The tower had been badly damaged by a pirate attack a few years previously, and King Otto had given orders that it remain in a ruinous state, to remind Atlanteans that they were never completely safe from invasion by sea.

  To reach the high and lonely room, Wyrd had to pass under a barrier marked Perilous. Wyrd had been reluctant to pass under the barrier at first, but then he had remembered Merlin’s words to him before they had arrived at the castle: “Somewhere that seems safe may well be unsafe, and somewhere perilous may turn out to be your sanctuary.”

  The boy had slipped under the barrier and climbed a spiral staircase that seemed to go on forever. He passed other tower rooms that were blocked or barred, until he reached the topmost chamber. It was draughty, and insects scurried away from him as he entered the room, but immediately he knew this was a place he could use
as his shelter.

  He made himself his very own mouse hole. To reach it, he had to crawl beneath a crumbling stone arch, which Wyrd presumed had once been a mantelpiece. He was small enough to fit inside. Just as his mother had looked up at him in the last moments of her life, he peered up the old, derelict chimney and stared at the stars.

  If ever it had been a fireplace, no one used it as that any more. Wood fires were for the smarter parts of the castle, not where Wyrd lived, high in its least hospitable corner. Wyrd’s hole in the wall was freezing cold in winter. Snow often fell on him during the night. Still, during the summer it wasn’t too bad.

  Wyrd felt safest in his room, but even here there were reminders of danger. There were two windows, both with spectacular views.

  Looking out of his window to the north-west he saw the constantly changing colours of the ocean and sky, the attempts of men to dominate the horizon with their boats of different shapes and sizes as they came and went to Castle Otto or sailed straight past, and an intriguingly unpredictable view of small islands.

  At first, Wyrd had rubbed his eyes when certain islands came and went, with no reference to the tides. But gradually he’d realised the truth. Some of them really were islands – they were the ones that didn’t move – but others were sea serpents, basking offshore and lying in wait to drag unwary ships below the waves. When that happened and the wind was from the north or west, Wyrd could make out the cries and splashes of the mariners as they dived into the sea in vain attempts to escape a serpent’s maw. As far as Wyrd could tell, not one ever made it to land.

  The first few times he saw a ship and its crew broken and consumed, he’d felt shocked for days afterwards. But after a dozen or more such events, he’d developed a grudging respect, even an admiration, for the monstrous predators. The sea serpents were perfectly attuned to their offshore habitat. They seemed able to wreck and consume an entire boat, its crew and cargo within a minute or two. Still, the sight of the voracious monsters in action made him extremely wary of ever venturing out to sea.

  Rather than explore the dangerous world outside, which Merlin had assured him might prove a deadly mistake, he contented himself with investigating more of the castle. When he had first glimpsed the castle in the night, it had looked like a huge, square city with four octagonal towers at each corner.

  But the more he walked around it, he discovered that really Castle Otto was four castles in one.

  Wyrd’s own humble habitat lay in the far north-west corner of the castle’s north-western section, the military headquarters, where King Otto’s knights lived, slept and kept their horses. The second window on the south-east side of his room overlooked the knights’ courtyard.

  From high in the ruined tower, he could watch as horses were exercised below, and admire the knights as they learned to fight and joust. He could always tell which knights were the best, for others flocked to watch them in combat.

  The tallest and handsomest knight of them all, Sir Tancred, recognisable even from above by his shock of blond hair, attracted crowds whenever he chose to do battle. Wyrd noticed that other knights sometimes had to be pushed into single combat with him, and they invariably lost.

  Watching from above, Wyrd envied the young knights who lived in the castle and strode around it with the confidence of young men in their prime.

  Wyrd was fifteen, but his body was thin, scrawny, unco-ordinated, and he still had a limp. He certainly wasn’t handsome like Sir Tancred, the most impossibly good-looking of all the knights. He was brown-skinned, golden-haired and extremely conscious of his own physique. Wyrd saw the maidens of the castle swoon whenever Sir Tancred passed by, in or out of his armour. Wyrd wondered if, one day, he too might become a knight like that. But then some casual rebuke from a passer-by, or a painful buffet from a knight bumping into him as if he wasn’t there, persuaded him that he never would.

  As a refugee from the south-eastern corner of the castle, where the kitchens were, Wyrd knew that he wasn’t meant to be living in the military part of the castle to the north-west. He learned that the best way to avoid trouble was to scuttle round the edges of rooms during the day. The only times he would dare to venture out into the centre of the great chambers were when others were asleep. Then he could do his cleaning chores.

  Even during the day, he often crept about with a pail of water and a scrubbing brush, to give the impression that he was working.

  The trouble was that in the daytime the castle was always busy, especially the military corner. People would fall over him as he dusted, or swear at him when they knocked over a pail of dirty water as he was on his hands and knees, scrubbing.

  “Damn you, boy! Can’t you look where you’re going?” snorted Sir Tancred, as he collided one day with Wyrd and sent his bucket clanking across the floor.

  Wyrd wondered for a moment whether to point out that it was Sir Tancred who hadn’t been looking where he was going. The knight had been a little too preoccupied with looking at his own face in the shield he was carrying. Wyrd wisely decided against it.

  “Sorry, sir, it won’t happen again,” he murmured.

  “It had better not,” grumbled Sir Tancred. “I don’t know where they find the staff these days. Ha!”

  This attempt at a witticism was greeted with spasms of laughter, for he rarely went anywhere without a gaggle of female admirers close behind him, giggling.

  Sir Tancred’s observation was repeated among the young women for whom he could do no wrong. Wyrd cringed into the shadows as they walked by, wishing he could disappear or – better still – return to guarding sheep in deepest Dumnonia.

  Even after five years, he occasionally felt homesick for everyone in his old village, most of all his parents (or whoever they’d been) and their modest, homely hut. He missed the smoke of their friendly hearth, the taste of his mother’s cooking, even the pagan oaths of his father, invoking gods of whom Wyrd knew nothing and cared even less. Most of all, Wyrd missed their unthinking kindness. There was no one here who cared much if he lived or died, except perhaps Wenda.

  Sometimes, he woke up in the night to find that he had been crying in his sleep. He was glad there was no one to see it. Then again, it would have been more reassuring if there had been someone like his mother to hold him in her arms and tell him that everything was all right. But his mother was dead. And everything was not all right.

  One morning, he saw Wenda looking at him in a strange way.

  “Have you been crying?” she asked.

  “Me? No,” said Wyrd.

  “Cos there’s a white line running down your cheek,” said Wenda.

  “What kind of a line?”

  “A crooked one,” said Wenda. “And it shows how dirty the rest of your face is.”

  “Sorry,” said Wyrd.

  “You don’t have to apologise to me,” said Wenda. “Why don’t you learn to stick up for yourself?”

  “I’m not sure I’m in a position to do that,” said Wyrd. “I mean, I am the lowest of the low.”

  “That’s true,” said Wenda. “But it’s all right to cry.”

  “No, it isn’t,” said Wyrd, remembering the stern view his father had had of children who wept. “Anyway, what have I got to cry about?”

  “Quite a bit, I should have said,” replied Wenda. “After all, bugbears did kill your mum and dad.”

  “Ssh!” said Wyrd. “People aren’t supposed to know that.”

  “I can’t think why not,” said Wenda.

  “Merlin told me not to talk about all that.”

  “A fat lot of good Merlin’s been to you,” said Wenda.

  “He rescued me from the bugbears. Or rather Drains did.”

  “Drains?”

  “His dwarf,” said Wyrd.

  “Whatever,” said Wenda, “And then he brought you here, where – as you say – you’re the lowest of the low.” />
  “At least I’m safe,” said Wyrd.

  “I wouldn’t be too sure of that,” said Wenda. “There’s talk of battles and wars coming this way.”

  “I don’t know about things like that,” said Wyrd.

  “Maybe you should,” said Wenda. “Especially if you’re going to be an epic hero.”

  “I don’t think I’m any kind of hero,” said Wyrd, miserably.

  “You need to cheer up,” said Wenda, “even if bugbears did murder your parents.”

  “Ssh! Anyway,” said Wyrd, with a lightness of tone that he didn’t really feel, “that was ages ago.”

  “My mother was killed ages ago,” said Wenda, “but I still miss her. Don’t you miss your parents?”

  “Of course,” said Wyrd. “And I miss my dog.”

  “You had a dog?”

  “Called Rulf.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “The bugbears killed him too,” said Wyrd. “I dreamed about him last night.”

  “So, that’s why you were crying,” said Wenda.

  “I wasn’t crying,” said Wyrd. “Well, not much. I probably had something in my eye.”

  “Like a tear,” said Wenda.

  “Ha ha,” said Wyrd.

  “Look, Wyrd,” said Wenda, “I know you don’t have many friends.”

  “Any friends,” Wyrd corrected her.

  “Okay, any friends,” said Wenda. “But if you want someone to talk to, you know, I’m around.”

  “That’s…” Wyrd tried to stop a lump coming into his throat. “That’s really kind of you.”

  “And if you don’t want to talk to me,” said Wenda, “there’s always Mrs Scraggs.”

  “I think I’d rather talk to you,” said Wyrd. “If it’s all the same to you.”

  Wenda studied him closely.

  “You’re crying again,” she said.

  “I know,” admitted Wyrd. “I’m sorry.”

  Wenda gave him a hug.

  “Don’t be,” she said. “Just try to be a bit braver, okay?”

  “Okay,” said Wyrd. “I’ll try.”