by Dan Davis
‘That would be amazing,’ said Keeper.
‘It would be,’ said Archer. ‘But it’d also be very bad for our health.’
‘Oh,’ said Keeper.
‘Well, we have to do something,’ said Weaver. ‘Or we might keep flying for ever.’
‘We have to come down eventually,’ said Archer, and he hoped he was right.
‘Hey, look,’ said Keeper, who was peering down over the edge of the basket. ‘There’s a man right below us. He’s looking up.’
They all turned and looked down at the ground far below. They had drifted even further across and down the Vale. Archer could see a tiny man, far, far below them, about as big as an ant. Archer could just see that he had taken off his straw hat and had his face turned up at them. Perhaps he had his mouth wide open. Archer was sure the man scratched his head.
‘Help!’ shouted Keeper, making them all jump. ‘Help us!
‘He cannot hear you,’ said Writer. ‘He is too far away.’
‘And how is he supposed to help us from all the way down there?’ asked Archer. ‘What could he possibly do, even if he wanted to help?’
‘Look,’ Keeper said to him, ‘That’s the village of Polstead, isn’t it? I live a half a day upriver with my grandma and grandpa. He might know them, mightn’t he?’ Keeper lent over the edge of the basket again. ‘You. Old man,’ Keeper shouted. ‘Go to Cobnut Forge and tell my grandma I’m fine. And tell grandpa I did make friends with a dragon after all, so he owes me a penny.’
‘Only a baby dragon,’ muttered Weaver.
‘Only a baby dragon!’ shouted Keeper. ‘But the bet stands.’
The man, all the way down there below them slowly wave his straw hat up at them as the balloon floated past him and carried on down the Vale by the wind.
‘He heard me,’ said Keeper, grinning from ear to ear. ‘He definitely heard me.’
‘I hope so,’ said Archer, knowing it couldn’t possibly be true, that they were just too far away, too high up and that the wind would have blown Keeper’s words away. ‘But we still aren’t getting any lower.’
He turned to look at them all. ‘And we’re heading north across the Vale. We are heading for the hills. We’re almost right above them, look. And if we don’t hit them then we will be outside of the Vale altogether. We will be over the Moon Forest, flying above all those trees. And heading right into that storm.’
They all stared at the dark horizon beyond the hills and over the deep green of the Moon Forest. The sky there was a dark mass of heavy storm clouds in a ring around the entire Vale.
The clouds were a purple so dark it was almost black. There was a flash of lightning inside those clouds.
‘Are we moving faster now?’ Weaver asked.
‘The wind is getting stronger,’ said Archer. ‘We’re getting blown north out of the Vale. We’re going towards that storm faster and faster. We have to get the balloon down now or we’ll be worse off than when we were locked in the Tower.’
They all looked at him as if he was mad to suggest that anything could be worse than being a prisoner.
‘Well,’ he said. ‘What do you think it would feel like to be in this balloon in the middle of a thunderstorm?’
Wind Blown
‘Oh, no,’ said Keeper. ‘We don’t want to do that, do we Burp?’
‘What are we going to do?’ asked Weaver.
Archer did not know. None of them knew. They just stared at the hills and the Moon Forest and the distant storm that grew larger and closer every moment.
‘I have always wanted to travel beyond the Vale,’ said Writer.
‘What is outside?’ Archer said to her. ‘I never really thought about it too closely before. I know there must be other places but no one ever talks about them, do they. All I know is the Vale is surrounded on all sides by the Moon Forest and beyond that is…’ he tailed off.
Weaver shrugged. ‘Nothing good, probably,’ she said.
‘Perhaps the Moon Forest goes on for ever?’ Keeper said. ‘In all directions.’
‘Surely there has to be an end to it,’ said Archer, peering into the growing darkness.
‘Not necessarily,’ Keeper said. ‘It might be trees all the way round.’
‘Of course there’s a whole world out there,’ Writer said.
Archer looked up at her face beside him. Her blue eyes had a faraway look.
‘The Alchemist had books that spoke of peoples and places I had never heard of. There’s somewhere called England near here.’
‘Never heard of it,’ said Weaver.
‘Is it a village?’ asked Archer.
‘More of a place like the Vale,’ Writer said. ‘Only it is extremely large and there are lots of people that live there. And there are places called Wales and China and Scotland . And Ireland and France. And Greece and Rome and a place known as the New World and somewhere very special indeed called The Far East.’
‘The far east?’ Archer peered off in that direction. ‘What, like Morningtree?’
‘Further,’ Writer said. ‘I think.’
‘There is nothing further than Morningtree, it’s just water,’ Archer said. ‘The Sweetwater turns so wide you can barely see either bank. Then it keeps going until you can see no land at all.’
‘Can you imagine travelling over that water to faraway lands?’ Writer said. ‘Just rowing away over the seas for days and days with nothing but water everywhere you look?’
‘Wouldn’t get me in a boat,’ said Weaver. ‘I just want to keep my feet on the ground, please.’ She looked over the edge of the basket. ‘On the good earth.’
‘Why do you want to leave the Vale?’ Archer asked Writer. ‘Where do you want to go to?’
‘I don’t know,’ Writer said. ‘But I want to go to there. Anywhere, really. There is so much to learn.’
‘No one has ever got out of the Vale,’ said Archer, shaking his head.
‘I bet Burp has,’ said Keeper, smiling. They all looked at Burp, curled quietly at their feet in the middle of the basket. He hissed.
‘Why do you bet that?’ asked Archer.
‘Well, how many dragons have any of you seen in the Vale?’ Keeper said. They all shrugged. ‘Exactly. So that means that Burp must come from outside the Vale.’ He smiled wider, very pleased with himself. As he had every right to be, in Archer’s opinion.
‘Look, Archer,’ said Weaver, irritated. ‘You got us into this device. Now get us out of it.’
Archer thought for a moment. ‘Let’s all see what we have that we might be able to use,’ he said to them. ‘What do we have in the balloon with us?’
They all looked around at the things they had brought with them, stuffed into the bottom of the basket under their feet.
‘Not a lot,’ said Weaver.
There was Archer’s long length of rope and the half-empty or empty sacks of cabbages tied to the outside for Burp food. There was a small pile of Burp’s iron droppings that Keeper had shoved into one corner.
‘Nothing helpful,’ said Writer.
‘What’s in your pockets? Or about your person?’ asked Archer. ‘I have my bow and my arrows.’
‘I have the Alchemist’s spell book,’ said Writer. ‘Which is useless until I learn what the spells do.’
‘I have a ball of string, some bits of old bread, a flint, my dad’s pocket knife, a bent old nail, a tin cup, and a wall mushroom,’ said Keeper.
‘I haven’t got anything,’ said Weaver. ‘Nothing good, anyway.’
‘Why on earth have you got so much in your pockets, Keeper?’ asked Writer.
‘I don’t know, I just like collecting things,’ Keeper said, shrugging.
‘What’s a wall mushroom?’ asked Archer. ‘I’ve never heard of that type before.’
‘It was a mushroom I found growing out of the wall next to the Alchemist’s bed,’ Keeper said, showing them a wide, flat, grey mushroom now rather squished. ‘I thought it might be nice to eat if we ever got some toast to go
with it.’
‘Toast?’ Weaver shook her head. ‘The things you come out with.’
‘And we’ve all got our eating knives, haven’t we,’ said Writer. She had hers in her hand.
‘Mine needs sharpening,’ Keeper said, pushing the point of his into his palm to demonstrate the bluntness.
Archer made sure he kept his pocketknife sharp at all times. You needed a sharp knife for making arrows. A blunt knife is much more dangerous than a sharp one. You have to push harder against the wood you are working and you are more likely to slip and cut yourself.
He did not say anything to Keeper because he did not want to be a know-it-all.
‘I don’t know if any of these things can help us,’ Writer said. ‘Is there anything at all we can do to go down to the ground faster?’
She shivered in the cold wind and hugged her arms around herself. It was getting colder every moment.
Archer peered up through the mouth of the balloon.
‘It is hot air inside the balloon that makes it go up,’ Archer said. ‘We have to make the air colder.’
‘How do we do that?’ asked Weaver.
No one knew.
‘We could make it heavier?’ said Keeper. ‘If it was heavier it would go down faster.’
‘How would we make it heavier?’ asked Archer. He could not imagine how that could be possible. On the other hand, he had just met a dragon and then seen an Alchemist turned into a giant wicker basket so he was willing to keep an open mind.
‘We’ll need to get something heavier into the balloon?’ Keeper suggested.
‘Such as?’ said Weaver.
‘My grandma’s got a big iron cooking pot that even my grandpa can’t lift up, these days,’ Keeper said. ‘That would definitely work.’
‘It probably would,’ Archer nodded. ‘How do we get it in the balloon, though?’
‘Oh,’ said Keeper. ‘Sorry.’
‘Typical,’ said Weaver, shaking her head.
Archer stood on his toes and peered out and down at the hills far below.
The north Vale hills were quite high. But the balloon was higher still. The grass was a bright green in the sunshine right. Ahead, in the direction the balloon was blowing, was the dark, deep green of the ancient trees of the Moon Forest.
To the west, the sun was getting lower in the sky and casting long shadows from the scattered trees and hedgerows. The trees at the edge of the forest below were quickly getting thicker and closer together.
What drew his eye and worried him the most was the horizon ahead of them darkened with purple-black storm clouds. It was obvious that out across the woodland, rain was falling.
A lot of rain. Lightning flashed in the clouds. A long while later the rumble of thunder reached him.
‘We’re nearly over the Moon Forest now,’ he said.
Everyone leaned over the side. The basket swayed and creaked under their feet. The wind grew stronger all the time and the dark clouds boiled up out of the distant horizon. Even though the wind was blowing toward the storm, Archer could smell the rain now.
It was a really big storm.
‘We’re not going to be able to fly over all of that forest before we smash into the trees, are we?’ said Keeper.
‘I would rather not smash into the Moon Forest,’ Writer said.
‘I’d rather not smash into anything,’ Weaver said.
‘I don’t think we have a choice,’ said Archer. ‘That’s the way the wind is blowing us, so that’s the way we are going. All we can control is how high we go.’
‘Why would the wind blow toward a storm?’ Writer asked. ‘I thought the wind comes from the storm blowing outwards.’
Archer had spent half his life up in the hills and out in the open and he knew from experience that that was not necessarily the case.
‘Not always,’ said Archer, looking round the purple-grey horizon to the side and behind them. ‘And not now. Besides, the storm is all around us, isn’t it. We’re simply closest to the north part of it.’
‘We are getting lower,’ Weaver said. ‘Look, the ground is closer to us, isn’t it?’
‘She’s right,’ said Keeper.
Archer looked up the balloon above them. Was it his imagination or was the bag less puffed up than it was before.
‘The air in the bag is getting colder,’ he said.
They all watched as the trees below came nearer and nearer and rushed underneath them. Some of the trees were huge, ancient old oak and beech and elm rearing up out of the sea of trees, like big boulders poking from the surface of the Sweetwater.
Some ways off but directly ahead was the biggest beech tree Archer had ever seen.
They were blowing right towards it. The wind grew stronger every moment and they blowing faster and faster. Directly towards the crown of that enormous ancient beech.
‘I think we’re going to crash into that tree,’ Archer said, pointing at it.
Everyone was staring at it already.
‘No, I take that back,’ Archer glanced round at them. ‘We are definitely going to crash into that tree.’
Crashing
‘Quickly, Keeper, give Burp some more cabbages,’ said Writer. ‘We must to go higher again.’
‘No,’ Archer said, having to raise his voice over the wind. ‘If we go up over the tree then we’re just going to get blown into that storm.’
Lightning flashed beyond the tree, inside the black clouds.
‘And we’d be torn to pieces in that. We’d fall to the ground from an even greater height.’
Their basket buffeted in the turbulent winds, shaking and knocking them about against each other. The noise of the wind grew ever louder and hummed through the strings.
‘What do we do, Archer?’ Writer cried.
Archer watched the treetop rushing towards them, the sky black as night behind it. He hung on so tight his knuckles were white. The wind struck them again and lifted them up and dropped them down, then lifted the balloon up higher.
‘Get down!’ he yelled.
They crouched low inside the basket to be safe, hoping that the wind would stop being so erratic.
As he thought it, the wind became constant.
The flight became smoother.
That is not the first time that has happened, Archer thought. Earlier, when we fell from the Tower, it felt like the wind did what he told it to do in his mind.
‘What’s happening?’ Keeper shouted. ‘Shall I give Burp a cabbage or not?’
The top of that great, ragged crown was a little lower than their basket. The wind was going to blow them just over the top of the highest of the branches. Which of course was wonderful because they would not crash into the beech.
On the other hand, they would still be flying over the forest right into the middle of that thunderstorm. If wind and rain battering the balloon to bits was not enough then lightning could strike them.
Archer had been caught out in the hills before and had seen lightning strike, shatter and then set fire to a tree. If the balloon blew into the storm then it would be destroyed.
The great beech tree was the closest thing to solid ground they would come to before it was too late.
‘No cabbages!’ Archer shouted over the noise of the wind. ‘
Archer grabbed the rope and tied one end around his chest under his arms.
‘You all hold on to the other end of this rope. Lower me down. I will grab on to the branches then tie the rope to the tree. Then you all pull the basket into the top of the tree.’
Thunder clapped and lightning flashed. All of a sudden, they were engulfed in sheets of rain.
‘That’s madness!’ shouted Weaver. ‘You’ll fall. We won’t be able to hold you.’
‘She’s right,’ shouted Writer. ‘Should we not think about this a little more?’
‘You can do it, Archer,’ Keeper said and patted him on the back. ‘Wonderful plan.’
‘No time to discuss it,’ Archer shouted, the beech
branches whipping back and forth before them.
He took a deep breath and climbed out of the basket into the wind and driving rain, clutching on to the outside.
‘Lower me quickly,’ he shouted. ‘Don’t let go!’
He leaned back and they lowered him below the basket. The rain lashed into him. He span freely in the wind with the basket over him.
Down and down they lowered him. He blinked and shook his head, squinting. The branches of the tree rushed toward him at incredible speed.
Wet leaves slapped his face and twigs scratched his face and hands.
I have made a terrible mistake, he thought.
He smacked into a thick branch.
It knocked the wind out of him. The shock almost made him release the rope. For a moment he was pinned where he was and then the rope dragged him through the branches and twigs.
The bow on his back twanged as it caught on twigs and pain slashed his face and hands as they were scratched and ripped by the sharp twigs.
Another branch stopped him and this time he wrapped his legs around it and held on.
Quickly, he had to move so quickly with the rope pulling and pulling at his body. He crawled around underneath the branch and heaved himself back up the other side.
Still tied to his chest, the rope was also wrapped around the branch. Just in time, for the rope twanged taught as a bowstring. The branch took the load of the balloon.
Archer looked up through the driving rain. The balloon was just above him, jerking in the wind. Straight as an arrow, the rope ran from the branch into the basket.
The rain slashed down into him, freezing his skin and making his fingers stiff. He reached up and pulled on the rope as hard as he could. The basket did not come closer. The rope did not come towards him at all.
He may as well have been trying to pull a building. He squinted up through the downpour. The basket tilted towards him but the bag was leaning the other way, away from him, buffeted by the gale.
Lightning struck nearby, the white flash blinding and followed just a moment later by the almighty thunderclap. A blurry, drenched Weaver was pulling on the rope up there half hanging out of the tilted basket, with Writer and Keeper behind her, all pulling and straining.