Toby Alone

by Timothee de Fombelle

  The last news that Elisha had dated back to February. Lex hadn’t reappeared, but Lola’s condition had stopped getting any worse. Her eyes were open, and she was able to eat a bit of breakfast. Her brothers sang every evening in the room next door, and Lola might be seen tapping a finger in time to the music.

  Her big sister kept watch over her, silent and discreet.

  Elisha told Toby this story among others, but what she wasn’t saying weighed heavily on her conscience: the phrase she had heard Joe Mitch’s men utter by the shores of the lake.

  On the fourth day, Toby spoke about his parents.

  “I thought about them all through the winter. There’s no point in waiting. They won’t come looking for me.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” said Elisha fervently. “You shouldn’t wait for them any more.”

  “If they don’t come looking for me, I’m the one who’s got to go looking for them.”

  Elisha gave a start.

  “Go where?”

  “Back up to the Treetop, to find them. Rescue them from Mitch’s paws.”

  Toby had been watching Elisha while he talked. She had lowered her long eyelashes, and was looking at the ground. She wanted to speak. That was when he realised that she knew something.

  “Toby … I overheard something about your parents.”

  Toby shuddered and tried reading Elisha’s look.

  “They’ve been sentenced to death,” she went on. “They’ll be executed on 1 May.”

  Toby grabbed Elisha by the shoulders.

  “Where are they?”

  “That’s not the problem. You’ve got to protect yourself.”

  “Elisha, where are they?”

  He was shaking her.

  “Please. Look after yourself, Toby. The hunt is still on for you.”

  “Elisha—”

  “Toby, I’ve got an idea of where you might be able to hide.”

  “I’m leaving, I’ll be in the Treetop in three days. It’s 21 April. That’ll give me a week to find them. Goodbye, Elisha.”

  He let her go. He was already standing up.

  “Listen to me!” shouted Elisha.

  “In ten days, they’ll be dead if I don’t help them. I’m going to the Treetop.”

  “Toby, they’re not up there!”

  Toby turned around again.

  “Where are they?”

  “They’re at Tumble,” whispered Elisha. “They’re at the fort at Tumble.”

  Toby went pale. Tumble was just a few hours’ walk away, which meant his parents were very close. And yet, Toby felt himself wavering.

  He knew something about Tumble from old Vigo Tornett, who had spent ten years there, and who could never bring himself to talk about it.

  If anyone said “Tumble” to Tornett, first his lips started trembling, then his whole body. Ten years of captivity at Tumble destroyed a man.

  By his own confession, Tornett had done some stupid things in his youth. Toby didn’t know the details. But Sim Lolness, who was better informed, admitted that Tornett hadn’t always been the gentle and benevolent old man who lodged with his grubber nephew. In fact, to be brutally honest, Tornett had been one of the worst brigands in the Tree, a bandit of the highest order.

  He had gone on to spend ten years at Tumble, when the prison was still controlled by the Grand Council. If it had looked like a vision of hell back then, that was a holiday camp compared to what Tumble had become under Joe Mitch’s control.

  Aside from the question of surviving inside the fortress, one thing was for sure: you would never escape from it. Nobody ever had and nobody ever would.

  Tumble was a ball of mistletoe dangling in thin air. It was a parasite growing in the Tree, sucking out its sap and drinking its water, attached to a branch by a single creeper, which was kept under surveillance by ten armed men. At the first sign of mutiny, all they had to do was cut the link and the prison would be plunged into the void. They called it the Final Plan.

  In a flash, everything Toby knew about the prison at Tumble came rushing back to him. His hopes were dashed.

  A sleepless night followed, in the silence of mourning, on the shores of the lake.

  By dawn, Elisha felt almost relieved. She had told the truth, and Toby didn’t look as if he was going to take up an impossible mission. He knew enough about what people had said on the subject of the ball of mistletoe.

  Ten days to get a clumsy scientist and his wife out of that trap – Toby would need at least ten years. Just to get in.

  Unless…

  Elisha prayed that an idea, which had just crossed her mind, didn’t occur to Toby. She chased it away by batting her eyelids and saying, “No, no, no” deep down inside.

  But Toby’s face was already a different shade. There was nothing she could do. Between their two hearts was a shortcut, with thoughts flowing freely along their narrow shared branch.

  Toby looked into Elisha’s eyes. He had decided to give himself up to Joe Mitch.

  Elisha shuddered.

  “If I turn myself in,” Toby explained pointlessly, “I’ll be taken to Tumble in a matter of hours, so half the journey will already be done.”

  “You’ll do the other half in your coffin!”

  It took a whole day and night for Elisha to realise that Toby wasn’t going to back down. If he didn’t risk everything for his parents, the rest of his days would be meaningless. His life would be like an ornament on a mantelpiece. It wasn’t about succeeding. It was about risking his life for them.

  Idiots would call this honour. Toby called it something else. Love, perhaps, even if he couldn’t bring himself to say it.

  It was like the night before battle.

  As she listened to him speak, at the back of the painted cave, Elisha put Toby’s feet on her knees and, with a strand from a feather soaked in blue caterpillar ink, she was drawing on the sole of his foot, a vertical line, a barely visible mark from his toes all the way to his heel.

  Toby didn’t put up a fight.

  “Is that my war paint?” he asked.

  He thought back to his childhood and remembered how, when he was little, he and his friend Leo Blue would sometimes paint signs on their hands and shoulders. Leo had always been a moody child, occasionally violent. The death of his mother when he was very young, followed by that of his father two years later, had left a terrible scar, but he wouldn’t talk about it, not even to his best friend.

  The last time Toby had seen Leo, before the winter, in the little hollow branch, it seemed to him as if the wound to his heart had become infected.

  Elisha went quiet. Her plaits brushed against her eyes.

  Toby knew that she had the same blue mark on the sole of her feet, and that it could only be seen at night when it gave off a blueish light.

  “Is it a secret?”

  Elisha nodded and put down the strand of feather on the edge of the inkwell.

  “I’ve got a secret too,” said Toby.

  And he told her about it.

  When he’d found himself all alone on the end of the broken branch, and he’d heard Venge wailing for his lost colleague, Toby had tried to think through his father’s plan, so he wouldn’t forget anything about the three clues he had been given.

  1) He had easily been able to explain the false treachery of Sim Lolness, because its only purpose was to help Toby escape.

  2) At the last moment, he had also decoded those words of warning: “And don’t go doing yourself another injury,” which had signalled the hollow branch at The Tufts – the place where he was small enough to escape his guards.

  3) But he still didn’t understand why Sim had raised his arm against his own son, when he ordered him to speak politely to the cretinous Razor. Again, it was completely out of character for Sim, so Toby needed to find a sign or a meaningful clue in it.

  An hour or two later, when Toby was already on the run, and Leo Blue had walked into Zef Clarac’s sitting room, Joe Mitch had thrown a furious tantrum under
the maternal eye of Pussykinska. Toby still alive? Mitch couldn’t bear the idea.

  Joe Mitch’s tantrums were like a bad case of wind. He gripped his belly, turned bright red, and made a thousand mysterious noises, which sounded like a cross between farting and bleating. His cigarette stub accidentally shot from his lips like a rocket being launched. It landed in Pussykinska’s cleavage, and she crushed it subtly by sticking out her chest.

  When he had calmed down again, Joe Mitch lay still for a few minutes. Then, very slowly, he turned his bulbous eyes towards Sim.

  There were certain matters on which Mitch never allowed himself to be caught out. He remembered full well that Sim Lolness hadn’t been searched. The diversion Sim had tried to create wasn’t enough. The Tree Stone was there…

  Mitch gestured towards Torn, who pounced on the professor.

  Maya was watching her husband. Toby was alive, but Mitch was still going to take possession of the Stone. She would of course have given twenty such priceless Stones in exchange for her son’s life, but the power bestowed on Mitch by this fortune would spell catastrophe for every life hanging in the balance of the Tree.

  Torn was searching Sim frantically. Even when he was stark naked in the sitting room, and two men were going over his clothes with a fine toothcomb, there was still a big smile on the professor’s face. His plan had worked.

  They didn’t find anything except for two balls of gum and a pencil. Razor squashed the balls of gum with his shoes: there was nothing inside them. The ball of gum stuck to his heel. Razor hopped from foot to foot, trying to get rid of the gum that was now gluing him to the ground. Faced with this absurd spectacle, Mitch’s eyes were rolling furiously in their sockets.

  Sim smirked.

  At exactly the same moment, during his desperate flight, Toby had run his hand through his sweat-drenched hair and found a ball of that same gum right there, stuck to the back of his head, in the place where his father had hit him so hard. Mixed in with the sticky substance, he could feel something much harder. He pulled it out of his hair – there, stuck between his fingers, was the Tree Stone.

  Now, four and a half months later, in the cave by the lake, Toby took the Stone out from the hem of his trousers and showed it to Elisha, who still had a bit of caterpillar ink on her hands.

  “Here’s my secret,” he said, holding the Stone between his fingers. “My father entrusted me with it. I’m going to hide it here, in this cave by the lake. If something happens to me, you’ll know where it is.”

  He went over to the back of the cave, lighting his way with a twig from the fire. He raised the flare up to a life-sized portrait of Elisha, alone, crouching down with her chin in her hands. He pierced one of her painted eyes and inserted the Stone in place of the pupil. The little flame went out.

  Toby turned towards the real Elisha. She was standing in front of the fire.

  “Don’t give yourself up to Joe Mitch,” she said. “I’ll help you.”

  22

  Educating Young Girls

  Wielding a stick that weighed more than she did, Bernie whacked the old man over the head.

  “Now, let’s go home!” called her father, who was watching her antics from a distance.

  The little girl didn’t bother to answer, but stood in front of the old man she’d just hit and put her hand on his bald head.

  “It’s growing,” she said.

  Sure enough, there was a nice big bump coming up. Bump number five. Definitely time to go home.

  Gus Alzan had two concerns. The first was being in charge of a thousand prisoners. He could handle that. His methods didn’t necessarily follow the rules, but they satisfied the Friendly Neighbour. Gus lived with his daughter at the heart of the mistletoe ball at Tumble, in the central knot. All the tendrils in the ball led out from this point, so he had total control.

  Gus’s other concern, his real one, was his daughter, Bernie. For a while now, he’d been worried about how she was growing up. Of course, he knew she was only ten years old, so Bernie was bound to change. She would mature, turn into a proper young lady. People had said to him, “It’s quite normal, at that age; there’s so much going on inside them.” And so, at first, he’d looked on rather fondly as Bernie smashed the furniture or strangled her governesses. “My, she is growing up!” he told himself. “She’s the spitting image of her godfather.” Bernie’s godfather was Joe Mitch.

  So Gus pandered to his daughter’s whims. He even lent her a few prisoners who were on their last legs anyway, to satisfy her appetite for bumps.

  But after a while, Gus Alzan began to worry. It had dawned on him that one day he would have to marry off his daughter. Clearly he was worrying ahead of time, but he reckoned that the more challenging the path ahead, the earlier you had to set out. In Bernie’s case, that path looked particularly challenging. In fact, it wasn’t so much a path, as a primordial jungle.

  At ten, Bernie already had a few undesirable habits for a young girl from a respectable family. Gus overlooked the prisoners who were battered to death, because perhaps they’d asked for it anyway. And the strangled governesses, because maybe their teaching methods were to blame. No, the first serious act involved the cook at Tumble, when Bernie plunged his finger into boiling oil and made him eat his own flesh while it was still on the bone, like a spare rib.

  Gus sacked the cook, who was no longer any use to him, and he punished Bernie by making her go without any pudding.

  From that day on, he decided something had to be done.

  Which is how Gus came to hear about a remarkable man, who was an expert in manners and social etiquette. He was just a simple cook’s assistant who had arrived at Tumble that winter, but his reputation had spread rapidly, and he soon got on people’s nerves. He smiled all the time, spoke in flowery language, and insisted on being called Clot.

  Clot showed up one Saturday morning at the Alzan home.

  “My most respectful greetings,” he said to Gus.

  “Same to you,” the governor answered him clumsily.

  “I have been informed that you were requiring to see me. It is most enduring of you. To what, may I ask, do I own the leisure?”

  “I… It’s my daughter.”

  “Your daughter,” repeated Clot, with a high-pitched giggle that was rather inappropriate, given the subject matter.

  “Well, yes. My daughter, Bernie.”

  “Bernie!” exclaimed Clot, still laughing now with a squeaky titter that grated on the ears.

  Gus Alzan took Clot’s whole face in his hands, squashed it a bit, and then pinned him against the office door.

  “What’s so funny, Clot?”

  “I … er … nothing, it’s just my way of relaxing.”

  “Good. Now, I want my daughter to become a young lady.”

  Clot set to work straightaway. He had lived with Joe Mitch’s most formidable guerrillas, but the three days he spent with Bernie Alzan were the worst of his life. The following Tuesday morning, he entered Gus’s office. It was the last week or so of April, and a fine spring day.

  “Well?” enquired Gus, hopefully.

  A black ring encircled each of Clot’s eyes. He had so many bumps on his head it looked like a spiked helmet.

  “I’ve come tho hand in my notith, Mither Althan.”

  Every other tooth was missing. He spoke with great difficulty and didn’t laugh at all. Discouraged, Gus Alzan granted him one day’s special leave.

  “Spethial leave?”

  Clot didn’t know about this system of granting leave. Working at Tumble was like working for Joe Mitch: people never took a holiday. Can holidays exist in hell?

  Gus felt thoroughly despondent after this failed attempt. What would become of his Bernie who he used to bring along, as a little girl, to tickle the prisoners on death row before they went to the gallows? What could she have missed out on growing up in this prison? To console himself, he threw two prisoners to the birds.

  Birds are partial to mistletoe. They love its j
uicy white berries, which are to be avoided at all costs during the winter if you don’t want to be eaten by a sparrow or a thrush. When he needed to relax, the governor of Tumble would sit a prisoner on a large berry and wait for the birds. As it was the end of April, there were only a few berries left, and they were so ripe that the birds wasted no time.

  Gus had a dreadful night. He dreamed about Bernie bearing down on him with giant wings. She ate him raw, and he ended up stuck inside bird poo.

  First thing next morning, there was a knock at his door.

  “Ith me.”

  Gus recognised Clot’s annoying voice. He opened up.

  “If you own me the leithure to discuth with you a thecond time—”

  Gus nearly floored him. No one just knocked on Gus Alzan’s door as if they were dropping by for a bit of “converthation”.

  If you came to his door you were expected to be a jittering bundle of nerves, and you had to tremble and beg to be forgiven without even knowing what you’d done wrong.

  Clot managed to avoid being reduced to a pulp by adding, “Ith about Bernie…”

  Clot didn’t have any more teeth than the day before, but he had his smile back. Curious, Gus let him in.

  For once, cook’s assistant Clot was very clear.

  He’d spent his “leave” in a neighbouring branch, taking the opportunity to reflect on Bernie’s situation. He was convinced that the little girl had a problem with authority.

  “Is that all?” asked Gus.

  Clot’s revelation was nothing new. But he went on to say that because of this, Bernie’s particular problem could never be dealt with by a father or a teacher.

  “A what?”

  “A teather…”

  “Is that all?” Gus repeated, his hands itching for action. He was getting ready to send Clot flying.

  But Clot went on.

  “What thee needth ith a fwend.”

  “A what?” Gus interrogated him.

  “A fwend.”

  Gus Alzan had heard this word before. Friend. But he only had a very blurry idea of what that meant. The kind of person who isn’t the boss, but who isn’t anyone’s slave either. A hazy concept that had been fashionable a long time ago.