by Piers Torday
Without even asking, I grab the dart, pull as hard as I can and yank it out. The stag stirs, but doesn’t move. His fur is matted with dried blood from where the dart entered him. Chucking it aside, I lie down on the damp ground so my head is facing his. His eyes are half open, his breathing very faint.
*Stag,* I say as gently as possible, *can you hear me?*
There’s a pause, while he closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. Like he’s summoning the energy to speak from somewhere very far away. I wait, while the mouse and the General hover behind me in silence, whiskers and antennae twitching.
His gummed-up eyes open just a crack again and he says something I can’t hear.
Words rush out of my head –
*I’ll go through Dad’s lab, he must have a magic that counteracts those darts, we’ll sort something out—*
*Kester.* His old deep voice never sounded so frail. Or so determined. *Listen to me. There is no poison in those flying feathers strong enough to kill me. I can feel it. I was weak after the plague, and am not strong enough to fight any more. Yet I am still here. Tired, but still here.*
The poison in the culler’s dart can’t be a poison after all; it must just be a tranquillizer making him sleepy. That’s not what a culler would normally do … I sit up, more words tumbling out of me.
*What happened to you …? What did they do to the others …? What do you think we should do next?*
Even weak and quiet, the stag has force to his words that makes me feel embarrassed.
*Wildness. You have so many questions. Those flying feathers have made an old stag even more tired than he should be.* He has to stop and gather more strength. *What is there to say about what has passed? While you were gone, the beast-killers came for us. Your father and I tried to resist them. They took the wild first. I tried to fight them for him at least …* Looking closer now, I can see that he is covered in other scratches and cuts in addition to the dart wound. *But you see what happened … he and the rest were taken. Well …* He spies the mouse and cockroach behind me. *Nearly all the rest were taken.*
I nod but don’t say anything, looking down and tearing blades of grass with my fingers. My father taken prisoner again. My wild captured. The stag wounded and weak. *Enough of what we have seen,* he says. *What about you?*
I tell him everything that has happened, but when I get to my escape from the Underearth, the stag opens his eyes, fixing mine, and it looks like that alone is using every last bit of energy in his body.
*You left the rat to his fate? The creature who tried to save you?*
I look down at my hands, covered with shredded grass. *It was my only chance to escape …*
All of the animals are silent in reply. Even the General.
*Why … is that so bad?* I sound sulky. I don’t want to sound sulky. *I had to get away … I was worried about my own wild. I didn’t ask him to save me –*
*Kester.* When the stag is stern he makes me nervous, even in his weakened state. He rests up on his front legs and flicks his sharp horns towards me. *Enough of what has been. The dream foretold this would pass. Which is why I did not tell you.*
*You mean it was some kind of test?* I know he’s been injured. I know there are drugs coursing through his system, making him tired. But this really isn’t fair. How can I make a decision about something I don’t know about? *Maybe if you just told me what it said, then maybe I could do something right for once!*
The animals glance at one another in the dusk.
*It is not that simple. The dream is not like one of your human stories … It is … something else.*
*Tell me!*
The mouse is doing one of her worry dances, which mainly involve shaking her head a lot. *The dream is sacred to animals only, stag. It is the story of creation itself. We must not share it. Not even with a human with the gift.*
*That would be most irregular,* agrees the General.
*It goes against our every animal law, but … who knows how many of those have been broken today in the land under our feet. Perhaps one more won’t make any difference.*
The stag takes a short breath.
This is the moment. He is going to tell me the dream, the secret animal story that has foretold everything we’ve done together so far. The story that began at the First Fold, where men first kept animals for food and clothes. When men lived in painted caves like the Underearth and drew wolves on the walls in blood.
*I cannot tell you the whole dream, Wildness,* he begins. *We would be here a lifetime. But we shall sing you the final lines – which no animal forgets once they have heard them.*
Then, without being summoned, the mouse and cockroach gather in a circle with the stag. They begin to hum. As they hum, as if the clouds have cleared, I feel light on my face, burning with an intensity that I could not have imagined. Every cell in my body is listening and waiting, as the hum turns into words, that they sing together. As their words begin to cry and roar in my head, so pictures seem to rise up before us in the glade. Terrible pictures.
*Listen! For this is the end of that dream
Which we have told one another since the beginning
In the tongue that only animals can understand.
We dreamed we saw a host of creatures
Rise up out of the earth and cover it with darkness
The fiercest of all animals!
Men bent down and wept for what they had done.
Fearful was it to behold.
Beasts and men tearing one another apart
Their blood ran freely
The sky turned black and wept many tears.
Truly it was the storm of storms, the end of all things.
The sky’s tears filled the great wet
And those waters spilled out over the earth
Covering us all—*
*Wait!* I interrupt.
The sounds and pictures crumble away into blackness. Fear pulses through my body, blinding me, making me feel sick and dizzy. I don’t want to know.
The stag looks at me, startled. *But we haven’t finished. The final verse is – we believe it is about you.*
I stand up. *You were right not to say. I don’t want to know what happens to me. Just tell me what I need to do to stop it.*
*It’s very simple,* says the stag. *The dream says you need to bring the dark into the light.*
*How?*
The stag’s expression softens, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. *You need to show them that humans can be good.*
*But I’ve told them – I told them about the cure, I told them about the Iris, it didn’t make any difference –*
*No,* he says, eyes burning bright. *I said you need to show them.*
The words and the pictures of the animals’ dream burn my brain up with ideas of what I need to do. I realize I at last have a plan that might work.
I have the Iris. The one thing that Aida and Littleman say could make the world well again, back to how it was. If I could get them Polly’s notebook, perhaps they could make sense of it. Perhaps then we could show Dagger’s wild that not all humans are bad.
Before we do anything though, the stag needs to get his strength back. The General and I leave the mouse to keep him company in the Garden of the Dead, picking mud and grass out of his fur and occasionally doing a gentle Dance of Nursing To Health (which mainly involves blowing on the deer’s nose).
I return in the evening with blankets to keep him comfortable and warm. With a screwdriver I scrape lengths of bark off our old apple trees for him to feed on, and I keep him dosed up on the cure. The normal colour of his deep brown eyes is beginning to return, but the lingering combination of the tranquillizer and the cure make him sleepier than ever.
I still don’t know why the cullers only tranquillized the stag rather than shooting him or capturing him. Perhaps it was a mistake in the heat of the moment.
It is not just the stag who needs time to recover though. I wash off all the dirt and dust of the Underear
th in the shower, hearing no more whispering from the drain. The silence makes me feel even more alone in the empty house, like the dark wild have been swallowed up by the earth completely, and I shiver as I dress myself in the mirror.
I patch up my cuts and bites as best I can. There is a bit of formula left in the kitchen, and I make it last longer like Polly would have done, mixing it with berries and leaves scavenged from the garden.
It’s not just me who needs patching up. I use Dad’s tools to replace the watch battery, and try to remember what Polly taught me about sewing to repair my torn scarf.
I can’t remember very much, unfortunately.
I fix the front door back on, not perfectly, but it shuts and locks if you give a good push. Then I tidy up Dad’s lab, righting desks and straightening what few papers are left back in piles, and put all the drawers and boxes of Mum’s stuff back where they belong in Polly’s room.
I don’t know how many days go by like this. All I know is that the clouds keep getting thicker and darker. As they grow thicker, so everything feels hotter and stickier too. Even the General notices that it’s getting harder to tell the difference between day and night. While he and the mouse take it in turns to spend time with the stag as he recovers, I stare out of my window at the sky and try not to think about the storm of storms.
But what I can tell, as the clouds occasionally part, is that the moon is changing. It’s getting smaller. Like the white disc is being eaten by the darkness around it, slowly shrinking, until only a thin sliver of a crescent remains.
No helicopter comes, nor can we hear any elsewhere in the city. It is like we have been abandoned by everyone and everything – our Culdee Sack could be an island cut off from the city.
While we wait for the stag to regain his full strength, I look again and again at the Iris microdots in Polly’s book under Dad’s microscope. All of his computers have been smashed, their innards gutted by the cullers.
But in his room his old books remain untouched, stacked up in dusty piles by the bed. I sit cross-legged on the floor and go through each one, trying to find any clue as to what the dots mean, what the Iris could be. And very slowly, making page after page of scrawled notes, I think I begin to find one.
There are billions of dots in Polly’s iris capsule, each dot containing vital information. The information that might show Dagger and his wild that humans can help make this earth a better place.
I know what the Iris is. It’s not just one thing, it’s a collection of them.
As the murky light fades for another day, I turn off the microscope, carefully close Polly’s notebook and hear a scratching at the lab windows.
The stag is standing on the steps, his fur looking golden and sleek again in the light from the house. The mouse twirls on his back in multiple Dances of Anticipation, while the General stands proud on his horns, his shell gleaming. I slide Polly’s book back into her bag and pick my scarf up off the chair.
We have the most valuable data in the world, data that could reset the planet. But it’s next to useless without the people who collected it in the first place – Polly and her parents, locked up in the Four Towers, along with Dad and my wild.
So now I’m going to get them out – with a little help from my friends.
Sitting astride the stag, as he clip-clops his way along the Culdee Sack, following my directions to Waste Town, I have a feeling deep inside me that I will never come back here.
I don’t know why. I hope so much that I will find my family of Dad, Polly and the wild again, but somehow I don’t think this house can ever be our home again.
But as I turn to look at it one last time in the dusk, I see something I was not expecting.
A pair of headlights slowly sliding out of a side road after us. Headlights that belong to a bike, but not one of Aida’s. In the dull orange of the street lights, I can see the bike’s metallic purple hood, the yellow band across the front.
A Facto bike.
They were waiting. And I realize why they left the stag and only tranquillized him. They didn’t find what they were looking for on their first visit.
Polly must have told them that the Iris was at the Culdee Sack but managed to keep exactly where a secret. Which would be typical of her. Now they’ve waited all this time for me to show them – but they’re going to be disappointed.
*Stag,* I say quietly, even though I know they won’t be able to hear. *I think we’re being—*
*I know,* he says.
Of course. A great stag will always know when he’s being followed; even when he’s being looked at from miles away, or watched for hours on end – he always knows.
He sniffs the air and trots off the road I’ve been guiding him along, into a narrow alley running behind a row of houses. It is just wide enough for him to walk down without his horns scraping the sides. The alley is unlit and smells damp.
*This is not the road I told you to take, Stag,* I say.
*Perhaps not. But it’s the way to escape. You forget that’s what I’ve been learning every day since I was born – how to avoid the human.*
Behind us, the patrol bike purrs into the alley, keeping a steady distance as they edge after us. The mouse crawls into my pocket, shaking, while the General marches to the back of the stag, yelling insults at our pursuers.
The stag emerges from the alley, moving with the speed I remember from our first meeting in the Ring of Trees. With a growl of acceleration, the bike smoothly follows, but they can’t follow where the stag goes next.
He crosses the street head on, making for a low wall ahead of us, which he leaps in a single bound. We land in a garden. In the pale light from a house, I see a sundial on a column and a pond full of weeds. Then we jump over an ivy-clad fence into another garden, the stag avoiding scattered plastic toys. And again, leaping over the covered pool running down the centre.
I am bent low over the stag to stay on with each jump, the mouse doing a Dance of Tell Me When It’s All Over so close to my skin that I can feel every one of her heartbeats.
Barely drawing a breath, the stag takes us down the whole street over walls, fences and even a washing line – a sheet flapping in my face and blinding me for a moment. Then we are scraping a holly bush that crowns a whole wall before cracking on to the pavement of the open streets again.
The stag pauses for a moment, catching his breath. And to our left two yellow bike lights slide out of the street next along, searching us out.
Then we are off again, down this street, crossing that one, keeping to the darkest shadows we can find. Shadows that end in large metal rubbish skips, a pile of cardboard boxes and a wall too high to jump. We canter round, to find ourselves facing the two yellow lights.
The more I stare at them, the more they seem like eyes, the yellow band around the purple bike like a mad, fixed smile. The bike snarls towards us.
*Hold on,* says the stag, and runs straight at it –
As we leap, I can hear his hoofs clip the metal of a helmet.
Now the chase is on, the stag galloping as fast as he can, the bike roaring after us –
*It must be here somewhere,* says the stag to himself, like he has been here before, as if he knows the city better than me. He is less calm and steady now, snorting, stamping his feet, frightened, his head trembling as he looks for a way out in this maze of hard streets.
There is no time to rest; the bike is nudging up behind us, letting out petrol-throated roars. I can feel the heat of it –
And we skid round a corner, finding ourselves in a wide street, with a wall of railings at the end, darkness beyond them. The stag gives a short sigh of relief and charges towards the gates.
*I can’t look,* says the mouse, and buries her face in my scarf.
*Coward!* says the General, suddenly appearing on my shoulder. *Now this stag can really show us what he’s made of.*
The arched gates are tied tight together with a chain and a padlock. In front of them stands a set of dusty striped ha
zard barriers, with a sign dangling over the front.
NO ENTRY
Fuzzy clouds of something overhang the railings, pushing spikes out between the metal. And I realize. It’s a place I had completely forgotten ever even existed in this city.
We’re heading for the park.
The stag snorts and, taking a deep breath, gallops hard towards the arched iron gates. Behind us the Facto bike speeds up, till it’s running alongside.
The gates are so tall, ivy wound around the spiked railings –
I can see two cullers on the bike, black and helmeted, reaching out towards us, trying to grab something.
Polly’s bag, that dangles from my shoulder.
I snatch it away, as the hands lunge again.
The stag pulls back on his haunches and leaps, higher and further than he ever has before. As the cockroach cheers, the stag clips the hazard barriers, and then we are sailing over the gates so close their spiked tips must graze his belly.
He grunts as we land on the other side and his head drops, gasping for breath.
From outside the gates, I can hear the bike skidding to a halt, the engine thrumming, while the cullers shout to one another. They are rattling the chain.
*Stag, we don’t have long. They’ll break in soon.*
*I know,* he says. *And then we shall see who is the master in here.*
Facto called the parks a ‘breeding ground for infection’ and cleared out the animals. Everyone thought they had been culled, but I know now where many of them went.
I remember coming to parks like this before the virus. When Mum was still alive. They were where I learned to ride a bike, racing my friends, doing wheelies … then eating sandwiches and drinking orange juice under the trees. Maybe in another world that’s what I’d be doing with Aida and Polly, rather than on my way to persuade one to help me break the other out of prison.
Now this park is empty and silent, apart from us moving swiftly through the trees and bushes. I wonder for a moment if the Iris will bring the old park back. Or whether it will be overrun by Dagger’s dark wild. But only for a moment, as behind us a pair of rusted gates clang open, a motorbike purring through, lights searching us out.