by Michael Tod
‘That iz all,’ he said, dismissing the stunned Oak with a wave of his paw.
Oak returned, tail low, to summon a Council Meeting of the exiles. He described his session with King Willow.
‘He may be King,’ said Heather. ‘Even so we should ignore him. He speaks from under his tail. He can’t hurt us. There are as many of us as there are of them, and, if hop comes to leap, the zervantz would be on our side.’
This was probably true. Two of them, a female called Woodlouz and a male. Zpider, were now regularly attending Old Burdock’s training sessions, as were the younger Royals with the exception of Next-King Sallow, though it was unlikely that King Willow was aware of this. Some of the other zervants visited at quiet times to talk with the exiles. Zpider had realised after one such visit that for the first time in his life he was walking with his tail raised. He lowered it quickly before any of the Royals saw him.
‘It’s not as simple as that,’ said Burdock. ‘We are still the foreigners here. Remember how we felt when the Greys came and ignored our wishes?’
‘But all the kernels are on our side.’ Said Chestnut. ‘Aren’t they?’ He looked at Burdock.
‘There are no kernels regarding royalty,’ she replied, ‘only on how chosen Leaders should behave. There are plenty of them and none gives the right to force-mate a female against her wishes.’
‘I haven’t said I won’t take Next-King Sallow yet,’ said Marguerite, and the squirrels looked at her in surprise.
‘Let’s leave that issue until the spring, and talk about living in the west of Ourland apart from the other until then.’
A swaying sapling
Survives the storm. Stubborn trees
Often get blown down.
CHAPTER TWENTY
It was not a good winter. Although there was plenty of food, the winds blew cold and rain was so frequent that it soaked into the dreys, chilling the squirrels inside.
On rare sunny days they would come out and run around on the ground and through the trees, enjoying the sunshine and the feel of the blood flowing through their veins. Then, resting, they would discuss what was likely to happen in the spring if King Willow insisted on pursuing his plans for a mating of Marguerite with Next-King Sallow. Marguerite seemed the least bothered of them all. ‘I can handle that squimp.’ She would say, but Oak and Old Burdock especially were concerned about the consequences for the Westerners if the Royals had cause to take umbrage.
Fern was not sure that the proposed mating would be a bad thing.
‘It would make our Marguerite the next King’s-Mate,’ she said to Oak one evening. ‘That would be something!’
I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that,’ said Oak sternly. ‘The only one of that bunch worth a nutshell is Poplar, and the King doesn’t even seem to notice that he exists. I’d rather she chose Tamarisk than Sallow!’
‘Tamarisk the Tactless? She’d never choose him.’
‘I know that. All I’m saying is that it has to be her choice, I’m not having my – our daughter force-mated with any squirrel. Especially Sallow.’
Marble was not enjoying that winter either. Alone for most of the time in his drey in the stunted spruce, he had ample time to reflect on his changed circumstances. Hope of power and influence at Woburn was clearly gone forever. His ambitions of becoming Great Lord Silver seemed ludicrous to him now.
His lifeline was Gabbro, who hopped over every time news was brought by passing Greys. This happened often as the Silver Tide swept on through the south-west of New America.
‘There is a whole new batch resting up on their way through to some place the natives know as the Wall of Corn. Sandy says she is going on with them, and would I let you know? No hard feelings, she said, but these are a vigorous lot and you know how she likes Lustees.’
Marble rubbed the stump of his missing paw and looked out of his drey, to where a cold mist swirled past the entrance.
‘When are they going?’ he asked.
‘Today I think, could even be gone by now. There’s not much daylight for travelling in winter and they’ve got a long way to go!’
Marble said nothing but Gabbro noted the forlorn look on his friend’s face.
‘Seems it’s all bad news today,’ he said. ‘There are rumours of some kind of illness about. The Lustees did not did not know much about it, but it’s bad down near the Bright Stone area. Hope it doesn’t come here!’ Gabbro looked out of the drey. ‘I’d better be off, the mist is thickening up. See you in a few days.’ He scrambled down through the scratchy dead twigs of the spruce and was gone.
Gradually spring emerged, heralded by the greening of the hawthorn bushes. The squirrels on the island tasted the fresh buds and combed the hazels for pollen-laden catkins, a welcome change from stored nuts. Marguerite was at this pleasant task when Next-King Sallow came courting, finding her sitting in a hazel bush with yellow pollen around her mouth and on her whiskers.
She hardly noticed him. She had been counting as she ate, seven lots of eight and six more, 76. Seven lots of eight and seven more, 77. She stopped. What came next? Since she has been Sun-inspired to abandon the figure 8, she could go no further. Was this as far as numbers could go? Next-King Sallow called up to her. ‘Hello, my pretty one.’
Marguerite looked down at him. He was pale and his tail was scraggy and thin. ‘Are you speaking to me?’ she asked, peering around as those to see some other squirrel that he might have been addressing.
‘Yez. Yew my pretty,’ he said, her scent floating tantalisingly down to him in the warm spring sunshine.
Marguerite assessed his strength and likely stamina. ‘If you want me, you’ll have to catch me,’ she called teasingly.
She leapt for the nearest tree. ‘One’ she counted, ran through the branches and leapt into the next. ‘Two.’
At ‘six lots of eight and seven more’, 67 she looked back and was amazed to find that Sallow was still following. She glimpsed other squirrels watching the chase from trees or from the ground.
Innocently unaware of the mating-scent trailing behind her, which was whipping Sallow into a frenzy of unaccustomed activity, she ran and leapt on.
At seven lots of eight and seven more, 77, Marguerite found that either by accident or by Sallow’s design she was in a tree on the edge of the wide Man-track with him close behind her. She would have to try a leap greater than she had ever attempted before or submit to Sallow and mate with him, and this was tree number 77.
Was the Sun saying, ‘There are no more numbers after 77, your destiny is to be mated with Sallow?’
She turned, looked into his leering dog-like face, saw the red foam bubbling around his mouth and felt a kind of hound-dread trying to paralyse her body, but, with a massive effort of will, she suppressed the hound-dread, gathered her strength, ran down a branch and leapt into space.
She cleared the Man-track, scrabbled for a hold on the very tips of the branches of the tree opposite and hung there, repeating, ‘I beat the hound-dread, I beat the hound-dread, the hound-dread, hound-dread,’ and as her brain cleared and her breathing slowed, a new and beautiful figure formed in her mind – 100 – and she knew then that numbers went on for ever and ever!
Below her, bruised and bedraggled, Next-King Sallow crawled from the puddle in the Man-track into which he had fallen, and, shaking off the proffered paws of Woodlouz and Zpider, limped back to the east, coughing and spitting out the blood which bubbled up from his strained lungs, and consigning all Westerners, and especially Marguerite, to the Sunless Pit.
Marguerite thanked the Sun for her escape but Oak and Old Burdock could not believe this would be the end of the affair.
The Bright One has recently taken to scratching numbers in the smooth bark of birch trees, 100, 101 …123, 321 … finishing off each session with her mark – X, until Burdock pointed out gently that as the trees grew the numbers would get bigger.
‘Larger,’ Marguerite corrected her grandmother, equally gently, and tried to expla
in the difference when applied to numbers.
‘Either way they disfigure the trees and that isn’t done, my dear.’
Squirrels protect trees.
They have enough enemies,
Treat them as our friends.
So Marguerite went back to scratching in the sand on the beach, but if any piece of driftwood offered a clear surface it soon carried the marks of her claws and teeth. 123 X. 654 X. 666 X.
CHAPTER TWENTY ONE
A week had passed since the chase. The days were warmer, buds were breaking and leaves opening all over the island. Most of the western squirrels were out in the sunshine and many, led by Fern, were replacing the linings of their winter dreys or contemplating building lighter summer ones. There had been no word from the east, and none of the Royals, nor any of the zervantz, were coming to the teaching sessions any more.
A Council Meeting was held but there was little to discuss. There was an air of expectation, but none could think of any action that they could take to heal the breach between east and west. They would just have to wait and see what would happen. It was as if an invisible wall had been built from north to south across the middle of Ourland, the Royals and the zervantz rigidly confining themselves to the eastern end and leaving the exiles to the own devices in the west.
After the meeting, Marguerite was on the beach scratching figures in the sand, watched at a distance from downwind by Juniper. She moved to a clear patch, away from the scratch-marks she had just made, and found a more curious piece of driftwood washed up by the sea. It was almost the same size as herself and the sand-smoothed wood was twisted into a spiral where some creeper had once grown tightly around it. The creeper itself had been worn away by the action of the waves and the sand that had smoothed the wood. She bit the end to try and identify the wood. It looked to her like hazel and the taste should confirm this, but the expected nutty flavour had been leached out by the sea and replaced by salt. She spat out the bitter wood and rubbed her whiskers that were tingling in a strange way.
Digging into her memory Marguerite recalled the hazel sapling, strangled by a honeysuckle bine, that she had seen in the shaft of sunlight when she had been with Rowan at the Blue Pool so long, long ago. She looked across the water at the mainland and sniffed. Juniper moved a little closer.
Enough of this squimpish nostalgia, she thought and reached out to scratch a number on the smooth wood. As she touched the spiral, her whiskers tingled again as though the wood held some hidden power, and she pulled her paw away. The tingling stopped. She tried again, producing the same effect. Juniper crept a little closer, his nostrils twitching.
Marguerite reached out boldly, held the stem firmly with her left paw and cut 123456710 X deeply into the wood with her teeth, her whiskers buzzing wildly with excitement as she did so. Juniper hopped closer still.
There was still room for more figures on the smooth grey driftwood so Marguerite lightly scratched a 3 after the X.
She felt a surge of power that spiralled out of the end of the woodstock and twisted across the beach, bowling Juniper over, before it dissipated above the sea, leaving him groaning and clutching his face.
‘Sun, my whiskers, Sun my whiskers,’ he kept saying.
Marguerite ran to him and pulled his paws away. His whiskers were curled into spirals as tight as those on the twisted stick. She tried not to smile at his ludicrous appearance as the attempted, unsuccessfully, to comb them straight with her claws.
An hour later, at Juniper’s insistence, Clover bit away each whisker, to stop the spinning feeling in his head
Several more days passed with no word from the Easterners.
Juniper was recovering slowly as his whiskers started to regrow but he could not climb and was living in a ground-drey hidden in the bushes near the shore.
The Woodstock, left on the beach while Juniper was being attended to, had evidently floated away on the next tide. Marguerite searched for it each day, trying beach after beach all round the western end of Ourland.
‘Why is it so important, my dear?’ Old Burdock had asked.
‘I don’t know. I just know that I must find it. Will you help me?’ They searched together in vain. Then, one evening, as the tide was going out, Marguerite, alone this time, was rummaging through the flotsam in the bat on the north-west corner of the island when, to her delight, she found the Woodstock again, lying half buried in the drying seaweed. She approached cautiously, reached out and touched it. Her whiskers tingled, and with mounting excitement, she again scratched a 3 after the 1234567 10 X.
The force spiralled out along the beach and she felt it fade away and die just beyond the water’s edge. She tried a 6 and out over the sea in the line the force had taken, a group of seagulls rose in a twist from the water, calling angrily. A 1 produced no result at all, and the force produced by a 2 did not even reach the shoreline.
So intent was she with her experiments in the gathering dusk that she did not see the ancient, dingy-white squirrel hobbling towards her on the sand.
He called to her, ‘Yew, Yew.’
She looked up in panic, pulled the Woodstock towards herself in a defensive gesture and scratched a 6 on the wood.
The surging, spiralling power caught the old squirrel and threw him on his back.
Marguerite ran from the beach as though all the foxes, dogs, martens and hawks in the world were after her.
In the calm of the morning she led others down to the shore, disturbing a pair of herring gulls who had just pecked the pink eyes from The Nipper’s body. No squirrel wanted to approach the corpse too closely, but despite their protests, Marguerite rolled the Woodstock to a place well above the tideline and then insisted that the body was decently buried under a tree, as was proper for any Sun-gone squirrel.
CHAPTER TWENTY TWO
Remembering the disparaging way in which King Willow had spoken of The Nipper, Burdock saw an opportunity to reinstate Marguerite in the King’s favour and perhaps end the artificial partition of the island. She went off alone later that day to see him.
She was coolly received. Like herself, the King was ageing rapidly and Next-King Sallow was not always at his side. Both were seated high in the Royal Macrocarpa Tree, with its many great trunks, as she described what has happened at the North-West Bay.
The King listened with interest; he was really quite fond of this knowledgeable old Tagger as she called herself, and was about to say, ‘Fanzy The Nipper ztill being alive,’ when Next-King Sallow, his thin face cold with fury, said to Burdock, ‘Are yew telling uz that yewr granddaughter huz killed a Royal?’
‘You could put it that way,’ she replied, ‘but…’
‘No butz about it,’ said Next-King Sallow. ‘By yewr own admizzion her huz, and her muzt be tried for it.’ He turned to the King. ‘Tomorrow uz tryz her; uz – Zallow – will prozecute.’
The King, with some reluctance, agreed, and said to Burdock, ‘Thiz iz the Law ant High Zun on the Morrow, Marguerite the Bright One muzt appear before the Royal Court. Her will be charged with ‘Taking the Life of a Fellow Zquirrel, Knowing Him to be a Member of the Royal Family, the punishment for Which iz Tail-docking.’
Next-King Sallow slipped away through the branches, his skinny tail even higher than usual, knowing that once the Court had been declared it could not be cancelled.
A shocked Burdock tried to speak about it to the King. ‘But this is a nonsense,’ she started to say.
Embarrassed, the King cut her short. ‘Uz can’t discuzz it with yew. That’z the Law,’ he said. ‘Yewr Marguerite muzt be here at High Zun. Her can have won other zquirrel with her, no more iz allowed.’
Burdock was ‘dismizzed.’
At the Westerners’ Council Meeting she related what had happened.
‘It’s the Sun-damned squimp Sallow trying to get his own back,’ said Heather.
‘That’s obvious,’ replied Clover, ‘but what can we do about it?’
‘Tell them to go to the Sunless Pit,’ said
Tamarisk the Tactless, now a handsome yearling, though as quick with his tongue as ever.
‘What are these trials like?’ asked Larch the Curious. ‘I’d like to go to one.’
‘You can’t,’ Burdock told him. ‘Only one other squirrel is allowed by their law. We must decide who it is to be.’
The choice came down to Oak, as Council Leader and Marguerite’s father, or to Burdock as the Tagger, and because she had a greater knowledge of squirrel traditions than any of the others. Although, as she readily admitted, the Ourlanders’ customs were different from those she knew so well.
Burdock skilfully guided the meeting to select her. She was thinking ahead.
At mid-morning on ‘the Morrow’, Fern was trying to groom Marguerite’s tail. ‘Appearances are important, my dear,’ she said as Marguerite pulled it away.
All the westerners accompanied Marguerite and Old Burdock to the west-east boundary where Oak took Burdock to one side and pleased with her. ‘Look after Marguerite, she means a lot to all of us.’
‘I know that,’ she told him. ‘I’ll do all I can.’
‘Sun guide you both,’ they called after the Bright One and her grandmother as they watched them hop off down the Man-track to the trial. It seemed unfair to them that all the Easterners were allowed to attend, even the zervantz.
Clover slipped quietly away to look for a woundwort plant.