The villagers muttered among themselves, but did not seem too surprised. Several nodded quietly. Some even seemed pleased that it was all, at long last, about to begin.
“But when they come we’ll be ready. You know our story. You know what to say when they accuse us of meddling with their precious Dragons. They’ve been terrorizing our valley for months! We had no choice! We had to use New Light to protect ourselves! The World One showed us how—you should listen to him. He knows a thing or two. He’s got a plan for those Dragons. You’ll see.”
“And you’re sure they’ll be against it?” someone called out.
“It’s a one hundred percent certainty! The Coven will never permit New Light in the Woods. And what will the Forest Folk think about that, with Dragons on the rampage? They’ll turn against the Coven!”
“Nobody turns against the Coven.”
“Oh, I think they will! When they hear what the World One has to say they’ll be with us all the way. You know how persuasive he can be! Then YOU’LL be the Dragon Hunters. Only this time you’ll not be gathering stories—you’ll be frying those Lizards with heavy-duty flashlights! And when the normal Dragons come back from migration you’ll be able to fry them too, before anyone notices they’re just good old dumb-as-a-doorstop Lizards. Once the Dragons are gone you can take your axes to as many trees as you fancy. You’ll be able to cut and chop to your heart’s content. And wait till you see what happens THEN! When you can build as many mills as you like! As many houses, as many boats, as many barges, as many factories and chimneys and cars and roads and bridges and towns and cities and motorways and quarries and mines and furnaces and forges and power plants! Wait till you see how good life gets! You’ll LOVE IT. You can bet your JACKSNAPPERS you’ll LOVE IT! But FIRST YOU’VE GOT TO DISPOSE OF THE DRAGONS!”
“Are the other Forest Folk really going to want to kill the Dragons?” asked an old woman near the front. “They don’t do anything but burrow around and eat Briarbacks.”
“NOT ANY MORE THEY DON’T!” screamed the Witch. “Dragons are killers! Dragons are slavering, destroying demon beasts with maiming fangs and a howling intelligence of sinister evil bent on total WARFARE. They destroyed half of Paris! And tonight, we’ve one lined up for Rosethorn! A Dragon attack at midnight! To catch them in their beds!”
A wave of shock passed through the crowd.
“Rosethorn?”
“Why?”
“They’re our neighbours!”
“Come off it!” the Witch snapped. “You turned your back on them two harvests ago!”
“But… you can’t!”
“It’s too much!”
“TOUGH! We need proof you’ve been living in harm’s way. The same thing will happen to you if you don’t follow the World One! That’s the line we’ll take.”
“But more people will die!” called out a woman near the back of the crowd. “It’s been enough already!”
The Witch went still. “Enough?” she whispered, so quietly even Max could hardly hear. “Let me tell you this—we’re nowhere near enough. We’re not even close. We’re a thousand miles from enough.”
“We got to enough when we wiped out the Dragon Hunters,” the woman shot back. A few of the villagers nodded in agreement.
“Then let me ask you a little question, dearie: How many children have you had? Eh?”
“I’ve had six. What of it?”
“Six! Six beautiful little angels! And how many of your most precious little loved ones did you lose?”
Every single face seemed to freeze at this question.
“Two,” the woman said.
“How about the rest of you? How many have you all lost? All you poor Mothers? How many darling little angels came and went without even saying ‘Mama’?”
Nobody answered. Finally an old woman said: “Five this year. Nine the year before.”
“Just here? Just in this little corner of the Woods? And how many died OVERALL? In the entire Woods, how many? In all the villages here and there, how many do you think? In the cities and towns how many?”
The crowd of villagers shuffled their feet and remained silent.
“How many sweet-faced innocents died of disease? How many of infected wounds? How many died of the Bloody Flux and St Anthony’s Fire, Lepry, the Ague and Measles, of Childbed Fever and Cholera? How many had the Red Plague ten years ago? How many died of Typhoid? How many got lost in the Woods and were never seen again?”
“Too many,” the old woman sighed, shaking her head. “Dear bless them, the little angels!”
“Let’s do away with the Dear Bless Thems!” snapped the Witch. “Dear Bless Thems never helped anyone! You’ve lost too many to count! And forgetting for a second about the little angels—as if that were even possible, as if they weren’t an ache in your hearts for ever—think about YOURSELVES! How many of YOU lead a life of suffering and labour, of back-breaking slog in the fields, a slave to the elements, eating or starving on a whim of the clouds, relying on the meagre patch of land the Dragon Hunters have allowed you to take from the trees?”
“Every one of us.”
“And NOW you’re talking about ENOUGH?” the Witch exploded. “You should be saying enough all right. YOU SHOULD WELL BE SAYING ENOUGH! Enough to the Dragon Hunters with their daft stories, who stop you chopping the wood you need, or taking the land when it’s there to be had! Enough to the Coven who oversee this morass of stupidity! Enough to the suffering and death and horror every year for years and years until THE COWS COME HOME because the World Ones need a BEDTIME STORY for their aching little souls! And how to get out of it? How to get clear of this disgusting rut? A few deaths, a hundred, two hundred, sure—Boo-hoo!—and then you have improvement and progress, comfort and cure. You have control of creation! You’ll ALL be World Ones then. You tell me that’s not better! You tell me someone who refuses to kill a hundred to save a million isn’t a MURDERER who should be locked up in a dungeon infested with RATS and COCKROACHES and FLESH-GUZZLING MAGGOTS! Morality has NOTHING to do with it,” she finished. “It’s maths! Maths, maths, maths!”
This final argument seemed to win over the villagers.
“Well I’m no murderer, so she must be right.”
“We’ve come this far. May as well finish the job.”
“We’ve just got to remember the numbers.”
“Plough the soil, then sow the seed!”
The Witch sprang down from the carriage and Max slid the hatch shut. Outside, the Witch gave one last flurry of commands.
“I want to see this place lit up like Christmas by nightfall! Prepare the torches. Fire up the generators. Now hop to it!”
The carriage was moving again almost before she’d climbed back in. Max sat staring straight ahead, pretending to have heard nothing.
I know what you’re thinking. But I can’t.
You have to try. You can’t just let them all die. They’re families, Max!
Even if I could escape, how do I have any chance of stopping a Dragon?
You can warn them at least!
It’s too far. You said it was a day’s travel, and the attack’s at midnight.
You’re not even going to TRY?
If I escape now, I might not find the Tinker. She’s going to take me to him. Then I can give him the tooth.
So you’re going to do the only bit that’s EASY and avoid everything else?
No, I’m going to do this FIRST, and then the OTHER THING.
By then it’ll be too late!
Maybe if we stay with her we can stop her. She must be the one who controls the Dragons.
Maybe MAYBE! You’re just SCARED! You’re not a KNIGHT at all.
That’s right, I’m not. I’m just a boy! They must have lots of boys in that Rosethorn place. There’s probably a gang. Let the gang deal with the Dragon.
You’re just a COWARD and I HATE YOU!
Oh, go and stare at your Scorpions. Or whatever it is you do.
A FAMILY QUARREL
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By the time the carriage rattled to a halt, the fighting had been replaced by tense, inner whispering.
We’re on Mount Gilead somewhere.
How do you know?
We’ve been going up, and the air is colder.
What time is it?
I guess about noon.
The Witch clambered out, the Mrs Jefferses clambered in, and Max was reinserted (“There! There!” “Now! Now!”) into the sack.
“Come on!” the Witch ordered. “We’ll lock him in the workshop!”
“We never did the potato!”
“It’s my turn!”
“You’re no good at it!”
THWACK!
THWACK!
“Forget the potato. We’re miles from anywhere. Now hop to it!”
Max felt himself being carried again. Footsteps crunched on snow and voices hissed at each other.
“That was your fault.”
“You said about the potato.”
“We’ll not get dinner now!”
“You’re not lifting again!”
“I am so!”
“You have to turn! We can’t get him in sideways.”
“Then you have to go backwards!”
“Why should I go backwards? You go backwards!”
“I went backwards last time.”
“I can’t hold him. He’s slipping!”
“The corner! Into the corner!”
“Hold him down!” the Witch instructed. “I’ll fasten the chain.”
Max was pinned against the floor. A hand reached into the sack, seized his ankle, and locked something heavy round it.
“Got him!”
The hands let go. The sack came off. Max sat red-faced and furious. A chain had been padlocked to his ankle. The other end was welded to the leg of a pot-bellied stove.
You should have escaped when you had the chance! Now you’ll never get out.
He looked around.
Where was he now?
In the Witch’s workshop.
The hub of her manufacturing operations.
A chipped stone table stood in the centre of the room, with bunches of tools hanging from its edges on hooks—hammers, tongs, pliers, saws, files, drills, screwdrivers and knives. All the tools were tiny, as if they had been magically shrunk to a fraction of their normal size. In another corner was a crate with a hinged lid, something like a toy box, with a few ragged blankets folded over the sides. But the most unusual feature of the workshop was the enormous collection of jars. They were stacked floor to ceiling against every wall, each meticulously labelled.
CHITIN
ARTICULATED CLAWS
HOCKED SNOT
PIPE CLEANERS
SPLINTERS
GANGLIONS
RANCID BUTTER
SAWDUST
GLASS BEADS
MANDIBLES
TURPENTINE
MALPIGHIAN TUBULES
GOLD
ELEPHANT SICK
All these shelves and jars were festooned in cobwebs. Here and there spiders could be seen trickling down on gossamer threads.
“Get this cleaned up,” the Witch snarled. “I don’t want a single WHICH ONE’S WHICH until the whole place is spick-and-span.”
“What about him?”
“Isn’t he going to help?”
“No. He’s a Vanishing Mastermind. There’s no telling what he could do. Now get to it. I’m going for a nap. It’s going to be a busy night!” With that, the Witch disappeared through a second door that led, Max guessed, into her cottage.
For the rest of the afternoon the Mrs Jefferses bent to their task.
First they snagged the cobwebs down with brooms and laid them out flat on the workbench. Then they retrieved dead flies from the cobwebs, picking the bodies apart with tweezers, salvaging legs and wings and compound eyes for later use and storing them, along with the cleaned cobwebs, in bottles.
Max made several secret attempts to loosen the chain.
Nothing worked.
He tried to trick the twins into unlocking him. He complained he was hungry. They brought him shrivelled apples.
Thirsty?
Some water.
The toilet?
A bucket in a corner.
The shadows lengthened as the sun set.
There was no sign or word of the Tinker.
Inside, Martha was frantic.
You have to get to Rosethorn! We’re running out of time!
HOW? Tell me how and I’ll do it!
At long last the Witch returned—but only to inspect the work.
“Not bad, not bad,” she said, running a finger along the surfaces. “Keep an eye on Fish Face while I make dinner.”
She left.
Her parting remark delighted the Mrs Jefferses. Name-calling, cruelty and bullying—nothing was better! They began prodding Max with broom handles.
“Fish Face FISH FACE!”
“Fish Face FISH FACE!”
“At least I’ve got my own face!” he growled, whacking them away with his hands. “I don’t have to copy anyone else’s.”
This only delighted them even more. They exchanged sly, cunning glances.
“You’ve got your own face?”
“Is that right?”
“We’ll see about that.”
Max stared at them. “Don’t you dare!” he whispered.
But they had already started. Joining hands, the Mrs Jefferses began to dance, capering round and round, throwing their heads back and laughing.
He ran at them, snarling. The chain snapped him back.
Round and round they went.
“Who are we?” they sang as they danced. “Who are we?”
Who are we?
Who are we?
Let us see!
Let us see!
You and me!
You and me!
Who are we?
Who are we?
Round and round …
And round and round and round and round…
Roundandroundandroundandroundandandroundandround…
And then they jumped up a gear, disappearing in a blur of colour.
FFWWWWWWZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ…
But this moment of maximum velocity lasted only a second. The spinning slowed. The colours came apart.
Two shapes became distinct.
Two Max-shaped shapes, holding hands, dancing round and round.
This is us!
This is us!
What a fuss!
What a fuss!
One of us!
Two of us!
This is us!
This is us!
Just remember—you’re the You with the Me in the finger.
Is that what I look like on the outside?
Yes. Sort of cute in a not-enough-sunlight kind of way.
The Maxes came to a stop.
Unlinked their hands.
Turned to face him.
“What do you say now?”
“Got your own face, have you?”
“That’s my Me,” Max said. “Get your own You back.”
“We can’t.”
“We don’t know who we are.”
“Yes,” said Max. “You do.”
“No we don’t.”
“We’ve never known.”
“You know inside. You don’t need anyone to tell you.”
“Oh?”
“Do you know who you are?”
“No. But that’s… that’s different.”
“See—you don’t know who you are either.”
“You don’t have a Mother. We can tell.”
“Only Mothers can tell you who you are.”
“There’s no use trying to know things on your own.”
“Sometimes we think we know without her, it’s true.”
“When we wake up and the sun is shining.”
“And the insects are singing.”
“And Mother’s still asleep.”
“And the box
is all warm and cosy.”
“Then he says he’s Kaspar.”
“And he says he’s Hauser.”
“And it feels right.”
“It feels perfect!”
“And we rush to wake up Mother!”
“And we tell her we’ve finally got it!”
“And she sniffs our breath and tells us we’re each other.”
“And then she gives us what for.”
“Because we woke her up.”
“She pretends she knows! She just takes whatever you say and switches it round.”
“Why would she do that?”
“She loves us.”
“If she did that she wouldn’t love us.”
“If she loves you so much why’s she always hitting you and calling you names?”
“Because we’re bad.”
“We’re naughty.”
“We pick our noses.”
“It’s disgusting but we do it.”
“But she’s not even your real Mother! It’s all a big lie! She stole you from your real parents just after you were born!”
“That’s silly.”
“She’s our Mother. She ate our Father. She told us she’d eat us too if we’re bad!”
“But you’ve got another Mother!”
“What’s the good of another Mother?”
“Our Mother’s right here.”
“She’s the only Mother we need.”
“What do other Mothers do?”
“Do they feed you?”
“Or teach you?”
“Or tuck you in?”
“Or lock the monsters out?”
“Or give you a comfortable box to sleep in?”
“What’s it like when other Mothers love you?”
“I… I don’t know. I never had any parents. I mean, I did—but they weren’t my real parents.”
“You had parents but they weren’t your real parents?”
“Yes…”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“It does… it does make sense.”
“You’re the one who’s confused.”
“Our Mother loves us!”
“You can’t tell us she doesn’t!”
“You’re the one who doesn’t know who you are.”
The Beginning Woods Page 25