Vivienne returned the needle to the pouch, then, considering it a rather useful find, she shoved the pouch deep inside her boot. She froze, her senses on high alert. Something was moving on the rafter above the bunk where she’d been lying. It was the merest shadow, but still she saw it.
‘Ermengarde?’ she whispered. ‘Is that you?’
A long black nose with twitching whiskers emerged from behind a roof beam. Two dark eyes, round and shiny, observed her. Vivienne climbed onto the bunk and reached out her hand. The little rat ran down her arm and nestled on her shoulder under her hair. Vivienne tickled her under the chin.
‘We may be in great danger, Ermengarde,’ said Vivienne softly. ‘So whatever you do, keep your wits about you.’
Ermengarde nibbled Vivienne’s fingers as if to say that she understood.
‘Are you ready?’ Vivienne asked. ‘Good.’
Easing the door open, Vivienne carefully peeked out into the corridor. It was empty. She crept along the hallway, all the while wondering how it was possible that this appeared in every way to be a cleaner, newer version of The Silverfish, the ship belonging to the pirate Carsten Mothwood, who had died from a fall on the Cliffs of Cartavia many moons ago. There was a silence to the ship that suggested there was nobody on board. But someone, or something, was keeping the ship on a steady course.
Vivienne sidled up the companionway, put her head out and examined the deck. She took in the clean timber decks and crisp white sails, the new ropes and polished brass. She frowned. This ship was so very similar to The Silverfish. But this was not that ship. Still, it was unsettling. She tiptoed out and hid behind the wheelhouse. As she did this, she had an odd memory of a girl and a dog. The vision was sudden and vivid, but just as quickly as it had come, it was gone. Peering out, she spied a tall, green creature standing at the ship’s wheel. He appeared to be woven out of fresh grass. He was wearing a green shirt and shorts and he had a head of bright green hair. When he turned in her direction, she saw he had a grass-green face. She took a breath and ducked back behind the wheelhouse, but almost immediately his voice rang out.
‘Ah, it’s true! True and real and alive. I did capture you! And it was easy! Here you are … Vivienne Small! It’s a blue day and you are on a vital green mission. Welcome aboard!’
Vivienne stepped out and stared at him. The grassboy left the wheel and danced his way across the deck to her in a nimble series of sideways steps. He attempted to take her hand and kiss it, but she managed to pull it away from him just in time.
The grassboy did not seem offended. ‘My, you are very small, aren’t you? A mere flyweight to carry! And, now that you are here, I’ll be needing your writer.’
Vivienne stared at the boy. He had a shimmering quality to his eyes. They were green and gold with no dark pupils and his teeth, against his green skin, were very white. But he smelled of something that had been long underground.
‘Writer?’ she asked. ‘What are you talking about? And why are we on The Silverfish?’
‘Silverfish? Nonsense! This is no Silverfish. This is Storm Rider! Before you were even a thought in her head, a speck of sunlight in her eye, this was the ship she made for me to sail upon.’
The boy indicated the flag flying from the top of the tallest mast, and Vivienne saw that it was not emblazoned with the eye and fish skeleton she knew from The Silverfish, but a picture of a great wave and a jagged bolt of lightning.
‘You know better than anyone, Vivienne Small, how writers can invent anything and how that changes your life! Oh yes, I’m sure you’re very familiar with that!’
He said all this in a surprisingly pleasant voice, full of music, but his eyes were as cold and hard as emeralds.
‘I don’t understand,’ said Vivienne. ‘What do you mean, a writer?’
‘Oh, we’re so forgetful, aren’t we? We have a big sleep and, oh, there they go, all those fresh and fragrant memories,’ said the boy. ‘C’mon, Vivienne. Snap out of it.’ And he clicked his woven fingers in her face.
‘Stop that,’ said Vivienne, taking a step backwards.
The boy stepped forwards and clicked his fingers once more. Vivienne scowled.
But he clicked his fingers again. ‘Once, twice, thrice, aren’t memories nice?’
Suddenly Vivienne did remember. It almost winded her, the tumbling onrush of images of the girl Tuesday, the dog Baxterr. Tuesday and Baxterr sailing in her boat Vivacious. Tuesday and Baxterr in a cave making dinner. Tuesday and Baxterr swimming in a pool. Tuesday and Baxterr on a long walk with Vivienne. Tuesday being lifted into the sky in the claws of a vercaka above the City of Clocks. And Tuesday appearing through a doorway in a wall.
‘There!’ said the boy. ‘That is your writer. Who just happens to be my writer, too. Thought this was your world, didn’t you? But it was mine long before you hatched from your grubby little egg.’
‘Why do you need her?’ asked Vivienne.
‘Ah, why. Such an interesting question. A question alive with secrets,’ said the grassboy.
‘Well?’ Vivienne asked.
‘I’m not telling,’ said the boy, shrugging. ‘I’m not telling at all. Don’t you know that about stories? The secrets don’t come out until it’s almost the end.’
Vivienne frowned.
‘Secrets,’ said the boy, ‘are not easy to catch. Like writers.’
‘Catch?’ Vivienne said, swallowing.
‘That’s right. But today is ripe with opportunity. So summon her.’
‘Summon who?’
‘Your writer, you fool! Did she give you no intelligence at all?’
Vivienne was sure the boy was quite insane and that she needed to get away. She took stock of the sailing ship and considered her options. There was no land in sight, only the wild, cold sea. But her wide blue wings could take her almost anywhere. As if reading her mind, the boy laughed and suddenly flipped himself up and spun through the air, landing on his bare green feet behind her. With lightning speed, he gripped her ankles and, in one swift movement, Vivienne found herself dangling upside down. He was strong for a boy made of grass.
She gasped, trying to wrench herself free. She felt Ermengarde’s tiny claws dig into her neck. Half a second later, Ermengarde was crawling underneath the collar of Vivienne’s shirt while the boy bound Vivienne’s feet to the nearest boom. He bound her wrists, too, with ropes like wide lengths of paper that he had pulled from the pocket of his shorts. Vivienne strained against her bindings, but they were much too strong to break. She hung helplessly, twirling like an autumn leaf. The sewing pouch that she’d tucked in her boot tumbled onto the deck. Vivienne could see it a short distance from her nose, but the grassboy did not appear to notice it. Then she felt Ermengarde’s tiny claws as the little rat climbed up her back, under her belt and continued up her leg along the inside of her trousers. Even though this was quite a tickly process, Vivienne managed to maintain her furious glare.
‘So, if this ship is called Storm Rider, what does that make you? Prince Lightning?’ Vivienne asked, keen to distract the boy while Ermengarde reached safety.
‘Prince Lightning. Oh, I quite like that,’ the boy said, dancing lightly around. He leaned over her and laughed. Vivienne breathed quietly, every part of her considering how she was going to escape.
‘Give me a name, any name,’ said the boy. ‘Call me Hendrel, Phandor or Tutelaine. I have been called them all. Windish, Merivane, Irmac. I have lived the four seasons over and over. I am the Ear of Spells. I am the Eyes of Time. I am the son of Hope and the Lord of Despair. I am …’
‘Exhausting?’ suggested Vivienne. She had battled many villains in her time. This particular creature was probably no worse than any of them, and there were two things she had learned from villains. The first was they wanted to be listened to. And the second was they wanted respect. So respect was the last thing Vivienne Small was going to give him.
The grass-green boy dropped to his knees and glared closely at Vivienne’s upside-dow
n face.
‘Let us get to the real business at hand. Summon your writer. I am in need of her.’
‘No! If you need her so badly, why don’t you summon her yourself?’ said Vivienne. Her head was pounding from being suspended upside down.
‘I’ll let you go if you call her for me. You see, it’s been such a long time, and I want to surprise her,’ said the boy in a pleading, wheedling voice.
‘Cut me down, then,’ said Vivienne, certain that if she only had a moment she could take flight and be gone.
Suddenly the boy noticed the sewing pouch and picked it up.
‘Ah, of course,’ he said. ‘One stitch, two stitch, three stitch, four, I hear a writer knocking at my door.’
As he continued this rhyme, he threaded a needle.
‘Five stitch, six stitch, seven and eight, I see a writer at my gate,’ he said, spinning Vivienne about. Briskly, he began to stitch together the beautiful blue wings. Vivienne gritted her teeth. With each stitch the needle pierced and stung, but she refused to cry out or even whimper.
‘Nine stitch, ten stitch, eleven and twelve, if you want a story you dig and delve,’ continued the boy. ‘Thirteen, fourteen, stitches aplenty, just six more to make it twenty.’
When he had finished, he cut her feet loose from the boom and Vivienne tumbled to the deck where she lay for a moment, winded, shocked, her wings aching and her body bruised. On the mast, not far from where Vivienne’s feet had been, she spotted Ermengarde. As Vivienne watched, Ermengarde scrambled up into the safety of the rigging. Clever girl, Vivienne thought.
‘Summon your writer,’ the grassboy said, smiling. ‘Come, Vivienne Small. We don’t have to be enemies.’
‘My wings …’ said Vivienne, through gritted teeth. She struggled to her knees.
‘Tut, tut, tut, Vivienne Small. Don’t you know when you’re overpowered? Summon your writer.’ ‘You can’t make me,’ said Vivienne, using her bound hands to push herself upright, then scrambling to her feet.
‘Oh, can’t I?’ he said. ‘Not even if I do this?’ His voice had come from Vivienne’s mouth, sounding in part like himself and in part like Vivienne.
Vivienne swallowed. Had that just happened? Then a laugh came from her throat. ‘Hello, I’m Vivienne Small and a boy made of grass has gotten the better of me,’ said the boy, and this time the voice was much more like Vivienne’s own.
Vivienne coughed as if she might force his voice out of her throat. ‘Stop it!’ she said.
‘Of course, dear Vivienne, I will do as you ask,’ he said, though her own lips were moving against her will. ‘Just summon your writer.’
‘I won’t,’ said Vivienne, momentarily reclaiming her voice. Her eyes darted around for anything sharp she could grab to free her hands so she could fight the boy. She leapt onto the top of the wheelhouse, but she was awkward on her feet. The boy, with unexpected speed and incredible reach, swatted her and she fell once more to the deck.
‘You will,’ said the grassboy. ‘It would have been so much better if you’d done it yourself. But no matter. He who lives alone must be resourceful.’
Out of Vivienne’s mouth, in her own voice, came the boy’s words, ‘Writer! I summon you!’
To Vivienne’s horror, a long length of greenish-silver thread appeared in front of her mouth and hovered in the air.
‘No!’ Vivienne cried.
‘Ah, this is fun!’ he said.
Again, he made Vivienne’s mouth move, and her voice cried out, ‘Writer! I summon you!’
More and more thread appeared as if it was drawn from an invisible and infinite supply, and in no time it was as big as a tennis ball and just out of Vivienne’s reach.
‘And once more for luck, I think,’ the grassboy said.
Vivienne’s voice rang out over the sounds of waves and creaking rigging. ‘WRITER, I SUMMON YOU!’
The ball of thread instantly leapt into the air and darted high up into the sky.
‘No! No! Don’t come, Tuesday!’ Vivienne cried, but already the thread was far, far out beyond this world and unravelling itself into another.
Chapter Eight
Tuesday and Colette spent all of that long, rainy Sunday getting to know one another. This involved several games of Cluedo and Monopoly and cribbage and pick-up-sticks and charades, as well as a frenetic card game that Colette called Spit. But when Tuesday pointed hopefully to the Scrabble set, Colette scowled.
‘With a writer? You have to be joking,’ she said.
It was a day that was slow and fast all at once, and when evening came, Tuesday found that she was still in the pyjama pants, T-shirt and hooded top that she’d been wearing at breakfast. Her clothes bore some marks from the sausages and mash she and Colette had whipped up for a late lunch – Colette having made a quick trip out for supplies, and finding in the pantry things that Tuesday had long overlooked.
‘How about we do some unpacking?’ suggested Colette. ‘Work up an appetite before dinner? Hmm?’
The majority of Colette’s many silver cases had been stowed behind the couch in the living room since she had arrived. What they contained, Tuesday now discovered, was all manner of camera equipment and film footage. By taking down a few paintings, Colette turned one wall of the room into a screen, and showed Tuesday some of her work-in-progress. The first sequence opened with a picture of a tiny child with a star-shaped tattoo on its forehead, sleeping against the flanks of an enormous white-furred animal that Tuesday was fairly sure was a reindeer. The camera pulled back to show purple mountains and meadows dotted with yellow flowers, and people dressed in layers and layers of colourful clothes. Then, in a heartbeat, the same child was a young boy weaving through a grazing herd of reindeer, appearing and disappearing between and behind the animals’ stocky legs. And then he was older again, longer haired and serious, sitting astride a reindeer with a strand of grass between his teeth. He and the reindeer reached the edge of a milky, aqua stream that coursed through dark rocks, and the animal bent to drink.
‘It’s like another world,’ Tuesday said softly.
‘There are worlds within the world. That is one thing I have learned from all my travels,’ Colette said. She nodded towards the screen and said, ‘Here, now, is another.’
This sequence began with the huge liquid eyes of a tiny girl strapped to her mother’s back with a length of saffron-yellow cloth. The mother was poling a small boat down a flat, brown river. The child’s limbs were bare and Tuesday could almost feel the humidity of the jungle that pushed in towards the water on both sides. Then the same girl was singing as she sat at a rough table on a jetty on the riverbank, and although she couldn’t have been more than five, she was expertly flicking the scales from the sides of a large, weed-coloured fish. The scene changed and the girl effortlessly transformed into a young woman standing on the same jetty, a huge red flower braided into her hair. She was talking to a man in a boat, her face calm and determined as she named her price for the fish in the bucket beside her.
‘You’ve seen such incredible things. These places you’ve been, the people you’ve seen … they’re amazing,’ Tuesday said, with a sigh that was almost sad.
Colette observed Tuesday intensely. Tuesday, in turn, observed the lines that framed Colette’s mouth and fanned out from the corners of her eyes. In the light from the film her hazel eyes looked green, but at other times – Tuesday had noticed – those same eyes looked brown, and at other times they appeared flecked with gold.
‘You will remember, Tuesday. You will,’ Colette said.
‘Remember what?’
‘That every day has the possibility of a little magic,’ her godmother said.
Tuesday smiled wistfully.
‘It is a hard thing,’ said Colette, tapping the side of her head, ‘to remember and never forget. We are always forgetting things, losing them in our brains. Store something in the wrong drawer inside your head, and lo, it is forgotten!’
Tuesday nodded. One of the things she was
most afraid of was that she would forget her father – that time would gradually erase him. It panicked her the way time had refused to stop when he died, even though it felt as if it should have done. It didn’t seem right that the sun had kept rising and setting, that days kept beginning and ending, each new one carrying her just a little further from the last time she had spoken with him, hugged him, seen his face.
‘Come on, kiddo,’ said Colette. ‘We have watched enough pictures. Why don’t you check if your mother is back yet? Maybe she will eat dinner with us.’
Tuesday managed to rekindle something of her smile. ‘Okay,’ she said.
‘C’mon, doggo,’ said Colette to Baxterr, who was snoozing on the rug. ‘Let’s see what we can make in the kitchen.’
Tuesday took most of the stairs two at a time, but slowed as she approached the last flight, the one that led to her mother’s writing room. Tuesday had hardly been in this room since her father had died.
Standing at the threshold, Tuesday remembered vividly the first time she had ever used her mother’s typewriter, and how she had first discovered the silver thread that had the power to take a writer there. She would never forget how it felt to be transported to the tree on the hill, to visit the great Library with the Librarian, or to meet Vivienne Small. But all those things seemed so distant and long ago that it was almost as if they belonged to another Tuesday McGillycuddy.
Tuesday switched on the light. It was clear Serendipity had not returned. In the centre of the room was Colette’s hammock and, piled in it, was Colette’s coat. At its tips, the black fur felt coarse, almost like Tuesday imagined a yak might feel if you were patting one. But further in, the fur was rich and plush. It smelled of pine needles and wood smoke. She made a mental note to ask Colette how she had come by it.
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