by Cliff McNish
I looked at Milo. I’d seen gold on him before, and glints of something else, but now every surface of his body was a sheen of lustrous silver. He was so radiant that I wondered how we could look upon him at all. It was, I thought, as if our eyes had been waiting for him. I glanced across at Helen, and saw she felt the same way.
Dawn arrived, the sun creeping over the humps of the eastern tip, but we barely noticed. All the light in the world seemed meaningless next to Milo. The twins peered between Walter’s legs.
‘If I was the moon,’ Emily murmured, ‘I’d disappear.’
‘If I was the sun,’ Freda said, her arm around her, ‘I’d shed a tear.’
For a while Milo simply towered over us, gazing outward across Coldharbour. Then he turned to stare at the ground. His eyes were so large that it was not possible to gauge precisely where he was looking, or at whom. But I knew. I knew he was looking at me.
I’d been hoping for a miracle. I’d hoped Milo had become so different that what had happened before between us would not matter any more – or that he would not remember. But as his eyes curved to the ground, I knew he remembered.
He understood exactly what I had done to him.
Should I run? Walter would take me if I asked, and perhaps the power of his legs would carry me half-way across Coldharbour before Milo reacted.
But that would not be far enough.
Milo lifted his foot. The shadow of it rose above me like a mountain. I shrank against Walter, thinking Milo was going to crush me. But Milo stepped backwards. A single stride took him across the river. Another step and both his feet were on the boundary of Coldharbour, their weight flattening the slopes of the northern tip.
From there Milo lowered himself to the ground. He lay flat, on his chest. He placed his head near the river. The heaviness of his chin striking the mudflats buried his face nearly up to the lips. His eyes, staring at me, were larger than my body.
I stood shaking in front of him, trying to say something.
‘The river …’ I managed. ‘When I carried you, dropped you … I didn’t –’ I broke off, unable to finish. I wanted to say more; I struggled to, but Milo shook his head, no, no, no need for that.
He moved his own lips. It was still difficult for him, and his words, when they reached me, came like a wind.
‘Thomas,’ he said, ‘forgive me.’
Forgive him? I gazed up.
‘I gave you no choice,’ Milo said. ‘Yet you kept me alive. Even when you believed you were dying, you did that.’
‘I was frightened –’
‘Because I took everything from you.’ There were tears in Milo’s eyes. They were normal tears; they fell down his face without drying, like our tears. He lifted one of his silver hands, as if to cup my face inside his fingers. Then he stood again, rising in stages. His face, once it reached the clouds, remained still, as if listening intently.
‘Can you hear it?’ he whispered. ‘Can you?’
And, of course, we could. It was the roar, ever closer now – as if with the emergence of Milo it was seeking us all out.
‘Soon everyone will hear,’ Milo said. ‘I do not know what it is, only that it means to consume us. It is an appetite, a hunger. That is all the roar knows, perhaps all it will ever need to know to hunt us down. Yet there may still be time to prevent it.’
His eyes looked through ours, and when he spoke again his voice had the weight of empires. ‘I am the first of the defenders,’ he declared. ‘I am the herald, the harbinger, the first. Prepare yourselves to meet those who are yet to come.’ Then, looking at each of us, he thundered:
‘ARE YOU READY?’
We recoiled in shock. Only Helen seemed to know what Milo meant, and she was more apprehensive than all of us.
‘I … think whatever makes the roar …’ she said weakly, ‘I’ve helped it. I’ve helped it discover us. I didn’t mean to, but when I looked into its mind …’
‘No,’ Milo said, ‘it would have found us just the same.’ He turned gravely to her. ‘I suffered pain,’ he said. ‘I never believed, Helen, you would walk willingly towards so much pain. Yet you did, and did so alone. Many from the next generation of children will also be alone. Some will not be able to express what they need. But you will know what to do for them. You will.’
Helen shook her head fearfully. ‘I … won’t. I’m not ready … for whatever it is.’
‘You think you are not strong enough?’
‘I’m not.’
‘You are.’
Milo returned his gaze to me. ‘The work for your beauty is only beginning,’ he said. ‘Are you ready, Thomas?’
I shook my head, not understanding, but Milo glanced nervously at the sky, as if a greater duty already beckoned him there. He said one more thing:
‘Walter! Protect them all!’
And then, gathering himself, Milo took a deep breath. He arched his back. He raised what was left of his hands, and the bones stretched into a cord-like thinness. Each cord lashed the air, then reached eagerly behind, until there was an unfurling of something stronger and heavier than feathers.
Wings.
Five times the span of Milo’s body were each of the wings, and on them he beat a path into the sky. The motion created a storm of wind that knocked us to our knees. Milo soared upward, in long hesitant arcs, and all around us paper and plastic and anything not anchored to the ground rose from the rubbish tips of Coldharbour, dancing in the air.
With our hair blowing into our eyes, we watched.
Milo’s first movements upward had been almost clumsy. But soon he gained a greater understanding of the power of his wings, and when at last he opened them fully nothing was the same. Their extent hid the stars. Gulls cried out, frightened by the noise of their beating. Whole towns fell under their shadow. Clouds were swept aside. A backward thrust of one wing, hanging over the sea, created a wave that started on the shore and forged like the beginning of a new ocean away from the land.
A beautiful, loud, complete silverness enveloped us.
For a moment Milo hovered uncertainly, as if he was not sure himself that the wings would carry his great bulk any higher. Then he laughed, and was sure, and took up a position in the upper reaches of the sky. He held that position – centred over Coldharbour – and looked calmly in all directions, his wings now beating to the same slow steady rhythm.
I recognized that rhythm. I stared at Freda and saw that she, too, recognized the sound of it.
‘The wing,’ she whispered. ‘It was Milo, Toms. Not just the roar. Somehow we were hearing Milo, too …’
I looked up from Walter’s arms, and from this distance I could see that Milo was not merely a silver child. He glowed other hues of colour as well. I don’t even know what colours they were, all colours, drifting down his body in a gradual way, like clouds over mountains. And even as we watched the purity of light grew, until his eyes – rimmed with bronze and dipped with fierceness – were almost unbearable.
Milo turned to face the world. Defying anything to resist him, he gazed across the town – and beyond it. We looked, and saw that everywhere lights were being switched on, windows thrown wide, doors opened.
‘Children,’ Helen whispered.
Milo drew them. His size, his light, called out to them. He was a beacon, a summons commanding them to come together where he could defend them.
The first children were not long arriving. Initially a scattering of them were just distant silhouettes across Coldharbour, bathed in Milo’s silverness. Then I saw that the silhouettes belonged to boys, members of night gangs who must have been out patrolling their territories.
‘They can hear the roar,’ Helen said to me. ‘It’s not just us any more. All children can hear it, now.’
The first to stagger towards us was a young girl with a doll. She wore a dressing gown and I think she must have been travelling for some time to have reached us so soon. The rubbish of Coldharbour had still not settled from Milo’s early wingbeats, and as the girl
made her way towards us a newspaper blew across her face. She pulled it off. Seeing us, she hesitated – then raised her face to stare at the sky.
‘Milo,’ she said – lifting her arms to him.
And Milo left his position amongst the clouds. To be with her he did that, the wind rushing ahead of him. He tried to alight on the surface, but his legs could no longer bear his weight, as if they were never meant to. Instead, Milo maintained a place just above her and delicately lifted the soil under the girl. He held her in the palm of his hand, and kissed her.
‘Jenny,’ he murmured.
She stayed there for a long time, curled inside a whorl of his finger.
‘Safeguard her,’ Milo whispered at last to Walter and the twins.
Then he swept back his wings and returned to the sky, anchoring himself in the same position as before – eyes outward – his body slowly turning and turning, guiding children everywhere towards Coldharbour.
I looked up at him and some part of me realized that Milo would never leave the sky again. His task from now onward would always keep him there. He was a protector. He was a guardian, the first of the defenders, a shield forever facing in the direction from which the roar would come.
Jenny stood nearby, holding her doll. While the twins tried to coax her to approach them, Helen’s dad was staring out across the mud to the south and west.
‘More are coming,’ he said. ‘How many are there?’
Helen pressed his hand. ‘They’re all coming. I can hear their minds.’
We waited, and gradually children started to arrive from every direction, stumbling over the rubbish-strewn ground. Nearly all of them had been caught sleeping, and turned up in nightwear. They stared in awe at Milo, but also at each other.
Jenny was still the closest. She stood beside us, uncertainly twiddling her doll. Emily and Freda, hardly able to contain their excitement, climbed down from Walter, and skittered across to her. Then they stopped, got off their hands, and stood up using only their legs, trying to look more normal for Jenny.
‘If I’d a grace,’ Freda said, ‘I’d charm the day.’
‘If I’d a song,’ Emily shouted out loud, ‘I’d sing away!’
I thought Jenny would run, hearing that shout, but instead she laughed. She was not afraid of the twins. She let them come over, and played with the buttons on their dresses briefly, but there was something else she wanted.
She headed for Walter.
Knowing what reaction children normally had to him, Walter had tried to hide his size from Jenny, crouching low somewhere behind us. Jenny threaded a path to him. She extricated herself from the clutches of the singing twins and walked up to him. She held out her arms to be picked up and Walter just looked at me, and I had no words to express the joy that spread across his face.
Above us, Milo’s imperturbable eyes gazed out over the world.
‘The children are coming to him,’ I said. ‘But he’s so high. How can they reach him?’
‘No,’ Helen said solemnly. ‘Don’t you understand? They’re not coming to him. They’re coming to us.’ She glanced at me. ‘I never did anything for him, you know. Milo never needed anything from me. Everything that happened was to prepare me.’
‘Prepare you?’
‘For this.’ With one arm Helen held on to her dad. With the other she indicated the thousands of children scrambling around and over the tips. Steadily, with determination, they were walking towards us across the filth and rubbish of Coldharbour.
‘I’m ready,’ Helen said, tears flowing from her. ‘And so are you.’
And she was right. I looked at the singing twins, and at Walter, now with Jenny in his arms, and as I did so I felt my beauty, like an ocean filling me, already making its way towards the nearest children, ready to provide whatever they needed. Amongst them were skills and gifts I could not believe.
‘Are you ready?’ Helen asked me.
‘Yes,’ I said.
Walter placed Jenny on his neck. He gathered up Helen and her dad. He let me walk up his arm. The twins dropped on all fours, and clung to his knees.
And together we turned to face the children now running towards us out of the dawn.
THE SILVER CHILD
First published in Great Britain in 2003 by Orion Children’s Books.
This eBook first published in 2010 by Orion Children’s Books.
Reissued in 2017 by Doomspell Books.
Text copyright © Cliff McNish 2003
Illustrations copyright © Geoff Taylor 2003
The right of Cliff McNish and Geoff Taylor to be identified as author and illustrator respectively of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the copyright, designs and patents act 1988.
All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: Smashwords
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