The 1,000 year old Boy

by Ross Welford

  For a split second, her eyes locked on mine, pure terror etched onto her face, and then she was over the edge of the slope and out of sight.

  There was a loud thump as she hit the ground, but no shout, no scream. I had drawn breath to shout her name, and to check she was OK, but the shout stilled in my throat as I saw the back door of the cottage burst open and the witch come running out.

  ‘Ay, ay, ay!’ she cried. And then something else, something I couldn’t make out, because it was in a language I’d never heard before.

  It wasn’t French. I know what French sounds like (third from top in my class, en fait). And it wasn’t Italian, because I’ve heard Spatch talking with his dad at home.

  It was like nothing I had ever heard before: a throaty, musical language. The witch – or ‘witch’, I suppose – hurried to where Roxy had fallen right below me. Then, in her language, she called out again, as if shouting for someone.

  That’s when I saw him.

  He stood in the doorway: a pale, skinny blond boy. A pair of sunglasses hung on a loop round his neck and he put them on before scuttling out into the sunshine of the yard to where Roxy lay.

  Was she dead? I was terrified, but I didn’t think it was likely, even though it was quite a long drop. Then I heard her moan. Thank God for that.

  Should I stand up? Reveal myself? I was caught in a terrified dither of simply not knowing what to do when the boy picked up Roxy and carried her little body easily into the house, a dripping trail of blood coming from her head.

  Both halves of the door clattered shut and I realised I hadn’t breathed since Roxy had fallen.

  This is what I know about the life-pearls:

  1. They contain a thick liquid which, when mixed with your own blood, immediately stops you from getting any older.

  2. If you repeat the process with another life-pearl, the ageing starts again.

  That is it. That is pretty much all I know, and all Mam knows too.

  As for my father, I am afraid I can hardly remember him, although Mam has told me all about him. One thousand years is a long time to hear stories again and again, but I never get bored of them.

  (Sometimes I can almost touch a memory of him. A fuzzy mental picture of a tall blond man; the smell of a ship’s rope dipped in tar; a feeling of fear in a storm; but they are indistinct recollections. They seem thin, as though constantly trying to bring them to mind has somehow worn them out.)

  Da’s name was Einar. He was a soldier-turned-trader from the island of Gotland in what is now called the Baltic, but in her stories Mam still called it the uster-shern – the Eastern Sea.

  Where did they come from, these ‘life-pearls’? No one knew, not for sure. There was a saga – an ancient poem – that Mam would tell by the light of the fire’s embers, of an alchemist’s manservant escaping from a massive tsunami in the Middle East. He carried a bag of the life-pearls across the desert, to the mountains of Carpathia in Eastern Europe. How much of it was true, though, was anybody’s guess.

  Mixing the liquid in a life-pearl with your own blood stopped you from getting older. It did not make you immortal however: you could still be killed in battle, or by disease, or – as Da found out – by accident.

  Mam said he had obtained the life-pearls when he had heroically fought some vagabonds who were raiding a tiny village. I loved this story.

  ‘Like a true and noble warrior,’ said Mam, ‘he spared the life of one of the bandits in exchange for the life-pearls.

  ‘Straight away he used one of them himself. He made two cuts in his arm and poured in the liquid from one of the glass balls. Four life-pearls remained. The valiant Einar knew, though, that they were so valuable that anyone who owned them was at risk: people would kill to have eternal life. So he told no one until he met …’

  ‘You!’ I would fill in and Mam always smiled.

  ‘That’s right. By then, he was already a hundred and forty years old. He was living in the land of the Danes, and speaking their language. We had been married for only six months when I learnt I was pregnant with you, Alve.’

  (‘We married for love,’ she never tired of telling me. ‘That was unusual then.’ A thousand years ago, love was very low down on the list of reasons to get married – a long way below things like family alliances, wealth and security.)

  Mam was poor, Da was not, and people were jealous of Mam’s good fortune in marrying the rich and handsome Einar of Gotland. And, when people are jealous, they start to talk, and the talk turned to Einar’s age, and how strange it was that the village elders remembered him from their own youth.

  Could he be one of the fabled Neverdeads?

  And, if he was a Neverdead, might he possess the livperler – the life-pearls?

  Already the Neverdeads were so rare that many people thought it was just a tall tale told by those who had travelled and met people from distant lands. For example, there were stories of a vast land to the south where there were four-legged creatures with tremendous long necks that could reach the topmost leaves of trees; where there were fat horses that lived in rivers; where there were tiny, hairy people, with long tails, who swung through the branches of the forest.

  No one quite knew how much of this to believe. Perhaps stories of the Neverdeads were just more travellers’ tales?

  But, when the rumours about his long life reached my father’s ears, he was taking no chances. With his wife and child, he made plans for a new life in the land of the Britons, where he hoped they would be safe. As it turned out, he was right … in part.

  He saved me and Mam. But he did not save himself.

  Einar of Gotland was unrecognisable as he stood on the wooden jetty of Ribe on the west coast of Denmark with Hilda, his wife, and a small child – me. That was exactly what he wanted.

  He had shaved his beard, cut his hair and dressed in the clothes of a middle-ranking tradesman. Not too rich to attract attention, nor so poor that people would question his ability to pay for a passage on the ship to Bernicia in the land of the Britons.

  No one knew him in Ribe, but he was taking no chances. We stayed a little way out of town. Da was on edge, said Mam. He thought he was being followed. Hilda was now a Neverdead as well, the bloody process carried out on the night of their marriage. Together they would live forever in the new land with their son.

  If they made it.

  Einar had bought passage on a cargo ship that would sail straight across the North Sea, stopping first north of the old Roman Wall to offload cargo and take on another shipment, and then carrying on down the coast to the mouth of the Tyne.

  The captain had said four days, maybe five, depending on the wind – and the wind was not cooperating. Cargo ships relied on sail, rather than the oars that the longships used, so if the wind was coming from the west – as it usually did – a journey to the new lands was hard sailing.

  After a week, the wind changed and in less than a day the battered old knarr, with its filthy, patched sails, and old, tarry ropes, was gliding out of Ribe harbour.

  Da boarded separately from Mam and me. We were to pretend for the whole journey that we were unconnected. Da gave the pearls to Mam, to keep them even safer, in case anyone recognised him. ‘Until we land,’ Mam had said to me, with her most serious face as she put it when retelling the story, ‘you must never speak to your da.’

  She said I was clearly puzzled but did as I was told. I was always a good, obedient boy, she said.

  We had very little luggage: a bag each, made of hemp, and, for me, a wicker basket containing a young cat that I had called Biffa. It was not a name, nor even a word. I think I just liked the sound of it.

  On the boat there was no privacy. If anyone needed to wee, or more, they had to do it in the sea, as the boat shuddered along over the cloud-coloured waves. The crew were not fussy: they just dropped their trousers and put their bottoms over the side of the boat.

  And that is how we lost Da, said Mam. No one saw him go. The wind had come up, and the skipper
had pulled in the sail, and the long knarr was rising and falling on the swell. As the boat bucked and reared on the white-capped waves, Da got up and clambered to the rear, which was where everyone went. It was a little bit private as there was a stack of barrels secured with rope that would give you some cover and you could hang on to the rope straps.

  And that was it, the last anyone saw of him.

  Mam was the first to notice. Everyone had been huddled over, trying to stay dry, when she said, ‘Where’s Einar?’

  When it became clear what had happened, the skipper turned the boat into the storm and tacked to and fro, going back way further than we had come that day, in case Da had been carried on the current. There was no sign of him. Even if he had yelled when he went over, he probably would not have been heard over the noise of the waves and the wind and the creaking old boat.

  What a way to go. It still makes me sad, even though I can hardly remember him, and this was centuries ago, but it still comes back to me, even after all the sad and bad things that I have seen.

  ‘The hardest thing,’ said Mam, ‘was being unable to grieve. I had to pretend to be as sad as someone who had only just met him – and that you were crying because you were small, and any death upset you, not because your father had gone missing.’

  ‘But why?’ I used to ask.

  ‘Because that was the plan, to avoid those who might be after the pearls. And I stuck with it. I did not know – I still do not know – if he was pushed overboard. There was another passenger on the boat: a mean-looking devil with a huge black beard, and he and your da had argued earlier that day. I know Einar did not trust him. When you cried with the cold, he told me to, “Shut that bairn up!” and when you howled for the man who had gone overboard – your da, though no one knew it – he threatened to throw you over to join him.’

  If I close my eyes, I can remember that face, inches from mine, growling, ‘Holl munnen!’ to a grieving infant. ‘Shut your mouth!’ The memory can still make me cold.

  And so, six days later, freezing cold, soaking wet and smelling strongly of sheep’s cheese, sealskins and ship’s tar, Mam and I sailed up the Teen and got out of the boat on the long wooden pier by the fishing huts.

  She had set off from Denmark as a young wife, and arrived in Teenmooth a widow, with a young, fatherless child.

  Little. Old. Me.

  Then, more than a thousand years later, a tiny little girl fell into our yard and banged her head. That was when everything changed.

  The morning it all happened, Mam said to me, ‘Do you know what day it is today, Alve?’ She still called me by my birth name when we were alone, which was practically always.

  I knew but I pretended not to, so that she would have the pleasure of reminding me.

  ‘Thirty years in Oak Cottage. Thirty years since we moved back into this house,’ and she smiled her gappy smile, and hugged me with her strong arms. ‘I do not want to move again. Not after the last time,’ she said for maybe the hundredth time.

  In response, I forced a smile, and nodded, and did not remind her that the world was changing faster than ever.

  Mam worried. We both did. Moving house, staying anonymous – living in general – was becoming harder and harder.

  It had never been exactly easy. Mam and I, however, had always been quite mobile and we had found that there was always someone willing to rent us a small house, or even just a room; we kept our possessions to a minimum, or stored them elsewhere, especially our books.

  But these days? These days, everybody wants to know everything about you. Rental agreements, bank accounts, licences for this, permits for that, forms to fill in, identification documents …

  Mam seldom listened to the news on the wireless. It was, she would say, ‘too confusing’. I think she meant ‘too scary’. We had shut ourselves away for so long that Mam no longer understood the wider world of motor cars, jet aeroplanes, computers, mobile telephones.

  But sometimes, when Mam was upstairs in bed, I would listen to the news. I would try to understand, and I would long to live in that world: the real world, with all of its wonders.

  Mam tutted. ‘She is here again, Alve.’ She wiped her hands and peered out of the scullery window. ‘That is the second time this week. And there is someone with her. Over there on the left. Can you see?’

  The ‘little nosy girl’ was what Mam called her. I now know her as Roxy Minto. Mam had initially seen her spying on us nearly a year earlier. At first Mam thought the worst – that it would be a repeat of the last time we had lived here, when the boys had made our lives a misery, and all the questions had started, and we had had to move away.

  It turned out not to be that. All the little girl wanted to do was to watch. We would hear her, trying her best to be quiet in the bushes.

  Until now she had always been alone. She would approach, and lie in the long grass in front of the gorse bush, and watch us go about our business. Then autumn came, and the leaves dropped, and she stopped coming because – I think – she would not be hidden so well.

  It was annoying to be spied on, but better than the fear that we might be attacked, or accused of who knows what.

  Witchcraft?

  I know that no one is accused of witchcraft in the twenty-first century, but we have feared it for so long that our solitude became our life, and being anonymous our only goal.

  And so we let her be. Then the spring came back, and the leaves, and so did the little girl in the bushes.

  Mam went to the half-door that led into the backyard and squinted out. Once more she said, ‘I am not moving again, Alve. Not after the last time.’

  The last time. I cannot forget the last time. Because the last time involved Jack, and Jack was the last friend I ever had.

  I don’t know how long I stood there, staring at the back door of the cottage in the woods where they had taken Roxy inside, but eventually I ran.

  I meant to get help: tell Dad, or whoever, what had happened, and it would all be OK, but, in my panic, I got lost.

  I know, the woods aren’t even that big, but there were no paths, and I kept criss-crossing my way through, passing the big gorse bush at least twice, and then trying to head uphill because I knew that that, at any rate, would be sort of the right direction.

  It must have been nearly an hour later when I emerged, sweating and filthy and panting and scared, at the top of the slope, a little way along from Roxy’s ‘garage’. I began running back to our house, and there she was.

  I stared, open-mouthed, at Roxy, looking so chilled, sitting in the doorway of the shed beneath the still-flickering –––AGE sign. Shouldn’t she, I wondered, be a bit more traumatised after her encounter with the witch of the woods? She certainly didn’t look it.

  ‘Your dad was here,’ said Roxy. ‘Well, there. Looking over the fence. He’s nice. He’s called Ben.’

  ‘Yeah, Roxy. I know. He’s my dad.’ I was thrown by all this. I wanted to know what had happened to her.

  ‘I’m OK,’ she said. ‘If that’s why you look so weird?’

  ‘Do I?’

  She inspected me, head on one side, really considering the question.

  ‘Yep. You’re covered in mud, your hair’s full of leaves and your face is red and sweaty. That’s weird to me.’

  ‘But what about you? What happened?’

  ‘Well—’ she began but was interrupted.

  ‘There you are,’ said Dad, peering over the back fence, which came up to his chin. ‘Cor! What happened to you? You look like you’ve been dragged through a hedge backwards!’

  This was far closer to the truth than I actually wanted to admit.

  And why was that? Why, at that very instant, did I not say something like this:

  ‘Wow, Dad – you’ll never believe what’s just happened! Me and Roxy (Roxy, meet Dad, Dad this is Roxy) have just found this amazing house in the woods. Did you know it was there? It’s, like, really well hidden. And this lady lives there that Roxy reckons is a witch,
which obviously she isn’t, although she looks like one! And anyway Roxy fell into their backyard and banged her head, but it looks like she’s OK now. Cool, huh, Dad?’

  But I didn’t. And I think I know why.

  Apart from the fact that we’d been trespassing – all those signs and barbed wire had ensured that I wasn’t even a tiny bit relaxed about our whole adventure – it was Roxy’s casual behaviour that was freaking me out a bit. I had noticed a thick surgical dressing stuck behind her ear by her hairline.

  It all made me think that there was something else going on here. Something that could be spoilt if I said too much.

  I also felt bad about not rescuing her. About standing still like a shop dummy while Roxy, bleeding, was carried into a strange house. I don’t think Dad would have been impressed by that.

  And so I lied – and I am the world’s worst liar. When Dad said his ‘dragged through a hedge backwards’ thing, I just laughed like it was the funniest thing I’d ever heard.

  ‘Yeah! I know! Just exploring, you know, Dad! Got a bit lost and that, but hey – no bones broken, eh? Ha ha!’

  Dad gave me a funny look. ‘Well, get in here sharpish, son. I want your help with the skirting boards.’ He turned to go back in the house.

  Wonderful, I thought. More decorating. The house hadn’t been in great condition when we moved in.

  We watched him go, before Roxy said to me, ‘You’re a lousy liar, Aidan. If there were prizes for bad acting, you’d win them all. In fact …’

  ‘Yeah, yeah – all right. Thanks a lot. It did the job. I want to know what happened to you.’

  Inside the shed, Roxy sat behind the tatty little desk. Her fingers were together like a tent in front of her mouth, and her elbows were on the table. I swear she was trying to be all cool and intimidating, but she was too small and scruffy to carry it off. Instead she looked like a kid impersonating a stern headmistress.