Broad sat, holding the bottle to the dying man’s lips as though he was nursing a big baby. The innkeeper’s eyes implored him. Broad shook his head slowly. At least the fellow would not be dying alone.
“I come from another realm,” Broad began, “Far from the Principality of Glaur. But I may never go home again, never see my family or the place I grew up in. I am an outcast - or rather, we are outcasts, for I do not travel alone...”
***
Before his shoulders were as broad as his name suggests, the young Broad was wont to play at the edge of the property, where the family’s fields were bordered by the darkest woods. Something about the trees fascinated him. Don’t go into the forest, his parents told him every day, and he never did, but it was certainly thrilling to be so close to danger, knowing the safety of home and his mother’s embrace was just yards away.
He would take his toys to his favourite spot and stage skirmishes between them, tiny wars between wooden figures for which Broad provided all the voices. The dialogue bore close resemblance to the arguments he overheard his parents having, and a few choice words he knew he shouldn’t utter, gleaned from a row between his father and their neighbour.
One day, Broad froze mid-onslaught. His skin was prickling with the curious sensation that he was being watched. He turned around, expecting to surprise one of his brothers sneaking up on him, but there was no one there. He tried to get back into the game but the feeling would not leave him. He stood.
“Hello?” he called out. Silence replied.
The boy shrugged and began to pack up his toys. He no longer felt like playing.
“Hello.”
He started, dropping a couple of soldiers on their wooden heads.
“Don’t go,” the voice said again. “I want to see who wins today.”
Broad spun around. There was no one there.
“Please!” begged the voice. “I have no toys of my own.”
He sounds like me, Broad realised. A child! “That’s all right,” he called out. “You may share mine.”
“I’ll just watch,” said the voice. “Go on.”
Broad crouched in the grass and set up his armies. He felt more than a little self-conscious, especially when it came to doing the voices and making the sounds he imagined firebombs would make.
Somewhere unseen, the voice laughed in delight. Broad played for hours until the sun was almost down and his mother called him in for his dinner.
“I’ll come again tomorrow,” he called over his shoulder.
“Goodnight!” said the voice.
“Who are you talking to?” said his mother, tousling his hair.
“No one,” Broad smiled. He hurried to the wash basin before she could scold him for getting his hands into their usual, filthy state.
His mother closed the back door as the encroaching night extended the darkness of the woods right up to the doorstep.
The next day it rained and Broad was not allowed out. He set up his soldiers on the windowsill in the hope that his invisible friend would see. The day after that, Broad’s mother insisted he accompany her to the market. Broad cried that he did not want to go. The market was hours away. It would be dark when they got back.
“You can play outside tomorrow,” his mother pointed out. “Although, honestly, dear, it’s about time you put away your toys and did some chores around here.”
Broad was horrified. Put away his toys! Do chores! If this was what growing-up involved, he wanted no part of it. Especially since he had found a friend at last.
On the third day, Broad slipped out right after breakfast. The grass was still wet with dew. “Hello?” he called out. “Are you there?”
There was no answer.
“I’m sorry I haven’t been out,” Broad addressed the trees, for surely that was where his invisible friend resided. “Do you want to watch me make a war?”
There was still no answer. Broad set out his soldiers. There was a dispute about apples falling into next door’s garden - a good enough reason as any for conflict on the grandest scale he could imagine.
Before long, he was absorbed in his game. The reds were massacring the blues but the blues had a trick up their sleeve. They were sending a cohort sneaking around the reds’ camp for a surprise attack.
“Die, you traitors!” he cried, making the red general jump up and down.
“No, you die, apple scrumpers!” said the blue commander.
Broad looked up. The toy soldier was jumping in mockery of its red counterpart. The little man was held by fingers that seemed to be made of pale smoke or mist. Broad could just about see the hand and the arm, the shoulder and the face.
“Hello!” smiled the boy of smoke. “I’m Shade.”
“I’m Broad,” said Broad.
“I know,” said Shade. “I’ve been watching you for ages. The blues are going to win, you realise.”
“We’ll see about that,” said Broad.
***
The boys played together every day for weeks until one morning when Shade was late to drift from the woods. Even though he was almost entirely see-through, his face was readable to Broad.
“What’s wrong?” the human child asked.
“Your family,” Shade could hardly get the words out. “You have to leave. All of you.”
“What? No!”
“You must!” Shade cried. “Or they will kill you. And I couldn’t bear that. Oh, it’s all my fault, my fault, my fault!”
Broad was as confused as he was distressed. “What do you mean? What’s happened?”
Shade struggled to compose himself. His shape kept breaking up and he could barely pull himself together. “They found out I’ve been coming to see you.”
“Who? Who did?”
“My folks. We’re not supposed to - we’re not supposed to-” the boy of mists and smoke steeled himself. He looked his human friend in the eye and for a brief instant, his face was malevolent and cruel. “We’re not supposed to play with our food.”
Broad was flabbergasted - which was another word he had picked up from his parents’ rows; Wide Forehead and Shapely Legs were often flabbergasted with each other. “I don’t understand,” he said.
“It’s like this,” said Shade, picking up a couple of toy soldiers. “We have a rule. We don’t feed on those near our nest. It gives rise to trouble and ill feeling. But we’re not supposed to fraternise with them either - for the same reason.”
“Frater-what?”
“We’re not supposed to be friends, Broad,” Shade hung his head. He held up a blue soldier and a red. “This is us. Always fighting. And now the blues are coming for you reds and-”
He smashed the wooden figures together. The red one snapped and splintered. Its head came off.
Broad gaped, horrified. “When?”
“Tonight. Sundown.”
“No!”
“I’m sorry. You better warn your folks.” He handed back the remains of the generals. “I’m sorry.”
Broad ran away. His feet pounded across the grass and he launched himself at the back door, shoving it open with his shoulder. “Mom! Mom!” he cried. “Dad!”
At the bottom of the paddock, Shade dispersed and drifted back to the woods. The soldiers lay forgotten; they were the first casualties.
***
Broad’s parents grew tired of their son’s wild imagination. The boy was overexcited and almost hysterical. Shapely Legs peeled his hands from her aprons and warned him if he didn’t stop with his nonsense, she would have to show him the back of her hand.
“You don’t understand!” the boy cried, his face purple with distress and frustration. “They’re coming to kill us! They’re coming to kill us tonight!”
“Who, son?” Wide Forehead - whose hairline wa
s actually a little low on his brow - spoke more calmly than his wife.
“The - the - things in the woods. They’re not supposed to eat people so close to their nest but they’re going to come and eat us tonight!”
“Hogwash!” cried Shapely Legs.
“Let the boy speak, woman!” Wide Forehead crouched so he could look his son in the eye and placed his hands on Broad’s not-yet broad shoulders. “Has someone been filling your head with fairy stories, son? Was it that old weirdo next door?”
“No!” Broad wailed. His nose was bubbling with snot; he sniffed it back loudly.
“I knew we shouldn’t have taken this place on,” Shapely Legs scowled. “My mother was right. It’s too close to the woods.”
“Quiet, Shape!” her husband scolded. “We can’t give in to superstition and a child’s imagination.”
“I - I’m not imagining it, Dad. Shade told me himself.”
His parents paled. “Who is Shade?” asked Wide, striving to keep a tremor out of his voice.
“My friend. We play together every day. But his folks found out and now they’re coming to kill everybody.”
Broad’s parents exchanged a look. Wide affected a casual tone but a sheen of sweat on his admittedly average forehead betrayed his terror. “What does he look like, your friend?”
“Like he’s not there,” said Broad. “Unless the light catches him just right. He’s like the steam rising off a saucepan, the mist in the morning, the smoke from Grampaw’s pipe.”
Shapely clutched at her husband’s hand. “I - I’ve never mentioned those - creatures - to him. Have you?”
“No!” Wide assured her. “But people talk. He must have picked it up from somewhere.”
They were grasping at straws and they knew it. They also knew their son never went anywhere.
“It’s that nutter next door,” Wide scowled at the wall that divided the two homesteads. “Filling the boy’s head with nonsense.”
He sounded neither convinced nor convincing.
“What are we going to do?” Shapely Legs wrung her hands.
“Nothing!” her husband faced the window that overlooked the back paddock. “They won’t come. They won’t.”
Broad was astounded. His mother had to tell him twice to wash his hands for dinner before he registered she was speaking to him. “Broad?”
He wriggled out from under the hand she placed on his head. “You’re a - you’re a pisser!” he roared. His parents were stunned; their son had never cursed them before. Wide’s simmering temper began to boil. He ordered Broad to go to his room and stay there, and if he was lucky, he might be invited down to dinner. And not a word of this nonsense to his brothers, was that understood?
Broad stomped up the stairs and flung himself on his bed. Stupid, stupid parents! They deserved what was coming! Why wouldn’t they listen? Stupid, stupid!
The boy sobbed himself to sleep and the sun crept inexorably across the sky.
***
Broad awoke to a room full of smoke. The house is on fire, he thought in the grip of panic.
“Ssh!” said Shade’s voice. The pall over the bed formed the familiar shape of Broad’s friend. “Hide and they won’t find you.”
“Who –?”
“No time! Get under the bed!”
Insubstantial arms like tendrils of fog clawed at the boy. Broad clambered from the bed and crawled under the mattress. Shouts from the room below were easier to hear down there. Broad froze in terror. My parents - He dared not think about what was happening to them.
A column of dark mist arose from a knothole in the floorboards. The shape of a large man appeared, his head stooped against the low ceiling.
“Have you fed, my boy?” the voice was deep and susurrating, like the wind finding itself at the bottom of a well. Broad heard Shade say no; there was no one else in the house.
“Don’t lie!” Shade’s father roared, his face turned a darker hue. “Where’s the whelp?”
“He’s - not here - he must have run away,” said Shade, standing his ground.
“You warned him!” Shade’s father cried in dismay. “How many more times? You can’t have feelings for these creatures. They are our sustenance and that is all. We do not make pets of our food, like the humans do.”
“I’m sorry,” Shade hung his head.
“You’re young,” his father’s voice softened a little. And then Broad found himself exposed, cowering on the floor, as Shade’s father flipped the bed over, sending it crashing against the dresser. “Well now, looks like he didn’t run very far.”
Broad whimpered. He cringed with shame to find he had wet himself.
“Feed!” Shade’s father pushed his son toward the cowering child.
“No!” Shade cried in defiance. “He is my friend!”
Broad felt warmth of a different kind. He got to his feet.
“Stay back,” Shade urged.
“It’s all right,” said Broad. “I’m not going anywhere.”
Shade’s father threw back his head and laughed. “The bravery of youth! Very well, I shall have to kill you both myself.”
Another column of mist appeared in the room. “Oh, no, Tenebrous Dark!” said a female voice. “You will leave these boys alone. It is enough that you have made him an orphan.”
Broad gasped. Shade’s mother sent him a pitying look. It was like being felt sorry for by a storm cloud. Shade reached for his hand and did his best to squeeze it.
“Keep out of this, Gloomy,” Shade’s father sneered. “I won’t have you undermining me in front of the boy.”
“The boy you’re going to eat? Really, Ten, you’re losing it. You’re drunk on the farmer.”
Broad squeezed Shade’s hand in return. He knew what it was like to have parents who were forever bickering.
“All right, then, how’s this? I disown him. He’s a disgrace to our kind. And I forbid you to see him ever again.”
“No!” Shade’s mother cried in dismay.
“You would rather I fed on him?”
“No!”
“It’s all right, Mom. I’m going. Come on, Broad.”
He led the human boy out of the room and down the stairs. “Probably best not to look up,” he advised, wishing to spare his friend the sight of his dead parents and siblings.
“Where are we going?” Broad asked, forcing himself to keep his eyes on his boots.
“I don’t know,” sighed Shade. “Just far from here,” he added with a bitter sob. “Far from them.”
***
It was fun for the first couple of days: two boys on the run, two friends having laughs. Shade did his best to keep Broad distracted from thoughts of home but it soon became apparent that the child of mist and shadow was fading fast.
“What can I do?” urged Broad. He was tucking into the apples they had liberated from an orchard. Shade, of course, could not eat fruit. Or, it seemed, anything else they could get their hands on. “You’re not going to eat me, are you?”
“No!” The idea was abhorrent to Shade. “You’re my only friend.”
“You’ve got to eat something,” said Broad. “Everyone has to eat something. Let’s find you somebody.”
Shade was appalled. “How can you suggest such a thing? I could never-”
“But you must! You’re my only friend too. I can’t lose you as well as - as well as-”
Broad didn’t need to finish. Shade was barely boy-shaped any more. He was like a tree-stump, sometimes with an arm or two, sometimes he was nothing more than a smudge in the air.
“Tell me how I can help,” Broad insisted. “What do you need?”
“I don’t know!” Shade wailed feebly. “You were to be my first. I was just a fledgling. You were to be the first meal
I didn’t suckle from my mother’s smoky teat.”
Broad giggled to hear the word ‘teat’. Shade smiled weakly.
“Get in my pocket,” Broad offered. “I’ll carry you to the next village.”
Grateful, Shade dissolved into a puff of steam-like vapour and poured himself into Broad’s shirt pocket. He weighed nothing but Broad could sense he was near, like an extra heartbeat next to his.
A boy apparently on his own raised a few eyebrows as he strolled along the main thoroughfare. Market traders kept wary eyes on him in case he tried to pilfer from their stalls. Market shoppers - especially the womenfolk - were more charitable.
“Are you lost, boy?” they asked. “Where’s your folks?”
And Broad would sniffle and burst into tears - it required little acting skill on his part - and the women would cluck and give him coins or buy him cakes. The boy would cheer up and thank them most profusely and then move on, before they could ask too many questions.
The village of Shortbury was little more than a bend in the road, a huddle of buildings between several farms. There wasn’t even an inn but the local costermonger sold ale of his own brewing to those willing to risk their eyesight and put their intestinal fortitude to the ultimate test. Here, the people were withdrawn into themselves; Broad found it difficult to attract the slightest attention. But the need was desperate - Shade might never come out of his pocket again. Broad feigned a fainting fit, flailing and thrashing around, colliding with a potter’s stall and upsetting an applecart.
“Fool of an urchin!” the potter said, hurling lumps of wet clay at the boy. “You shall pay for the breakages.”
“You young clodhopper,” said the apple seller. “Those pippins aren’t fit for cider now.”
Broad swooned in a puddle, longing for someone –anyone - to pick up the cue. And then, at last, a man stooped over him.
“Come, boy, look up,” the voice was kindly. “Let’s get you out of the muck.”
Broad’s eyelids fluttered. “Oh, sir; do not trouble yourself. It is only weakness from hunger.”
The man handed coins to the potter and the apple seller, who both grumbled but, pocketing the payments, returned to their stalls, compensated.
Navarin, Thunder and Shade Page 9