‘Let ye not be arguing,’ said Kevin. ‘Come on now, lads, we’re going to have to stay friends. We’re going to have to think up a plan.’
‘Yes,’ said Beverley, not wanting the leadership of the little group to slip away to Kevin. ‘Yes, Kevin’s right. We need a bit of co-operation around here, not fighting.’
Elizabeth threw her eyes up to heaven. Look who’s talking, she thought.
‘We need water,’ said Gerard. ‘But I’m tired. I’m too tired to go and look for any.’
‘I’m tired too, Gerard,’ said Beverley. ‘Look, why don’t we all have a bit of a rest, and then we can go and look for water.’
Nobody objected to the idea of a rest. It sounded even more attractive just now than a drink of water. At the very idea of a rest, they all gathered more closely together and huddled in a little group in the shade of the hawthorn hedge out of the heat of the noonday sun. Beverley threw a jacket over Elizabeth, because she thought she might be in shock.
‘What about another story?’ Kevin ventured, looking tentatively at Beverley. ‘Just to relax us all.’
‘That’s a great idea,’ said Elizabeth. ‘Gerard can tell.’
Gerard reddened with pleasure.
‘I think this is just like The Canterbury Tales,’ Elizabeth went on. ‘We’re like pilgrims, aren’t we?’
‘Wha-at?’ asked Kevin, who’d never heard of Canterbury or its tales.
‘You know, the pilgrims in The Canterbury Tales – they all tell each other stories. This is just like that, a pilgrimage with stories.’
‘It’s not a pilgrimage,’ said Beverley firmly. ‘It’s an expedition.’
‘Well, I’m playing that it’s a pilgrimage,’ countered Elizabeth complacently.
‘Huh!’ said Beverley, who at thirteen was working hard to eliminate the word ‘play’ from her vocabulary. Elizabeth was a whole year younger, so that explained why she had such an immature outlook.
‘And now we even have a sick,’ added Elizabeth in a satisfied tone.
‘What?’ asked all the others, slightly disgusted.
‘A sick,’ explained Elizabeth. ‘You’re supposed to take the sick on pilgrimages. I’m the sick.’
‘Oh yuck!’ said Gerard.
‘Yes,’ said Elizabeth, warming to her idea. ‘And maybe we’ll have a miracle. Maybe I’ll be miraculously healed and you’ll all be witnesses and somebody will be canonised.’
‘Who?’ asked Beverley skeptically.
‘I don’t know,’ Elizabeth admitted. ‘But anyway, go on, tell the story, Gerard. We’re all ears.’
Gerard hesitated. He looked at Beverley pleadingly.
‘Go on, so, Gerard,’ said Beverley. She’d got over her inhibitions about stories. In fact, she thought, this was a good way to postpone worrying about their situation just a bit longer.
And so they all settled down together in the shade of the hedgerow, like little birds nestling on their night perches, to listen to a story.
Chapter 11
GERARD’S TALE
GERARD DREW IN A BREATH, swallowed some chocolate and began: ‘Once there was a young woman. Well, a girl, really; she was like a princess, or an heiress, or something. Very rich, very good family. When she was fourteen, her father made her get engaged – what do they call it in stories?’
‘Betrothed?’ Elizabeth suggested.
‘Yes, that’s it, thank you, betrothed. He betrothed her to a young man from another good family, a family he wanted to make an alliance with. The girl hadn’t met the young man. It was an arranged marriage. But she didn’t mind. That was how she had been brought up. She didn’t know any different.’
‘Huh!’ said Elizabeth.
‘Hmph!’ said Beverley.
‘Because she was only fourteen, it was agreed that it would be a fairly long engagement. Her fiancé wouldn’t come to claim her until her sixteenth birthday. In the meantime, she could finish out her girlhood, learn the things she needed to know in order to be a wife, and adjust to the idea of marriage.’
‘Grrr!’ said Elizabeth.
‘Crumbs!’ said Beverley. Was this boy only eleven? Where did he get these ideas from?
‘The girl was quite excited about it all. Getting married was a very important step in a girl’s life.’
‘Oh my!’ said Beverley, shaking her head.
‘Rats!’ said Elizabeth, through gritted teeth.
‘Give over, you two,’ said Gerard. ‘You’re spoiling it.’
‘Well, it’s a stupid story,’ said Elizabeth.
‘No, it’s not. It’s just the way things were in those days.’
‘Oh well, in those days,’ said Elizabeth, giving in, because she wanted to hear what happened next.
‘Getting married,’ Gerard went on carefully, challenging Elizabeth with a frown not to interrupt him again, ‘was when she stopped being a child and started to live the life of an adult. She looked forward to that. She would have her own house, and her own servants, and she would be in charge. And some day, she would have babies of her own too, and that would also be nice, better than dolls. This was how she was thinking. But she hardly thought at all about the young man she was supposed to be marrying. You see, she had never met a young man before, and had no idea what to expect. The only man she had ever known was her father, and he only came to see her on her birthdays, and anyway he was old, with a beard and a pot belly. So the girl concentrated on thinking about the house and servants and children she would have, and didn’t think at all about the husband.
‘One day, just before her fifteenth birthday, she was out riding in the woods, which she liked to do most days. She loved riding along as fast as her horse would go, leaping over fallen tree trunks, feeling her long black hair streaming in the wind behind her and being gently brushed back from her face by the twiggy hands of the forest.’
‘Mmm,’ said Elizabeth. This sounded better.
‘Yes,’ agreed Beverley.
Only Kevin heard a soft, soft echoing ‘Mmm’, or thought he did. He looked around carefully, but there was nobody to be seen.
‘This particular day, as she was skimming along over the forest floor, she met another rider coming towards her. This rider was as swift as she was, and before long they met on the narrow woodland path. The girl reined in her horse as they came close, and the other rider did the same. Soon they were face to face.
‘Well, the girl had never seen such a face as the face of the other rider. It was a handsome, golden-skinned face, and when it smiled, it was like the sun breaking through a cloud. She sat on horseback and stared at the rider. When he put out his hand to her, she dismounted without thinking and allowed the other rider to swing her up onto his horse, and away the pair of them galloped through the woods.
‘As soon as she dismounted and rode off with the stranger, the girl’s horse turned around and trotted off back home.
‘When the horse arrived back at the girl’s house without the girl, her father called together all his henchmen, and they went searching the woods for the lost daughter. For three days and three nights they searched, and at last they found her, in the golden-skinned horseman’s arms, under a tree.
‘The girl’s father immediately dismounted, wrenched his daughter from the arms of her lover, threw her across the saddle of his horse and slapped the horse’s haunches to make it go, with a cry of “Go home. Go home. Take her and go home.” The horse obediently trotted off with the girl hanging, weeping, over its saddle, and the father drew his sword and challenged the golden-skinned stranger to a fight.
‘The stranger hopped up and drew his own sword, and with a few swift strokes he had chopped off the raging father’s arms, legs and head and left the bleeding pieces on the forest floor. Then he put up his sword and walked away to his own home.
‘When the horse carrying the daughter arrived back at home, the girl’s mother came running out and gently lifted her daughter down and brought her indoors.
‘The father of co
urse never came home, which was no loss to the girl or her mother. Nobody in the family had ever liked him much, and nobody went looking for him either. The bleeding pieces of his body are probably lying about in the woods still, for all I know.
‘Anyway, after some months it turned out that the young girl was going to have a baby. Now, this was a terrible disgrace, as young girls without husbands were not supposed to have babies in that country and at that time. The girl herself was happy enough about the baby, but her mother wanted to keep this terrible disgrace hidden, so she kept the daughter in the house all the time she was pregnant and would not let her meet her friends or talk to anyone.
‘When the baby was born, the girl’s mother took the little scrap away and told her daughter the child had been born dead. The girl was dreadfully upset at first, but after a while she began to get better and to look forward to the wedding. She would be sixteen very soon now, and her fiancé would come for her.
‘Meanwhile, the grandmother took the baby and looked for a place to hide it, so people wouldn’t know about the shameful thing that had happened in the family. She crept out of the palace one night and put the baby in the cowshed with the cows, where it would be warm and would have milk to drink, and she left it there and never went back.
‘Imagine the surprise and delight of the girl on her wedding day when her bridegroom turned out to be the handsome stranger she had met in the woods, and who was the father of her child!
‘On their wedding night, the girl told her husband the whole story, and he was furious to think that his child had been allowed to die. The next morning, he went to his mother-in-law and asked her where the baby was buried, so that he could erect a cross of mother-of-pearl to the child.
‘The mother-in-law at first told lie after lie about where the baby was buried, but every lie was so unbelievable that at last the son-in-law winkled the truth out of her, that the child had been sent to live in the byre with the cows.
‘In a dreadful rage he left the palace and crossed the yard to where the farm animals were kept, and he searched every shed and outhouse till he found where the cows lived, and there he found a tiny baby, just a few months old, lying curled up in a bed of straw, with a mother cow bending over her and licking her with long, milky, moo-cow licks. He snatched the child up from the floor of the cowshed and brought her back into the castle.
‘But as soon as her father lifted her up, the baby started to roar, and she roared and cried all the way back across the yard and all the way through the corridors of the palace to her mother’s bedroom, where her mother was undressing for bed.
‘“What’s this?” cried the bride, jumping up from her dressing table and looking aghast at the brown, smelly, roaring heap of rags and straw he brought with him.
‘“This is our daughter!” said her husband, proudly presenting his wife with the bundle.
‘“No, it’s not,” screamed his wife, backing away in disgust. “It’s a calf. It’s a little sucky calf! Can’t you hear it mooing?”
‘And sure enough, the baby’s cries were not like baby cries at all, but long, mournful moos. The baby was crying for its cow-mother.
‘The bridegroom got the servants to bring a silver basket and silk robes for his daughter to sleep in, but all night she mooed and bellowed, and all the next day, and all the next day and night too. The baby kept up its roaring and bellowing for a solid week, and all this time it refused every sort of food. At the end of the week, the father had to let the child go back to its home in the cowshed in case it died of hunger. And so the child grew up among the cattle and never learnt to speak or to read or even to walk on her legs like a human being.
‘But every evening, her human father would leave the palace and cross the yard to the cowshed and dandle his daughter on his knee, and there in the warm safety of the byre the child would laugh up into her father’s face, and the father knew that his child was happy with this strange animal life, and he never again tried to make her live the life of a normal human child.
‘But his wife, knowing now that her child was alive and well, but living among the beasts of the stall, never had a day’s happiness, and she died soon afterwards of a broken heart.’
Chapter 12
A STRANGE CARAVAN LUMBERS FORWARD
‘WEE-IIRD!’ WHISPERED KEVIN.
‘Aaah!’ sighed someone. Nobody knew who. The children looked at each other for a moment, and each one wondered which of the others it was. But no one asked. Perhaps they were afraid. Perhaps they thought that if they asked, it would turn out not to be any of them. But if it wasn’t any of them, then who was it? Perhaps it was just a little sea breeze, soughing in the hawthorn hedge.
There was silence for a while. Then Elizabeth spoke.
‘I don’t like the ending,’ she said, and she spoke for all three of Gerard’s listeners. ‘Does she have to die?’
‘Yes,’ said Gerard. ‘That’s part of it.’
‘Could you not change it?’
‘No,’ replied Gerard. ‘That’s the way it happened.’
‘What do you mean, that’s the way it happened?’ asked Beverley. ‘It’s only a story after all.’
‘It’s not only a story,’ said Gerard, with much more authority than he had in real life. ‘It’s a story, and that’s how it ends. She dies.’
‘But you made the story up, so you can change the ending if you want to,’ argued Beverley, who shared Elizabeth’s opinion about the ending.
‘No,’ said Gerard strenuously, ‘it doesn’t work like that. I made it up, but that’s the way I made it up, with that ending, so that’s the way it is. If you want to change the ending for yourself, well, I suppose you can, but then it’s a different story.’
Elizabeth shrugged. She’d never known Gerard to be so vehement before.
‘Oh well, so what?’ said Kevin, sensing strain here and trying to sound cheerful. ‘As Beverley says, it’s only a story.’
He was more concerned with their real plight than with whether or not a story had a happy ending. It didn’t seem to have occurred to the others, but Kevin was aware that they were pretty well trapped on this island. First of all, they were trapped by the tide. They hadn’t a hope of getting back to the mainland until evening. Secondly, they were trapped by Elizabeth’s lameness. How could they possibly get her back across the causeway in the brief space of time the tide would be fully out, if she couldn’t walk? Thirdly, not only were they trapped and without food, but he knew that there was at least one other person on this island too – a very peculiar person, maybe not dangerous, but certainly not predictable. And he couldn’t help feeling that not only was she on the island, but that she knew they were here too.
‘Uh-huh,’ Elizabeth was saying, disagreeing with Beverley about the story. ‘It’s too late now, but I think we should have a rule about nobody dying in any of our stories. Just in case.’
‘Just in case what?’ asked Kevin, his voice gone to a squeak with apprehension.
But Elizabeth didn’t want to explain her theory that you might get stuck inside a story, and if people died in the story, then you might never come out of it again. She didn’t want to spook them all. She shivered, though, and bent over her sore foot to hide the expression in her eyes.
The sunny warmth they had enjoyed all morning and which had dried Beverley’s and Kevin’s jeans to a strange and salty stiffness had stultified now to a dead and heavy heat. Beverley looked at the sky. It had clouded over considerably in the last half-hour. Where before there had been blue with sprigs of clouds tripping across it, as if for decoration rather than with any serious intention of rain, now the clouds had started to mass and push their way, greying gradually and with steady determination, across the expanse of blue, and threatened to engulf it completely before long.
‘Rain on the way,’ said Beverley scientifically. There was something comforting in her matter-of-factness about natural phenomena. Beverley wasn’t one for believing you could get stuck in a story or be wat
ched by a secretive witch.
Kevin looked up at the sky and saw a storm written across its face. He shivered and drew his jacket around him, though it was very warm.
‘Cumulus clouds,’ Beverley went on, ‘always a bad sign. That’s all we need! Look, we really must do something about Elizabeth’s foot. It looks gross. We need to try and get the swelling down if we can.’
‘My mother uses ice,’ said Elizabeth, regarding her deformed ankle with tenderness mixed with foreboding.
‘The next best thing to ice would be running water,’ said Beverley. ‘A stream would be ideal. Or the sea. Maybe we could get you to the beach to bathe it.’
‘Wait a minute!’ cried Gerard. ‘I saw a house on my way to the beach. Where there’s a house there must be a water supply. And it would be much closer than going all the way back to the beach. Anyway, you can’t drink seawater, and I need a drink.’
‘A house!’ exclaimed Elizabeth. ‘You couldn’t have seen a house, Gerard. You went back along the same path we came on this morning. We didn’t pass any house then.’
Gerard thought for a moment. ‘I’m sure I saw one,’ he said slowly, wondering.
A house! That had to be her house, Kevin was sure of it. Well, they couldn’t go to that house, anyway. Although at least a house was some sort of sign of normality. He had been half-afraid she might live in a cave or a tree-house or something outlandish.
‘Why don’t we try to make for there?’ Gerard was saying eagerly, glad to have discovered something useful, ‘and see if they have a tap or something?’
‘It’s made of gingerbread, I suppose!’ Elizabeth tried to inject scorn into her voice, but she was half-afraid that Gerard was going to reply that now she mentioned it, yes, it was actually made of gingerbread. She didn’t like the idea of meeting this strange person that Kevin had hinted at, though she didn’t like to admit it.
Kevin made a small strangled sound in his throat. Beverley absentmindedly clapped him on the back, as if to clear a blockage in his oesophagus, but she wasn’t really paying much attention to Kevin. She was far more interested in this house of Gerard’s.
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