Tom, Thom
Page 3
“It’s too cold for birds,” Tom says. Resentment prickles. “And I wanted to keep it. Now it will die out in the wood.”
“No,” Thom says. “It will live.”
“Will it go back to your kin, to the people in the forest?”
“Yes. Or hunt in the dark.”
“Will you go back to your kin?”
Thom breathes out against the window. His breath leaves the glass frosted. He puts his pale hands there, paints warm, empty prints. He says, “I can’t go back. I don’t know the way back.”
“Back through the woods?”
“Yes. It’s a long, hard journey.”
“Will you stay here with us, then? Forever?”
Thom sighs and climbs into bed. “Forever?” he says. “Here is a story about forever. In the reign of the old king Eothred…”
Tom waits for his mother to bring them warm milk and pull the blankets up over the bed. He does not pay attention to the thread of Thom’s story. Thom’s voice is hoarse. It sounds thin. Tom watches as moths lay siege to the gas lamp. Their wings are soft. The light makes them look red. They make a sound like birds in the dark. Their shadows seem to reach out, covetous and insubstantial. He shifts, very nervous, just for a moment.
“That is what is meant by forever,” Thom says.
* * *
Thom coughs a great deal through the end of winter, grows ever more hungry. He is listless by the time that spring begins. But he was pale before, and always starving—always small in Tom’s cast-off clothing, always a little too thin. And, anyways, this is the sickening season. Tom himself gets ill, and then gets better. There isn’t a name for what ails him—just illness. So it is with Thom. Tom’s mother says, “He’ll come out of it.”
But Thom doesn’t. The days drag on. The air warms and the wind thickens, bringing rain up from the south, bringing mayflies that die on lamps. Thom is hot, often feverish. In the late bluish evenings, he lies in bed. He tires very fast during the day. He lies in the shade, his eyes slack-lidded.
“Is this summer?” he asks Tom one day. They are out in the garden. In spite of the weather, the trees are still bare. Come a fortnight, they’ll all clot up with blossoms. Tom can see it on the branches, all the dark buds there.
“Not yet,” he says.
“It’s so warm here.” Thom lets his head drop back to the ground. They are both lying in the flat grass. Tom can smell the growing heat that will backbreak the winter, the spring coming up from under the earth. Birds are returning, too, from their travels: crowds and crowds of sparrows, and swallows overflowing with song. He wonders what Thom understands of their noise. From time to time an aeroplane soars past, larger and farther out than a bird, and Tom points it out, but thinks, Thom does not really care.
He resents Thom’s sleeping all the time. He does not like the worry with which his mother stares at Thom when she thinks that no one is looking. He has heard her on the phone to Leynmouth’s doctor. He has heard her crying in the other room. He regrets his impatience, his small resentments. He wishes for an end to Thom’s illness.
“When summer comes,” he tells Thom, “we’ll go into the woods. We can find the place that you came from then.”
Thom doesn’t reply. He plucks at the grass. Where he closes his hand around it, it withers and dies. He seems oblivious to this.
“We could go now,” Tom says, “but I am frightened of wolves. They roam in the winter.”
“There are no wolves,” Thom says. “Not here.”
“Do you really mean it when you say that?”
Thom looks at him. “Wolves only live in other places. Dark places. Here they’re a story to frighten you with.”
Tom wonders: Am I frightened? He is frightened, yes. He wants to hide from them. But now when he dreams of wolves, there is another instinct. He wants to bury his face in their thick grey fur, to feel their warm pelt under his cheek and breathe in that strong rank wintry smell.
He doesn’t tell Thom this. He asks instead, “Will you be happy there? If we find the way back to your country? It won’t be as warm as it is here, will it?”
Thom shifts. He stares up at the clouds as they scud through the air, pursued by sunlight. “No,” he says. “It will be winter. It is always winter there.”
* * *
Thom begins to cough in spasms that unsettle his small body. At night, his coughing shakes Tom awake. He sees Thom’s bright eyes right upon waking, and wishes he could go back to sleep. Their bed is increasingly filled with feathers: white feathers, soft as down. Tom is not sure what they mean. He likes to think that the white bird Thom hatched comes back to visit while they sleep, and breathes out the air of that other country where winter is everlasting. He pictures its wings, now speckled like eggshells. Its breast is frost-coloured, pure and clean, and it sings a song like the wind on the mountains. It digs its claws, its hard bone claws that have been hunting, into the bedpost. Its song is also a hunter’s song, and when Tom imagines it, he feels his heart seize. He thinks, I have not heard this song before. But I have waited all my life to hear it.
He suspects that, in reality, Thom coughs up the feathers. It is a part of his sickening. Tom has never coughed up feathers whilst ill, but it seems possible that this is how folk sicken, off in the wood, off in that other country. He says nothing. He sweeps up the feathers. Off they go: out the window, into the warming breeze.
“Will Thom die?” he asks his mother. This, too, seems possible. He has a notion of dying. He has seen animals dead in the fields. Dying is what his father did in the war. He wonders if men are like birds and sheep, if when they die the flesh goes off them till they are just bones you turn up in the weeds. Bones, white and rough and thin. He thinks that men cannot be like this. Men are men. They are not made of the same stuff as birds and sheep. There is something else to them.
His mother says, “I don’t know, my darling.” She does not reassure him. Neither does she remind him of what legend says: a changeling is not put in the world to live. They have not spoken of this before, though it hangs over them. Nor do they speak of why those folk did not take Tom. Tom thinks, sometimes, about that animal breath. His finger hurts where the splinter pierced it. He thinks of the single black feather drifting past him.
Now Thom eats only bowlfuls of beef broth. He is only bones and skin. He lies in bed and his breath is a rasp. Tom’s mother cleans Thom’s sweat off him. She collects the feathers that rise from his mouth, and she does not ask questions. Except: “Should I take you homewards?” which she asks more than once. Mute, fretful, Thom shakes his head. It is not clear that he knows what she’s asking. He mutters often to himself, but Tom cannot understand what he’s saying.
“He does not know the way back to where he came from,” Tom tells his mother. He feels important. Thom entrusted him with things that she doesn’t know: with stories, with secrets.
“Does he not? And what else has he told you?”
“About the sorcerer Lopt,” Tom says. “About a boy who put wings on his body and a woman who was once a flower. About the wolves that don’t live in the wood. He says they live in other kinds of places.”
Tom’s mother puts an arm around his shoulder. Her arm is warm, but heavy as lead. “And what isn’t there can’t hurt you, can it? You see, wolves are only a legend.”
Tom stiffens. “Thom can curdle milk,” he points out. “That’s what the shopkeeper says. He can make the grass die. Is that a legend? He can crack the shell of an egg.”
“Yes.” His mother sighs, a drawn-out sound.
“Is Thom going to die because his folk did not take me?”
“Of course not. Did he tell you that?”
“Was he always going to die when the winter was over?”
“No.” His mother’s arm tightens on his shoulder.
“Didn’t you know, though? How could you not know?”
It is the first time he has made his mother cry. He sees the tears move like ice that has melted. He feels cruel.
He feels like proving a point. He squirms out from under her arm. “You did know. You did know. You tested him. You made him take hold of iron, and it burned him. How could you?” he asks. “I wanted him to be my brother. But he can’t be. The dead can’t be our kin.”
He runs from the room. He leaves Thom coughing, small white feathers coronating his head. Tom runs from the cottage and slams the door behind him. The night air is calm and cool and wet. Tom sits on the step of the little stone house. He watches the moon make inlets in the clouds’ sediment. The land under them looks lifeless: a flat black sketch of trees and hills. A mess of earth. Dead. The air is so warm that his breath does not frost it.
He thinks about the wolves. Where are they, if—as Thom insists—they’re not in the wood? Somewhere further, in the same far place as Thom’s bird, in that other country? He pictures them: hunting-eyed, light-footed, and lethal. Just a few feet from him the wood begins, and beyond it.… He can hear the thrumming of their great paws. He can hear the drum of their heartbeats pounding, a low-down rhythm that he longs to feel in the cage of his chest. Their grave eyes search for him.
He stands. He starts forwards, not sure of himself. He goes towards a point he can dimly sense. Steadily, now, he picks up speed. Above him, the moon sleeps in darkness. He hears birds calling all around him. He listens for the single note he needs, the note he has not heard before, unmelting and solid. I am here, he wants to shout. I am here; I am coming. Take me, take me. Fear shuts his throat and closes his voice. Still, something in him makes a sound. Soon he is running, swift as the wolves. The wood enfolds him, cold and hard, hastening him towards his homecoming.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Begin Reading
Copyright
Copyright © 2016 by K. M. Ferebee
Art copyright © 2016 by Rovina Cai