by Toby Forward
All day he ate them, licking the pus, pushing his pointy tongue into the broken shells, throwing away the husks.
He felt stronger. He got up and decided not to die today.
When evening came he sat by the fire. He always sat very close to the fire because he was always cold. He threw an empty beetle case into fire and it flared up, melted, reshaped itself and scuttled out again.
He picked it up, popped it into his mouth like a hot chestnut, and ate it.
He threw the shell back into the fire and out it ran again, a new beetle. He ate this one as well and threw it back. And so he spent the evening before he went to bed.
The next day, he had two teeth, one at the top and one at the bottom so he could bite.
Now he set about eating the beetles as fast as he could. He crunched them up, threw them into the fire, caught them as they ran out and ate them again.
The next day he had seven teeth and his hair had begun to grow back.
“I thought you said it was about a little girl.”
“I’m coming to that.”
“Can you do it soon?”
“All right, well, to cut the story short, after a while the beetles stopped nourishing him and he started to eat slugs and frogs and weasels and things.”
“Ugh.”
“Yes, ugh.”
“When does the little girl come into it, and the magic?”
“Shall I continue?”
“Yes.”
By eating the living beetles the man had broken into the sealed life of an animal. He had released something new. It was the first trickle of magic ever seen. And so he ate all the other animals alive as well. He had to gobble them up before they died and make sure they were still alive when he swallowed them. He could do this with toads and slugs. Bigger animals, weasels and rabbits, he bit their heads off and ate them quickly while the animal was dying. The bigger the animal, the greater the magic that he released. And when he swallowed the animal he swallowed its magic.
Every time he ate a bigger, more complicated animal he grew younger and stronger. Of course, there was a limit. He couldn’t eat a dog or a sheep. Not by biting its head off. So he made his servant hold them still while he sliced their heads open with an axe and grabbed at their brains and ate as much as he could before they died.
But the magic wore off as soon as he stopped eating them. After just a few days he would grow old again very quickly and the magic would dribble away.
The servant had watched all this and she tried eating the beetles, too. She liked them so much that she never bothered to eat anything else, and, little by little, she turned into a beetle herself.
Every day was a contest with death. If he stopped eating living things he aged so quickly that he knew he would be dead by morning. It was a race to survive.
And so he made a plan.
He caught a dog and the servant held it tight while he sliced the head and ate the brain. As soon as it died, he threw the dog into the fire. The dog blazed up, barked and ran out again and out of the yard before the servant could catch it.
“I don’t like this story. And there’s still no little girl.”
“She’s just about to come into the story.”
“I don’t want her to now.”
“It’s too late. Here she comes.”
So he captured a little girl and took her to the yard. The servant held her and the old man sliced the top of her head off and ate her brain and threw her into the fire.
The sky split open. Magic rained down from the stars and drenched everybody in the yard, the old man, the girl, the servant, the beetles.
As the old man had expected, the girl came straight back to life in the fire. Only she couldn’t run out. He lunged forward to pull her clear, so that he could carry on making magic from her. He fell in and they both burned terribly.
The servant was more a beetle than a woman by now. She dragged them from the fire. The old man had crumbled to ash, and the girl was scarred and burned all over. But they were both full of magic. The cloud of ash formed into a shape like a woman and ran off from the crime, followed by the servant. They locked themselves away for shame and no one ever saw them again. They built themselves a castle of magic and lived there, with the beetles, and never grew older and never died. People say that one day they will come out and eat again.
The girl recovered, in a way. She lived and she was so full of magic that she could do anything, only you would never know to look at her ruined face. People say she’s waiting somewhere, ready to act if ever the ash person comes out of the castle.
The magic that spilled from the sky that day rained down on other people as well. Every time a star shoots across the sky another baby is born with the gift of magic.
He finished his story.
“And that’s how you were born,” he said. “When a December star shot across the sky. Well, that’s the story, anyway.”
“Shall I be burned and ugly?”
“No. Wizards don’t look like that any more. Only the little girl.”
“Is it true?” she asked.
“It’s a story. The blacksmith story is nicer, but there isn’t a little girl in it. There are babies, though.”
“But it is true?” |
Acknowledgements: My thanks, as ever, go to Denise and Ellen and Ben, at Walker Books, for unending help and encouragement, and to Felicity at Curtis Brown for her enthusiasm and practical skill.
Thanks to my family for enduring with such good grace the misfortune of being related to me by birth or marriage.
Thanks to Tom and Sarah who talk to me about writing and who keep me going.
Special thanks to those great people of the past who endowed and established and provided free library services. They gave me and countless others the opportunity to discover books, a place to be quiet and alone, and a vision of something beyond our surroundings. Civilized nations build libraries; lands that have lost their soul close them down.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, are used fictitiously. All statements, activities, stunts, descriptions, information and material of any other kind contained herein are included for entertainment purposes only and should not be relied on for accuracy or replicated as they may result in injury.
First published 2011 by Walker Books Ltd
87 Vauxhall Walk, London SE11 5HJ
Text © 2011 Toby Forward
Illustrations © 2011 Jim Kay
The right of Toby Forward and Jim Kay to be identified as the author and illustrator respectively of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted or stored in an information retrieval system in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, taping and recording, without prior written permission from the publisher.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data:
a catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-4063-4217-8 (ePub)
www.walker.co.uk