Where the World Turns Wild

by Nicola Penfold

  “Not far, Queenie!” Hester calls after her. “The wolves are circling.”

  “Wolves?” I gasp.

  “Because we’ve been here too long,” a voice comes from across the fire. Manfri’s. He’s looking right at me, accusing.

  Hester glares at him. “Ah, Mani, it’s always the same round here this time of year, and you know it. Don’t make the girl feel bad. It wasn’t her fault she got caught in that trap.”

  Larch raps at him with a huge spoon and Manfri shrugs and turns back to what he’s doing – mending something. Something leather for the horses, I think.

  “So there are wolves?” I ask Cam. “We’d heard them but we haven’t seen a single one. I was starting to think we’d made them up.”

  Cam shakes his head. “The wolves are real all right. Only they’re clever. They stay clear of the bigger places. They know to leave humans alone, most of the time anyway.”

  Most of the time? Suddenly it comes back to me. My fever dream. The grey shapes at the entrance of our cave. How could I have forgotten? My eyes fix on Bear. “They came, didn’t they, when I was sick? The wolves came!”

  Bear’s face scrunches up. “One did. It came in the cave. Ghost chased it off.”

  “Bear!” I stammer, reaching out to him.

  “It was OK, Ju,” Bear says quickly, though his eyes are wet all of a sudden. “I didn’t mind. I knew Ghost would protect us.”

  “You should have lit a fire,” carols Queenie, riding round the camp in circles. “Wolves are scared of fire.”

  “I did some of the time,” Bear says, wiping at his face. “But it kept going out when I was sleeping.”

  “You did a grand job, Bear,” Hester says firmly. “You kept Juniper safe. You should be real proud of yourself.”

  I pull him against me, but he pushes me away. “Ju,” he whispers, his cheeks scarlet. “Queenie will think I’m a baby.”

  “Tell them, Cam. Tell them how you saved Dani from the wolf,” Queenie’s calling, and then Cam’s on his feet, puffing out his chest like the birds do to keep warm. Bear turns his back on me to listen. He doesn’t want to think about the cave.

  Cam points his finger out round the camp. “It was a winter just like this, the snow heavy in the hills.”

  “The wolves always come when there’s snow,” Queenie interrupts. “Cause there’s less prey.”

  Cam nods impatiently. “We were getting ready to move south. The wolf burst from the mountainside. The biggest wolf we’ve seen. She jumped for Dani’s face. She wanted to snap his head right off, I reckon. One giant bite.” Cam snaps with his teeth and lunges forwards.

  “Cause he had the meat. Isn’t that right, Cam?” Queenie adds.

  “That’s right,” Cam says. “They smell meat for miles.”

  I glance nervously at the cooking pot. Cam continues, acting his story out as he talks. How he flew up, bare-handed, and dragged the wolf to the floor.

  “Not quite that quick, from what I remember,” Dani says, tracing the gash across his face with his index finger.

  I shudder, thinking of Bear back in the cave when I was sweating up with fever. Cam’s still going on about punching the wolf, bare-fisted – he’s clearly proud of that bit – and how the wolf went off crying like a baby. He’s got a gleam in his eyes and I can’t work out whether it’s fear or excitement.

  “You’ve got to fight to the death usually and make sure the dead one ain’t you.” He fixes me right in the eye and Hester chides him.

  “Cam, give it a rest! You’re scaring them.”

  Cam shrugs. “How they going to know how to win against a wolf if no one’s ever told them?” He points his finger at us like he’s a teacher in front of a class. “You’ve got to keep the fire going. Wolves hate fire. They don’t like noise either. You’ve got to bang on the cooking pot, use whatever you’ve got. Shout and holler. Make yourself all big.”

  “And don’t go carrying meat around, like what I was,” Dani says.

  “So you won’t be wanting this, Dani?” Larch says, carrying out a bowl full of stew.

  Dani laughs. “I think we’re safe tonight with Cam on guard. He’s volunteered to be wolf-watcher.”

  “I don’t think so,” Cam says, diving in front of Larch to claim the first soup. She punches him playfully in the stomach.

  “Go and get the bread, will you? Guests first, remember. This bowl’s for Juniper, in honour of her recovery.” Larch hands it to me smiling, and Cam puts down a plate of the delicate flat bread they fry over the fire, and all thoughts of wolves go out of my head.

  When everyone has finished eating, Dani gets out a wooden instrument – a collection of hollow reeds which he blows across, and this lilting, loveliest of sounds comes out. Queenie pulls Cam up and the two of them dance. Slow at first and then faster, faster, as Dani speeds up the tune, till Queenie collapses in a heap of giggles.

  Larch insists on brushing out my hair as we watch. It’s been in plaits ever since I left the city and it curls all the way down to my waist when she unties it. She spreads it out over my shoulders and hands me a small oval mirror with roses painted round the glass.

  “You’re beautiful, Juniper,” she says and I blush, and Bear looks at me astonished. I always thought the curls were part of Bear’s wildness. Now I’ve got as many as him. I don’t exactly look wild in the rose mirror, I just look older. Stronger, maybe.

  The dancing goes on for ages. Larch gets Manfri to join in and he spins Queenie round and round, and Bear looks on so enviously that Dani passes the pipe over to Hester so he can spin Bear too.

  When the little ones tire, Larch gets up and dances in Manfri’s arms, and I colour and look away because sometimes he bends down and kisses her head.

  Hester’s songs get slower and sadder and at some point Larch starts to sing. It’s the most beautiful sound I ever heard, all sweet and haunting, although I don’t know what she’s singing about. She’s slipped into another language entirely.

  I could sit for hours, just listening, but Cam’s next to me, talking a hundred miles per hour. He knows everything about the Wild, or the Wildwood as he calls it – all the places they’ve been, the stories and traditions, the rituals, the history.

  He wants to know about our city too. He says around the other cities, the handful of other places that survived, the Buffer Zones are open. They’re markets and performance spaces. There are visiting traders and acrobats and musicians.

  “Not your one,” Cam says, this dark excitement in his eyes. “Not Portia Steel’s city. We can’t get close and we wouldn’t want to. We’ve heard all sorts. People going in, never coming out, like it’s a black hole.”

  I don’t want to talk about where we’ve come from, not now, when Bear and I are the happiest we’ve been for weeks, but Cam’s leaning in, waiting. I’ve got to give him something. So I start talking about the Palm House and the Emporium.

  “They were just the best bits,” Bear pipes up. “The rest was vile. Especially school.”

  “Why?” Cam asks.

  “Because you’re always inside. Even when they say go out, you’re still inside really. And the grass is plastic, and there’s just a silly climbing frame to play on, and they don’t even let you run fast. They say it’s dangerous.”

  “Dangerous?” Cam scoffs.

  “There wasn’t space,” I explain. “There was never any space. And it’s all just grey and the same, everywhere you look.”

  “Like a prison,” Bear says. “I’m never going back. Never ever!”

  “I couldn’t stand it,” Queenie says passionately. “I wouldn’t have let them lock me up! I’d have run away from Portia Steel years ago!”

  Bear gazes at her like she really is a queen.

  When we can’t keep our eyes open any longer, Cam drags a couple of stones from the fire with a stick. He wraps them in furs and hands one to each of us and we hold them next to us like big warm hugs.

  “Goodnight, city kids,” Cam says, smiling.
r />   Bear’s eyelids are drooping, but he still finds the energy to stick his tongue out.

  We set off at dawn. There are six horses, or three horses and three ponies, as Queenie corrects me. Hester and Larch ride the larger horses and they make me ride too, to keep the weight off my foot.

  My face froze when Cam said I’d be riding a horse called Lightning, but he pointed to the white-bolt pattern across the back of her neck and laughed. “Her name wasn’t on account of her speed. Old Lightning’s the slowest we’ve got. Your biggest problem is going to be keeping her awake!”

  Bear runs on with Queenie, whooping.

  “Bear!” I scold when he winds in front of Lightning. I’m scared she’s going to trample him. “You’re too loud.”

  Hester laughs. “Let him be, Juniper.”

  “The drones…” I start.

  “Your city’s metal birds?” Hester exclaims. “They don’t come this far north. Why would they?”

  “They followed us.”

  She nods. “Aye, Bear said. I still reckon you’re safe. You’re far enough away.”

  “Don’t other cities have drones too?”

  Hester shrugs. “Why would they?”

  “I guess,” I say nodding, but if we hadn’t staged that fire, the drones would have followed us, I know they would. Our city’s more dangerous than Hester thinks, I’m sure of it, but what’s the point in thinking about that now? There’s nothing her people could do except stay clear of our city, and they’re doing that already.

  Ghost isn’t with us. She came when we were packing. She stood on the edge of the encampment and the horses stamped and whinnied their disapproval. Manfri cursed and threw a stick at her to see her off.

  “Manfri!” Hester had shouted as I got to my feet, shaky, to call her back. “She’s Juniper’s cat.”

  “She won’t hurt them,” I’d said angrily. “You scared her.”

  Manfri hadn’t budged. “We had a lynx jump from a tree on to one of the foals once. The mares know predators when they see them.”

  “Ghost’s not like that,” I’d said at once, though I’d thought of the deer she caught and how I hadn’t even felt sad. Only grateful and proud.

  “Are you sure you’re holding tight enough?” Cam asks, walking beside me, holding on to Lightning. “Your knuckles are like stones!”

  I pull a face. “What if she falls on the ice? It’s a long way down!”

  “Trust her, Juniper. She’s a mountain pony.”

  I smile and try to relax. There’s something magic about the way Cam leads her. Something between them. Some three-way thing between the boy and the land and the horse.

  Bear and Queenie weave in and out of everyone, jumping on two of the little pack ponies, Flotsam and Squall, when they tire.

  Bear has proper boots now. Hester scoffed at his shoes and found an old pair of Queenie’s for him before we set off. “You need proper soles out here or you’ll be slipping down them mountains.”

  The furs help too. Ours are rabbit like Queenie’s – lots of rabbit skins, all stitched together. Cam says the wind’s got teeth this far north and he’s right.

  Hester knows when to slow and when to stop entirely so I can take a break. “You’re doing well, Juniper,” she says, sitting down beside me on some rocks where she’s insisted I raise my foot up and rest.

  I grimace. “I’m slowing everyone down.”

  “It’s good to be slow sometimes. You see more.”

  “I suppose,” I say, though she’s right of course. After all those weeks in the cave, I see everything afresh. The way the light falls across the mountains, the dances of the birds above our heads. A lone kestrel, hanging in the air, hovering, like it doesn’t need to flap its wings at all. And birds Bear says are buzzards circling over us, their wings and tail fathers spread right out like a kite.

  The trees are the most amazing thing. You can trace patterns right up into the canopy. Their skin, their bark, marked with indentations – lines like ravines in the wood. Rivulets. Folds coiling into circles or spirals.

  Etienne’s mum would love this. The infinite variety, the shapes, the patterns. This, here, is what she was trying to replicate with her fractals. She’d never seen it for real, only in old pictures, but she understood its lure. This is what she thought would heal us.

  Sometimes I think of the kids back at school. How I always thought they didn’t miss this. How could they? They didn’t know about it. But maybe, deep down inside somewhere, they missed it anyway.

  “You should stay with us,” Cam says, watching me ride. He’s finally let go of Lightning’s rope. I think this old slow horse suits me pretty well. “You’d make good nomads, you and Bear.”

  “Can we, Ju?” Bear asks eagerly, by my side at once.

  “Bear!” I sigh. “What about Ennerdale?”

  Bear looks guilty. “I don’t mean… I didn’t mean instead,” he flounders and I have to cut in. Rescue him.

  “I know you didn’t mean it.”

  “He did,” Cam says assuredly. “Why would you want to stay in one place anyway? All your life in one place? That’s crazy!” He bends down so Bear can climb on to him for a piggyback. Bear stretches his arms right out like the kestrel’s wings and suddenly I’m back on the pavement outside the climbing centre, with Bear an albatross on Etienne’s back. Tears well in my eyes.

  There was this old fairy story we had back home. The Snow Queen. Gerda’s best friend, Kay, is taken by the evil Snow Queen and Gerda sets out to rescue him. On the way she gets distracted by a beautiful garden and forgets who she’s looking for. I always loved the garden part, where every kind of flower grew but roses. The old lady who tended the garden had made the roses shrivel into the ground when Gerda came. She knew roses would remind Gerda of Kay and she wanted Gerda to stay in the garden forever.

  Seeing Bear like a bird on Cam’s back is like seeing roses again and remembering. Except we’re not going to find Etienne or Annie Rose. We’re going to a place I left almost a decade ago and parents we barely remember. Who knows what we’ll find?

  Ghost still hasn’t shown up. The landscape’s rawer now and the sides of the hills are covered in dead brown fern – bracken – and grey stones and rocks that break away and fall on to the valley floor. Cam calls it scree. Is it all this that Ghost doesn’t like – the exposure, out on the hillsides, climbing between valleys? Or is it the people, the ponies, the songs?

  I think Hester’s people are glad Ghost has stopped following us, but I look for her. All the time I look for her on the hillsides, and backwards as we pass from one valley into the next. Have we gone too far for her to follow?

  “She’ll show up,” Bear says, coming to stand next to me at the edge of the night’s encampment. “She always does.”

  “She’s not been gone this long before.”

  “She wouldn’t leave us, Ju.”

  I believed that too, and yet when you say it out loud, you realize how crazy it sounds. Ghost’s wild. Why should she follow us? If she did feel any sense of obligation, if that’s even possible, we have human friends now. They’ve taken over her role.

  “She doesn’t like them, does she?” Bear says sadly.

  “It’s probably the coats they wear.” I don’t mean for my voice to sound bitter, but it does. Even Cam’s wearing lynx.

  “Cam said the lynx were dead already. They don’t waste dead animals.”

  “That’s convenient,” I say sarcastically. “So did they eat them too?”

  Bear pulls a confused face and walks away, back into the firelight. For a while I just stand there.

  “Penny for them?” a voice says beside me and I jump. It’s Hester.

  “Are you OK, Juniper? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  “Our grandmother used to say that.”

  “Annie Rose? Bear’s talked about her. You must miss her.”

  I nod, not trusting myself to speak.

  “You’re shivering,” Hester says. “You should be b
y the fire with everyone else.”

  “I just…”

  “Needed some quiet?” Hester asks.

  “No!” Then I smile as Hester laughs. “Well, maybe. A little. Just to think.”

  “Juniper,” Hester says, serious now. “It’s time. We’ve held off as long as we can, but it’s time now. We head south tomorrow.”

  I turn to the fire and gaze at them – Hester’s little band. Her troupe. “All of you?”

  “All of us, Juniper. We stick together. We go south in the winter. It’s who we are.”

  “You don’t need to explain.”

  “Juniper, we’d come with you if we could. You know that. But there’s folks waiting for us and more snow coming. Look how low the clouds are and that light around the moon like a silver halo. They’re snow signs if ever I saw them. If we get further into the mountains, getting down again will be too difficult with the wagon.”

  “It’s fine, Hester. It’s completely fine.”

  Hester places her hands on my shoulders. “Juniper, you and Bear fit in so well with us. Even Manfri’s coming round.”

  I raise my eyebrows and Hester grins.

  “He says we could trade some of your pictures, hire you out as a portrait painter!”

  “Even though I made Queenie’s nose too big and Cam wasn’t handsome enough?”

  Hester cackles. I’d been tasked with drawing portraits for them all last night, and it was touching how pleased they seemed to be with my quick sketches, despite their complaints. “It’s a rare gift you’ve got. Don’t underestimate it. Come south with us, Juniper.”

  “We can’t, Hester.”

  “No?”

  “We’re going to Ennerdale. To our parents. It’s who we are. It’s what we do.”

  Hester smiles at me and sighs. “Well, you got me there. I can’t argue with that.”

  Back by the fire, Cam comes to sit next to me. “Hester didn’t persuade you then? I told her she wouldn’t.”

  “We didn’t just want to escape the city. We wanted to go home.” I swallow hard as I say this because I’m not even sure what’s true. Maybe home’s still a glasshouse hundreds of miles away?