by Kate Gordon
“You know why we keep strangers away,” Rook muttered.
“Well your super subtle techniques have created an urban legend, and TV stations love urban legends. Everyone’s sentimental at this time of year. We would have been in the clear if you hadn’t sent that damned card to make me feel bad about skipping Christmas.”
It was a beautiful card. Handmade by Rook’s sister Cyan, who distributed her art to a bunch of different shops around Northern Tasmania, and kept a display near the till of Whitlam’s Hardware N’ Hobbies for the rare occasion when a tourist was allowed into their town.
The card depicted Main Street, edged in snow and tinsel, with Happy Holidays From Mt Valkyrie in bright scarlet lettering. Lief hadn’t managed to hide it fast enough before Piper announced in her alarmingly loud squee-tone: “OMG, is that from Matilda? Who do you know in Matilda?”
(Yes, Piper was exactly the sort of person who said OMG in real life.)
Cornered by four of her workmates, Lief confessed that Matilda was her hometown and … well, the producer of their Hobart Mornings show worked his magic pretty fast after that.
“Crap,” said Rook now, not even denying that he had sent the card out of pure emotional blackmail. “They didn’t know?”
“Of course they didn’t know. Matilda is the white whale of the Tasmanian news industry, so I knew better than to tell anyone … until you outed me. And here we are. It’s going to be me plus one very enthusiastic junior camera operator. We’ll make it as boring and normal as we possibly can, give the show some shots they can recycle every year and that should keep the sharks at bay for a decade or more. Trust me,” Lief added, as Piper finally made it across the road, and was near enough to hear. “I know what I’m doing.”
“At least you’re coming home,” said Rook, recovered from his panic enough that there was a smirk in his voice.
“I hate you,” Lief laughed. “Tell Banjo and Siegfried I’m on my way. No funny business, or the War Horse will give them heaps.” She patted her tangerine car fondly.
“I can’t believe she’s still running,” said Rook. “See you soon.”
Piper, who was barely out of her teens and bounced on her heels instead of walking like a normal person, pressed a coffee cup on Lief and climbed back into the passenger seat, her bare legs glowing under a tiny scrap of a skirt. She wore candy-pink sandals, and the same shade of lipgloss. “How long now?”
“It’ll be another two hours after the turn off,” said Lief. “This is the last stop I’d call civilisation for a while.”
“Good thing I bought danishes!” said Piper, pulling her giant sun-goggles down over her eyes. “I can’t wait to get there. I’ve never had a white Christmas.”
“It gets old,” Lief assured her, indicating and pulling out on to the highway. A little way out of town, she turned west, along a dirt track that didn’t look like it went anywhere but farms.
“Surprised you don’t have a four wheel drive,” Piper said idly, as they bumped and crackled along. “If you go home a lot. Is this a Prius?”
“Not exactly,” said Lief.
“The petrol gauge has barely moved. It’s not a Tesla, is it? You’re not going to find charging stations out here…”
“It’s kind of an experimental vehicle,” Lief admitted. “A bit of this, a bit of that.”
“Huh,” said Piper. “It looks vintage.”
“That’s part of its charm.”
“But it is a hybrid, right?”
Lief smiled. “That’s … a good word for it, yes.” She eyed Piper’s golden arms, bare like her legs. “I hope you brought some jumpers. It’s really not going to be normal Tassie weather where we’re going.”
Piper stuck her tongue out, flickering a heart-shaped stud in Lief’s direction. “It’s all about layers, baby. I’ve got it covered.”
“Sure,” said Lief, not believing her for a minute.
No one ever believed in Matilda, until they saw it for themselves.
If you looked up Matilda, TAS, you’d find a painstakingly maintained Wikipedia page and very little else.
(The most active editors on the page were R Whitlam, Rook White, and Hrokr_Featherwit, names that apparently raised no eyebrows at Wikipedia Central.)
Known facts about Matilda: a small town in the foothills of Mt Valkyrie, stable population of around 350 people, founded over a hundred years ago to service a small gold mine long tapped out. It had one school, two pubs, a hardware n’ hobbies store, a very small town hall which doubled as a community centre, and a service station shop with an excellent coffee machine.
Matilda kept itself to itself. But there was one oddity that was not currently mentioned on the Wikipedia page, despite numerous attempts from outsiders to add a reference to it.
There was always snow on Mt Valkyrie, even in the hottest parts of summer. The rest of Australia was prone to extreme temperatures and bushfire warnings from late November through to the end of February — and while Tasmania was known for having lower temperatures than the mainland, ice and snow was a rare occurrence even on mountaintops at this end of the world.
In the township of Matilda, according to legend, there was always snow on the ground on Christmas Day, no matter how hot it was everywhere else in the state. This hadn’t always been the case — early accounts from the town’s mining history never mentioned extreme cold snaps in winter, let alone in summer.
Then again, early accounts from the town’s mining history never mentioned Mt Valkyrie at all.
“I don’t see any snow,” said Piper, pouting with disappointment.
“Just wait,” Lief promised her.
The road narrowed and became bumpier as they rattled through the bush, deep enough that you couldn’t see anything but trees. The road wound higher and higher, through thick rainforest greenery that dripped on the windscreen.
As they swung around another tight turn they met a fork in the road. One way was clearly the better-travelled surface, and other was a trail barely wide enough to squeeze a car through … with a large, broken gum tree slung across it. Lief turned the War Horse, stopping just short of the fallen tree.
“Wait, really?” said Piper. “I mean, I know you’re local, but…”
“Trust me,” said Lief. “You’ll need to stay in the car.” She released her seatbelt and slipped out, closing the door firmly behind her, then stepped over the fallen tree (definitely too heavy for one person to shift), and took a few paces forward. On this side of the fallen gum, the air shivered.
She hated how good it felt to be this close to home.
“Trouble and Mischief!” she yelled at the trees. “Get down here now.”
There was silence for a moment, then a scurrying sound.
A nine-year-old, grubby and grinning in a bright pair of purple overalls, came running out of the trees and flung herself directly into Lief’s arms. “You’re home!”
“Hey, Banjo,” said Lief, setting the kid down on her feet. “Where’s your brother?”
“He’s around. I’m a girl now!” Banjo declared cheerfully, tapping a lopsided hair bow that was pinned to one of her pigtails, which was even more lopsided.
“So I heard. Congratulations.” Lief gave Banjo a hug, still scanning the trees for the other reprobate. “Want me to teach your Uncle Rook how to do hair things while I’m here?”
“Yes please! He won’t go on YouTube.”
“It is his greatest flaw,” Lief agreed. “Come on, snotball, I don’t have all day!” she called out, louder than before. “I have a guest with me!”
“Not allowed to let invaders in,” hooted a voice from up above her head.
Lief put her hands on her hips. “This one’s invited. I filled in the mayor’s online form and everything. Are you seriously gonna make me miss Christmas?”
There was a smushing sound, and a rustle. Finally Siegfried, a year younger than Banjo and twice as much trouble, slouched into sight. “Uncle Rook says…”
“Uncle Rook
isn’t the mayor, and neither are you,” said Lief firmly. “I did the paperwork, kid.”
“Fine.” Grouchily, Sieg grabbed one end of the tree, while Banjo hooked her glitter-glue streaked hands around the other. The two kids swung the tree trunk to the side of the road as if it was made of empty toilet rolls and pipe cleaners. Once the barrier illusion came down, this proved to be true.
“Play School didn’t teach you this,” Lief sighed.
“Uncle Rook,” Sieg started to say.
“Yeah, yeah. Uncle Rook only wants to protect us. Believe me, I’ve heard it before. Want a ride into town?”
“Yeah!” said Banjo, before Sieg could protest. She grabbed her brother’s hand and dragged him to the car. “Hello, War Horse, we missed you! Saddle up.”
Piper looked very confused as the two kids bundled themselves into the back seat. “Uh,” she said. “Did they just move that whole tree by themselves?”
“This town’s big on Pilates,” said Lief. “Good for core strength.”
It took another ten minutes of driving along the slow bumpy road before Piper threw in the towel, and pulled a cardi out of her rucksack. It was a tiny thing, made of hot pink yarn with sunflower buttons, and it barely covered her arms.
Reluctantly, Lief turned the heat up a notch or two in the car, to ease the transition. The War Horse didn’t like to get too hot so there was only so much she could do.
Banjo and Sieg kept up a loud chatter about town gossip, rattling off names Lief had known all her life, and details that showed neither kid had given up their habit of hiding under tables while the adults were talking.
Finally they swung around the last bushy corner, and the view opened up like one of Cyan’s greetings cards, bright blue sky and blinding snowcaps on Mt Valkyrie.
“Holy CRAP,” said Piper. “I didn’t know it was that big.”
“The altitude makes it look larger from this distance,” said Lief, one of many glib phrases that Rook had made her learn before she left for the ‘big city lights’ of Hobart.
Piper gave her a sidelong glance. “But we’re barely above sea level here. What altitude?”
Damn smartwatches.
“Um,” said Lief, and turned another tight bend on the road, which spiralled down, down into the town of Matilda.
“OMG,” said Piper, sounding out every syllable. “How is that even?” She tapped her smartwatch, as if trying to make sense of how high up they were now.
“Hold on to something,” said Lief.
“Wheee!” said the kids. Banjo had half-wriggled out of her seatbelt already.
“Safety first,” Lief snapped.
The War Horse liked this road, smoother than any since Campbell Town. The car went faster than was recommended on these turns, but Lief couldn’t resist. She was home. Happiness bubbled up inside her.
(The feeling of being trapped, the heavy weight on her chest, that would come soon enough, but she still appreciated this moment of joy.)
“What kind of tyres are these?” gasped Piper. There was snow now, here and there, crusted to the side of the road, dripping in soft blobs from the green pines and scraggly eucalypts. “We were in rainforest and now we’re…”
“You know Tassie weather,” said Lief automatically. “So unpredictable.” It didn’t hurt her soul as a qualified meteorologist to say such a thing. Everyone knew that Tassie weather broke all the rules of logic.
“Mmm,” said Piper dubiously.
Lief kept her eyes on the road. She’d banked on Piper’s inherent ditziness to get away with this. Had she underestimated the girl?
The War Horse’s steering wheel hummed under Lief’s fingertips as she took the final curve and rolled into town. This close to Christmas, there was snow on every rooftop, glistening on the lawns and the side of the road, though it wasn’t quite as thick and lush as it looked on the greeting cards.
Not yet.
Above the town, the looming mass of Mt Valkyrie was a spectre of rocks and whiteness.
“Did we take a wrong turn and end up in like, Norway?” said Piper. This was a little too uncomfortably close to, well. Not the truth. No one was going to guess the truth. “Are we in NARNIA?”
Ouch, well. That was closer to the truth.
“No lions or lamp-posts,” said Lief, as they pulled up in front of Whitlam’s Hardware N’ Hobbies. Which happened to have an old-fashioned wrought iron lamp-post right outside it, damn it, town beautification project. “Well. No lions.” Another truth. She was on fire today.
Christmas had come to Matilda as it always did. The lamp-posts and shop fronts were lined with festive bunting, stars and giant scarlet bells. The lights at night would be spectacular against the backdrop of the snow.
There was a giant tree, sparkling with baubles, set up further down Main Street, in front of the council hall. The decorations were always the same, and it tugged Lief’s heartstrings to see them.
Hello, nostalgia my old friend.
The kids scrambled out of the car the second that the War Horse stopped, and ran into the shop shouting “Uncle Rook, Uncle Rook, Lief’s home!”
A moment later, a handsome man with a close-cropped dark beard and bright green eyes stepped out. His entire face lit up when he saw them.
“Well, hello tall, dark and everything,” said Piper in a low, impressed voice.
Lief flew out from behind the steering wheel and flung herself at him. Rook was going to drive her nuts for this entire trip, she knew. She was prepared for that. Still, he was one of her favourite people in the world, and it was so good to see him.
He hugged her back. For a moment she let herself enjoy how safe it felt.
“Everything is terrible,” Rook muttered into her ear.
“I know,” Lief said, and hugged him harder.
That was her rook, always squawking doom and despair. The worst part was, he was rarely wrong.
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Merry Happy Valkyrie by Tansy Rayner Roberts