Bily lamented over how tired Zluty must be at the end of each long and lonely day of walking, and how horrid it must be to lie down on the hard ground with the vast open vault of the sky curving overhead. But if Zluty was weary, it was a good kind of weariness that made his blood sing and his heart lie quiet within his chest. Impossible to explain that he even liked the heaviness of the pack dragging at his shoulders. As for sleeping on the hard ground with the stars and the open sky above, Zluty thought that might just be the thing he loved best of all.
But there were not words enough to make Bily understand. It might be possible to play a tune that captured some of what he felt about the journey across the plain, but in the end, the only way his brother could ever truly understand would be to try it for himself. There were some things that could not be told or shown, but must be felt.
That whole afternoon, Zluty tramped steadily over the most barren stretch of the journey. There were no insects and no plants and it was hot despite the constant breeze flowing from the West like one endless cool breath. The only things that moved were his shadow lengthening as the sun made its own slow journey overhead, and the green forest growing larger and more distinct the nearer he came to it. Then, in the afternoon, the sun was swallowed up by the bleary redness spreading out across the Western sky, and hours before dusk Zluty found himself walking through a murky brown twilight.
But Zluty did not stop until it began to get dark, and when he set down his pack his weariness seemed to fall into him like a great weight. The wind was gritty with sand and so he lay out his bedroll in the lee of one of the metal objects that littered the plain. The longing to lie down and sleep was nearly irresistible.
He had to force himself to gather a few ground cones and scoop out a little fire-pit. Then he sat down on his bed and dug out his flints and some white fluffs. When the cones were crackling brightly, he rummaged in his pack for a pot and made a simple stew from some water and a few bits of dried root and mushroom. As he waited for it to cook, he unwrapped a scone Bily had made and bit into it. It was dry now but very good and he felt less light-headed after eating it. He was suddenly glad he had made a proper meal. The previous night he had simply eaten some nuts before sleeping.
He tipped the stew into a bowl and ate it hungrily. It tasted especially delicious, as all food seemed to when eaten out on the plain. Perhaps it was because the food carried the memory of home, which never seemed sweeter to Zluty than when he was away from it.
When he had finished eating, Zluty scoured the pot and mug and spoon with sand and packed everything away into his pack. By his reckoning, he had made up enough time to arrive at the forest by midday tomorrow, rather than late in the evening. That meant he would be able to tap the trees for sap straightaway rather than having to wait until the next morning.
It took a whole night and day for the thick dark sap to fill the pots, and being able to begin when he arrived meant the pots would be full by nightfall. During the day he would gather the mushrooms and get the honey and he ought to be able to set off for home on the morning of the sixth day, rather than on the seventh. That would bring him back to the cottage a whole day earlier. Zluty did not want to lose any of his hard-won extra time by waking late again so he lay down and closed his eyes.
He was so tired that he had thought he would fall asleep at once, but as sometimes happens, his weariness was so great that sleep would not come.
He found himself picturing Bily fighting a grass fire alone. It was something that had happened once when he had been away from the cottage, and Bily had managed well enough. But the fire had happened when Zluty had been less than a day away from the cottage, and it had been Summer, when they always dug a wide firebreak in the prickly wiregrass that surrounded the cottage, and kept buckets of earth and water in a line along the back wall of the cottage.
‘It is not Summer,’ Zluty reminded himself, sitting up and putting his last two ground cones on the embers, for the breeze had made the night cool. Sparks coiled up into the dark dry air as they caught light, and Zluty lay down again to watch them. Finally, he slept and dreamed of a creature red as blood, red as the heartstones of a fire, running across the ground, setting alight everything it touched.
5
Bily felt that something was wrong even before he was properly awake, and when he opened his eyes and found himself bathed in reddish light, he shuddered. Sitting up, he saw that the red mist now covered the sky. He climbed out of his bed and hurried to the East-facing window. As he had feared, the redness reached far enough around that he could see it from this window, too. And it was no longer simply a colour, for it was now close enough for him to see that it moved and roiled like the thick heavy smoke that came from a fire made of green ground cones. The plants and bushes in the garden stirred and shifted restlessly as if they disliked the unnatural red light as much as he did.
Bily went into the kitchen and made himself porridge for breakfast. He was halfway through eating it when he suddenly realised that he had not heard the birds singing when he awakened. Usually the morning rang with their calls and songs. He told himself that the unnatural sky had put the birds out of their routine, but his heart was beating swiftly as he went to the front door and opened it.
The door faced North, which was the way Zluty had gone, and here at least, the sky was reassuringly blue. Bily went out into the garden and made his way through the vegetable patch to the fruit trees. He was relieved to see that there were a few birds here and there, clinging to swaying branches, though not nearly as many as there ought to have been, and all were unnaturally silent. Bily went to the tree that grew by the outside cellar trapdoor, which was home to a family of small brown birds that spent their days squabbling and threatening one another. Its branches were empty. He went around to the back of the cottage where ground cones were piled up to dry out in the sun before being shifted into the cellar. Above the pile, under the eaves, were nests of clay fixed to the rock wall, but when he looked into them, he found only three birds. The rest were empty.
Bily did not know what to make of it. He whistled to Redwing and was relieved when she uttered her soft, high call. He found her sitting on one of the hard metal objects that littered the plain. This one was barely visible under the coils of a night-flowering creeper. In the reddish light of the sky, Redwing’s feathers glowed beautifully crimson as she fluffed up her plumage and chirped a greeting.
Bily was so relieved to see her behaving normally that he put his arms around her and pressed his cheek gently to her head before asking if she knew what had made so many of the birds fly away before they would usually leave for the Winter.
Redwing gave an expressive trill, but Bily could not quiet his thoughts and fears enough to make out what she was saying. It was something to do with the birds being frightened. She gave another earnest trill and he made himself concentrate. She was telling him the only birds that remained other than her were those with eggs yet to hatch or nestlings too young to fly. The parent birds were not singing because they feared what would happen to them and their young.
‘Are they afraid of the red mist?’ Bily asked.
Redwing chirped that they were afraid the red wind would kill their eggs and nestlings.
Bily thought he must have misunderstood her, for Zluty had said the redness was a mist. He would have asked further questions of Redwing, except that he noticed one of the long strands of a creeper that usually attached itself to the side of the cottage was flying free. If left untended the whole bank of it might be torn away by the buffeting wind.
Bily ran inside to get twine and his stone knife, and set about binding the creeper up. As he worked, he realised that his fur was beginning to fluff. That and the growing strength of the wind were sure signs that a storm was brewing. He ought to be relieved that the mysterious redness might only be a storm after all. Except the birds had never flown away because of a storm before.
Bily tied up the creeper, then he tied up all of the vines and staked the
tomato plants and the bellflowers, just in case. As he worked, he made up his mind that when he was finished he would try to convince the birds to let him carry their nests into the cellar. He could open the outer trapdoor, and they could fly in and out as they pleased.
Zluty woke at dawn, and set off at once with only a handful of nuts for his breakfast. By midmorning he could see the Northern Forest clearly, though it would still take him several hours to reach it. The wind blowing from the West was much stronger than it had been the day before, and the redness had unfurled like a great cloak across the sky to the South and the East. The wind did not hamper him as it would have done if he had been walking into it, but its constant side shoves were wearisome. The sooner he reached the forest the better, for not only would he be able to get out of the wind but he would also be able to drink. He had run out of water that morning and the wind was making him terribly thirsty. Even so, he decided he would not stop until he reached the spring cave.
Just on midday, when the sun was directly overhead, Zluty was startled to find himself in the midst of a buzzing cloud of bees.
He stopped, startled to see bees so far from the forest. Then he realised they would not have flown so far – they must have a ground hive nearby. Despite his thirst and his impatience to reach the forest, Zluty pricked his ears at the thought.
Honey from the plains had a special flavour that he and Bily liked very much. If the bees would give him some, he could put it into the extra pot he had brought, and give that to Bily as a gift instead of the blue berries.
Before he could ask, the bees began to hum. He listened carefully to their beesong and was astonished to be told that his coming had been foreseen by their Queen who wished to speak with him. She could not fly, being wingless, so he must come to the hive. It was not far, they promised.
‘What need have you?’ Zluty asked courteously, lying on his belly and stretching out his hand so that the great lustrous Queen bee could clamber onto it. Then he sat up, holding her very carefully as her subjects hovered anxiously, and tilted his ear to hear her song.
‘I dreamed that you made the earth about the hive flat so that it was safe from the great earth bird. When you refused, the terrible earth bird whose purpose was to destroy all life gouged up the hive. My subjects tried to build up the earth but they were too slow. I and all of the fledgling queens were killed. The hive was doomed, for a hive must have a Queen.’
Zluty had no idea what an earth bird could be, but only a bird full of madness would attack a hive and risk being stung to death. Most likely he had misunderstood, for bees always spoke as if everything had already happened, even when they were talking about the future. He might have asked more questions if he had time to sit and listen over and over to their songs, but instead he merely agreed to do as the Queen asked.
He took from his pack the small wooden spade he used to shovel earth over the embers of his campfires, and set about laying a good cover of earth around the hump that was the upper part of the hive. By the time he had finished, there was no longer a dip with a hump in the middle of it, but flat ground. If he had glanced in this direction now, Zluty would not even have noticed the hive.
The bees busied themselves tidying the new entrance, and when Zluty bent to lift the Queen down to it from the pack where she had waited as he worked, she told him he had taken some honeycomb and a bee with him, and that she had dreamed of a hive that had been set up in the vale of bellflowers at the end of his journeying.
Zluty was puzzled. The Queen seemed to be offering him a fledgling bee queen, for a hive could only be set up by a new queen, but what did she mean about the vale of bellflowers? Perhaps she meant the cottage. No doubt the little bed of bellflowers Bily nurtured by the well would seem like a vale to a tiny bee queen whose hive was situated on such stony ground, and certainly the cottage was the end of his journey.
It surprised him that the Queen of the plain hive knew what a bellflower was. Perhaps she had seen one on her maiden flight before she lost her wings. Occasionally, flowers did bloom on the plain after rare rainfall. Though it must have rained very hard to bring bellflowers to life, for they needed a lot of watering.
‘You want me to take a queen bee?’ Zluty asked, to be sure he had not misunderstood.
‘You took a small queen and three males,’ the Queen agreed, even as a cluster of bees emerged from the newly tidied entrance to the hive carrying a small chunk of honeycomb upon which sat a very small bee.
Zluty got out the little pottery jar he had intended for the blue berries, trying to imagine Bily’s delight at having a hive in his own garden. Once it was established, Zluty would never need to bring honey from the forest again. That meant he could carry more tree sap or mushrooms.
The bees flew busily back and forth bringing more and more honeycomb to the jar until the Queen pronounced it was enough to last the bees to the end of their journey. It was far more honey than a few bees would eat in five or six days, Zluty thought, but he said nothing for it would be poor thanks to the Queen for such a magnificent gift if he showed his impatience to be gone.
He put the jar carefully into the top of his pack, leaving the stopper out so that his bees could breathe, then he rubbed his hands with sand until they were no longer sticky, and came to thank the Queen. She had gone back inside the hive, but the bees sang her gratitude for saving the hive from the earth bird before they all swarmed into the hive after her.
Finally, three male bees remained and they sang that they had accompanied him on his great journey to the vale of the bellflowers. Zluty bid them fly into the top of the jar carrying the little queen and then carefully hoisted his pack onto his shoulders.
Zluty set off quickly for he had lost several hours in coming to the hive and he needed to get to the Northern Forest early enough to set the tree taps before night fell.
He glanced back at the redness growing in the sky. The wind had grown stronger. He wondered if, after all, the redness was a storm cloud. He would know soon enough, for it was drawing closer behind him and would eventually reach the ground hive.
It might very well be what the Queen had meant when she had sung about the earth bird that would endanger the hive, Zluty thought. Certainly the spreading redness did look like the wings of a vast bird. Though what a storm had to do with the earth, he could not guess.
Zluty puzzled for a time over what the bee Queen had said about the earth bird wanting to destroy all life, before deciding that he had probably misunderstood – for how could a storm be said to want anything?
It was late in the afternoon before Zluty reached the narrow rift where the spring cave lay. Beyond it, the vast Northern Forest rose up like a cool dense dream.
Zluty went down into the cave, set his pack down carefully and threw himself on his belly to slake his thirst at the cold pool of water that lay at the base of the spring. Then he lay out his bedroll, resisting the impulse to lie down for a little and rest. He had to get the tree taps in place before the sun set.
He unfastened his collection bag from the front of the pack and, being careful not to wake the sleeping bees, he took out the bee jar and set it aside. Then he dug out the tree sap pots, the tap tubes he had whittled, and the hammer he would use to drive them into the tree trunks. Putting everything into his collection bag, he slung it over his shoulder and took up his staff.
Coming out of the rift, Zluty was startled at the force of the wind, which seemed to have redoubled in the little time he had been in the cave. The redness now filled half the sky and he was suddenly certain that it was a storm and, given the wind, it would surely reach the forest not long after dusk.
Then, with a stab of disquiet, he realised that it must already have reached the cottage and Bily.
6
Bily had just finished carrying the last of the nests down into the cellar. It had taken him over an hour to persuade each bird that if the wind became any stronger it was likely to dislodge his or her nest. He had no doubt now that there was a sto
rm coming, whether or not it was the redness in the sky or merely the thing pushing it. Aside from the growing force of the wind, his fur was fully fluffed. The birds knew it, too, yet without Redwing, Bily doubted he would have managed to convince them to let him shift their nests. Most of the parent birds had come down to the cellar with their nests, but there were a few who were too frightened. They were desperate to be reunited with their babies but they needed help to overcome their fear. Bily was crumbling some bread into a bowl to set in the cellar beneath the open trapdoor as an encouragement for them, when he heard a tearing noise from above.
He thought at once of the roof tiles.
Since midday the rising wind had been plucking and worrying at them. Though well made and carefully tied down, the woven tiles had yet to be repaired and strengthened for the Winter to come. If the wind managed to tear away one of the tiles, it was possible that, bit by bit, the rest would be torn away, and even if only a few patches in the roof were opened up, rain would get inside the cottage once the storm struck. It seldom rained on the plain, but Bily could smell it on the wind.
Opening the front door to go out and look at the roof, Bily was startled at how much stronger the wind had become. All of the bushes and plants were bent over under its force and some had even been completely stripped of their leaves. No wonder most of the birds had flown away. He backed away from the cottage to see the roof better.
It was dark because of the dull red sky, but he saw at once that the wind had torn away almost a whole line of tiles along the western side of the roof. Bily knew he ought to get the ladder and climb up onto the roof to tie the remaining tiles down, but the wind was so strong that he dared not try it. If only Zluty had been there to do it – he had no fear of heights.
Bily wrung his hands for a moment, wishing hopelessly for his brother, but he knew that Zluty could not help him now. This knowledge frightened him, but it steadied him, too, and let him see there was only one thing he could do.