The only sensible thing was to wait for morning, when there would be sunlight to let him see his way back to the plain.
Just so long as the stones stopped falling …
8
Bily stared into the little fire he had lit in the pit he had dug in the earthen floor of the cave cellar. He was thinking about the monster he had discovered the previous evening.
He glanced over to where it slept, remembering the way his heart had nearly jumped out of his chest at the sight of its glowing eyes. They were not small and bright like birds’ eyes or soft and round like diggers’ eyes. They were long and narrow like a grain of wild rice. And the colour – they were the light radiant yellow of the leaves that fell from the fruit trees in Autumn, and were slashed from top to bottom by narrow black irises.
Seeing those strange eyes glaring at him out of the black shadows in the corner of the cellar, Bily had truly thought he would faint out of sheer fright. But he had not fainted and the monster had not sprung out at him and eaten him.
It had simply gone on looking at him.
Bily might very well still be standing there, frozen with terror, if the lantern had not guttered, its feeble light dimming further. Only the fear of being plunged into darkness had given Bily the strength to back away from the monster.
He had got halfway to the steps, all the while imagining how it would feel when the yellow-eyed monster leapt on him, when to his everlasting astonishment it spoke.
‘If you go back up into your dwelling, you will die,’ it had said in its thick, furry voice.
‘If I stay, you will kill me,’ Bily had gasped, only to distract the monster from noticing that he had taken another step back.
‘I will not harm you,’ said the monster. ‘This is your territory and I came only because I was in need of shelter from the arosh.’
‘What is an arosh?’ Bily asked, horrified that there might be another monster roaming about the plain. And what must it be like if this one feared it?
‘It is the red wind,’ said the monster. ‘The wind of stones.’
‘You … you came here to take shelter from the storm?’ Bily stammered.
‘I did,’ said the monster. ‘Do not fear me for even if I desired to attack you, I would not be capable of it. I am hurt.’
Thinking it might be a trick to put him off-guard, Bily had asked warily, ‘What is wrong with you, monster? Were you struck by the falling stones?’
‘They had not begun to fall when I smelled your dwelling. I raced across the plain with the arosh at my back and I had just smelled a way into this underground cavern when something bit me. It was some small creature with very sharp fangs, and its bite was very painful. Even as I broke into this under chamber, I felt my limbs failing under me. I could barely drag myself into this corner.’
Bily gave a little gasp. ‘You must have stepped on a blackclaw. There is a nest of them near the digger mounds a little way from the house. Their venom causes numbness.’ He had stopped, not wanting to tell the monster that whenever a digger had been bitten by a blackclaw it had suffered numbness and then it had died. But perhaps his face showed his thoughts too clearly, for the monster had given a heavy sigh.
‘I should have been more careful,’ it said. ‘The seer told me to watch my step, but I thought he spoke only of being careful in general.’
Bily had not known what it was talking about, but the diggers always raved and rambled nonsense after being bitten.
‘I can give you a lorassum leaf. It will numb the pain that will come when the venom spreads,’ he offered.
‘I would be grateful to have something, for pain is clawing at my belly like a beast that wishes to gnaw its way out of me,’ the monster said.
Bily had been startled because usually once the pain came, a digger writhed and groaned and whimpered until Bily fed it lorassum leaf.
Bily went to where he kept his store of lorassum leaves. There were only a few left and they would no more save the monster from the deadly blackclaw venom than they had been able to save any of the diggers. But at least it would not suffer as it died. He had no idea how much leaf would be needed to soften the monster’s pain, but it would need water, for the taste of the leaves was very bitter.
The lantern flame dimmed again and he hurried back to refill its reservoir. When he turned back to the monster, the brighter light showed clearly how enormous it was, and how long and sharp the claws were at the end of its four strong, long legs. But then Bily saw that the monster’s golden eyes had grown cloudy, just like the diggers’ eyes did when the pain was very bad towards the end.
It was this that gave him the courage to go and dipper water from one of the urns he had filled into a bowl and carry it and the lorassum leaves to the monster. As he approached it, his legs stopped of their own accord. He was two steps from the enormous triangular head, and its fangs looked long and sharp as dagger thorns against its dark muzzle.
‘I can smell your fear,’ the monster said softly in its thick whispering voice. A beautiful voice that, if it were a colour, would be a rich dark brown, Bily thought with the corner of his mind that was not terrified. Then he noticed that the monster was shivering and again pity overtook fear. He stepped closer and held out a lorassum leaf.
‘I am not sure how much you will need. Usually, I only give the diggers half a leaf to chew, but their bodies are very small. I think you had better have a whole leaf to begin with. It will not be enough to deaden the pain completely, but I have only a few leaves, and once they run out, you will have to endure terrible pain.’
‘You mean that I might not die soon enough for the leaves to last if I have enough to numb the pain now,’ said the monster.
Struck by the strange wry flash of humour in its eyes, Bily did not know what to say. The monster opened its mouth and, after a slight hesitation, Bily put the leaf into its red maw. He was surprised that neither his hand nor his voice shook as he explained to the monster that it must chew the leaf but not swallow it.
‘If you swallow it, you will get a terrible bellyache,’ he warned. ‘Once you have chewed it till the bitterness is gone, you must spit it out, and then you can drink some water.’
‘I understand,’ said the monster.
Leaving the bowl of water close enough that it had only to stretch out its head to drink, Bily went to get a rug – the diggers always complained of the cold after they were bitten. Spreading it over the monster he noticed several partly healed burned places on the pale parts of its pelt. There were also angry welts on its flank that looked fresh.
Now, gazing into the fire, Bily wondered what had caused them. It was a pity that he had not brought down the soothing salve he kept with bandages and other medicines in a little box under his bed in the cottage, but he could not go up and try to get it until the stones stopped falling. He listened for a moment to the muted thunder of the stonefall, marvelling that he had hardly thought about the storm since discovering the monster in the cellar.
‘The arosh,’ he murmured, tasting the odd unfamiliar name and wondering why anyone would name a storm. He might have asked, but the monster had fallen into a lorassum trance so deep that it had not reacted even when he examined the bite on its swollen paw. The heat coming from the wound had told him that it would not be long before the poor monster died, and though it would not heal the hurt, he had crumbled a little of another lorassum leaf onto the bitten paw to deaden the pain before very gently binding it.
A sudden loud crash from above brought him to his feet and he stood trembling as a great shuddering and creaking ended in a rumbling series of thuds that shook the roof of the cellar, dislodging a shower of small stones. The birds screeched and flew up from the nests where he had finally got them to settle.
In the deep silence that followed, Redwing trilled to Bily that the roof of the cottage had fallen in. Bily’s heart ached, but then he thought of the dying monster, and of Zluty, who might not have reached the forest in time to be safe from the red wind and
the falling stones, and knew that much as he had loved it, a cottage roof could be rebuilt. A life lost was lost forever.
Bily turned to the sleeping monster and saw that although it was not asleep the lorassum had numbed it so that it seemed not to have heard the terrible crashing noise overhead. It lay so still that if its eyes had not been open, he would have thought it had died already.
Bily sat back down on the bale of white fluffs he had been using as a seat, and wondered what Zluty was doing. His brother had always been so quick-witted and clever that Bily was certain Zluty would have found a way to make himself safe, even if he had not reached the Northern Forest before the stones began to fall. It struck him all at once how very queer it was to think of the forest as a refuge, when he had thought of it as a dangerous place for so long.
Then he realised something else and sat bolt upright.
It was silent. The stones had ceased falling!
9
Zluty was so thirsty that he kept picturing the pool in the cave, or the water shining in the well by the cottage. When he did manage to forget his thirst for a time, he worried about Bily and wondered what he would do if the stones kept falling so that it never got light enough for him to find his way out of the forest. He told himself it was silly to think the stonefall would not stop just as a rainfall did, but who knew what rules such a freakish storm would obey.
Suddenly an idea came to him of how to pass the remaining hours until morning. He could explore deeper in the forest simply by using the shining stones to mark the way from the earthbank. Of course, the stones were too few to take him far, but when he came to the end of them, he could just turn around and come back to the earthbank, collecting the stones as he went, and then strike out again in another direction.
His heart beat fast with excitement as he got up and emptied everything out of his bag but the pouch of stones and his little hammer. Slinging it over his head and shoulder, he took up his staff and carefully set one of the shining stones on the highest part of the earthbank, gouging an arrow beside it to show which direction he had first gone in. Then he set off at a measured pace, checking constantly over his shoulder to make sure he could see the shining stone. When he could only just see it, he put down another shining stone, and set off again.
He found nothing in his first journey out from the earthbank but a few bits of metal jutting up from the moss and several more of the metal tree trunks. He was surprised to find that the moss was mostly white, for he had always imagined it to be green like the moss at the edges of the forest. It was not until his third journey out that he noticed some rare black shelf mushrooms growing from a tree. Zluty was elated. Bily especially loved them for the strong spicy flavour the tiniest piece gave a soup or stew, and they lasted almost as well as those he had gathered at the earthbank.
He picked a few and carefully folded them in leaves to carry them back to the earthbank. He was tempted to stop and try to sleep again but he decided he would make one last trip out from the earthbank, for it would be a whole year before he would be able to explore again.
He made another gouge in the moss to show which way he had gone, and set off again, wishing he would find water. He had laid down seven stones when, through the gloom, he caught sight of something that made him forget his thirst.
It was a low wall of stone, ancient and crumbled. Zluty wondered who had built it and why. Then it occurred to him that if he walked along it, he need not leave a trail of stones to show him the way he had gone. He could walk as far as the wall went! He put one stone on the wall to show where he had joined it, for the wall ran in both directions out of sight, and then he set off walking to the right, holding the staff out before him.
He had thought he might find other ancient buildings, but aside from the wall there was nothing but more enormous trees and soft moss broken only by the occasional jut of metal. Zluty counted seventy steps before the wall ended quite suddenly at the edge of a great swathe of bare black earth.
He put one of the shining stones on the end of the wall and moved out onto the black earth. It crunched loudly under his feet and some of the brittle black chunks collapsed into soft powder. Kneeling to look more closely at the ground, Zluty discovered it was not earth but charcoal and ash under his feet. A fire had burned here so blazingly hot as to scorch the very earth.
He looked up, lifting his staff high, and saw that the dense forest canopy overhead was unbroken. The branches must be sewn together by such an intricate interlacing of threads and winding creepers that they had not fallen. Was it possible the fire was so ancient that the trees had grown up around the burned space?
Zluty knew he ought to go back, but he could not resist using his remaining stones to go as far as he could across the blackened earth.
Something caught his eye a few steps away. It was a smooth round object buried under the burnt ground. He knelt and laid down his staff so that he could use both hands to dig. Then he stopped, seeing that what he had found was an egg! Not the frail pale egg of a bird or even the hard horny black egg of a lizard, but a metal egg like the one from which he had Bily had hatched – only many, many times larger!
Zluty kept digging around its edge until he found the seam. It was cracked open, the gap wide enough for him to get the head of his staff through and peer in.
Zluty’s fur fluffed with shock at the sight of a white cluster of bones. Feeling ill, he realised that whatever had been inside the egg was long dead. His curiosity to know what the creature had been was stronger than the sudden fear that gripped him, and Zluty pushed the staff deeper into the metal egg. He wanted to see the shape made by the bones, but they were too big and the light of the stone too weak. Finally, he drew back and got to his feet, feeling oddly shaken.
Another glimmer of metal caught his eye. Again, he had to dig whatever it was out of the black stones, and again Zluty drew in a breath of amazed wonder. For it was another metal egg, this one small enough to fit into his hands.
He brought the head of the staff closer and studied the tiny egg. It had the same studs and seam as the enormous egg, only this one was still closed. He laid down the staff and picked it up, wondering how the eggs had got here and what they had to do with one another. Then he imagined Bily’s amazement when he saw the egg, for it was so small and light he could easily carry it home in the space left by the broken pots. There was no sense in leaving it. He had no idea if the creature inside it was alive, but if something did hatch, Bily would know how to look after it.
Thinking of Bily made Zluty long for his brother. He put the metal egg gently into his bag and turned back to the big egg. He took out his pipe and played the same solemn tune he played for the diggers when one of their number died, to mourn the enormous unknown beast that had never had the chance to live.
When the song was finished, Zluty returned to the wall, collecting the glowing stones as he went. As he walked, his thirst returned to torment him and it seemed a long time before he finally reached the earthbank. But to his great relief, even as he tucked away the last shining stone, he saw the familiar pallid greenish light of day in the distance and his heart leapt, for it meant that the long night and the deadly stonefall had both come to an end.
Eagerly, Zluty packed the mushroom bundles into his collecting bag with the metal egg and set off towards the plain. Never had he longed for anything so much as to be out in the open with nothing but the blue sky over him and sunlight warming his fur. Despite his burdens, he was almost trotting by the time he could see the plain through the gaps in the trees at the edge of the forest. The sky had a dull bruised look, but the great red cloud had vanished. The queer storm had spent itself in the night, or the wind had blown it beyond the forest to the edge of the world.
Either way, it was over.
Zluty made his way straight across the plain to the rift cave, stumbling a little over the hundreds of fallen stones. Inside the cave, he laid down his staff and bag and knelt to drink from the cool, wonderfully sweet pool of spring
water. Then he stretched out on his bedroll, marvelling at his adventures. Never had so much happened on a trip to the forest. He would have to be careful how he told his tale, for he did not want to frighten Bily.
His eyes began to droop but he knew he had better trek to the forest hive to get honey and collect the pots of tree sap before he allowed himself to sleep, for he wanted to leave by dusk. If he moved quickly, there would still be time for a sleep before he left.
Returning to the forest, he was surprised at how reluctant he was to re-enter it after the long night he had just spent there. He made his way West along the outer edge of the forest until he came to the tree where the tree hive hung. He was saddened to find that it had been smashed to the ground by falling stones. There was no sign of the swarm that had inhabited it and he wondered if the bee Queen had survived. Most likely she had been killed, for being wingless she would have no way to escape. But the swarm would have taken the fledgling bee queens and that would enable them to establish a new hive. The loss of the hive would have dismayed him far more if he had not been gifted with a bee queen from the desert hive, though he was sure that in time he would locate the new forest hive.
He took enough honeycomb from the broken hive to fill the pots he had brought and then made his way back to collect the tree sap urns.
He stopped each urn with a plug of moss, pulled out the tap tubes and plugged the wounds in the trees with more moss. He was elated to discover that the urn he had left so close to the edge of the forest had survived the stonefall and was full of sap too.