It might just be the wrongness of stones falling from the sky and the unnatural rain that had awakened a memory of the voice, but when he thought of the words it had said, the fur on his neck and ears bristled.
Go, before it is too late.
He rose quietly, and lifted the metal egg from between two sleeping diggers, being careful not to wake them. On impulse, he got one of the shining stones from its pouch and put it between them where the egg had been, wondering what the little creatures would make of his gift. The egg was still warm from the body heat of the diggers when he pushed it gently into the depths of his pack alongside the bee jar. He took out the pancakes he had cooked the previous night, and put them in a pile by the burned-out fire pit so that the diggers would have something to eat when they woke, then he crawled back to the entrance of the cave, dragging his pack and the collection bag after him.
Outside, the rain immediately began seeping through his fur, but he ignored it as he arranged the staff and leaf parasol to protect the mushrooms and the bee jar.
‘Perhaps when dawn comes the rain will stop,’ he told himself as he set off.
12
Bily sat up in dismay, realising he had fallen asleep waiting for the rain to cease. The fire was now utterly dead, the embers black and lifeless. He could see only because it was morning, though it was a dreary grey morning and still the rain fell. He sat up and gasped aloud to see that the dark puddle under the broken cellar doors had spread so that almost half the cellar was now under water.
Bily leapt up and dragged his bedding further up the cellar floor before going to check on the monster. He was worried that it might have lost its blankets again, for the air was cold and clammy with dampness, but instead, as he approached it, he felt a terrible sick heat coming from its body.
He lit the lantern so that he could examine its bitten paw and was horrified to see it had swollen to twice its proper size. He soaked some of the white fluffs in the bowl of water he had left by its head, and spread them over the monster’s hot face and neck to try to cool it down. The fluffs weighed almost nothing but the pain of the wound must have been awful, for the monster groaned and gnashed its teeth when Bily lay one of them on the wound. Suddenly its eyes flew open. They blazed with feverish brightness.
‘I should have been more careful …’ it said. ‘I should not have been so clever, thinking I could change things that have been unchanged for thousands of years … Cleverness will … will be the death of me.’
Bily said nothing, for he saw that the monster was not truly awake. Its eyes were wild and it shifted restlessly in the grip of some fever dream. He left it to drag everything that was still dry up to the high end of the cellar. Last of all, he carried the birds’ nests to the shelves near the monster, where he kept his seed cases, for that was the last place the water would reach. Then he tried again to force open the cellar doors. They were as immovable as ever.
He came slowly back down the steps, feeling sick, for there was only one thing he could do now. He must wade out into the water under the broken trapdoor, find the ladder and climb out of the cellar so that he could get the stones off the other doors. He had to do it now for if the water kept on rising it would eventually fill the cellar. He could save himself and the birds by climbing out of the cellar, but the only way the monster would be able to get out was to climb the steps and come out the cellar doors. He refused to think about the fact that the monster was too weak even to lift its own head. The longer it lived, the more determined he became that he would save it.
Bily stopped at the edge of the pool of water. It was so much deeper than it had been. Down by the end wall where the ladder had fallen, it would probably reach up to his neck.
He hated getting wet above anything. He had sometimes had nightmares about Zluty wading into the black filthy water of the swamp, but even his brave brother had never got into water as deep as this.
Bily told himself that it was his own fault for having put it off for so long. If he had gone the night before instead of deciding to wait until the rain stopped, it would be over with. He wished with all his heart that Zluty would come and save them, but Zluty would only just have left the Northern Forest that morning. If he had not delayed because of the rain and if he had not been hurt by the falling stones, it would still take him four days to get home.
At least now there was daylight he would be able to see the ladder. He shuddered anew at the realisation that he would have to put his head under the water to look for it, and forced himself to step into the water. It reached through his warm fur and touched his skin like hundreds of cold little fingers. Bily stopped, shuddering with disgust and fear.
‘I have to do it,’ he told himself.
Only then did he notice Redwing, perched on the top of one of the water jugs and watching him with her small bright eyes. She gave a chirp of enquiry, but he did not know how to explain what he meant to do without also telling her how frightened he was. So he just smiled at her and forced himself to take another step into the icy black water.
As he moved forward, the feel of the water creeping through his thick belly fur was far more horrible than he had imagined it would be, but he clenched his teeth and told himself that when at last all of this strangeness was long past and they sat by the fire and talked of this time, for once his stories would be more dramatic and exciting than Zluty’s.
The water was now at his chest, but he hesitated for his breath had caught in his throat and would not go in or out. He forced himself to take another step forward and gasped at the feel of the water creeping up under his arms. A little whimper of fear came from him because he was still several steps from the end of the cellar and if he took one more step his head would go under the water.
‘I have to put my head under to find the ladder,’ he reminded himself desperately. He was at the very edge of the uneven square of light coming down through the broken doors, and tiny drops of water were splashing up into his face from the force of the falling raindrops.
He closed his eyes and thought of Zluty, then he stepped forward. The water came up to his mouth and as he lifted his head he felt the rain falling on his ears and head. Gasping in a final breath of air, he took another step and went under.
The silence was immediate and absolute, and the feeling of water against his eyes and in his ears was very strange. Bily looked around. The light was very dim and slightly greenish-yellow under the murky water. He tried to bend down but the water resisted him, slowing his movement and making him awkward. His feet floated up and this frightened him, but he forced himself to stay calm and pushed against the water to make himself go forward.
At last he could see the cellar floor. He had hoped to see the ladder at once, but instead he saw only a shadow some distance away. He flapped and pushed and struggled against the water until he was close enough to see that it was only a piece of wood that had broken off from the trapdoor. But just past it lay the ladder, broken into pieces.
Then Bily saw something else. It was so strange and unexpected that for a moment he forgot his dismay at seeing the ladder was broken and his loathing of being wet. It was a crack running along the floor of the cellar and up the end wall. Bily came close enough to catch hold of the edges of the crack and that was when he felt the distinctive flow of icy-cold water against his face.
Fear filled him at the realisation that water was flowing into the cellar. Bily did not know how that could be, but he needed to breathe badly now. He let go of the crack and tried to stand up, but he had forgotten that the water was too deep here for him. Beginning to panic, he thrashed and flailed forwards, desperate to get his head above the water. But as soon as he moved away from the wall, he lost his sense of direction. He ought to have been able to work out which way to go from the slope of the floor, but the water was confusing his senses and his feet kept trying to float up.
He fought for calmness. His ears ached and his chest burned with the need to breathe, but still he could not think which way
to go.
‘I am going to drown,’ he thought despairingly.
Then he heard a muffled splash. He looked up and was astonished to see red feathers. With a rush of love and relief he realised it was Redwing, flapping overhead and trying to show him which way to go. He watched until he saw the feathers break the water again, a little further away, and then he pushed his hands against the water as hard as he could, propelling himself in that direction.
Bily’s ears emerged from the water so that he could hear Redwing piping her distress overhead. He tilted his head back and stood on tiptoes to draw a breath of air, then he pushed himself forward again. At last he was high enough to get his head properly above the water.
Bily felt drained of all strength, but he floundered his way slowly to dry ground. He was so weakened by his ordeal that he could only crawl above the water line, then he lay down, gasping. He would have fallen asleep like that but Redwing landed beside him, nudging and pricking at him with her beak until he gave into her urging and crept up to his bedding. But there were no blankets, for he had given them to the monster.
Shuddering with cold, he staggered up to where the monster slept, muttering and grinding its fangs, and curled up beside its fevered body. Redwing snuggled as close as she could on the other side of Bily to try and warm him.
It was some time before Bily realised that he could no longer hear the sound of the falling rain. The fact that it had stopped at last ought to have cheered him, but Bily could only think of the force of the water he had felt flowing so strongly into the cellar through the crack in the floor. They would drown unless he could figure a way to get out of the cellar.
13
Not long after the rain ceased, the clouds began to fray and disperse. First there was blue sky and then the sun came out. It transformed the great grey puddles of water into dazzling pools of gold and silver and the world became so radiantly beautiful that it took Zluty’s breath away.
He walked all that day and deep into the night, keeping up a fast pace for he was determined to reach the cottage as soon as he could. He stopped near morning only because he found a little cluster of dry ground cones caught in a tiny rift that allowed him to light a fire. He would not have stopped at all, but walking in the cold and the rain had given him a chill and he did not want it to get any worse. He made himself some soup and though he had not intended to sleep, being full and warm made him drowsy. Before he knew it he was dreaming that he was setting off on a bright day to dig for tubers, dragging his wheeled pallet after him. As he walked, the pallet grew heavier and heavier until finally he turned around to see if something had got tangled around the wheels. He saw with a thrill of horror that the bones from inside the enormous metal egg were lying on it, gleaming with a ghastly whiteness in the sun.
Then the bones spoke to him in a hissing sibilant voice. ‘Hurryyyy.’
The nightmare brought Zluty wide-awake with a thundering heart. After he had gotten over the fright, he was glad the nightmare had woken him and kept him from sleeping half the day away. He was much better for the food and rest, and the chilly ache had gone from his bones. If only he did not feel so anxious for Bily. The more he thought about the inner voice that had whispered at him to hurry, the more sure he was that it had not been a dream; the more sure he was that Bily was in danger.
He was glad of the distraction when the bees emerged to buzz about his ears, asking when they had got to the vale of bellflowers. He had taken the moss stopper from their urn when he had thrown away the limp leaf parasol.
‘This afternoon or tonight,’ he promised them, wondering how any of the bellflowers could have survived the stonefall.
A little later they came to a slope he recognised as being less than half a day from the cottage. A wild crop of feathergrass had once grown on the other side of the slope, but it was so badly crushed and mired over with wet, red mud that he doubted the plants would ever manage to reseed. That made him wonder how the wild rice in the swamp and the white fluff plants had fared. Wild crops were hardy, but the battering the plain had taken during the stonefall was not something they would ever have experienced before. He wondered for the hundredth time what had caused the strange storm, but knew he was no more likely to learn the answer to that question than to discover what the creature was that had died in the enormous egg he had found in the Northern Forest. The world was full of mysteries and secrets that cared nothing for his curiosity.
Bily thought that a mystery was pointless unless it could be solved, but Zluty had always liked imagining that the world was full of mysteries no one would ever solve. Yet somehow, the stone storm had shaken his delight in unknown things.
It was almost dusk when Zluty came at last to the top of a familiar rise and looked down the other side. His eyes searched hungrily for the cottage in its hollow, but there was nothing. Where the cottage ought to have been was a ruin of rubble and broken boards. There was only one part of the wall left standing. The lovely garden Bily had planted and nurtured was completely gone, most of it swallowed up by a great pool of reddish-brown water that lapped up against the remaining wall.
But where was Bily?
Zluty had to force his fingers to unhook themselves from his staff so that he could take off his pack and his collection bag. He ran down the slope towards the destroyed cottage. Then he stopped. His heart beat with a strange and dreadful apprehension as he gazed at what had once been the door to his home. The great branches that he had dragged in his wheeled cart from the Northern Forest to serve as the main beams and lintels were broken and half buried under rubble. He thought of the long, back-breaking hours he and Bily had spent gathering and mortaring stones into what had become the strong outer walls of the cottage. The kitchen table had been entirely flattened beneath one of the roof beams, along with one chair, and the other chair lay on its side with two legs snapped off.
The only thing that seemed undamaged was the stone oven in which Bily had made so many pies and loaves of bread. It stood, squat and solid and unharmed in the midst of the chaos. Zluty stared at it, thinking of how many Winter nights he and Bily had sat before it warming themselves as he had played on his pipe.
Sorrow welled up in Zluty and he sat down in the midst of the ruins and wept. All of the joy he had taken in setting off on his annual journey to the forest seemed a dreadful mockery now, for what did any adventure mean in the face of such a terrible loss?
‘Bily,’ he sobbed. ‘Oh, Bily, I am so sorry I was not here to help you.’
14
It was a long time before Zluty could bear to get up and begin the search for his brother’s body, which he knew must be buried under the rubble. The thought of finding Bily and of having to kiss his cold face and bury him was so awful that Zluty sobbed until he could hardly see out of his tear-swollen eyes.
He had only just begun to haul rocks aside to get at the table, weeping anew at the horrible vision that came to him of his brother hiding under it as the roof fell, when he thought he heard something.
He froze and listened, fur fluffed out with the urgency of the hope that suddenly burned in his heart. Then, all at once, Zluty realised something that he had been too distraught to think of sooner. Bily must have taken refuge in the cellar!
Heart pounding, Zluty began frantically to lift away the great mound of stones that covered the cellar doors. Some of the rocks were still mortared together and were too heavy to lift, so he rolled them aside.
Fear and hope and weariness had muddled together in his mind and were making it very hard to think clearly. So it was that he had been labouring for some minutes before he remembered the outer entrance to the cellar. If Bily had been inside the cellar and unable to open the doors at the top of the steps leading into the cottage, he would simply have climbed up the ladder to get out the other door. If he had not done so, it must be because he could not, which meant he must be injured!
Zluty hastened to climb over the broken section of the cottage wall to get to the outer cellar doo
rs, but with a rush of despair he saw that the dark pool of water he had seen from the top of the slope had covered the doors completely.
Zluty gave a cry of anguish and returned to the inner cellar doors, frantically shifting stones and telling himself that the cellar could not be completely flooded. There must be space where there was air to breath.
But there were so many stones! Zluty worked, refusing to allow himself to dwell on it any more until at last he had cleared enough of the rubble to see the wooden doors.
‘Bily!’ he shouted.
He strained his ears to hear the slightest sound, but there was nothing save the terrified banging of his own heart.
With renewed desperation, he pushed and levered and struggled to shift some more stones until at last he had exposed the seam between the two doors. He stopped his mad assault at once, seeing that both doors were cracked and buckling under the weight of two clusters of stone that had formed into enormous boulders. One rested squarely on each door, and they leaned heavily against each another. Even if he managed to move one, the other one would topple forward and smash through the doors.
Zluty felt sick with fear at the thought that his brother might even now be under the doors, unable to speak, and unable to retreat because of the water filling the cellar. Oh, for a moment he was so frightened for Bily that he just knelt there trembling. But then he gathered his courage and ran back up the hill to get his staff. It was very strong wood and it would make a good lever. Returning, he was casting about for smaller stones or bits of metal that he could use as wedges, when he heard a muffled thud.