Silverstone Part One: Through Dark Waters (7 page)

Ben didn’t know where to
look.

“Welcome croppers of
Peregrine!” Alder began. “Beside me stands our newest friend;
Silverstone!”

A cheer went up from the
warriors, loudest of all from Ivor.

“He is a citizen of Norchand; a
travelling wanderer seeking knowledge.”

Ben decided not to protest the
lie.

“He has fought bravely today
alongside our warriors in the defence of our home, and must be
given our warmest welcome. He will stay with us for just a few
weeks while his war wounds heal.”

Ben blushed. He didn’t feel
very brave. After all, all he’d wanted to do was escape. And what
was this about staying for a few weeks?

Alder smiled widely at him. “He
will put down with Appleby, helping tend the farms and learning our
simple ways.” With that pronouncement, he took a short bow, and
moved to one side, leaving Ben standing alone in the spotlight.

Ben flushed brightly, and
looked back to Alder for help.

“Say something,” Alder said
cheerfully. “They don’t bite.”

Ben frantically racked his
brain. What could he say to this group of strangers amassed in his
honour, no doubt expecting him to deliver something funny yet bold
and inspiring. He felt like Tim Wisecroft during the English lesson
when Mrs Greenleaf had asked him a question. He glanced around at
the faces of the crowd. He certainly didn’t feel brave now.

The crowd stared at him
curiously. A young boy near the front of the group shouted out, “do
you have trousers?”

The crowd roared with laughter.
Ben stood paralysed, wondering whether he could run away.

“Quiet!” Liam suddenly stood
and joined Ben. The crowd quickly silenced.

“This lad swam through that
cursed lake, and saved my life today, through his bravery in
battle. So I for one will welcome him with the respect he
deserves.” He slapped Ben on the back.

The crowd bustled into life,
and a group of the men came up to welcome Ben. One of them handed
him some trousers, which he gratefully received and put on. Ivor
hustled him back to the seats as music began to play. He handed Ben
a heavy mug of something that smelt like the alcohol Ben’s parents
had drunk the night they’d finally bought the house, but was a
horrid purple colour.

Ben tested it timidly. It felt
as if he had swallowed one of the red-hot coals from the great
fire, and that it was slowly winding its way down his throat into
his belly, setting everything alight as it went. He coughed hard,
which seemed to only encourage Ivor, who whacked him on the back
encouragingly.

“I don’t drink alcohol,” Ben
stuttered, at least happy to have finally warmed up.

“
You
must
drink vol
Silverstone! We’ve brewed this here batch from the plants at the
edge of the lake and I think it contains the strange secrets of the
weird water in it! It is delicious, ain’t it? And besides it will
help you sleep well and ease your bruises!”

Ben tried to avoid the purple
vol as best he could that evening, carefully dribbling it from his
mug onto the ground beside him when nobody was watching. He
listened to the tales the fighters told of their travels with the
camp from place to place, of their skirmishes with bandits and
other strange peoples, and of their simple lives tending the farms
with their families.

One by one the men moved away
to their families, slumped off to their tents, or simply closed
their eyes and snored where they sat, so that Ben marvelled at how
they balanced on their tree trunk stools. Ivor energetically
entertained the rest with his stories, which Ben suspected had
drifted from recollections to fantasy as the night wore on. He
wondered just how much of Ivor’s latest tale about the tall-necks
of the Edustus desert was fanciful. It didn’t matter. He enjoyed it
anyway, and felt the calmest and warmest he had done since he had
left for school that morning, a whole world away.

Suddenly Ben felt something
touching lightly on his back, and he turned to find a young girl
around his own age smiling at him. She was very beautiful, with
long, dark curly hair, and bright, wide eyes. He began to feel
uncomfortable.

“Hello. I’m Eva,” she said.

“Erm. Hi I’m B… I mean
Silverstone.”

She giggled a little.

An older man appeared behind
her, also smiling at Ben. “My name is Appleby. You are to be my
guest for the time of your stay with us. It’s my honour to welcome
you.”

Ben felt ashamed at imposing on
this man he hardly knew, when all he’d done was try to survive a
battle. Everyone was treating him like he’d won the battle of
Waterloo. He stood and introduced himself.

Appleby explained that the
family was now turning in, and Ben was very happy to follow him. He
patted Ivor on the shoulder as he left, but the man was not
distracted from the climax of his story. Ben felt sure he’d hear it
another time.

The Appleby tent stood towards
the outer edge of the circle, near the animal fences, and was one
of the largest in the camp.

As they entered, Ben saw soft
rugs scattered on the floor. To one end of the tent were colourful
cushions and a coal basket very similar to the one in Alder’s tent.
At the other edge was a row of thick woolly rugs that looked like a
cross between a mattress and a sleeping bag. They were covered in
patchwork blankets. Ben felt sleepy just looking at them. It had
been a big day.

Eva’s aunt Lea was also in the
tent, rocking her sleeping baby. She smiled at Ben and he nodded
back to her.

Appleby silently waved a hand
toward one of the sleeping mats at the far side of the row, and Ben
understood it was to be his. Before he could jump in to it, Appleby
insisted on tending to Ben’s wound. He extracted a pot of a kind of
herbal ointment from a bag, and dabbed it gently on the bloody scar
on Ben’s left arm. It stung, but Ben was too tired to protest.

Finally when Appleby had
finished, Ben thanked his host again quietly, stumbled towards his
bed, and fell into the blankets. His mind quickly turned to his
parents, and to Toby, Paddy and their crumbling old house, and he
missed them terribly. That morning he had shouted goodbye from the
doorstep before he made his way to Hulstead College, and now here
he was, going to sleep on a woolly mat in a farm camp, next to Lake
Kaidesh. He silently whispered goodnight to his family, hoping
somehow that his words would find the way back to them, far away in
his own world. Then he fell asleep.

Ben spent the next few days in
the company of Appleby, Eva, Liam, Ivor, Alder and others of the
Peregrine farmers.

The people were good-humoured
and the camp was often filled with laughter. They had suffered
greatly during the plague, and in their travels with the tented
village from one place to the next, but rather than break their
spirits, it had made them hardy to most day-to-day problems. Even
the latest bandit attack was treated with a good sprinkling of
jest, and the warriors’ heroism exaggerated ever further at evening
meals, which the camp ate together in the main shelter.

“If those marauders want to
take my best blucumbers they’ll have to do better than a few bows
and arrows and sneaking up at them through the forest. Why, I’ve
more to fear from the snails and brownfly than them!” he’d heard
one lady shout.

“My turnapples’d turn sour and
poison the land for that foul behooded lot if they laid a hand on
them anyways!” another chimed in.

On Appleby’s farm plot, Ben
tried to assist as best he could. On the first day as their guest,
Eva showed him around to get him familiarised so that he could help
with her chores.

She began with the pomp-hens.
“Pomp-hens lay us big, rounded eggs, like these beauties.” She held
up a black-shelled sphere the size of a tennis ball from the laying
tables inside the wooden hutch. “If we’re lucky, they each lay
three a day, and that’s plenty for us and leftovers to barter with.
But Pomp-hens need to be treated carefully,” she said, as she
placed the egg carefully in a grass-cushioned tray and directed Ben
outside to the day pen.

“Pomp-hens are very majestic
and like to be treated with respect. You have to stick to the same
time going into their hutch so as not to surprise or interrupt
them, and if you’re looking at one and catch her eye you should bow
and show her lots of humility, or she will get very grumpy and peck
and scratch at you till you’ve learned your lesson. When you feed
them it’s best to keep your eyes down and carefully spoon the feed
into neat piles; they’re a very particular about that as well.”

Ben stared at the strange
things. They were a lot like the chickens he knew, but bigger and
prouder, and with bright, multicoloured feathers more like he’d
expect to see on a parrot. One of the birds strutted towards him,
and he noticed a bright yellow crest on its head, swept upwards and
to one side like Jordan’s blond quiff. It looked boldly back at
him, and he suddenly realised that Eva was bowing next to him. He
hastily bent over, hoping he had been fast enough. After a minute
the pomp-hen pivoted like a catwalk model and swaggered away
confidently.

Next, Eva moved them along to
the digboks enclosure. As Ben walked towards it he thought it might
be empty, as he couldn’t see anything moving within the fence
perimeter. All he noticed were some muddy mounds, and near them a
few short posts, which had wide, flat metal bases.

“Digboks are very difficult
animals to keep,” Eva began, “because they love to burrow. If we
let them, they would dig their way to the great open plains west of
Murdimore, and I bet the one or two we have lost are there right
now, feasting on the green grasses.” She chuckled.

Ben looked more closely. At the
top of each post there was a taut rope, leading straight down into
a little hole in the ground. The mounds must be everything they had
dug up already, he realised. “So you keep them from escaping with
those heavy anchors in the field?”

“Yes, exactly. The land anchors
hold them. But we keep them well fed so I think they’d miss us if
they escaped anyway.” She picked up a bucket of yellow pellets from
near the gate, and motioned to Ben to follow her inside.

They approached one of the
holes, and Ben leaned over to see how deep it went. It dropped
steeply for at least five metres and then ran off towards one of
the other openings.

“I think the tunnels probably
connect with each other down there in a big underground cave where
they all sit, planning how to overthrow us and make their escape,”
she said as she shook the feed bucket.

For a minute or so nothing
happened. Then the rope on the anchor twitched.

Ben took a step back, slightly
apprehensive about what creature might emerge.

The other ropes began to
slacken, and Eva kept shaking.

After a few more rattles of the
bucket, a short legged, pale haired creature the size of a lamb
sprang out and looked around. It shook off the dirt to reveal a
pair of large ears, baby horns, a hairy beard, and a snout covered
in long whiskers. A tongue hung from its open mouth, and it looked
very much like it was smiling.

Ben stepped back beside Eva as
the other digboks appeared and wandered over. The animals rubbed up
against them insistently until they were fed, and devoured the
pellets hungrily.

As soon as they had finished
the feed, the digboks turned their inquisitive snouts to Ben,
wriggling their damp noses around his legs and hands. He worried
they may have confused him for a food pellet.

“These ones aren’t so proud!”
Ben laughed

“They seem to be quite
interested in you actually!”

Finally, in the largest pen,
Eva introduced Ben to the two hayhoppers, Mirri and Mordred. “The
hayhoppers will eat anything that grows out of the ground, and have
got quite an appetite, so we have to move their pen around
regularly. We only transferred them from the north side of the camp
a couple of days ago, and they have already eaten their way through
all the grasses and plants here.” She motioned to the earth, and
Ben could see it was very brown at the end nearest to where the
animals stood.

One of the animals looked up
from the grass it had been busily munching through, and began to
slowly rear back on to its two rear legs. It had a long tail, Ben
could see now, and its front legs were slightly smaller. Then it
began to hop towards them. It wobbled around awkwardly like it was
a bit too fat to be jumping, but managed to keep its balance until
finally it had reached them. It lowered back onto all fours, and
sniffed at Ben’s feet and hands.

“Mordred’s looking for a reed
sugar lump!” Eva explained. “Here you go, why don’t you make
friends.” She handed Ben a cluster of reed sugar.

Ben slowly extended his closed
hand out towards Mordred, but the hayhopper had already covered it
in a long tongue and soaked it in green saliva before he could open
it. He yanked his hand free before the animal digested it too, and
wiped it off on his shirt with a groan.

Eva laughed. “Don’t worry, they
do that to me too!”

Ben was eager to help despite
his lack of farming experience, even with animals in his own
world.

On that first day he managed to
let one of the Pomp-hens out of the day pen, and had to run after
it, bowing enthusiastically. Later, he was bitten on his behind by
Appleby’s favourite digbok. But Eva’s gentle laughter and
reassurance helped him overcome his embarrassment, and he quickly
picked up the basics.

Each day Ben would get up with
Eva before dawn and help with her morning chores; collecting the
pomp-hen eggs for breakfast, milking Mirri the hayhopper, and
checking the fences around the animals for any suspected wildfox
burrowing.