The Various (6 page)

Hunting was in his nature, it was his daily task and required but little conscious thought, so Glim was able to turn his mind to other things as he tracked the
squirrel
through the branches of his stretch of the wood. He thought about the Naiad horse, Pegs, and the growing rumour that the animal was lost, somewhere on the wetlands, out there in Gorji territory. Two days had passed and the creature had not been seen. Now the talk was that Pegs had gone to seek out fresh pastures – to the Far Woods, if the gossip was to be believed. These were harsh times for the Various tribes, he knew that. Who knew it better? Aye, and they needed food, and fresh hunting grounds. They could never survive another winter like the last. But to send Pegs into Gorji territory . . . it was too dangerous. What if the horse were seen? Or captured? Men would come, the Gorji giants, they would come at last. All the forest – East Wood, North Wood, West and South – all would be overrun. And all the Various tribes – Ickri, Naiad, Wisp, Tinklers, Troggles – all would be finished. The Various would be doomed. The winged horse should never have been allowed to go.

Glim quietly followed the squirrel to the topmost outer branches of the East Wood. He glanced downwards from his high perch to the landscape below – the wetlands, stretching out towards the far hills. Pegs was out there somewhere. He saw the flat open countryside, criss-crossed for miles with rhynes and ditches, still flooded here and there, the rows of pollarded willow trees dipping down towards the shimmering waters. He thought of eels and wondered if any of the Wisp had been out fishing in the night, and whether they had been successful. All this in the merest glance, but then something caught his
attention
for a second and he stopped concentrating on the squirrel.

On the hillside that sloped away from the edge of the forest, far below, stood a small Gorji dwelling – a cattle-byre perhaps – an ill-repaired thing, ugly with its rot-metal red roof and dirty grey walls. Glim had seen it before, and had turned his back on it before, as he turned his back on all the works and ways of the giants. But some tiny movement had caught his practised eye, and he paused. A pale flicker by the corner of the building had appeared and disappeared. A hand? Ah, he had not been mistaken, for just then a Gorji child – a maid, he would judge – ran around the building and out into the open. She stopped to study an object half hidden among the nettles. A trough or a cauldron. Some Gorji thing. Then she looked quickly about her and ran back the way she had come, disappearing from view once more. The impression of her remained. A worried child. Panicking, frightened. A child who was not at play.

Glim watched and waited for a minute or two, thoughtfully combing his thin brown fingers through his curly beard. He saw nothing more, and could hear nothing but the breeze whispering among the leaves around him. Finally he shrugged. ’Twas no business of his. He hitched his quiver of arrows a little higher onto his leather-clad shoulder and melted back into the deep foliage. The squirrel, of course, had long gone.

Chapter Five

THE GALVANIZED DOOR
of the pig-barn felt cool to the touch, and Midge leaned her head against it as she gulped at the fresh air outside. She had no recollection of how she had got there. It was as though she had somehow managed to both faint and run, at the same time. Wings! The thing had wings! Like . . . a bat. Like huge bats’ wings – not the feathery little wings of fairytale horses – but skin, and bone, velvety, covered in fine downy hair. Whitish, beneath all the blood and dirt. And it spoke! It spoke to her in strange voices, and colours, and oh, but this was too . . . this was . . . She held on tight to the door for support. A semicircle of young cattle, black and white heifers, had gathered before her. Midge had not noticed them till now. They edged closer, their front legs splayed as though some invisible force were pushing them from behind. There was something comical and reassuring about them, with their dribbly noses and woolly fringes. They were comfortingly real. And wingless.

Midge pushed herself away from the door, and jammed her hands into the back pockets of her
dungarees
. The sudden movement took the heifers by surprise, and they skittered sideways. Midge ignored them and tried to think. What should she do? She must go and get help, of course. This was too much for her to deal with. She was only twelve. She must go back to Mill Farm, tell Uncle Brian – then he would phone . . . who? The police? The vet? The zoo? Midge wandered around to the side of the barn, thinking. How could this be? Something that Mr McColl, her English teacher, had once said came drifting into her thoughts. ‘What’s
for
ye, won’t go
by
ye.’ He was fond of delivering Scots quotations, was Mr McColl, though he didn’t really have a Scots accent. He just put it on sometimes. The words didn’t seem particularly appropriate.
Was
this for her? Was
she
meant to do whatever needed doing? The creature, the horse, had said ‘
You
help me.
You
 . . .’ Help me, maid. You. The words went round and round.

She raised her head and let her gaze travel up the hill towards the overgrown wood, the Royal Forest. She knew then, suddenly and instinctively, that the horse had come from there – belonged there. And she knew that it was up to her, somehow, to get it back there. This
was
for her. She would not let it go by. She would do what she could. Turning around, she found herself confronted once again by the heifers, stupidly shuffling and nudging each other towards her. Now they were a distraction, a nuisance, and they made her angry.

‘Yah!’ she shouted, waving her arms at them. ‘Yah! Yah!’ The animals scattered, kicking their back legs
into
the air. The ground tremored slightly with the weight of them. Midge tucked her hair behind her ears and strode purposefully back inside the pig-barn. She knelt down in the muck beside the poor broken creature that lay there, and bravely put her hand on its slim white neck. It didn’t move.

‘I’m here,’ she whispered. ‘I’ll do whatever I can.’ She felt a slight shiver beneath her hand in the darkness, and – overcome with fear and pity, and the utter strangeness of it all – she began to cry.

High up in the forest, Glim had caught the faint echo of Midge’s voice as she shouted at the cattle. ‘Yah! Yah!’ – a tiny sound drifting in from the outside world. The Gorji child. He paused, but did not turn around. His curiosity had already cost him one squirrel that morning.

There was a bucket, battered and rusty but reasonably sound, and there was some folded blue polythene sheeting, stiff and unyielding. There were a couple of ancient bales of straw, musty and grey. There was a sack, one of the old-fashioned hessian sort, not a paper one, that had served as a cushion on the seat of the tractor. Two feed troughs. A bottle jack, thick with grease and furry grey dust. A worn-down scrubbing brush. A fuel can. A huge wooden rake, riddled with woodworm. And there were sundry stones, bits of wood, and a few broken concrete blocks.

Half-remembered snippets of first aid came into
Midge’s
mind as she assembled her finds: ‘First clear the windpipe of any obstruction. Place the body in the recovery position. Treat as for shock.’ None of it seemed likely to help. And besides, her first obstacle was the raking machine – somehow she had to move that. Or get the horse out from under it. She looked doubtfully at the pitiful collection of resources that somehow had to serve as an animal hospital. The scrubbing brush could be useful. And the bucket. Maybe the sack . . .

She turned her attention to the raking machine. The sight of the impossible creature, crushed and motionless beneath it, nearly broke her heart. But she had dried her tears and would cry no more. Being frightened would not help. Crying would not help. A wild idea came into her head that maybe she could use the tractor to remove the raking machine, and she wasted precious minutes sitting on the tractor seat and examining the controls. Stupid. Stupidstupidstupid. How could she drive a tractor? She could barely manage a bumper car.

She clambered down from the tractor and knelt once more beside the horse, holding her nose until she was gradually able to bear the smell. What exactly had happened here? The animal was lying on its side. Two spikes of one of the wheel-rakes had pierced through the uppermost wing. The other wing was twisted awkwardly beneath its body. The spiked wheels, arranged in an overlapping line, were not quite touching the ground. Midge found that she could freely turn the wheels that were not entangling
the
horse. She examined the way that the crooked spikes had pierced the wing, entering at an angle. Maybe she could withdraw the spikes just by turning the wheel backwards. She tried, very gently, to see if this would work. It didn’t. The wheel moved a little, but more spikes just got in the way. Somehow she needed to raise the whole line of wheels, lifting them away from the body beneath them.

She walked around the machine. There were big levers, orangey red, mounted on the frame, close to where it would hitch onto a tractor. What did they do? She tugged at them experimentally. Nothing happened. One of the levers, she noticed, was mounted in a kind of curved slot that had notches in it. Maybe this was to make the wheel-rakes higher or lower. Her eye followed a long thin rod that ran from the lever to the frame, and her heart jumped. She thought she could see how, by pulling on the lever, the wheels were lifted. It all seemed to connect up. She would try it. She grabbed the lever with both hands and attempted to yank it towards her. Nothing moved. Then she realized that the lever was held in one of the notches, the next to last one. She would have to pull it
out
of the low notch,
then
back towards her, and up to a higher notch in order to raise the wheels. OK then. She grabbed the lever again, and heaved it sideways with all her might. The lever came out of its notch – and was nearly ripped from her grasp as the weight of the mechanism pulled her forward. The lever hit the end of its travel with a clang, and the spiked wheels were now resting on the floor. Midge gasped and ran
round
the machine to see what she had done. ‘Oh no, no!’ She had made matters infinitely worse. The spiked wheels had been lowered completely, and the animal was more securely trapped than ever. In vain she tried to pull the lever back again, tugging and tugging until she was exhausted. She simply wasn’t strong enough.

This was impossible – the whole thing was just mad and impossible. She would have to get help. Tears of frustration blurred her vision as she made her way to the door. She couldn’t pull the lever back by herself, and she had no way of lifting the machine. It was as heavy as a car. And nobody could lift . . . she suddenly remembered the bottle jack.

Midge knew what it was, and what it was for. She had once earned two pounds just for watching someone use one. The bottle jack, the bottle jack. She stood and looked at it, trying to remember what she had seen.

Her mum had left for rehearsals one morning, and then had run back into the flat two minutes later. ‘Damn!’ she said, slamming the front door. ‘Got a flat tyre.’

‘Can’t you fix it?’ said Midge.

‘Got no thingamajig.’ said her mum. ‘No jack. The idiot who sold me the car forgot to give it to me.’

‘Phone the AA then.’

‘No time for that. They could take ages – it’s hardly an emergency. I’m supposed to be at rehearsal in twenty minutes. Rats! I’m going to have to ask Colin Bond. Aaaaaaghhh!’ she screamed.

Colin Bond lived two floors up, and her mum could never get away from him. She reckoned he fancied her. He was a pest. But he could fix things.

‘Listen,’ she said, ‘if I ask Colin to come and change the wheel, then you’ve
got
to come with me. I’ll give you a pound,
two
pounds, to stay with me until it’s done.’

‘OK,’ said Midge, who would have watched anyway. And so Colin had come down, delighted to be needed, and he had brought his bottle jack with him. ‘Bottle jack,’ he had said to Midge, though she hadn’t asked. It was a silvery-blue thing. Mum had hovered around the car, subjected to Colin’s dull running commentary, and continually glancing at her watch. Midge had sat on the garden wall watching – and earning herself two pounds for being Mum’s chaperone.

The car was a Citroen, small but quite high up off the ground, and Colin had to find a brick to put under the jack so that it would reach. Midge had hung around, dutifully, but vaguely interested nevertheless.

‘Screw in this little knob here, see, shove this handle in here, see, and pump it up and down. And . . .
up
she rises – easy peasy.’ He had changed the wheel and then said, ‘Course, when you’re ready, and you want ’er to come back down again, you just
un
screw yer little knob, see, and
down
she blows.’ The whole thing sounded quite nautical.

‘Thanks, Colin,’ her mum had said. ‘You’re brilliant.’ She glanced at Midge and raised her eyebrows slightly. ‘My hero.’

So Midge looked at the bottle jack, much bigger
than
the one Colin had used, and knew what it was for. But where was the handle? She found it, eventually, under the front axle of the tractor – which was probably where the jack would have been last used, the front tyre being flat. She worked out how the handle fitted into the jack, and tested it out. This time she would
think
before acting. No more stupid mistakes. She pumped the handle up and down, noting with satisfaction how the centre of the jack rose up. The freshly exposed metal tube, that slowly appeared as she worked the handle, was shiny and clean – in contrast to the blackened greasy outer casing of the object. It
was
a bit like a bottle, she supposed. She saw that by twisting the little tap-shaped thing on the side of the casing, the central tube could be slowly pushed back down again. And she blessed Colin Bond for that piece of information. She doubted that she would have figured it out for herself. Satisfied, then, that she knew how the thing worked, she dragged the heavy object over to the raking machine, and paused to consider where best to put it.