The White Horse Trick
Read The White Horse Trick Online
Authors: Kate Thompson
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Version 1.0
Epub ISBN 9781407050690
THE WHITE HORSE TRICK
A BODLEY HEAD BOOK
Hardback: 978 0 370 32992 5
Trade paperback: 978 0 370 32993 2
Published in Great Britain by The Bodley Head, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books A Random House Group company
This edition published 2009
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Copyright © Kate Thompson, 2009 Cover by
www.blacksheep-uk.com
The right of Kate Thompson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
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For Mother Earth and all her children
Also by Kate Thompson:
The Switchers Trilogy
Switchers
Midnight’s Choice
Wild Blood
The Switchers Trilogy
(3 in 1)
The Missing Link Trilogy
The Missing Link
Only Human
Origins
The Beguilers
(CBI Bisto Award 2002)
The Alchemist’s Apprentice
(CBI Bisto Award 2003)
Annan Water
(CBI Bisto Award 2005)
The New Policeman
(Guardian Fiction Prize 2005,
Whitbread Children’s Book Award 2005,
CBI Bisto Award 2006
and Dublin Airport Authority Children’s Book Award 2005)
The Fourth Horseman
The Last of the High Kings
Creature of the Night
For younger readers:
Highway Robbery
The idea for this book arose out of my research into climate change during a three-month residence in Bristol. This was initiated and supported by the RSA Arts and Ecology Centre (
www.RSAartsandecology.org.uk
), working with Situations, a Bristol-based research and commissioning organization (
www.situations.org.uk
). The residency was generously funded by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. It was a wonderful opportunity to spend time learning at my own speed and in my own style, and I would like to acknowledge the financial and practical help I received. Particular thanks to Claire Doherty and Katharine Daly for facilitating the somewhat unpredictable directions of my research.
Kate Thompson, 2009
ART
O
NE
THE END
1
They came in the dead of night when the family was sleeping. If there had been any dogs left they might have heard the men approaching, but there weren’t. There hadn’t been dogs there for years. Who could afford to feed dogs? So the people had to listen for themselves in the night, and even though they all slept lightly, with one ear open, the violence of the wind and the rattling, gurgling torrents of rain engulfed the house in noise, and the sound of approaching footsteps was lost in the din.
The first things the family heard were the crash of the front door breaking down and the yelling of dangerous men as they burst in. It was a small house. There was no back door and nowhere to hide. The mother and her two children jumped out of their beds just as a heavy boot smashed through the door of the bedroom. A powerful beam of light blinded them all and made the children, who had never seen a working torch before, reverse into the corner, wailing in terror.
‘Take whatever you want!’ the woman said. ‘There’s
apples in the larder. Potatoes. Take everything, we won’t stop you. Just leave us in peace!’
‘We don’t want your apples,’ said a man’s voice, deep and powerful, as though it came from an enormous chest. ‘We only want the boy. Hand him over and there won’t be any more trouble.’
‘No.’ The mother clung to her children, one arm around each of them. They gripped her hands and stared like night creatures into the light. When the torch beam dropped for a moment, they could see dark figures gathered behind it, huge ones, all of them slick and shiny from the rain.
‘Don’t be a fool,’ the same man said.
‘Get out of here!’ the mother yelled. ‘Leave us alone!’ She pushed the children behind her into the corner and stood between them and the advancing men, as though her thin, frail body could possibly deter them from taking whatever they wanted. But she had to try. She had already lost too much.
‘Just the boy.’ The torch came closer, the dark, hulking figures of the men behind it.
‘No. You’re not having him.’ Her husband had set out to search for firewood on a winter’s morning three years ago. She had begged him not to go and she had been right to. He had never returned. He was dead in a ditch somewhere – killed for the firewood he had found or perhaps for nothing, just because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. A year later, her elder son had slipped away in
the night and joined the army. She couldn’t bear to lose his brother as well.
‘Hand him over,’ said the man. ‘Commander’s orders.’ He was right in front of her. She could smell his breath, but because of the torch beam in her eyes she still couldn’t see his face.
‘But why? What do you want with him? You’ve already got my other boy.’
They took them young into the castle army, she knew that, but not this young. Billy had just turned seven. There was only one reason for taking him that she could think of, and that was to put him to work on the terraces. The idea filled her with horror. She would die before she would allow that to happen to him.
But the argument was over, and she was suddenly struggling with slippery waterproofs and the heavy men inside them. It was entirely useless. They pushed her aside, dragged Billy out of the desperate grip of his sister and took him, flailing and screaming, away with them. She tried to follow, but one of the men stayed behind to delay them. He stood in the doorway, as big and heavy as a boulder, and just as immovable. When the mother grew tired of fighting him, she went to the kitchen and picked up a heavy frying pan, but by the time she got back to the door he had gone out and closed it behind him, and was holding it to prevent her getting out.
She changed tactics and sneaked away to climb through a window, but the windows were small and
it took too long, and already it was far too late. The door-blocker had outwitted her and vanished into the darkness, and there was no way of knowing which way he had gone.
The other men, taking it in turns to carry Billy, were already far away, striding through the storm across the uneven surface of the Burren. From time to time one of them would slip or stumble and curse the rocky ground and the darkness, but they didn’t turn on their torch, so Billy had no idea where he was being taken.
He was tucked under strong arms and draped over massive shoulders. He squirmed and kicked and punched, but he was wasting his energy. These men were too strong and too determined for him, and eventually he exhausted himself and submitted to captivity. For a long, long time the men walked on, neither ascending nor descending but keeping on fairly level ground and skirting sinister black lakes that glistened in the darkness like windows into hell. Gusts of wind rocked the men so hard that sometimes they lost their balance and their footing, and had to hang on to one another to stay upright. And sometimes, when the wind dropped for a minute, Billy would shout out, ‘Where are you taking me?’ or ‘What are you going to do with me?’