The Various Read online

  Directly in front of her, where the light fell through the doorway, she could see the front of a grey tractor. The radiator grille was all cobwebby and tilted to one side slightly – one of the tyres was flat. Midge slowly put her head in through the doorway to try and see more.

  ‘Where are you?’ she said quietly. A rustle and another gasp of pain came from the darkness, making her jump back yet again. The sound had come from the furthest corner of the barn. She looked nervously in once more, but couldn’t see a thing. ‘Shall I get help?’ She was almost whispering now. There was a smell, not pleasant – an animal smell of dung and ammonia. Another sharp gasp of breath from the darkness, then the voice – and once more the words seemed to appear from somewhere inside her. No! A pause. You . . . help . . . me. You!

  Midge stood her ground this time, but again her first reaction was to put her hands up to her ears. The voice frightened her. It was as though someone was talking to her on a strange kind of telephone. A telephone inside her head. She could hear the words, she could see them somehow, like pictures, like colours, and yet there was no sound in the air. The accent was foreign, or unusual at any rate, and the voice seemed distant – not human. It wasn’t her own voice, she was sure of that. Was she dreaming?

  Her left thumb hurt, but she was too frightened to look at it – too frightened to look away from the darkness inside the barn. Finally she managed to pluck up enough courage to creep slowly forward.

  She shuffled to the left, once she was through the doorway, and edged along the wall a little so that she was no longer blocking the light. The tips of her fingers brushed the cool roughness of the concrete behind her. She moved forwards slightly. Now she could see more. In the furthest corner of the building she could make out a piece of farm machinery. It had several large spiky wheels – like spiders’ webs or Catherine wheels – which were overlapping, the spokes slightly bent in a crooked regular pattern. The wheels were pale yellow, or so they seemed in the dimness of the barn, and were mounted on a heavy red frame. Some kind of raking machine? A sudden movement beneath the frame made her jump back against the wall, and again she was ready to run. That’s where it was! Lying beneath the machine! It looked like – a bundle of rags or sheets, whitish, something flapping. Midge glanced back at the doorway, reassuring herself that she could flee at a moment’s notice, then edged away from the wall, and crept slowly towards the machine, her heart bumping. More movement! She stopped. She could see – what? A leg? Legs. The pale limbs of some creature, an animal, skinny, like a greyhound or a small deer. Was it a deer? A white deer? The game she had thought of playing suddenly came back to her – hunting the hart in the Royal Forest. Was it a white hart? No. But this was too weird. And what about the voice? She was frightened again, thinking that there must be someone else in the barn besides her and . . . whatever was lying there. She looked around, but could see nothing, nobody else. What was it?

  Aaach! Another groan and more flapping of the sheet, or whatever the creature was tangled up in. Midge caught the flash of what looked like a tiny hoof, delicate, familiar, but so small . . . well it certainly wasn’t a dog at any rate. She could make out a pale belly heaving, slim legs, bits of . . . cloth, maybe, flapping. Hair, long matted hair. But no head. Where was its head? It still made no sense. She crept closer . . .

  Spick! Spickitspickitspickit! Midge felt her heart bounce up into her throat, and once more the cold prickly feeling shot up the back of her neck. She knew now that there was nobody else in the barn. There was no doubt that the voice came from . . . whatever that thing was. Whatever it was – and it was certainly an animal – it had a voice. But the sound of the voice was in her head.

  It was moving again – some other part, something that had been hidden, was moving. The tangled mess of a creature, covered in dung, bloodstained, trapped and exhausted, seemed somehow to unravel itself. Slowly and painfully, it lifted its head. Midge stood, unable to move, eyes wide open in disbelief. It was a horse. It couldn’t be – and yet it was . . . though like no horse she had ever seen before. Tiny, slenderly built, not much bigger than a baby deer after all, it nevertheless appeared to be full-grown. A small white horse. The head, fine and delicate but streaked with muck and sweat, turned slowly in Midge’s direction. Its silvery mane was caked and clagged with blood, and its expression was one of absolute anguish. The dark eyes, deep and glistening with pain, looked directly at Midge as she stood in the middle of the barn floor, her mouth open, transfixed. A long moment passed as they stared at each other.

  Then the horse spoke to her, and Midge felt her knees begin to buckle. She almost fell. The voice, dry and croaking, thickly accented, seemed to enter her mind from another world. There was no sound in the still foetid atmosphere of the barn, yet the words were as clear to her as if they had been spoken closely into her ear, as clear as colours on a screen – and strange beyond belief.

  Help . . . me . . . maid. Some mercy . . . I beg.

  The struggling creature, elegant, beautiful even in its agony, arched its slim neck and attempted to look over its blood-streaked shoulder, indicating to Midge where the trouble lay. Midge stumbled closer, almost against her will, and the back of her hand banged across her open mouth as she did so. Now she could see clearly. At last she realized what had been causing the noise she had first heard, the frantic beating that had drawn her towards this moment. The tiny horse was skewered to the filthy concrete floor by the spiked wheels of the raking machine. The prongs had pierced straight through one of its . . . wings. The other wing flapped in the muck a couple of times, uselessly, and then ceased.

  Chapter Four

  THE DRIFTING SUNBEAMS and dappled shadows gave perfect cover for Glim the archer, as he slowly moved towards his prey, among the high branches of the East Wood. A nice fat throstle – more intent on singing to the heavens above than watching out for enemies below – puffed out its speckled breast and filled the air with its morning song.

  Never taking his eye off the bird, Glim felt for the shallow groove in the end of the arrow, and fitted it to the taut waxy bowstring. He drew the bow back till the knuckles of his left hand brushed against his bearded cheek. He would not miss. He was an Ickri – a hunter – and was reckoned by most to be the best archer of that tribe.

  It had been a good morning’s work. Three finches and now a fine throstle, to swell the leather pecking bag that swung from his waist. The finches would go in the meat-basket to be shared by all, but the throstle he would keep. He would give it to Zelma. She would bake it in clay and it would taste good. It was rare nowadays to find such a bird, such a large bird, in the East Wood. There were pigeons sometimes, but the rooks and crows, the blackies and throstles, had almost disappeared. They had learned to make their homes elsewhere. Only the visitors, the little finches and swallows that came and went with the seasons, could be found here in any quantity. And with each season that passed it seemed that their numbers, too, had dwindled.

  Now the summer had come at last and the times were easier, but the winter – the winter had been hard. He would not forget. The Ickri, hunters and tree-dwellers, had survived. But the tribes that dwelt on the land – the Naiad and the Wisp – had suffered. And as for those below ground, the Tinklers and the Troggles . . . well, he would not think of that this morning. They had starved, and some had died, so ’twas said. But he would not think of that. Summer was here and on this day at least, nobody would starve.

  Glim spread his wings and floated down to a lower branch. A grey squirrel, sensing the hunter’s approaching shadow, broke cover and scrabbled up the trunk of a nearby ash tree, seeking the safety of the higher foliage. This was an old trick of Glim’s. Sometimes it was better to show yourself, to panic your prey into movement. Just a little movement, that was all he needed. Keeping his sharp eyes fixed on the whereabouts of the squirrel, he patiently began to climb once more.

  Hunting was in his nature, it was his daily task and required but little conscious thought, so Glim was able to turn hi
s 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 examin
ed 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.