Читать книгу The Call - Michael Grant - Страница 9

A REALLY, REALLY LONG TIME AGO…

o twelve-year-old Grimluk hit the road as a fleer. He wasn’t quite sure why he was supposed to flee from the Pale Queen, but he knew that’s what people did. And in those days long, long ago, smart people didn’t ask too many questions when they heard trouble was on the way.

Grimluk rounded up Gelidberry, their nameless baby son and the cows and hit the road.

They carried with them all their most prized possessions:

 One thin mattress made of straw and pigeon feathers that was home to approximately eighty thousand bedbugs – although Grimluk could never have conceived of such a vast number

 A lump of clay shaped like a fat woman with a giant mouth that was the family’s goddess, Gordia

 One small hatchet with sharpening stone

 A cook pot with an actual metal handle (the family’s most valuable object and one of the reasons many others in the village were jealous of Grimluk and thought he and his family were kind of snooty)

 One jar of bold ale, a beverage made of fermented milk and cow sweat flavoured with crushed nettles

 The tinderbox, which contained a piece of rock, a sliver of steel that had once chipped off the baron’s sword and a tiny bundle of dry grass

 Gelidberry’s sewing kit, consisting of a thorn with a hole in one end, a nice spool of cowtail-hair thread and a six-inch-square piece of wool

 The family spoon

Other than this they had the clothes on their backs, their foot wrappings, their caps, the baby’s blanket and various lice, fleas, ticks, crusted filth and face grease.

“I can’t believe we’ve acquired all this stuff,” Grimluk complained. “I was hoping to travel light.”

“You’re a family man,” Gelidberry pointed out. “You’re not just some carefree nine-year-old. You have responsibilities, you know.”

“Oh, I know,” Grimluk grumbled. “Believe me, I know.”

“Just point the way and let’s get going,” Gelidberry said, gritting her teeth – she had six, so her gritting was a subtle dig at Grimluk, who had only five.

“The Pale Queen comes from the direction of the setting sun. We’ll go the other way.”

So off they went towards the rising sun. Which was rather hard to do since in the deep forest one seldom saw the sun.

They walked with the cows and took turns carrying the baby. The mattress was strapped to one of the cows while the other cow carried the pot.

At night they lay the mattress down on pine needles. The three of them squeezed together on it, quite cosy since it was still the warm season.

They rose each day at dawn. They milked the cows and drank the milk. Sometimes Grimluk would manage to hit an opossum or a squirrel with his axe. Then Gelidberry would start a fire, cook the meat in the pot and they would hand the spoon back and forth.

From time to time they would encounter other fleeing families. The fleers would exchange information on the path of the Pale Queen. It was pretty clear that she was coming. Some of the fleers had run into elements of the Pale Queen’s forces. It was easy to spot the people who’d had that kind of bad luck because they didn’t always have the full number of arms (two) or legs (also two). Many had livid scars or terrible wounds.

Clearly fleeing was called for. But Grimluk still had no idea what the Pale Queen herself was, or what her agenda might be. None of the others he met had seen her.

Another way of putting it was that those who had seen the Pale Queen were no longer in any position to flee or tell tales.

But it happened that on their fifth night in the forest, Grimluk came to a better understanding of just what or whom he was fleeing.

He was out hunting in the forest, armed with his hatchet. The forest was a frightening place, full as it was of wolves and werewolves, spirits and gnomes, flesh-eating trees and flesh-scratching bushes.

It was dark in the forest. Even in the day it was dark, but at night it was so dark under the high canopy of intertwined branches that Grimluk could not see the hatchet in his own hands. Or his hands, either. Let alone fallen branches, twisted roots, gopher holes and badly placed rocks.

He tripped fairly often. And there was really very little chance that he would come across an animal to strike with his hatchet. No chance, really. But the baby was teething and therefore crying quite a bit and Grimluk hated that incessant crying so much that even the forest at night seemed preferable.

As he was feeling his way carefully through the almost pitch black, he saw light ahead. Not sunlight or anything so bright, just a place where it seemed starlight might reach the forest’s floor.

He headed towards that silvery light, thinking, Hey, maybe I’ll find an opossum after all. And then I will rub it in Gelidberry’s face.

Not the opossum. The fact that he’d found something to eat. That’s what he would rub in her face. Because Gelidberry had accused him of only pretending to hunt so that he could get away from the crying, crying, crying.

Grimluk expected to find a clearing. But the trees did not thin out. Instead, he noticed that he was heading downhill. The further downhill he went, the more light there was. Soon he could see the willow branches that lashed his face and make out some of the larger rocks that bruised his toes.

“What’s this about?” Grimluk wondered aloud, reassured by the sound of his own voice.

He heard a sound ahead. He froze. He listened hard and tried to peer through the gloom.

He crept, silent as he could make himself. He crouched and crept and squeezed the handle of the axe for comfort.

He moved closer and closer, as if he could no longer stop himself. As if the light was drawing him forward.

Then…

Snap!

The sound came from behind him! Grimluk spun around and stared hard into the utter darkness. It was too late to go back now – something was there.

Grimluk now had an unknown terror behind and a light that seemed ever more eerie ahead. He lay flat and breathed very quietly.

There was definitely something moving behind him and coming closer. Something too large to be a tasty opossum.

Grimluk wished with all his heart that he could be back at the little campsite with the screeching nameless baby and Gelidberry and the cows. What would happen to them if he never returned?

Grimluk crawled on his belly, away from the approaching sound, towards the light, further and further down the slope.

And there! Ahead in the clearing… a girl!

She was beautiful. Beauty such as Grimluk had never seen or even imagined. Beauty that could not be real.

She was perhaps his age, although there was an agelessness to her pale, perfect skin. She had wild red hair, long curls that seemed to move of their own accord, twisting and writhing.

Her eyes were green and glowed with an inner light that pierced him to his very soul.

She had a sullen mouth, full red lips and more teeth than Grimluk and Gelidberry combined. In fact, she seemed, miraculously, to have all of her teeth. And those teeth were white. White without even a touch of yellow.

She wore a dark red dress that lay tight against her body.

Grimluk realised with a shock that the light he had seen was coming from her. Her very skin glowed. Her eyes were green coals. Her hair glistened as it moved.

“Who comes hither?” the girl asked and Grimluk knew, knew deep down inside, that he would answer, that he would stand up, brush himself off and answer, “It’s me, Grimluk.”

But he also knew this would be a bad thing. No creature could possibly be this beautiful, this bright, this clean, this toothy, unless she was a witch. Or some other unnatural creature.

As he was in the act of standing up, a voice spoke from the darkness behind him.

“Your servants, Princess.”

The voice was definitely foreign. It wasn’t simply that the voice spoke the common tongue with an accent; it was that it seemed to form sounds within that speech that were unlike anything that could come from a human mouth.

A dry, rasping, irritating, whispery voice in response to the cold, confident voice of the stunning object identified as ‘Princess.’

“Ah,” the girl said. “At last. You have kept me waiting.”

Grimluk heard things moving behind him, more than one thing – several things, maybe as many as six. Or some other very large number.

He crouched and did not move. If he could have stopped the very beating of his heart, he would have. For the creatures that now emerged into the light of the princess’s perfect form were monsters.

They stood as tall as the tallest man (five feet, three inches). But they were not men.

Like huge insects they were, like locusts that walked erect. They moved with sliding steps of bent-back legs and planted clawlike feet. Jointed arms stuck out from the middle of their foul, ochre-tinged bodies. And a second set of arms, smaller than the first, emerged from just below what might be a neck.

And the heads… smoothly triangular, with bulging, wet-shining eyes mounted atop short stalks.

They were hideous and awful. And from their midsections – not waists so much as precarious narrowings – hung belts that held varieties of bright metal weapons. Knives, swords, maces, scrapers, darts and all manner of objects for stabbing, cutting, slicing, dicing and chopping.

Grimluk hoped they were simply well-equipped cooks, but he doubted it. They moved with an arrogant swagger, not unlike the way the baron moved – or would have, had he been a very large grasshopper.

They gathered around the princess, illuminated by her own light.

For a moment Grimluk feared for the girl. They were a desperate, frightening bunch and looked as if they could make short work of the red-haired beauty.

But the girl showed no fear.

“Faithful Skirrit minions, do you bring me news of the queen, my mother?” she asked.

“We do,” one of the bugs answered.

“Good. You have done well to find me. And I will hear all you can tell me, gladly. But first, I hunger.”

This news caused a certain shuffling and back-pedalling among the Skirrit.

“Hungry?” their spokesman or leader asked with what must be nervousness among his kind. “Now?”

“One will be enough,” the princess said.

The Skirrit captain pointed his two left-side arms at one of his fellows. “You heard the princess,” he said.

The designated Skirrit drew a deep breath and released a shuddery sigh. Then he bent his long legs and knelt down. He bowed his triangular head and his ball eyes darkened.

And then the princess, the beauty beyond compare, began to change.

Her body… her form…

Grimluk had to clap both his hands over his mouth to stop the scream that wanted to tear at his throat.

The princess… no, the monstrosity she had become – the evil, foul beast – opened her stretched and hideous mouth and calmly bit the bowed head from its neck.

Green fluid spurted from the insect’s neck. The headless body collapsed with a sound like sticks falling.

And the princess chewed as if she had popped an entire egg into her mouth.

Grimluk ran, ran, ran, tripping and falling and leaping up to run again through the black night.

He ran, shrieking silently in his mind, from the terror.