Читать книгу The 1,000-year-old Boy - Ross Welford, Ross Welford - Страница 17

This is what I know about the life-pearls:

1. They contain a thick liquid which, when mixed with your own blood, immediately stops you from getting any older.

2. If you repeat the process with another life-pearl, the ageing starts again.

That is it. That is pretty much all I know, and all Mam knows too.

As for my father, I am afraid I can hardly remember him, although Mam has told me all about him. One thousand years is a long time to hear stories again and again, but I never get bored of them.

(Sometimes I can almost touch a memory of him. A fuzzy mental picture of a tall blond man; the smell of a ship’s rope dipped in tar; a feeling of fear in a storm; but they are indistinct recollections. They seem thin, as though constantly trying to bring them to mind has somehow worn them out.)

Da’s name was Einar. He was a soldier-turned-trader from the island of Gotland in what is now called the Baltic, but in her stories Mam still called it the uster-shern – the Eastern Sea.

Where did they come from, these ‘life-pearls’? No one knew, not for sure. There was a saga – an ancient poem – that Mam would tell by the light of the fire’s embers, of an alchemist’s manservant escaping from a massive tsunami in the Middle East. He carried a bag of the life-pearls across the desert, to the mountains of Carpathia in Eastern Europe. How much of it was true, though, was anybody’s guess.

Mixing the liquid in a life-pearl with your own blood stopped you from getting older. It did not make you immortal however: you could still be killed in battle, or by disease, or – as Da found out – by accident.

Mam said he had obtained the life-pearls when he had heroically fought some vagabonds who were raiding a tiny village. I loved this story.

‘Like a true and noble warrior,’ said Mam, ‘he spared the life of one of the bandits in exchange for the life-pearls.

‘Straight away he used one of them himself. He made two cuts in his arm and poured in the liquid from one of the glass balls. Four life-pearls remained. The valiant Einar knew, though, that they were so valuable that anyone who owned them was at risk: people would kill to have eternal life. So he told no one until he met …’

‘You!’ I would fill in and Mam always smiled.

‘That’s right. By then, he was already a hundred and forty years old. He was living in the land of the Danes, and speaking their language. We had been married for only six months when I learnt I was pregnant with you, Alve.’

(‘We married for love,’ she never tired of telling me. ‘That was unusual then.’ A thousand years ago, love was very low down on the list of reasons to get married – a long way below things like family alliances, wealth and security.)

Mam was poor, Da was not, and people were jealous of Mam’s good fortune in marrying the rich and handsome Einar of Gotland. And, when people are jealous, they start to talk, and the talk turned to Einar’s age, and how strange it was that the village elders remembered him from their own youth.

Could he be one of the fabled Neverdeads?

And, if he was a Neverdead, might he possess the livperler – the life-pearls?

Already the Neverdeads were so rare that many people thought it was just a tall tale told by those who had travelled and met people from distant lands. For example, there were stories of a vast land to the south where there were four-legged creatures with tremendous long necks that could reach the topmost leaves of trees; where there were fat horses that lived in rivers; where there were tiny, hairy people, with long tails, who swung through the branches of the forest.

No one quite knew how much of this to believe. Perhaps stories of the Neverdeads were just more travellers’ tales?

But, when the rumours about his long life reached my father’s ears, he was taking no chances. With his wife and child, he made plans for a new life in the land of the Britons, where he hoped they would be safe. As it turned out, he was right … in part.

He saved me and Mam. But he did not save himself.