8

Bily stared into the little fire he had lit in the pit he had dug in the earthen floor of the cave cellar. He was thinking about the monster he had discovered the previous evening.

He glanced over to where it slept, remembering the way his heart had nearly jumped out of his chest at the sight of its glowing eyes. They were not small and bright like birds’ eyes or soft and round like diggers’ eyes. They were long and narrow like a grain of wild rice. And the colour – they were the light radiant yellow of the leaves that fell from the fruit trees in Autumn, and were slashed from top to bottom by narrow black irises.

Seeing those strange eyes glaring at him out of the black shadows in the corner of the cellar, Bily had truly thought he would faint out of sheer fright. But he had not fainted and the monster had not sprung out at him and eaten him.

It had simply gone on looking at him.

Bily might very well still be standing there, frozen with terror, if the lantern had not guttered, its feeble light dimming further. Only the fear of being plunged into darkness had given Bily the strength to back away from the monster.

He had got halfway to the steps, all the while imagining how it would feel when the yellow-eyed monster leapt on him, when to his everlasting astonishment it spoke.

‘If you go back up into your dwelling, you will die,’ it had said in its thick, furry voice.

‘If I stay, you will kill me,’ Bily had gasped, only to distract the monster from noticing that he had taken another step back.

‘I will not harm you,’ said the monster. ‘This is your territory and I came only because I was in need of shelter from the arosh.’

‘What is an arosh?’ Bily asked, horrified that there might be another monster roaming about the plain. And what must it be like if this one feared it?

‘It is the red wind,’ said the monster. ‘The wind of stones.’

‘You … you came here to take shelter from the storm?’ Bily stammered.

‘I did,’ said the monster. ‘Do not fear me for even if I desired to attack you, I would not be capable of it. I am hurt.’

Thinking it might be a trick to put him off-guard, Bily had asked warily, ‘What is wrong with you, monster? Were you struck by the falling stones?’

‘They had not begun to fall when I smelled your dwelling. I raced across the plain with the arosh at my back and I had just smelled a way into this underground cavern when something bit me. It was some small creature with very sharp fangs, and its bite was very painful. Even as I broke into this under chamber, I felt my limbs failing under me. I could barely drag myself into this corner.’

Bily gave a little gasp. ‘You must have stepped on a blackclaw. There is a nest of them near the digger mounds a little way from the house. Their venom causes numbness.’ He had stopped, not wanting to tell the monster that whenever a digger had been bitten by a blackclaw it had suffered numbness and then it had died. But perhaps his face showed his thoughts too clearly, for the monster had given a heavy sigh.

‘I should have been more careful,’ it said. ‘The seer told me to watch my step, but I thought he spoke only of being careful in general.’

Bily had not known what it was talking about, but the diggers always raved and rambled nonsense after being bitten.

‘I can give you a lorassum leaf. It will numb the pain that will come when the venom spreads,’ he offered.

‘I would be grateful to have something, for pain is clawing at my belly like a beast that wishes to gnaw its way out of me,’ the monster said.

Bily had been startled because usually once the pain came, a digger writhed and groaned and whimpered until Bily fed it lorassum leaf.

Bily went to where he kept his store of lorassum leaves. There were only a few left and they would no more save the monster from the deadly blackclaw venom than they had been able to save any of the diggers. But at least it would not suffer as it died. He had no idea how much leaf would be needed to soften the monster’s pain, but it would need water, for the taste of the leaves was very bitter.

The lantern flame dimmed again and he hurried back to refill its reservoir. When he turned back to the monster, the brighter light showed clearly how enormous it was, and how long and sharp the claws were at the end of its four strong, long legs. But then Bily saw that the monster’s golden eyes had grown cloudy, just like the diggers’ eyes did when the pain was very bad towards the end.

It was this that gave him the courage to go and dipper water from one of the urns he had filled into a bowl and carry it and the lorassum leaves to the monster. As he approached it, his legs stopped of their own accord. He was two steps from the enormous triangular head, and its fangs looked long and sharp as dagger thorns against its dark muzzle.

‘I can smell your fear,’ the monster said softly in its thick whispering voice. A beautiful voice that, if it were a colour, would be a rich dark brown, Bily thought with the corner of his mind that was not terrified. Then he noticed that the monster was shivering and again pity overtook fear. He stepped closer and held out a lorassum leaf.

‘I am not sure how much you will need. Usually, I only give the diggers half a leaf to chew, but their bodies are very small. I think you had better have a whole leaf to begin with. It will not be enough to deaden the pain completely, but I have only a few leaves, and once they run out, you will have to endure terrible pain.’

‘You mean that I might not die soon enough for the leaves to last if I have enough to numb the pain now,’ said the monster.

Struck by the strange wry flash of humour in its eyes, Bily did not know what to say. The monster opened its mouth and, after a slight hesitation, Bily put the leaf into its red maw. He was surprised that neither his hand nor his voice shook as he explained to the monster that it must chew the leaf but not swallow it.

‘If you swallow it, you will get a terrible bellyache,’ he warned. ‘Once you have chewed it till the bitterness is gone, you must spit it out, and then you can drink some water.’

‘I understand,’ said the monster.

Leaving the bowl of water close enough that it had only to stretch out its head to drink, Bily went to get a rug – the diggers always complained of the cold after they were bitten. Spreading it over the monster he noticed several partly healed burned places on the pale parts of its pelt. There were also angry welts on its flank that looked fresh.

Now, gazing into the fire, Bily wondered what had caused them. It was a pity that he had not brought down the soothing salve he kept with bandages and other medicines in a little box under his bed in the cottage, but he could not go up and try to get it until the stones stopped falling. He listened for a moment to the muted thunder of the stonefall, marvelling that he had hardly thought about the storm since discovering the monster in the cellar.

‘The arosh,’ he murmured, tasting the odd unfamiliar name and wondering why anyone would name a storm. He might have asked, but the monster had fallen into a lorassum trance so deep that it had not reacted even when he examined the bite on its swollen paw. The heat coming from the wound had told him that it would not be long before the poor monster died, and though it would not heal the hurt, he had crumbled a little of another lorassum leaf onto the bitten paw to deaden the pain before very gently binding it.

A sudden loud crash from above brought him to his feet and he stood trembling as a great shuddering and creaking ended in a rumbling series of thuds that shook the roof of the cellar, dislodging a shower of small stones. The birds screeched and flew up from the nests where he had finally got them to settle.

In the deep silence that followed, Redwing trilled to Bily that the roof of the cottage had fallen in. Bily’s heart ached, but then he thought of the dying monster, and of Zluty, who might not have reached the forest in time to be safe from the red wind and the falling stones, and knew that much as he had loved it, a cottage roof could be rebuilt. A life lost was lost forever.

Bily turned to the sleeping monster and saw that although it was not asleep the lorassum had numbed it so that it seemed not to have heard the terrible crashing noise overhead. It lay so still that if its eyes had not been open, he would have thought it had died already.

Bily sat back down on the bale of white fluffs he had been using as a seat, and wondered what Zluty was doing. His brother had always been so quick-witted and clever that Bily was certain Zluty would have found a way to make himself safe, even if he had not reached the Northern Forest before the stones began to fall. It struck him all at once how very queer it was to think of the forest as a refuge, when he had thought of it as a dangerous place for so long.

Then he realised something else and sat bolt upright.

It was silent. The stones had ceased falling!