13

Not long after the rain ceased, the clouds began to fray and disperse. First there was blue sky and then the sun came out. It transformed the great grey puddles of water into dazzling pools of gold and silver and the world became so radiantly beautiful that it took Zluty’s breath away.

He walked all that day and deep into the night, keeping up a fast pace for he was determined to reach the cottage as soon as he could. He stopped near morning only because he found a little cluster of dry ground cones caught in a tiny rift that allowed him to light a fire. He would not have stopped at all, but walking in the cold and the rain had given him a chill and he did not want it to get any worse. He made himself some soup and though he had not intended to sleep, being full and warm made him drowsy. Before he knew it he was dreaming that he was setting off on a bright day to dig for tubers, dragging his wheeled pallet after him. As he walked, the pallet grew heavier and heavier until finally he turned around to see if something had got tangled around the wheels. He saw with a thrill of horror that the bones from inside the enormous metal egg were lying on it, gleaming with a ghastly whiteness in the sun.

Then the bones spoke to him in a hissing sibilant voice. ‘Hurryyyy.’

The nightmare brought Zluty wide-awake with a thundering heart. After he had gotten over the fright, he was glad the nightmare had woken him and kept him from sleeping half the day away. He was much better for the food and rest, and the chilly ache had gone from his bones. If only he did not feel so anxious for Bily. The more he thought about the inner voice that had whispered at him to hurry, the more sure he was that it had not been a dream; the more sure he was that Bily was in danger.

He was glad of the distraction when the bees emerged to buzz about his ears, asking when they had got to the vale of bellflowers. He had taken the moss stopper from their urn when he had thrown away the limp leaf parasol.

‘This afternoon or tonight,’ he promised them, wondering how any of the bellflowers could have survived the stonefall.

A little later they came to a slope he recognised as being less than half a day from the cottage. A wild crop of feathergrass had once grown on the other side of the slope, but it was so badly crushed and mired over with wet, red mud that he doubted the plants would ever manage to reseed. That made him wonder how the wild rice in the swamp and the white fluff plants had fared. Wild crops were hardy, but the battering the plain had taken during the stonefall was not something they would ever have experienced before. He wondered for the hundredth time what had caused the strange storm, but knew he was no more likely to learn the answer to that question than to discover what the creature was that had died in the enormous egg he had found in the Northern Forest. The world was full of mysteries and secrets that cared nothing for his curiosity.

Bily thought that a mystery was pointless unless it could be solved, but Zluty had always liked imagining that the world was full of mysteries no one would ever solve. Yet somehow, the stone storm had shaken his delight in unknown things.

It was almost dusk when Zluty came at last to the top of a familiar rise and looked down the other side. His eyes searched hungrily for the cottage in its hollow, but there was nothing. Where the cottage ought to have been was a ruin of rubble and broken boards. There was only one part of the wall left standing. The lovely garden Bily had planted and nurtured was completely gone, most of it swallowed up by a great pool of reddish-brown water that lapped up against the remaining wall.

But where was Bily?

Zluty had to force his fingers to unhook themselves from his staff so that he could take off his pack and his collection bag. He ran down the slope towards the destroyed cottage. Then he stopped. His heart beat with a strange and dreadful apprehension as he gazed at what had once been the door to his home. The great branches that he had dragged in his wheeled cart from the Northern Forest to serve as the main beams and lintels were broken and half buried under rubble. He thought of the long, back-breaking hours he and Bily had spent gathering and mortaring stones into what had become the strong outer walls of the cottage. The kitchen table had been entirely flattened beneath one of the roof beams, along with one chair, and the other chair lay on its side with two legs snapped off.

The only thing that seemed undamaged was the stone oven in which Bily had made so many pies and loaves of bread. It stood, squat and solid and unharmed in the midst of the chaos. Zluty stared at it, thinking of how many Winter nights he and Bily had sat before it warming themselves as he had played on his pipe.

Sorrow welled up in Zluty and he sat down in the midst of the ruins and wept. All of the joy he had taken in setting off on his annual journey to the forest seemed a dreadful mockery now, for what did any adventure mean in the face of such a terrible loss?

‘Bily,’ he sobbed. ‘Oh, Bily, I am so sorry I was not here to help you.’