Amber and Willem Page 3

  ​“You have crawled a long way, little spider,” the bird said.

  ​It took a step back to allow Willem more room on the ledge and Willem sat up to look at it. Its feathers were different shades of gold, like real gold, shining in the moonlight. “Can I touch you?” Willem asked.

  ​“All right,” said the bird. And Willem stood to reach and touch those feathers, some impossibly soft, some tough, like steel, and the hard, curving beak as well, as big as Willem’s whole body.

  ​“How do you fly? Is it magic?” Willem asked.

  ​And the Eagle suddenly spread its wings, almost sweeping Willem back and over the ledge again with the force they flung into the air.

  ​“I fly with my wings and my will,” the Eagle said. “I don’t understand what you mean by ‘magic’.”

  ​Willem was surprised. He had expected the Great Eagles to know everything and to be able to teach him, but it was the other way around. “Magic is the power to do things that shouldn’t be possible, like the opposite of nature. I can do magic. It is how I can talk to you,” he said.

  ​“I have never tried to talk with a spider before,” the Eagle said. “Can’t all of you talk?”

  ​“I am not a spider,” Willem said impatiently. “I am a boy.”

  ​The Eagle laughed. “So that’s what you are, is it? And what would a boy want to crawl all the way up here for, I wonder?”

  ​“I…” Willem was suddenly aware of the Eagle’s great pointed beak, and of its massive talons as well, for the bird had turned its head and was looking at him out of its other eye. Still, he had come all this way, and he meant no harm to the Eagles. “I want to learn how to fly,” he said defiantly.

  ​And then, as fast as thinking, he felt the talons of the Eagle’s right foot close around him and begin to squeeze, hard and rough so that he could not breathe.

  ​“You do not have any wings,” the Eagle said, “but perhaps you have will.”

  ​The talons let go as suddenly as they had grabbed on and Willem found himself standing on the very edge of the mountain top, facing the Eagle, so he could see both of its great eyes. And the Eagle pushed forward with its huge shining beak so that Willem stepped back, he had to, into nothing but the air.

  ​Perhaps I have will, Willem thought, as he flew. Was it flying, or was it falling? Was there a difference? Willem did not care, for the moments of it that were the most wonderful moments of his whole life, when he was soaring free through nothing.

  Chapter Four: Amber

  Amber’s mother did not come back before dark and so Amber supposed she would be away another day yet. Solie often went to town, to see friends she said. She might stay away days at a time and when she came back she usually slept for another whole day before she was any use to anyone.

  ​So Amber was alone and asleep when they knocked.

  ​She woke, startled, for it was dark yet and who would be knocking on her door in the dark?

  ​It was a strange knocking too, a continuous rapping, and not one knock at a time, but many.

  ​Amber was not afraid. She opened the door wide and fast and all of the geese rushed in at once, honking and shrieking and knocking their bills on the floor and the furniture, on Amber’s legs too. Flapping their wings and bashing into each other.

  ​“Get off me you idiots!” It was fair enough to call geese idiots. They didn’t understand her anyway. “What’s wrong with all of you?” She fetched a broom and began shovelling them out of the house with it, but they wouldn’t be shoved. As soon as any were out more would be back in, flapping frantically to get into the air. It was as if they were all possessed.

  ​Gilly the gander flapped up onto the table and shrieked even louder, and the other gander, Garnet, hissed at the geese on the floor. It was the strangest thing the way those geese were, for they had never in all of Amber’s life behaved that way before. Gilly stood on the table and shrieked and honked; he seemed to stamp his foot in anger, and Amber clutched at her broom, frozen with a sudden realisation. “What’s happened to Willem?” she asked in a whisper.

  ​And then it was Amber hammering on a door in the dark, on Jessa and Galen’s door with all of the geese around her feet.

  ​Galen was up already, smiling. “What is it Amber? It’s certainly early enough!”

  ​“Where’s Willem?” Amber asked. The geese crowded in behind, pushing her forward, but Galen pulled Amber into the house, and he hissed at the geese, slamming the door on them.

  ​“Willem went out riding yesterday morning,” Galen said. “He’ll be back today I expect.”

  ​“Riding Arrelestravandias?”

  ​“Yes. But that’s not your concern.” Galen spoke soft but firmly.

  ​“Shouldn’t he be back already though? What if something’s happened to him?”

  ​“Willem’s tough enough. He’ll be all right,” Galen said. He would not yield in any way.

  ​“The geese think something’s happened to him,” Amber said desperately.

  ​And Galen laughed then. “How could the geese think anything? And how would you know if they did?”

  ​“Because they woke me up and came in the house all stirred up crazy. And they came here with me too.”

  ​“I don’t see what any of that has to do with Willem.” Galen always moved slowly, and he talked slow too.

  ​“Willem talks to the geese, they can understand each other.”

  ​“Yes, but Willem hasn’t said anything to those geese today has he? He isn’t here!”

  ​Amber bit her lip; she had come to a dead end it seemed, but she would not give up. “Can I stay here and wait for him?” she asked.

  ​“I suppose you can if you’re prepared to work,” Galen said.

  Amber worked all day, scrubbing and shovelling and sorting, riding Merch the new grey who had quite a mind to him and Arrelinvittorio who was unbalanced and fell over his own feet.

  ​“He’s just learning,” Kastie said.

  ​Amber didn’t say anything. She did not want to talk to Kastie anyway.

  ​“Can you really understand what he’s saying?” Kastie asked. “Willem says you can.”

  ​Amber had been so absorbed in riding she had forgotten Willem; now she remembered. She narrowed her eyes. “Go away Kastie. I don’t like you any more.”

  ​Kastie was older than Amber and Willem, but she was still just a girl from the village; nobody.

  ​“You can’t tell me to go away! I work here and you don’t! You think you’re so special, you and Willem with your magic, never talking to anyone else. I can get them to send you away!”

  ​So that was it.

  ​“Go ahead, I don’t care,” Amber said, and she would have said more, but she was interrupted by the sound of drumming hooves coming in from the moor, drumming a rhythm she knew too. It was Arrelestravandias come back at last.

  ​Amber couldn’t help but be pleased to see him, even though he didn’t have Willem, like she had known he wouldn’t. She jumped down from Arrelinvittorio’s back and ran.

  ​“Where have you been and what have you done with Willem?” she demanded all at once.

  ​“I was in the mountains,” Arrelestravandias said. “I went right to the top of a mountain and I saw the whole world. You should have come with me.”

  ​Amber ought to have been able to guess that. “But where is Willem?” she asked.

  ​“Where is what?” Arrelestravandias did not care very much about individual people and he had trouble telling one from another.

  ​“Is he talking to you?” Kastie asked, suddenly there at Amber’s elbow. “What is he saying?”

  ​Amber ignored her. “Willem went with you, don’t you remember?” she said to the horse.

  ​“I do remember,” Arrelestravandias said. “But he went a different way.”

  ​“Where?”

  ​“I don’t know. Is there anything to eat?”

  ​“No. You have to take me to where Willem i
s.” Amber jumped up lightly into the saddle.

  ​“You can’t ride him!” Kastie got hold of the rein. “You’re not allowed!”

  ​Arrelestravandias snatched the rein away from her and bared his teeth so that she took a step back and Amber laughed, urging her horse off towards the moor.

  ​“I’m hungry,” said Arrelestravandias.

  ​“That’s a pity,” said Amber.

  Willem woke up. He was cold, lying on hard rock and his leg hurt. He shifted his hips and was suddenly gripped by such an unimaginable and devastating pain that he screamed with it, and his screams came back to him from the rocks, echoing all around and terrifying. But before everything went back to black he was able to call out to all the birds in the world and to God as well.

  The geese had been standing sentinel, still as stones on the highest ground they could find, staring out over the moor towards the mountains. Galen had thrown them a few handfuls of corn, but they had ignored it, and Galen had shrugged his shoulders and gone about his business, off to fix up the fence around one of the enclosures.

  ​Nobody was there at all to see when the geese began shrieking and honking and flapping in apparent consternation. They were arguing, that’s how it would have looked if anyone had been looking, but they did not argue for long. Those geese could flutter into the air with a great deal of effort, but they could not fly, for their flight feathers were cut out. They set off running instead, through the yard and out on to the moor.

  Arrelestravandias was tired. Amber was not surprised; it was such a long way to the mountains, further than she had ever ridden before. The sun was coming down already. But the horse kept going nonetheless, galloping on and on because it was what she had asked him to do.

  ​The mountains rose up before them and they began to climb, fast to start with, but inevitably slowing as the track grew steeper. Amber looked up and gasped in awe, for there above them circled a gigantic bird, a Great Eagle. It floated in a majestic arc before disappearing among the crags.

  ​“This is the way to where I went,” Arrelestravandias said. “But there’s no sense in going there now, it’ll be too dark to see anything by the time we get to the top.” The horse stopped with his head down, breathing in great huffs.

  ​Amber slid off his back. “Where did Willem go?” she asked.

  ​“I don’t know,” said the horse angrily. “I told you that already.”

  ​And it seemed obvious anyway. Amber followed the stony track towards the Eagle’s crag till she came to a sheer cliff of rock and she looked up. It seemed to go up for ever. Did Willem climb up there? Was he up there still? She rested her head on the rock in despair, for she was as tired as Arrelestravandias, and how could she climb a rock face in the dark?

  ​“Willem!” she called, hearing her voice echo all around.

  ​He did not answer, but someone did. Amber knew it was a bird crying, even though it did not sound like one. It sounded like a human voice calling out in anguish. She stood still listening and realised there were other birds calling too, and all from the same place.

  ​Away from the rocky cliff, through tangled bushes, Amber found the birds circling, roosting, fluttering and making all of their various songs and shouts. Birds of different sizes, hundreds, even thousands of them in great moving clouds, and under them all lay Willem, eyes closed and smiling with one leg all buckled and twisted so that you couldn’t look at it. Amber knelt down beside him and all the birds flew away, every one.

  ​“Willem,” Amber said. She didn’t want to touch him. He was too broken to touch.

  ​“I flew,” he said.

  ​“That’s good,” said Amber.

  ​But he wouldn’t say anything else, or move, even when she shook him.

  ​“Arrelestravandias!” Amber called, and she could not help but feel immensely glad and proud when the horse came pushing his way through the scrubby trees to find them. She made him lie down and dragged Willem over his shoulder. Willem had been born too early, tiny and blue, and he’d grown as much as anyone, but had never been able to catch up. He was smaller than Amber so she was able to lift him.

  ​Arrelestravandias got up carefully and Amber climbed into his saddle. He was worn out and he stumbled on the rocky ground. It was almost dark.

  ​“Can you gallop?” Amber asked uncertainly.

  ​“Don’t know until I try,” the horse replied.

  Chapter Five: The Land of the Ganders

  The village healer pulled Willem’s leg straight and Willem’s screams pierced everyone’s hearts until he fell silent, which was worse somehow.

  ​“He won’t be able to ride any more,” Jessa said. She sat holding Willem’s hand and staring at his pallid face.

  ​And Amber thought that a strange thing to say. Willem wouldn’t mind if he couldn’t ride, he’d be happy! He’s alive, she said to Jessa in her imagination, don’t you even care? But she kept her thoughts to herself because she did not want them to notice she was there and send her away.

  ​But Jessa did care, and she noticed too. She made a meal for everyone, all the horse-makers and some of the yard workers who had stayed too. Amber found she was ravenous and ate furiously until she became warm and sleepy and her head began to nod. Everyone was the same it seemed, sat round the kitchen table with staring eyes, not talking. Willem woke and screamed in pain, and he went on screaming.

  ​“I’ll take Amber home,” Galen said. “All of you should go, I reckon. This isn’t going to stop and there’s nothing any of you can do to help.”

  ​And Amber found herself lifted and carried down the hill with the geese following behind in the dark. It was dark again somehow. It had taken a night and a whole day as well to get home from the mountains, though it hadn’t seemed that way. But there was light spilling out from the little house’s window, which meant her mother was back, and Amber was hopelessly relieved. Galen took her through the door and bundled her straight into bed.

  ​“Oh Galen,” Solie said. “Is Willem all right?”

  ​“I daresay he will be,” said Galen, “but sometimes things happen that just tip you on your head and everything you thought you knew turns out to be wrong.”

  ​Amber wondered what he meant, but she found it hard wondering, for she was falling asleep.

  ​“It’s thanks to Amber anyway. She knew,” Galen said.

  Willem did not stop screaming when he was awake, day after day, and Jessa could not stand it. She sent for a healer from town who came with potions to make Willem sleep more of the time, most of the time. And so he spent his days, wandering in and out of dreams. Some of those dreams were peaceful, you could tell, because he lay calm and quiet, and even smiled, but some were not. Sometimes Willem flailed and writhed in his sleep, and woke screaming, bursting from his dream-terror into real life, which was just a different kind of nightmare.

  ​Amber came to see him every day, but there was little point because he did not know she was there. She did not like looking at him for he was so pale and small, getting smaller because no-one could make him eat.

  ​She went to visit Arrelestravandias instead and seeing him always made her glad, though she was not allowed to ride him.

  ​“No-one will ride Arrelestravandias now,” Jessa said. “He does not need riding.”

  ​So Amber rode other horses. She would not go home, and nobody could be allowed to simply stand around the horse-makers doing nothing. She did Willem’s work readily, but it soon became apparent that she could ride as well as anyone, and better than most. The yard people got used to her and came to rely on her to such an extent that soon no-one could remember a time when she had not been there working.

  One day Willem woke from a peaceful dream and opened his eyes to see Amber there, sat looking at him.

  ​“I’m hungry,” he said. “Have you got anything to eat?”

  ​That day Willem sat up and ate soup and bread, though he could not sit up long. Jessa cried and held on to him and he laughe
d at her and fell asleep in her arms.

  ​But it was a long time before he could even begin to walk anywhere, over a year. Everyone went back to their usual busy lives and more or less forgot about Willem, left stuck in his bed at home or sat at the window reading, or talking to the birds he’d called to come. Amber reckoned he had secrets.

  ​“You said you flew,” she told him once.

  ​“What?” Willem looked so confused for a moment that Amber wondered if he’d expected her to talk in the language of the birds.

  ​“Didn’t you ask the Great Eagles how to fly?”

  ​“I don’t remember,” Willem said, frowning. Then he brightened up. “Amber, can you help me make a staircase for the ganders? They come to see me all the time, but they can’t get in.”

  ​“If you want,” Amber said. She found an old, dead branch to lean up against the window and the next time she visited, the ganders were on the table and Willem was creased up and crying with laughter.

  Gilly and Garnet were the strangest of birds really. They knew things that they had no business to know, but then they were very old; older than Solie, Amber’s mother.

  ​“We thought you had gone to the Land of the Ganders,” Gilly said.

  ​“Don’t be soft,” said Garnet. “Willem couldn’t go there, he isn’t a gander!”

  ​“Oh, I think they’d let him in,” Gilly said. “He can speak gander after all. I’ve always thought that maybe he was a gander put under a spell. I’ve heard of that before.”

  ​“What is the Land of the Ganders?” Willem asked.

  ​“Haven’t we told you?” Gilly asked.

  ​“Of course we have,” said Garnet. “But he’s forgotten. He’s a human after all, you can’t expect him to be clever and remember things. You have to lower your expectations.”

  ​“The Land of the Ganders is where ganders go when they die,” said Gilly, ignoring Garnet.

  ​Willem laughed. “But we don’t go anywhere when we die!” he said.

  ​“You don’t,” said Garnet. “Ganders do.”

  ​“And anyway, how do you know you don’t?” Gilly asked. “Nobody does know, until they die, and then they can hardly come back and tell everyone, can they?”