The House of Storms Read online

  But it’s just—I sometimes despair. Even though I love him so deeply. And even if we have no choice.

  ‘We must strive to be practical. That’s the thing which is most important. And probably also the hardest. Who knows what the future will bring—but he’s part of it.’

  After all, who would have him now?

  ‘He’s perfect. He’s unique, and he’s ours. He truly is Chosen. It’s too late for regret. Think of how we came to this place, Ida …’

  So much of that and many other things made little sense to Klade. But the world was growing, and so was he, and meanwhile he must study. Study tasted like spiders and dust. There was even a room for it, set high in a corner of Big House where the beech tree tapped the windows, and in summer you could hear the nesting swallow chicks chirruping as they learned their part of the song.

  ‘Now, listen. Say it slowly. Take your time. My name is Klade.’

  Klade did, but Silus shook his head. Klade could feel even as Silus made his mouth into a smile that he was sad.

  No…

  ‘I don’t want you to talk as I talk, Klade. Open your mouth properly. You shouldn’t slur or spit.’

  But that’s …

  ‘I know, I know. It’s my fault. It’s the way I’ve been changed.’ The grey in Silus’s eyes, the song in his head, dimmed. Other aspects of the song—the birds, the tap-tapping beech tree—welled up around Klade. Ida was moving outside in Garden, and he knew that she was listening. Or not listening—for to listen you used ears; the part of the song which was sound. So perhaps not listening at all.

  ‘You should speak, I think …’ Silus said.

  And perhaps not. Perhaps this is even more confusing. ‘Speak as you hear Ida speaking. In your head.’

  With that clarity. ‘Does that make any sense?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Ida, in Garden, snapped the dry stem of a teasel, the feeling of it mingling with that of her flesh.

  Yes.

  From then, it was easier. Klade was to make sounds in his mouth rather than inside his head. Like birdsong, yes, although we are not birds, Klade, we are the Chosen, we are the Children of this Age. And you are not to put stones in your mouth, no matter how cool and sweet they taste, or, even secretly, to lick the windows.

  Then, with spring, arrived the fluttering things which smelled like the corner of the house where its walls bulged and the rain trickled in. Things which Ida would cup in her awkward hands or place on her rough lap and stare at for the longest time. They were called books and these, yes, Klade, are letters, words. They’re a special part of the song. With summer, the cows came charging into Garden and the Farmers escaped with them, mooing and chomping amid the hazy flies and trampling the nettles until the Ironmasters came in as well to shoo them off with the paddles of their big hands still glowing from the forge.

  Summer was a good time. Summer was sitting with Ida on the old bench in the butterfly heat. Summer was for books. Summer was learning to read. She’d point a black finger against the grainy shapes. Cow. Bird. Then Dog—which was like Cat, but which he’d never seen until Ida showed him. How they laughed when she made it stand in the middle of his head and wiggle its tail! Yes, he soon knew these things, and the special shapes they made when you squashed them up like flies between these things called pages. But—man, woman? What is sad, Ida, about those words? And how do you spell Chosen?

  Klade was, long before he discovered the phrase, a voracious reader. In fact, he was a voracious everything. He gobbled things up, and no longer just pebbles, for voracious meant eating without eating. Gobbled Big House. Gobbled the sun-flecked attic. Gobbled Garden all the way to the Woods where the Shadow Ones dwelt but not beyond. Gobbled the long space they called No Through Road, which went all the way to the Ironmaster’s Forge in the one direction, and absolutely nowhere in the other.

  He loved to sit in the Forge’s mad heat and glow, with all the huffing of the furnace and the shouts and the clamour. There were two Ironmasters, with their flat red faces, their huge shoulders, their blistered, greying, clanking arms, but there might as well have been one of them. Like the image you saw when they doused the heat of their metals into the lovely, scummy surface of the water butts, they were joined in the heat and the glow and the steam. They made big sounds to go with their hammerings, but the words which came from their mouths were nothing like the ones Klade read in books, or that he was supposed to make. Ida told him that they were Endlessly chanting the spells they’d learned in their apprenticeship, which meant some secret and distant part of the song he still didn’t understand.

  In a corner at the back of the Forge, near where the Impassable Stream laughed and rattled, Klade found huge sheets of words which had somehow escaped from the books Ida was showing him, and then been piled and tied and tightly squashed, and lived in by mice who’d left their mousy stains and smells. Fascinated by these browned pages, unpicking his way through holes and droppings, Klade discovered many words about these creatures called women and men, whom Ida and Silus and Blossom mostly called Outsiders when they called them anything at all, and who were not Chosen. They had things called Births. They had things called Marriages. They had things called Guilds. They had things called Deaths. Some of these Outsiders liked to have themselves squashed into pictures in these pages just like flies and dogs. They were always in shades of brown—the colour of mouse pee, in fact, even when mice hadn’t peed on them.

  Einfell, he understood, was a particular place, and there were other places which lay elsewhere with names like London and Preston and Bristol where the bricks of many houses and the Outsiders themselves were all piled together and clambered over each other like the woodlice you found if you peeled away the walls of Big House when Silus wasn’t looking. Outsiders were everywhere.

  There was this machine. It came from the nowhere end of No Through Road each Tenshiftday afternoon and into the Fold Yard beside the New Barn, which was where the cats lived. The machine had a face on its front with something like eyes which glowed with bits of sunlight when it was winter but otherwise were entirely blank. It spat and clucked, and there were these big letters down its side. A. Brown. Taunton. Grocers And Suppliers. Then, watching, watching through the weeds and the cobblestones, the side of the machine put out a wing as if it was a beetle in the sunshine, and Brown stepped out. Not all of Brown was brown, though. Bit of Brown’s face were very red, and there was sparse gingery stuff on his head which he kept rubbing. His eyes were red as well; and white, too, and blue. The cats came prowling and purring with their tails up around Brown’s legs and he tutted at them with what seemed like every last bit of his attention. The funniest thing was, Brown worked his mouth as he petted the cats, and clicked and licked with his teeth and tongue, and turned his head to spit out shining jets which sat there bright and bubbly on the cobbles and hung on the seedheads. Brown was so brown that brown was leaking out from him.

  Klade edged forward. He touched the brown stuff and sniffed and tasted. Harsh and warm and tart. More like the paints he sometimes squiggled on bits of paper to try to make Dogs and Cats and Cows than anything he could make come out of his own mouth. Brown was looking at him. Rubbing the top of his head.

  ‘Well, I’ll be …’

  ‘Hello,’ Klade said, feeling proud of himself for doing so. ‘I am Klade.’

  Brown’s brown tongue licked his brown lips and moved something brown he was chewing from the side of one brown cheek to another. The song edged and swirled about him in joyous loops, but never quite went inside. He was like a rock in the middle of the Impassable Stream. ‘By the sweet Elder,’ he said in a flat, brown, songless voice. ‘You’re young to be that way, aren’t you?’

  I am, and you’re not Chosen.’

  ‘Course you are—it’s a lad, isn’t it?’ Without actually moving forward, Brown squinted more closely at Klade. ‘But no one would know from the look of you. Mama got caught, eh? Poor little bastard …’

  Then Ida came, and so d
id Silus, and then the Ironmasters and the Huntsman as well, and several of the Chosen from the Far Village who were capable of being a help. Brown opened the bigger wings at the back of his machine. Things came out: cabbages and bags of sugar and flour and sea-potatoes but mostly tins and sometimes even fresh books which Ida cuddled to her chest and the song brightened around her for a while like the eyes of the machine which were called headlights and were powered by something called electricity, which they didn’t have in Einfell, but which was very important in the Outsiders’ world.

  Ida sat him down on his stool beside the fire in the Big Room and laid out sheets of newspaper around him on which the mice hadn’t yet peed. She stroked his back, and the feel of her hands was like branches. The song, within Ida, was always happy and sad. It reminded him, in its highest reaches, of that part of the song which wafted from the Shadow Ones in the depths of the Wood; it was that lost and strong. When she took up the joined objects which were called scissors, Klade could tell she found them difficult to hold in her funny hands. The song went Snip, Snip as the air whispered around Klade’s head and tickled his neck. There was something else in the song, something from Ida’s memory like a bit of summer stolen by the headlights of Brown’s machine. Klade was sitting there, and Ida was cutting not his hair—alive or dead, remember the difference, although surely his hair was dead, or else cutting it would have hurt—but the hair of someone else, in a different room, and the hair had the colour of the memory itself, which was sunlight, in shining, golden curls.

  I’m so sorry, Klade. Everything about you makes me think—

  —Not sad or sorry. He remembered himself. ‘Tell me, Ida. I’m interested. What you’re thinking is Outside, isn’t it?’ He remembered one of the many labels of the tins he’d taken to reading. ‘Is it Floodgate Street, Deritend, where they make the powder for Alfred’s Custard, which is Every Housewife’s Best Dinnertime Friend?’

  The scissors paused and he felt the tinkling rush which was Ida’s laughter, although the sadness beneath it didn’t go away. No, Klade, it’s not. It’s in York. Not that it matters. It might as well be Africa for all the difference it makes …

  So he sat there and the scissors snip, snipped and the walls of Africa grew flowers which were like the flowers Blossom formed in the air but yet were drawings on paper, and the shape of the window and the smells and the sounds which came through it were entirely changed. This was a quite different part of the song to any Klade had experienced. The rainy growl and rustle of something called Traffic. Many, many voices, and Ida laughed with a different voice which was still hers and stroked him with softer fingers as, one-handed now, she snipped away the golden stuff of his curls. ‘Careful, careful, or I’ll snip your ears …’ The voice was and wasn’t hers.

  The snip, snip of the scissors, the feel of Ida both here and now and in a far away place called York was sweet and dark to him. Snip, snip, and the way she studied him when the scissors had stopped and his hair lay fine and fallen about him was both golden and dark. An ache came in his eyes and in his throat and his belly, and Ida was all around him, warm as the sun and cold as the moon and so big that for a moment she was like the wildest of the Shadow Ones and there was nothing in her but the song. But Klade longed for some reason to press himself against her, to feel more than the branchy touch of her hands. He envied those books—the way she pressed them to her—and wished that she was softer, lighter, more giving. Lovely though Ida was, as beautiful as were all the Chosen, he wanted her to be something else.

  The scissors dropped. Well, I think that’s finished. She scooped up the papers, ran her clumpy fingers through their scatterings and then, in a sharp rush of smell and smoke, tossed them all on to the fire.

  Winter came. Rain beat the windows. If he looked carefully, Klade could see the garden all the way to the shimmery dark of the woods held in every drop.

  ‘That’s an optical effect,’ Silus told him. ‘It’s a bending of the light.’

  ‘Like a mirror?’

  A pause. The rain went Drip, drip, drip. ‘Ah, but you haven’t seen a mirror. We don’t have those in Einfell.’

  ‘But lots Outside, amid the Browns?’

  The gutters chuckled. ‘That’s true, I suppose. But they’re not Browns. I thought, Klade, we’d told you this already. Master Brown is just one particular man who does some of our deliveries. Brown is also a colour, but it just happens to be his name. We call the people who live outside Einfell in towns like Bristol or Taunton Outsiders. But that’s just because they live outside Einfell and we live inside it. Do you understand?’

  ‘Yes. York as well. And we are the Chosen.’

  Drip, drip, drip. Chuckle, chuckle, chuckle. If Klade looked hard enough at the darkening glass, he could see Silus’s face captured in it, rippled and stretched like a clouded moon. He could almost see his own. ‘That’s right. But you shouldn’t spit as you talk, Klade—I thought we’d told you that, as well.’

  The raining and the dripping continued, day after day, and Ida fed the fire in the Biggest Room with wet coal, which left everything hazed and smoked, and he helped her with the cooking. Sometimes, she would grow forgetful and just stand there in the smoggy light, her song drawn down and inwards like the swirls of the smoke. He had to remind her at these times when to do things, and how to do them. She cut his hair again, and this time her song was distracted and she did snip his ear. Klade was astonished. He was Red inside, not Brown, although he knew in reality he was Chosen, and he knew by now the difference between what you really thought in your head and what you could say with your tongue. Drip, drip, drip went the rain and the gutters couldn’t stop from laughing and suddenly there was an almighty crash as the roof decided to come down the stairs and the whole place was fuller than ever with the song in creaks and moans.

  Some roofers came to fix the roof. Klade, who’d read many adverts for Building Services in old copies of the Bristol Morning Post by now, was tremendously excited. He watched through the thistles on the far side of No Through Road as they lifted ladders from their van. Smoke came streaming from the things they had burning on their lips. When one was thrown away, Klade combed the wet grass. Short and wet and white and stubby—he gave it a sniff, and nodded knowledge-ably to himself, for these guildsmen were definitely Browns.

  He listened to their voices, that songless song.

  ‘How bad can it be, eh? Triple time on a Fiveshiftday. Just a roof, innit? But did you see that one—Jesus Christ… What a dump this place is! You’d never ever believe anyone actually lived here. And them things in that fucking wood. Fucking wafting about like stray bits of fucking washing …’

  ‘Excuse me.’

  The roofers looked down at him from their ladders, grins frozen on their faces through teeth where were even brighter and sharper than the Huntsman’s until one of them spat them out into his hand and Klade saw they were the metal things called nails.

  ‘I was wondering if you might not be from Frandons of Frimley, who offer Services to all Kinds of Guilds and Reasonable Prices and Free No-Obligation Quotes,’ Klade said, pleased with himself for remembering the exact advert, and for not spitting once.

  ‘Come again?’

  ‘I was—’

  ‘Nah. You’re one of them, aren’t you? A little fucking troll. What d’you reckon, Eddie?’

  Another roofer called Eddie peered down from a new patch of slate on which he was spread-eagled with a hammer. ‘Can’t be, can he? I mean, look at him.’

  ‘But—see, his wrist—he’s got no Mark. Old enough for Testing as well, I’d say.’

  Klade looked down as well, studying the grubby off-white stretches of flesh where the veins met his palms and then holding them up for the two roofers to see as they balanced on the dripping roof and the winter sky poured in around them.

  ‘Or maybe it’s true. You know—all them tales. The bastard changelings really do steal our fucking babies. Just you wait ‘till I tell our Shirl…’

  The
men, turning away from Klade, went back to their work up amid the sky, and shouted at him soon after to get out of the way, you fucking freak, because it’s not safe down there. But their left wrists, Klade had noticed, all had the same small wound on their insides as if they’d all somehow caught themselves when they were cutting their hair or hammering. So, he noticed later on, did Brown and the other delivery men. He experimented with the same effect himself, Snip snip and some more of the fucking red came out of him, and Silus found him and spat all over his face as he told him he should never, ever, do that again, nor use that sort of language. He sent him away, and then came looking for him later to say he was sorry and that he sometimes forgot just how awkward things were.

  ‘The Outsiders,’ he said, ‘they have this Mark on their wrist which shows they’re not Chosen. It’s something we don’t have—or that we lose. And they don’t call us the Chosen, Klade. They have bad words for us. Words like the ones you were using. Troll and monster and sometimes—although this is not quite so bad; there are graduations even in these things—changeling. They fear us, and that’s why the roofers talked to you in the way they did.’

  ‘This Mark—where’s it from?’

  A long pause. The song was oddly quiet and was mostly that new-roof smell, which was cut wood and raw stone. ‘The Mark comes from aether, Klade. It’s the same thing which makes us Chosen.’

  ‘What’s aether like? Is it like electricity?’

  Silus considered this. The angles of his face were as smooth as a plate. ‘It’s best if I show you all the things that aether isn’t before I help you to understand what it is. After all, it’s time you learnt a little more about the world …’

  Silus showed him the things called maps, which Klade had seen before in the adverts in newspapers—How To Find Our Showroom—but had never really understood. The blue, here, was water, and there was so, so much of it, and the green—and, yes, Klade, the brown as well—that was land. Klade touched his finger to the place to which Silus’s black nail had pointed, which was Einfell, then twisted his gaze out of the window and up past the tapping beech tree to see if he could see it coming down out of the clouds. Silus laughed at that. Sometimes, Klade …