A Whisper of Horses Read online

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  To

  Penny, without whom this book would not exist;

  Ellie, protector of horses;

  Dorn Cameo, the best horse;

  and in memory of Bambi, Oliver, Autumn Butterfly, and Parhelion.

  May you gallop and graze in peace.

  We did not dare go near them. Yet they waited,

  Stubborn and shy, as if they had been sent

  By an old command to find our whereabouts

  And that long-lost archaic companionship.

  —Edwin Muir, “The Horses”

  PART ONE

  INSIDE

  chapter 1

  SERENDIPITY

  IT WAS AROUND about the time Mama died that I started noticing the horses. Not real horses, obviously. But the statues of horses. Strong and proud figures that dotted the streets of Lahn Dan and stared stiffly ahead like they hadn’t seen you looking. And on their backs, important men. Whenever the storytellers start talking about the horses, they always tell you that they carried important men. Lord this or King that. Into battle usually. Into war. If the Gases hadn’t killed the horses off, then the wars would have done in the end.

  The day Mama died, the sky was slightly more violet than normal, the clouds fatter and blacker. The coughing had got worse—hack, hack, hack, it had been—and her color more yellowy sick. I had helped her walk to the hospital at Lahn Dan Bridge and she had lain there all groans and hack-hack-hacks. They put her in a wheeling chair and whizzed her up to a room filled with other groaners and moaners and agey old hack-hack-hackers. At least the candles and lamps in the room meant that you couldn’t see her properly. Couldn’t see how sick she was getting, I mean. The nurses all shook their heads and made sad eyes, and one of them felt the need to put their arm around me. I knew then I’d be going home alone.

  At one point Mama pulled herself up and, through the gloom, tried her best to look me in the eye, the coughing temporarily catching its own breath. Her straggly red hair tipped forward as she leant in closer and grabbed my hand in her own bony fingers. A gentle tug, an almost invisible whisper on her lips. I pushed my ear towards her.

  “… iiiiddde…,” she whistled through her teeth.

  “What?”

  “… iiiiiiDDDDDE.” Frustrated, she yanked harder on my arm.

  “Sorry, Mama. I don’t know what you’re saying. Try saying it—”

  “Arrrttssiiiiddde.” Her hand dropped mine and her finger pointed itself at me. Slowly. Deliberately.

  “What? Oh.” The trip flicked somewhere in my brain. “Outside? What do you mean?”

  Before she could reply, her whole body flopped back onto the bed as the hack-hack-hacks started a fresh attack and Mama’s dying body fought to keep itself still.

  She lived for two more hours and never said another word.

  * * *

  Initially, I thought that she was trying to protect me. Wanting me to go outside the hospital so that I wouldn’t see her die. Sparing me the pain of her slip into the hands of the God Man.

  It took some time for me to fully understand.

  Walking home, I went a different route. I should have just kept along the bankment wall and scooted westwards, but for some reason I took the bridge over the Tems. Don’t know why. Too many tears in my eyes. Not wanting to be home alone, I suppose. I found myself wishing for something I hadn’t wished for in a long, long time—that I had a father. A father to go home to. But there was no one.

  It used to be a river—the Tems—so they say. One of the biggest rivers in the world. Gushing and whooshing along. Not that I’d ever seen a river, but that’s what the storytellers say they did, gush and whoosh along. It started in the hills a hundred miles away and slid its way to the sea, cutting Lahn Dan in half on the way. Boats would go up and down, this way and that way, taking stuff back and forth. But all it is now is mud. A horrible, dangerous twisty line of mud. People fall in and never get out again. Robbers knock people on their heads and throw them in. That sort of thing. If you want to get rid of something, throw it in the Tems, that’s what everybody says.

  I walked and walked until I was well and totally truly lost among crumply old buildings that I’d never seen before. Men and women pushing handcarts and rubbing their tiredy backs stared at me like I was a dancer in a roomful of lazybones. But still I walked and walked. I walked and walked and walked.

  Until I came across it.

  When I talked to the Professor about it a few days later, he told me that the part of Lahn Dan I found myself in was called Ole Bone Circus and before the Gases, people would go there to chatter to each other and barter with each other to make as much money as possible. Now it sits as quiet as a dead mouse and nobody pays it much notice. All you can hear is the wind tunneling down the different roads and the flap of people’s cloaks as they hurry on past.

  But in the middle …

  In the middle is one of the statues I was talking about. A man—a prince, the Professor says—on the back of his horse, waving his hat as if to say “Hello and welcome.” And the horse. Oh, the horse. If ever I see anything as handsome and as beautiful in my life again, I should shudder in amazishment. His neck all muscly and smooth like a rolled-up carpet from the Gallery Market. His legs as sharp as Mrs. Ludovic’s knittering needles. His tail, slippery and silky. It was as if the prince himself were riding a king—a magnificent, majestic animal king.

  Suddenly my legs stopped walking and my eyes stopped crying, and for the first time since Mama had died earlier that afternoon, I was thinking about something else. I stood there for who knows how long and just stared at the creature made of bronze. People went past and the day went past and all I did was wander around the statue and stare at it with my sore, red eyes. I don’t know what it was, but something held me fixed. Its beauty and elegance. Its strength.

  It reminded me of that bashed-up wooden toy Mama bought for me a longish time ago. One dull afternoon, thinking it was my birthday, she’d spent her last few pennies on it. The bashed-up wooden toy I’d lost forever.

  As the sky eased itself into a darkness, I shook myself together. It wasn’t too far off the Bat Shriek curfew and I was a long way from home. I raced back through the streets and over West Minister Bridge with just a few moments to spare before the sirens wailed over the city. Brushing past the moths in Dew Bee Lee Gardens, I grasped on to the ropes of the Lahn Dan High, pulling myself up and clambering across the spiderwebby mesh into our pod. My pod. It was only me now. I lit a candle and popped one of the dinner pills into my mouth before climbing into my sleep bag.

  I didn’t draw the curtains. I couldn’t bear to see the shadows of moths tonight. I needed to see the stars.

  chapter 2

  PROFESSOR NIMBUS

  EARLY THE NEXT morning, before my head had a chance of flapping itself awake, the little stones in the pod rang clack. Someone was down below. It shuddered me into reality, I can tell you, and my
heart dropped like a rock when I remembered that my mama was gone. I think I might have been dreaming about the horse from Ole Bone Circus. Mama and me were riding it over a field and through the streets and jumping over the Emm Twenty-five Wall. But being jolted awake made the dream disappear like water through my fingers, and within seconds of waking up only a kind of sickening sadness remained.

  Clack-clack. The stones rang again and I dragged my legs out of the sleep bag and leant against the side of the pod to try and see who was pulling on the rope. From where I was standing I could see the top of the Professor’s head. He looked up and gave me a quick wave with his fingers. I waved back—not so much a greeting, more of an indication that I knew he was there and to tell him that I was coming. The Professor was a storyteller, but he didn’t normally come to collect me for storytelling. Did he know about Mama?

  I dusted my clothes off, gave my face a wipe with a cloth in the bucket of cold water that Mama had filled just the day before and climbed out onto the ropes, gently lowering myself down towards the ground. The mud of the Tems shone pink in the yawning morning light and Mrs. Ludovic’s washing was already dangling out to dry. It takes a couple of minutes to get from my pod to the ground, and by the time I’d arrived the Professor was sat on the floor, pulling his shoes back together with his tatty old laces.

  “I need to find myself some more laces.” He spoke without looking up at me, his slightly graying hair bouncing up and down with each word. “These shoes keep falling off me. If I don’t get new laces, I shall lose them one of these days—you mark my words. I shall be pacing around Lahn Dan in my naked feet. People will call me the Shoeless Man and point and laugh. It’s just a matter of time.” He stood up and looked at me. “Hello, Serendipity.”

  “Professor. What are you doing here?”

  “I’ve come to collect you.”

  “Collect me?”

  “For storytelling. It is a storytelling morning for you today, is it not? Not a day for digging up the spuds or carrots or tending to the pigs?”

  I shook my head. Like all other Pbs in Lahn Dan, for five days a week I had to work on the lotments or work with the pigs and goats. That usually meant trudging up to Hide Park or Gents Park to spend the whole day bent over, doubled up. All in return for a couple of potatoes and carrots and a tiny bit of goat’s milk. If you were lucky. If the Cus were feeling generous. “No. No work today.”

  “Then it’s time to get going.” He stamped his feet to see if his shoes stayed on. “Come on. No time to waste.” The Professor pulled his long jacket about him and started to march off, his green trousers blowing about his sticky thin legs. “A tidy time waits for no man. Or girl.”

  I ran to catch up with him; his steps were longer and straighter than mine so that I struggled to keep alongside.

  “I heard about your mother, my dear. I am sorry.” He tried an awkward smile on me. “Must feel a bit…” He searched for a word. “Must be a bit strange.”

  “Yes.” I didn’t really feel like nattering about it. Once I started nattering I wouldn’t be able to stop. Or worse still I’d start crying.

  “Did you do the Good-bye Ceremony?”

  “What?”

  “The Good-bye Ceremony? Did you do it?”

  “I don’t know what you mean, Professor.”

  He stopped for a moment and pulled his hands from out of his jacket pockets. I could see that his fingers looked stained and wrinkly like the muddy-dry-cracked Tems on the warm days.

  “Did you cross the paper?”

  “I—”

  “They should have given you a piece of paper with a box on it. You take a pencil and you put a cross in it.” He made a sort of cross in the air with his flattened hand. “It’s the Good-bye Ceremony. It’s how you say good-bye. Apparently. Reducing emotion to a cross in a box.”

  My mind reached back to the evening before, and remembered a nurse standing in a hallway holding something—a sheet of paper?—but I was too upset to take in what it was. Then I left and that was that.

  “I can’t remember,” I said and carried on walking.

  “Ah well, not to worry.” It was his turn to catch up with me. “Say good-bye in your own way. It’s what your mother would have wanted.”

  We made our way along through the Shell building, around IMAX and into the big red block where our storytelling sessions were held. The foyer was crowded with children and a few other storytellers. Storytellers were employed by the Ministry to keep us busy when we weren’t working on the lotments; get us up to the scratch with the rules of Lahn Dan; and teach us what the world was like before the Gases. Professor Nimbus waved at a couple of them and the noise bubbled around as everyone started to climb up the echoey stairs.

  “Serendipity!” I turned around to see Gry just behind me, her spiky brown hair looking even more spiky than usual. “Sit next to me! Sit next to me, please. I don’t want that horrid Bracken girl sitting next to me.”

  “Just ignore her,” came Bracken’s voice a few steps farther back. “Everybody does. Even her ma and pa. They push stones in their ears to stop listening to her. That’s what I’ve heard.”

  “See what I mean?” Gry’s eyes half closed in pretend annoyance. “Always sticking a pin in the ribs, she is.”

  The Professor’s room was on the third floor and we filed off from the rest of the crowd through the door.

  “Why doesn’t Gry sit on one side of me?” I suggested, pleased to be distracted. “And, Bracken—you can sit on the other side of me. That way you don’t need to look at each other all that often. And if you do, then I can get in the way.”

  “Okay.”

  “Sounds good.”

  They obviously hadn’t heard about Mama. Thank the Goodness.

  * * *

  It stood on a base that shaped upwards like long moorland grass. Its legs were thin and breakable sticks that thickened into muscle the farther up you went. Its body sanded and filed and rasped into muscle that seemed to glint in the last end specks of the well-hidden sun. Its tail a proud twist falling away from its body; its neck and mane tapering towards its long elegant head.

  “You like it?” Mama nodded her own head encouragingly.

  “It’s lovely,” I said.

  “Its ear’s come off, I’m afraid.”

  I rubbed my finger over the place where, at some point over the last few hundred years, somebody had accidentally or deliberately snapped off the tiny point of its left ear.

  “Doesn’t matter,” I said. “I think it’s lovely.”

  “Saw it there in the market and thought … well … thought you might like it.”

  I got down on the floor and started pattering it about as if it was moving or galloping or something, bringing it to life in my own childish mind. “I do like it, Mama. I do. Thank you. It’s the best present I’ve ever had.”

  chapter 3

  STORYTELLING

  PROFESSOR NIMBUS PULLED his long thin arms from his long dark coat and stabbed it on a hanging peg on the back of the door, while the children sat down on the cold and difficult zigzaggy wooden floor. There were usually about thirty of us—boys and girls, all different ages. Most of us turned up. The punishment for not turning up was longer shifts on the lotments, and nobody wanted that. Some older boys squatted in a corner, wiping their noses on their sleeves and quietly laughing among themselves. Towards the front, a couple of the younger ones were huddled next to each other, rocking back and forth to some little tune they were making up and playing Patty-cake Patty-cake. Us middle ones (I think we were about twelve years old) took up the middle of the floor—Bracken and Gry on either side of me.

  It was still quite early in the morning and the sun hadn’t completely hit its peak in the window, so the Professor took his matchbox out of his trouser pocket and lit two or three of the oil lamps that were placed on shelves around the room. The room itself was always dusty. On the wall was a blackboard where the Professor would draw pictures in scratchity chalk to try to he
lp us understand things. I think most of the dust came from that chalk. Anyway, a lot of the chalk ended up on the Professor’s trousers and waste-catching coat, which always made us laugh.

  Professor Nimbus grabbed his chair and positioned it right in front of us. Wiping the rusty old specs that sat on his nose with a tuft of cloth, he gave a bit of a quieten-down-and-listen-to-me sort of cough before slowly sitting himself down and looking around to see who was there.

  “Is Fox not here? Fox? You here?”

  “Taken ill, Professor,” a voice from somewhere just behind me replied. “Wasn’t well up on the lotments yesterday. Had to walk home sick and didn’t get her food for the day. Must be still ill.”

  Nimbus shook his head in disappointment. “What about Enzo?” He looked towards the group of grinning older boys. “Is Enzo coming?”

  One of the boys shrugged. “Dunno. Don’t care. Don’t like him anyway.”

  The Professor frowned at the lad. “One of the things you all need to understand is that as Pbs—for you are each and every one of you a Pb—as Pbs, you need to get on with one another. Respect each other’s opinions and space. In our world there are Pbs and Aus, who consider themselves golden. Be able to put your trust and faith in your fellow Pbs, the workers. Generally”—and at this point he glared at the shrugging boy—“try to like each other. Okay, Mathias?”

  “Yes, Professor. Sorry, Professor.”

  “If there is anything at all you can learn from me,” he said, addressing us all, “it’s that you need to stick together. Like gum. The whole of Lahn Dan depends on you. You are the backbone of this place. The workforce. Don’t ever forget that.”

  “Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.” The grinning boy still seemed to be apologizing.

  “Now.” Professor Nimbus leant back in the chair. “Stories. What sort of stories do you want me to tell you today?”

  “Tell us about the machines again.” It was one of the older boys. “I love the machines. Tell us about the ones that flew through the sky.”