The Golden Flight (3 page)

‘We’ll go tomorrow,’ said Silica, ‘or maybe the day after.’ He yawned and went back into his drey.

Malachite was half watching an ichneumon fly probing through the pine bark with the long spike under her tail, seeking wood-boring grubs in which to lay her eggs. The other half of his mind, preoccupied with his ambition, ranged across New America to the Oval Drey at Woburn where the leader of all the Silver Squirrels lived and ruled by edict. One day
I
will be the Great Lord Silver, he was thinking. One day!

Near the Blue Pool, in the woodland that the Greys called New Massachusetts, but was known to the native Reds by the more prosaic name of the North-east Wood, a middle-aged squirrel known as Rowan the Bold was preparing the last teaching session for the batch of Greys that had formed his Early Spring class. These had arrived soon after the storm had blown itself out and, finding most of the old dreys had been torn down, eagerly began building new dreys to replace them. Rowan had noticed with interest that they built to a new design, more basic than the traditional ‘family’ ones. Their new dreys had room only for a single squirrel, although two Reds, being smaller, might just have been able to share. The Greys had a new name for them too – dreytels.

Rowan was joined by his life-mate Meadowsweet, their daughter Bluebell, and the ex-zervantz Spindle and Wood Anemone, together with their twin daughters, Rosebay and Willowherb.

After greeting one another, Rowan asked Spindle if he had seen Hickory and Sitka.

‘Them’z probably zeeing that the coloniztz have left the dreytelz tidy. Them’ll be along here zoon.’Spindle replied, his accent giving away his island origin.

Hickory and Sitka had been the leaders of the Greys who had been misled by the Temple Master the year before. After losing the battle at the Agglestone Rock, they had stayed here with Rowan and his party, helping to teach new batches of colonists the ways of the natives, as directed by their leader, the current Great Lord Silver, from his base at Woburn.

The Early Spring class had learned well and were now moving on to colonise lands to the far west, though one pair, Sumac and Tumbleweed, had decided to make their home on Screech Hill across the Great Heath to the south-west.

The session that Rowan had prepared for this last teaching day was mostly revision of the more important Kernels of Truth and, by High-sun he could sense that the Greys were all eager to leave and put some of these teachings into practice. He dismissed the class and the Reds brushed whiskers with their ex-pupils and watched the new colonists troop excitedly off across the Dogleg Field, heading westwards.

‘Do you know when the next batch is due in?’ Rowan asked Hickory.

‘I would think that they’ll be here with the first showing of the New Moon,’ he replied.

CHAPTER THREE

The grey squirrel, Sumac, with his mate Tumbleweed, had been among the new graduates when they had crossed the Dogleg Field and the humans’ roadway. On the far side of that they had waved farewell to their class-mates. The mass of Greys had headed west, seeking lands to colonise.

Some of the ideas these friendly Reds had introduced him to were very different to the traditional concepts of the Greys. Guardianship, for instance – being responsible for an area instead of owning and defending it against all comers. Then there was this idea of Life-mating. He looked at Tumbleweed as she sat watching the others going out of sight. Did he really want to spend his whole life with her, rather than ‘play the wood’ as Grey males had traditionally done? Did she share his views on all the things they had been taught?

Sumac had decided that they would not travel with the others but would see if he could find a vacant territory to look after on Screech Hill, which he could see forming a hump on the skyline to the south-west. But suppose that any Greys he encountered were not friendly or still practised the old ways?

‘Wait here,’ he told Tumbleweed, ‘I need to go back and ask Rowan something. I won’t be long.’ He checked that there were none of the humans’ travelling boxes coming along the roadway from either direction, and then scurried across.

The horses that lived in the Dogleg Field were down at the far end of the field and did not see him as he hopped across it, avoiding the piles of dung that littered the cropped grass, sun, rain and beetles breaking each pile down to return the borrowed nourishment to the soil below. Soon he was with Rowan.

‘Hello, Sumac-friend,’ Rowan greeted his star pupil. ‘I thought you had left.’

‘I had, but there is something I needed to ask you.’ Rowan raised an eyebrow and waited.

‘It’s about the Sun. I’ve listened to all you taught us and everything makes sense to me, but most of the other Greys were not so convinced. How can I tell whether or not any Grey I meet is a true believer?’

‘As you are obviously a Sun-squirrel, I will let you into a secret,’ Rowan replied. ‘What does
this
mean to you?’

He scratched
 in the dirt where they were sitting.

‘It looks like a fish to me,’ said Sumac.

‘Right,’ said Rowan. ‘That’s what it is. Marguerite, my sister, learned the shape from some dolphins – you remember I told you about them. We Sun-squirrels use it to let others know what we are.’

‘But what has a fish go to do with being a Sun-squirrel?’

‘Nothing, that’s why we use it. If we used a symbol like this
 it would be easy to guess its meaning. So, if you are not sure of a squirrel’s beliefs just idly make the fish mark and any Sun-squirrel will recognise it and identify himself.’

‘Thank you my friend.’

The Red and Grey squirrels brushed whiskers.

‘The Sun be with you.’

‘And with you.’

Sumac was about to hurry back to join Tumbleweed when he remembered a kernel that Meadowsweet had taught him.

Squirrels do not live

By nuts alone. Take time off

To seek out beauty.

He changed his direction and set off to circle the Blue Pool for one last time, relishing the bright azure colour of its still waters where it lay deep among the green of the pines and the banks of purple rhododendron flowers, flamboyant against their glossy dark leaves.

Tumbleweed was waiting impatiently. ‘Where in the Sunless-pit have you been?’ she snapped.

Sumac decided that it was not the right time for him to explain about
 symbols and Sun-squirrels.

Larch the Curious looked at the tree that had lost its top in the Great Storm. The splintered trunk was silhouetted against the dawn sky and he thought it looked like a giant squirrel with two spikes of torn wood fibres forming its tufted ears.

He ran up the scaly bark and bit at some of the exposed wood, then came down for another look. It was even more like a squirrel now, only the nose was wrong. He went up again and gnawed at that area. By the time the sun was well up, his teeth and jaws were aching from his efforts and he climbed an unbroken tree to rest. It was too early in the year for the boatloads of human visitors to arrive, but he always enjoyed this daytime snooze in the high branches. He wished that his life-mate Clover would join him, but knew that she was off somewhere with the two ex-princesses, Cowzlip and Voxglove.

Clover had told him that she had been planning a special kind of drey with them. Cowzlip and Voxglove had taken over her role as Carer and had suggested that they ought to have another drey near their own for sick squirrels to use. A further drey was to hold a selection of healing herbs.

This was all very well, thought Larch, but with Clover doing her best as Tagger for the increasing population of the island and this involvement with the Carers, she had little time to spend with him.

Larch admitted to himself that he was bored. Making that broken tree look like a squirrel had been fun – it had certainly made the time pass more quickly.

He was waking from a lazy afternoon’s dozing when his son and daughter joined him.

‘Greetings, Larch-Pa,’ they said together and he greeted them in return.

‘Come and look at this,’ he said, leading them to where they could see the shape of a squirrel’s head against the sky.

‘That’s great, Larch-Pa,’ Elm said, glancing at his sister and trying to keep a straight face, ‘but its forepaws are wrong.’

‘I haven’t done anything to those,’ Larch said.

‘It looks as if it’s holding a Woodstock,’ said Trefoil. ‘With a bit of careful shaping it would scare off any pine marten.’

Larch looked round apprehensively. It was only the year before that the pine marten which had terrorised the island squirrels had been killed. Sun, save us from any more, he thought.

Trefoil and Elm were already up the broken tree biting at the flaking bark and trimming off some of the dead twigs and small branches which were sticking out.

‘A bit more off that one,’ Larch called up to Elm.

CHAPTER FOUR

Marguerite was concerned about Chip. Since he had come to Ourland he had outgrown a lot of the shyness which had, without doubt been caused by his fear of his father, the dreadful Crag. The young squirrel, for whom she had a special affection, had proved to be very clever, but since he had been down-tagged, little had been seen of him. She asked other squirrels if they knew where Chip was and one told her that he was twisting rushes together down near the Zwamp. It was here that she found him, engrossed with something that he had made and, so as not to frighten him, she called, ‘Chip, it’s me,’ as she approached.

The young squirrel looked up, apparently pleased to see her, and held out the thing he had made. ‘Look at this,’ he said proudly.

Marguerite reached out and took the square of woven rushes from his paws. Across the hollow of the square were single pithy stems of reedmace and on each were threaded several rings of cherry bark. Marguerite had often seen hollow reddish-brown tubes of bark on the ground beneath wild cherry trees where the tough outer coverings of fallen twigs and small branches had been slower to rot than the softer wood inside. Chip had evidently bitten one of these tubes into rings. She counted eight rings on each rush stem.