The Winds of Heaven Read Online Free Page A

imagine, had been coming closer and closer all the long day, till it was so very near you could reach out and touch, and then – she’d gone and missed it. She’d missed it.
    And now she would never see it, and she would never taste ambrosia, never – ‘Never ever!’ shrieked Clementine.
    Her mother held her closer and kissed the top of her slippery hair.
    ‘Oh, Clementine!’ she sighed. ‘What are we going to do with you?’

Chapter Two
    They shared Fan’s room at the end of the hall, a small room with two beds, a battered wardrobe and an old chair squashed in beside the chest of drawers. Clementine’s bed was beneath the window, Fan’s up against the wall, and the space between them was so narrow they could hold hands.
    Fan’s room. But it had once been Caroline’s room too. Clementine hadn’t asked Fan about her sister, though she longed to know if Caroline had run away. She hadn’t asked because Fan never spoke of Caroline, and this seemed strange to Clementine, who’d always wanted a sister and knew that if she’d had one she’d never stop talking about her, like her friend Allie never stopped talking about her big sister, Meg. Perhaps it was different if you had a sister who’d run away.
    Fan told stories. She was in the middle of one now, spinning round in the cramped space in the centre of the room while Clementine sat cross-legged on her bed, listening hard, because she’d never heard stories like these.
    ‘And then,’ Fan cried, flinging her head back so that her two thick plaits bounced and swung against her shoulder blades, waving her arms dramatically, ‘then, well, the magic kid, he sang the tree – ’
    ‘He sang to it?’ asked Clementine. ‘He sang a song to a
tree
?’
    ‘No, not sang
to
it. He
sang
it.’ Fan stood still for a moment. ‘That’s a kind of magic,’ she explained. ‘It’s making things. It means he made the tree
be
there.’ With small quick hands she shaped a tree growing, spreading the roots wide and deep, raising the trunk, stretching her arms out to make a thick canopy of leaves and branches, her movements so sure and tender that Clementine wouldn’t have been surprised if a real tree had suddenly sprung up through the floor. You could
feel
a tree.
    ‘So,’ Fan went on, ‘so he sang the tree and it flew right up into the sky with all the bad spirits hanging on to it. And when it was high, really high, right up in the clouds – ’ she stood on her toes and stretched her arms above her head, ‘then he called the winds of heaven and they made the tree shake like anything, like there was a big storm, a thousand storms, and the wicked spirits all fell down to the ground and changed into great big stones – ’
    ‘I’ve seen those stones!’ Clementine burst out. ‘I saw them when we were coming up in the train! They’re grey and they look like sheep sleeping in the grass!’
    ‘And did you see the pebbles? The little white pebbles lying everywhere?’
    Clementine shook her head. ‘The train was going too fast.’
    ‘Those pebbles are the bad spirits’ teeth. When they fell down all their teeth got knocked out and turned into little white pebbles and scattered all over the ground!’
    ‘Oh! And then what? What did the magic kid do then?’
    ‘What do you think?’ Fan jumped up beside Clementine, and the old wooden bed creaked and groaned beneath them. ‘Like an old cow having a calf, eh?’ giggled Fan. She reachedup and yanked the curtains apart and together they peered out into the dark backyard, at the black shapes of Uncle Len’s shed and the big gum tree beside it, and beyond the sagging fence the night-time paddocks stretching on and on, all silvery with the moon. Fan pointed upwards to the vast black sky that was filled with stars. They were bigger than the ones Clementine saw in the city, they were as big as the magic dogs’ eyes in the story Mrs Carmody had read to them on the last afternoon before the holidays; as big as teacups,