John Saturnall's Feast Read Online Free Page B

could not name. They carried words in their beaks, fluttering up out of their treetop garden. The building featured again, larger now but obscured by the trunks of the trees. The chimney peeked over the top. His mother turned and the bolder pages resumed. They seemed to have been added later to illustrate the ancient ones, for these showed birds from great eagles to fig-peekers. John turned to a river with fishes jumping in and out of the water. Each scale held a word, the lines leaping from body to body. The building rose on the far bank. The next was a seashore teeming with tiny scuttling crabs. Now he could see that the building was grander: a hall with high arched windows. The chimney was a great tower. Orchards of cherries, apples and pears followed, the trees all laid out in a criss-cross pattern. There were the high arched windows and chimney again. Almost a palace, John thought. Who lived there?
    A strange plantation passed before John's eyes. At the back of his throat his demon stirred as if he might smell the scents of the blossom or taste the fruits. Every plant and creature imaginable was here, he thought, the real and fanciful crowded together. But the wisps of steam still rose from her kettle. The strange gardens no more told him why he and his mother belonged in Buckland than the grass in the meadow outside. John felt his defiance evaporate, replaced by bafflement.
    ‘I don't understand,’ he confessed at last.
    His mother smiled.
    ‘I'll teach you.’

    It was all but dark when the driver turned the piebald mare off the road. Josh and Ben tramped through a meadow to a broken-down barn. A ramp of earth led into the croft. Joshua hitched up the horses. Then he came to the mule. On its back, the boy lolled to one side.
    ‘I told you to keep an eye on him,’ the driver told Ben sharply. ‘Now look.’
    The boy was shivering. Joshua untied the bindings about his wrists and ankles then eased him off the animal's back. He collapsed on the floor.
    ‘I thought you meant he'd run away,’ Ben Martin offered awkwardly.
    ‘How's he going to do that?’ Josh snapped, chafing warmth into the boy's hands. ‘Ain't got nowhere to run, has he? Come on, get hold of his feet.’
    The boy struggled weakly as Josh stripped off the sodden coat. They worked on his shivering limbs then pulled a wool coverlet from one of the sacks. The boy seemed indifferent to these attentions, neither helping nor hindering. He was thinner even than he had appeared on the mule, his ribs and collarbone jutting out. His face betrayed no reaction as Josh wrapped him in the blanket.
    While the driver brushed down the horses, Ben Martin foraged for wood. The parcel's strange odour wafted up. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the boy's head turn.
    ‘You know this smell?’ Ben asked.
    The strange odour had hung about him since the back room of the Dog at Night the week before. Like pitch but sweet, even wrapped in oilcloth and sealed with wax. Almery had heaved the parcel onto the table.
    Buckland Manor, the dark-faced man had told him in his strange accent. Carriage to Richard Scovell. Master Cook to Sir William Fremantle himself, the man had added with a grin. Nine shillings had seemed a good price at the time.
    Before that night he had carried nothing heavier than the ledger-books of Master Samuel Fessler, wool-factor, who was Ben's late employer. He had never set foot in the Vale of Buckland. He had never been so far as the Levels. But Ben had nodded to the dark-skinned man in the warm back room. The next morning he had shouldered the strange-smelling pack and set out for the Vale.
    The boy looked away. The fire crackled and Josh cut a loaf into three. The men watched the boy rip hunks off his share and cram them into his mouth, chewing and gulping with a grim determination.
    ‘Where's his folks?’ Ben Martin asked.
    ‘Ain't got none.’
    Josh recalled the trudge through the silent village, Father Hole's six half-flagon bottles clanking