Tom, Thom Read online

  To his mother, he says, “But will he talk? Will he order me about? Will I have to be nice to him?”

  His mother smiles. “Perhaps. I don’t know yet.”

  “When he gets older, will he go back to his kin?”

  Then the smile droops. “We must never speak of that, Tom. Not to him. Not to anyone. Do you promise?”

  “I promise,” Tom says. He would not like it if someone reminded him that he had been left on a stranger’s doorstep, that his folk had crept home through the night without him. That would be hurtful. It would break the oath he has sworn, an oath between brothers, vague and solemn.

  All the same, he senses that this new promise will not stand for long. He already presses against his limits: swollen with secrets that stretch his skin. He looks at this frail thing, his little brother. This not-quite-human bundle of limbs. He should feel love. Instead, he feels tired. Unequal to the task. Somewhere deep inside him, a twinge of dread begins.

  * * *

  Since the war, the folk of Leynmouth have not been so superstitious. Still, they have lived a long time with superstition. All their lives have been steeped in it, spent beside the peril of the forest. At times, along the ridge of the almost-black woodline, dogs and birds have been found dead. No one can say for sure what killed them. And so a certain legend resounds.

  It is no surprise, then, that word gets around about Thom. When Tom and Thom go into town, other boys throw rocks at Thom’s head. Very small rocks, ripped-up road rubble, but hard and sharp-edged. Shops close their doorways, shutter their windows. “Sorry, my lad,” says the shopkeeper, who, in summer, had given Tom an apple. “Best go elsewhere. Bad for business.” He acts like Thom is not there at all, like Thom is a shadow that Tom casts.

  “They think that your brother will rot their apples,” Tom’s mother says, when he comes back and tells her of these proceedings. “They think he will cause their milk to curdle, and crack all the shells of their eggs.”

  When Thom comes back from town bleeding at the eye, Tom’s mother forbids them to go back to Leynmouth. “I’ll do the shopping till they find their senses,” she says. Still, trouble finds its way up to their doorstep. There are notes tied to bricks tossed through the window. There are straw crosses, and holly branches bound with white thread. These are signs to keep off the Devil. There is the dead bird that Tom and Thom find nailed to the broad painted wood of the door, its eyes like filmy black ice chips, its fine-boned wings outspread.

  It is not clear to Tom how much of this Thom understands. Thom will say only their shared name. He says it for all communication. He cries when hurt; he cries over his burnt hand, though Tom’s mother rubs beeswax salve into it and sings him nursery songs made up of nonsense.

  At night, when the two of them are tucked up in bed, she tells them stories. She tells them of the great king under the mountain who sleeps with a mistletoe sprig through his heart and a crown of holly berries on his head.

  The midwinter nights grow long and spiny as frost. Snow compounds snow with its odd permanence. Tom starts to dream of wolves again. Now, though, when he wakes in the night, Thom is beside him. Often, he is not sleeping. Tom thinks, He sees into my dreams. That is what wakes him. He wonders if Thom has dreams of his own. Perhaps he does not, and they share Tom’s dreams.

  One night, not long after Christmas, Tom wakes from the same wolf-troubled dream. In his dream, the snow is up to his knees. The wolves are passing all around him. They are as tall as he is, fast and sleek. Their eyes are dense and gold as birds’ eyes. They shake the snow off their pelts and pace on either side of him. He curls in the snow, brought low by terror. He hugs his arms around himself. Just when he smells the woodsy, rotting wolf-breath and feels its warm damp on his skin, he snaps awake.

  Thom is watching him. In the dark, his eyes look like amber. He says, “There are no wolves in the wood. So why do you dream it?”

  “I don’t know,” Tom says. “It’s just a dream.”

  He turns on his side and resumes his sleep.

  In the morning, when Tom wakes again, Thom is still talking. He goes on talking in a not quite natural manner, as though he is pruning the words from some overgrown tree. When she hears Thom at the breakfast table, chatting carefully, Tom’s mother drops her coffee cup. But all she says is, “Would you like some more sausages? Tom? Thom?”

  Thom says, “Yes, please.”

  * * *

  For the rest of that winter, Thom practises speaking. He has a strange way of speaking in stories. Perhaps he has absorbed it from long nights of Tom’s mother’s fables. Perhaps it is how his own people speak. If Tom says to him, “Look where that old crow is sitting! I bet I could strike him from his tree with a pebble,” Thom is apt to respond, “The old king Mark had a daughter who kept ravens: Forthright, Sanctity, and Seacraft. So she called them. Each one would fly around the world and say to her exactly what it had seen. And if you said a wrong word to her ravens, or shook a weapon, and if her ravens hapt to see, then the daughter of King Mark would come to you at night.”

  “And then?”

  “Then she would curse you. So your heart would turn to a piece of seed, and one of her ravens would pluck it up.”

  “Mum says there’s no such thing as curses,” Tom says, but all the same he throws no pebbles at the crow in the tree.

  Another time they are trudging, as they often trudge, through the snow round Loch Leighin’s boundary. Winter is no bar to Thom. He likes the cold, and will carelessly leave his coat and hat until Tom’s mother runs after: “You’ll catch your death, what are you thinking?” Thom will allow her to button him into his coat—but then loses his mittens or scarf, shedding them indifferently.

  Tom doesn’t care for the cold. It hurts his bones. But he can’t admit that without wounding his infant bravery. So instead he walks with Thom along the woods and the icy lakeside. “In summer there are fishes,” he says to Thom. “In summer there are flowers. I carry my rod and catch the fish. I lie in the grass and I count aeroplanes.”

  “What is ‘aeroplanes’?” Thom asks him.

  “Where you come from, don’t they have aeroplanes?”

  He realizes that he has broken his promise. He is not meant to ask about where Thom comes from, an inhibition imparted daily by the climate of chill round the topic. He wishes the words back, feeling shame.

  But Thom looks at him calmly. “The old king Tistram had a beautiful son. More beautiful than all the world was the son of this king. But he was alone, since no one in the world could match his beauty. He grew sad and sold his soul to the sorcerer Lopt, who gave him a white seabird’s wings. Tistram’s son thought he would fly from this world. But it did not work. He was too heavy.”

  “So what happened?”

  “He fell to the earth and died. But the earth would not bury him, because of his beauty. So it gave him to the sea, but the sea would not bury him, because of his beauty. So it gave him to his father, the old king Tistram, who placed his son’s body in a place where the birds could come and eat. So all the birds of the world came and ate him up, and were more beautiful for it.”

  Tom says, “That’s a horrid story.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Can’t you see why it’s horrid?”

  “No.”

  Sometimes Tom thinks Thom seems much older than him. They are the same size; they have the same bedtime; often Tom will recognize an object—a lamp, a motorcar, a coal scuttle—and Thom will not know what it is. As though Thom is an infant, new in the world, where Tom is old and confident. And yet Thom will tell stories rife with corpses, with broken swords and madness. Thom’s stories have ghosts and gruesome trials, sad gods; they end in suffering. Sometimes they have no ending at all. They are not proper stories.

  “When it’s summer,” Tom says, “we’ll stay outdoors forever. I’ll show you the aeroplanes then. You’ll see. They look like birds.”

  “Summer,” Thom says.

  He says the word in a w
ay that suggests it’s foreign, like wireless, petrol, telegraph, heat. Tom wants to ask, Is there not summer where you come from?, but it seems an absurd thing. Summer is not set to one location. There is summer in the woods and summer in Leynmouth; there is even summer in the mountains to the north. Green surfaces and spreads across the dead grass of hillsides. Gorse shows where the frost has been. There is nowhere on earth immune to summer.

  That night, when Tom wakes from his wolf-dream, Thom asks him, “Why are there always wolves in your dreams?”

  “I don’t know.” Tom hunches his shoulders inwards.

  Thom says, “I don’t dream.” It sounds like a secret, something confided to the air that their shared breath heats.

  Tom asks, tentatively, “Where you come from, do the people not dream?”

  “We don’t sleep. Not like you do. We might sleep for a season, or for a whole century, maybe.”

  “For a hundred years?” Tom cannot believe it.

  “We get tired.” Thom’s eyes flicker.

  “Do you miss the place that you came from?” Tom asks him.

  Thom tells him a story. “When Prince Uther was still in his regency, he fell in love with a night-blooming flower that grew upon the King of Arth’s barrow. So he changed the flower into a young woman, and she was very pure and fair, and he carried her off to his own splendid castle. But so strong was her own nature, so great was the sympathy of earth and root and stem, that the flagstones of Uther’s castle cracked under her footsteps. Every sort of sapling broke through the stones. Brambles overtook Uther’s towers, and a river rose up from the seat of his throne, and a multitude of strange fish swam in it, and great beasts lumbered in the shadows of the forecourt. And though the young woman could never again be a night-blooming flower, she could rule over all of this.”

  Silence hangs in the still, dark air. “I don’t understand,” Tom says.

  Thom shrugs. He fingers the scar on his palm. “Sometimes I don’t understand things that you say.”

  Tom senses it is not the same somehow. But he does not know how to say the difference between his descriptions of gas stoves and kettles and the strangeness of Thom’s stories. Instead, he says, “Do you not mind when I ask you about it?”

  “Why would I mind?”

  “Mum says I shouldn’t. You might be sad. That’s what she thinks.”

  Thom blinks slowly. His eyes are wide, bright, foreign. He says, “I’m sad anyways.”

  * * *

  After that, they talk often about Thom’s homeland. They talk about it quietly, in secret, so that Tom’s mother won’t hear them. She’s the one it would make sad, Tom thinks. This must be the logic to her prohibition. For Thom does not mind the talking-about-things. He will go on at length, lost in description. Tom learns that in the land where Thom lived, there is not bread, or milk, or even bacon. There aren’t even apples—“not the kind you have here, white when you bite them. Only gold ones that taste like cold, sweet water.”

  “That doesn’t sound very nice.”

  “You haven’t tasted them.”

  Even the water that runs through Thom’s homeland is different. It is white as snow, and very pure. “But cold,” Thom says. “Everything is cold there.” The nights last for thirteen or fourteen hours. Sometimes there are nights that go on for years, and no one can predict when they will come. One day the sun does not rise in the east, and then you know that night has come. The sun travels elsewhere. The birds stay asleep. “We have, in my home,” Thom says, “many birds. They sleep all through the long, long nights. But when the sun’s out, they sing in mortal words, and tell us our fortunes, and speak with our gods.”

  Thom is astonished to learn that Tom thinks himself uncomprehended by birds. “You are just not singing to them right. Listen.” He whistles, low and complex. A dark winter bird, something close to a crow, echoes it back from the branch of a crooked sapling. Tom tries, but he can’t make the same sort of bird sound. He feels a hollow resentment grow.

  There are times when Tom wonders if Thom’s being entirely truthful. Tom’s mother has told him not to tell lies. The Devil is the breeder of lies, she tells him. He pictures the Devil: a beekeeper in a back garden, keeping and tending his hives, while lies fly out in little black swarms, wild and venomous and alive. That is what a lie is like, in your belly. When you spit it out, it puts its sting in your tongue, poisons you as it takes flight. So he does not lie if he can help it. But Thom, he thinks, Thom might lie. In Thom’s stories of his homeland, there are always sweet apples and red grapes and wine, and milk, and tree-sap-coloured honey, and a kind of warm syrup that smells of pine. All of the men there feed on nectars. But Tom has seen Thom at supper, and knows he sucks the marrow out of beef bones. He likes lamb shanks. He delights in the pinkest part of the meat. He drinks the bloody juice from his plate. Tom can’t imagine him drinking wine, or eating fruit steeped in flower water. He remembers the carrion smell at his shoulder when he stood at the woodpile that November night. That was the smell of a hawk or a vulture. A hunter. So when Thom describes the mild tastes of his homeland, Tom thinks, Are you lying?

  Once, after Thom tells him how each tree in the forest used to be a courtier under the old king Gawain, and each courtier in turn asked the king for a gift, and that gift was the gift of never dying, and the old king Gawain made it so that they would not die, but would live forever in the bodies of trees … When Thom has finished telling this story, Tom turns to him and asks, “Did you make that story up?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Are you lying to me?”

  Thom doesn’t blink. “And what if I was?”

  “The Devil is the breeder of lies. You mustn’t tell them.”

  Thom considers this statement. “Why not?”

  Tom flounders. The conclusion ought to be obvious. Yet Thom appears not to see; he stares at Tom and waits for an answer.

  “I don’t know why,” Tom says. “You just shouldn’t tell them.”

  When no further answer is forthcoming, Thom turns away. A sullen air settles on him. “Where I come from,” he says, “the Father of Lies is our favourite god. Every year there is a festival devoted to him. Everyone tells all the lies they can and their lies become more and more beautiful. At the end of the festival, the man who has told the most beautiful lies gets a gift.”

  “What does he get?”

  “His lies become true.” Thom scuffs his foot against a snow bank. He squints up to where the sky is barraged by birds. The birds are black, and then all at once they have left. The sky is white where the clouds blunder low. All other colour has been leached from that landscape. Thom alone stands out from the snow, with his wolf-like eyes and his wild red hair.

  * * *

  By the time the snow starts melting, Leynmouth similarly thaws in its treatment of Thom. No longer are there stones aimed at his head, though the shopkeepers hold fast—Thom may press his face to the glass of their windows when they’re not looking, but they will not let him in.

  “Could you really,” Tom asks him, “curdle their milk? If you wanted to?”

  “I don’t know,” Thom says. He appears uninterested in the subject.

  “Could you crack the shells of their eggs?”

  They are walking through town. Thom stops at a window. He leans forward. His breath clouds the glass. His boots scrape the pavement. It is the butcher’s shop, where several half-pigs hang in the window: skinless, their bones exposed. The white fat on them glistens.

  Tom swallows. He does not like to look at the pigs. He thinks of the wolves tackling prey in the forest. He thinks of the things that older boys have said about what happened elsewhere in the war. “Never mind,” he says. “Let’s go.”

  Thom doesn’t move. He licks his lips. He is more than usually hungry, since winter began to fade. The new warmth seems to make him leaner. The longer sunlight thins him down, makes his face look sharp, his arms like sticks. “When the sorcerer Lopt was a child,” he starts …
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br />   “Never mind,” Tom says again. “I don’t want you to tell me a story.”

  “I thought you liked my stories,” Thom says. For an instant, a look of despair crosses his face; ends Tom’s impatience. Tom reaches out to touch Thom’s hand. He thinks to himself: Kin. He feels the white scar that bands the palm there: Not kin.

  They walk home through the mud streets of Leynmouth. The snow-melt turns the fields into fens, segments the earth in splinters and shudders of rivers.

  That evening, when they are dressing for bed, Thom pulls an unbroken egg from his pocket. Perhaps he has stolen it from the kitchen. It looks like quite an ordinary egg. Thom holds it flat, balanced in his palm. “It’s for you,” he says. “A gift.” He is whispering: this is a transaction between them.

  In Thom’s palm, the egg begins to crack. First the fragile china skin splits, like the crust of ice on the lake when springtime erupts from under it. Thom holds his hand still and lets the egg shudder. A little gilt beak comes out of it, and then the curve of a wing, pearl-coloured. A bird pushes out, bit by bit: not a dull, plain bird, like a goose or a chicken, but something iridescent. Its eyes are amber-gold. Its silver wing-tips are sharp. It is so small that it can fit entirely in Thom’s palm. Tom watches its pinprick claws flex and curl.

  “Oh,” he says. “Can I hold it?” He keeps his voice quiet, so as not to scare the bird.

  Thom shifts the bird out of Tom’s reach. “Only I can handle it. If you were one of the folk of my country, then you could have one of your own. In my country, the air is full of them.” The bird blinks and makes a cooing sound. Thom holds it close and strokes it.

  “Can we keep it? We could keep it in a cage in the corner.”

  Thom doesn’t answer. He carries the bird to the window and undoes the latch that sticks the pane shut. A gust of raw wind gets in, smelling of places where the ice is still thick on the ground. Thom slips the bird out the window. It clings to the ledge. He whispers to it, bending close. He whistles. It takes flight: wings like knives in the darkness.