The Runes of Norien

Yonfi was chasing a butterfly. It was almost as big as a sparrow, and its wings were a deep, striking blue that caught the moon and shimmered like the smoke from Papa’s long wooden pipe in the darkness before bedtime, so that Yonfi thought that if he tried to grasp it the butterfly would melt in the air – which made his desire to catch it even greater.

  And running after the pretty butterfly through tufts of weeds and wildflowers, Yonfi soon found himself in a place entirely familiar, even though Mama and Papa didn’t want him playing there anymore: the wild-grown garden of Master Gaddel. They said it was a dangerous place for a little boy, because it was full of nettles and thistles and thorn bushes, amongst which snakes and rats might be lurking. But Yonfi didn’t think of himself as a little boy, nor did he fear being pricked or stung or bitten; he wasn’t a cry baby – whenever his arms and legs were grazed, he merely wiped the blood away and carried on, sometimes even bringing his bloody fingers to his lips to taste the strange salty stuff that was inside him.

  But the main reason why Mama and Papa didn’t want him ‘frolicking around over there’ was because Master Gaddel was dead.

  Now Yonfi knew about death and dying, yet he wasn’t sure he understood just how it worked. It meant that someone had stopped living and gone to the sky to be with the Spirits – but then why say that this someone was dead? It was like saying, Mama was anrgy, or Papa was tired, or Yodren (his big brother, whom Yonfi had never seen and wanted more than anything to meet) was far away being a clever thing called a ‘Scribe’. So if Master Gaddel ‘was dead’, maybe not all of him was gone, maybe a part of him was still there, sitting around and not talking or eating but sleeping all the time and never waking – being dead.

  What was even more intriguing to Yonfi was the way Master Gaddel had ended up being dead: he had died of sadness. When he’d first heard this – by Yofana, who was older and smarter and knew a heap of things, secret things she’d learnt by pretending to sleep while Mama and Papa talked quietly (he had tried that too, but he always fell asleep) – Yonfi was terribly worried, because both Mama and Papa were sad a lot of the time, but Yofana had told him not to worry, and that Master Gaddel’s sadness had been a thousand times greater than theirs; and then she had told him why.

  It seems that, before he was born, (a time Yonfi couldn’t imagine very well, but since everyone agreed there had been such a time, then it must be true), Master Gaddel had a wife and two sons who were twins, which meant that they looked exactly alike and only their parents could tell them apart. These twins were all grown-up and big and strong, but they didn’t want to be Farmers like their Papa because they said that if they were Miners they would earn more money and be able to buy a big house and have all sorts of pretty things that only the rich could buy. (Here Yonfi usually pictured a big room filled with fancy toys like the red rocking horse his big brother Yodren had sent him from the Castle). So they went off to the Minelands, and they became Miners, and got married to the daughters of a rich gold Miner (were these twins as well? Yonfi wondered). And then one day while they were digging for gold in a tunnel, very, very deep inside a mountain, the roof of the tunnel fell down on them and killed them.

  After that, Master Gaddel and his wife were terribly unhappy, but the wife must have been even more terribly unhappy because after a while she hung herself – which was an awful thing to do if you weren’t a very bad person who was hung by others; Yofana said Spirit Servants didn’t pray for people who hung themselves, for they were cursed – leaving poor Master Gaddel all alone. And the garden of their house, which was once beautiful, filled with rose bushes and lemon trees and singing birds, had gone to weeds, because Master Gaddel was too sad to care, too sad to do anything, like eat or drink water or go to bed at night, and so after a while he died too, of his huge sadness.

  Thinking about these things had taken Yonfi’s mind off the butterfly, and by the time he remembered it and looked around, trying to spot it, all he could see were the purple flowers at the top of the thistles and the thickets of dried grass that reached as high as his head. But he didn’t mind losing the butterfly, because now something far more tempting had dawned on him, something he wanted to do for a long time but didn’t dare to because he knew, even without telling them about it, that Mama and Papa would be terribly mad at him for even thinking such naughty thoughts. What Yonfi craved, what he sometimes even dreamt of doing, was to sneak inside Master Gaddel’s house and see his dead body. Part of him was also a little frightened, for Yofana had told him that dead bodies were really scary, and that’s why people buried them, so they wouldn’t have to see them and get scared all the time. Yet somehow even this fear was part of why Yonfi was so thrilled at the thought of making his bad-boy, naughty wish come true.

  And before he knew it, drawn towards the old, crumbling house like a dog after a hidden juicy bone, Yonfi suddenly realized he was standing on Master Gaddel’s porch and looking with big, hungry eyes at the front door, whose lower half had rotted away, leaving a gap just big enough for him to squirm through.

  Straining his ears in case Mama was calling for him, Yonfi plucked up his courage (though it didn’t take much; he was a brave boy, Yonfi was) and thrust his head in the gap, squeezed his shoulders together to get them through, then spread his palms on the dusty wooden floor and finally, sucking in his belly, he pulled his lower half inside, tumbling across the creaky planks.

  After he’d shaken the thick dust off his face and hair, Yonfi pricked up his ears, but the only thing he could hear in the murky silence was the sound of his own excited heart. He then sniffed the air, sneezed, and sniffed again; Master Gaddel’s house smelled like their cellar, only without all the nice smells from the food Mama kept down there – the jams and the pickles and the slabs of cured pork and heads of hard cheese and the sweet prune wine that they let him have a sip of when he was a very good boy and did all his chores – although lately the shelves seemed to empty a lot more fast than Mama could fill them up again, which made Mama worry even though she tried to hide it by laughing and saying he was eating them out of house and home.

  But the thought of all that food, especially as it was getting late and close to suppertime, made Yonfi’s empty belly groan with hunger, and so, before exploring the house to look for Master Gaddel’s dead body he made his way to the kitchen, guided by the rays of the afternoon moon that snuck through the cracks in the rotting wooden walls. He could tell he was getting closer, because he could hear the scurrying of the rats who’d heard him approach and were diving for their nests and hiding places. The kitchen was bigger than at home, and like most of the house he’d seen until now, it was covered in cobwebs, thickly-woven sheets of delicate white strings stretching between the ceiling corners and the table, chairs, stove and cupboards. Yonfi found cobwebs fascinating, mainly because they seemed to magically appear without anyone having actually seen the spiders spinning them; he had tried to catch a spider at work many times, staring at the little things to see how fast they could weave their white yarn, but it was as if they didn’t want him to see, like their webs were a secret – and so Yonfi had decided that they worked at night, when no one was around to catch them in the act.

  There was no way of snooping around without getting tangled in the cobwebs, but Yonfi didn’t mind (in fact he liked tearing through them, although he felt a little sorry for the spiders, having all their hard work torn apart), and he was instantly rewarded – for in the back of one of the lower cuboards, protected from the rats in a big dusty jar, he found something that looked like sugar. The only trouble was that the jar had one of those thick wooden lids that grownups used to seal jars really tight, and which not even Yofana could pry open. And Yonfi could neither take the sugar back home, nor did he like the thought of breaking it; this was still a strange house and it wasn’t right to break other people’s things even if they were dead like Master Gaddel.

  But then, trying against hope to open the jar, the lid came right off in his hand, to Yonfi’s immense s
urprise. Was it already loose, or had he grown suddenly stronger? Choosing to believe the latter – this proved that he wasn’t a little boy anymore! – he stuck his hand in the jar, took out a scoop of white grainy stuff, and tasting it with the tip of his tongue felt the delightful sweetness of sugar.

  Though he knew that what he did was stealing and also that it would spoil his appetite, Yonfi couldn’t resist, and soon his face and his hands were all sticky from the sugar he hungrily munched and licked off. Now all that remained for this to be a perfect day was finding Master Gaddel’s dead body and seeing if he really was all that scary or if Yofana was lying to make him feel like he was a baby and she a grownup.

  Most people died in their beds, or so he’d gathered (maybe because dying, like Papa said, was like falling asleep) and so he thought that he would have to look for Master Gaddel in his bedroom. But the moment he walked into the room close to the front door – a big room with another, bigger table and more chairs, not wooden ones like they had but big ones made of plump dusty cushions – he saw Master Gaddel’s dead body, not lying down but sitting in one of the big plump chairs, his face turned towards a shuttered window, which convinced Yonfi that even if he wasn’t in his bed Master Gaddel was definitely dead, because if he were alive he would open the window to be able to see outside. He just stood there for a while, gazing at poor Master Gaddel and turning his tongue around to get the sugar that had got stuck between his teeth.

  And then, wiping his hands on his shorts, he placed down the jar and began to walk towards the dead body, taking small, slow, quiet steps although he knew nothing could stir Master Gaddel from his deep sleep. Once he was standing before him and could examine his face more closely, he noticed two things that were strange: the old man’s eyes were open and white like milk, and a long strip of cobweb stretched from his parted lips to an oil lamp on a low table nearby. Could the spider have made its nest inside Master Gaddel’s mouth? Yonfi shuddered at the thought, but his curiosity was greater than his aversion, and so, standing on the tips of his toes, he reached out and touched the old man’s lower lip, to see if he could scare the spider out.

  Then suddenly he gave a gasp of fright and pulled back – but even as he heard it Yonfi knew the gasp wasn’t his, because he’d been squishing his lips together to keep his breath from disturbing the cobweb. And then he heard it again, a long, rattling gasp for air, and looking up he saw Master Gaddel staring at him with wide, terrified eyes.