-14-
SMOOTHLY, THE ship glides through the waves. Although the waters are calm, I don’t feel quite steady on my legs, so I hold on to the railing. Or maybe I’m just spinning on my legs because of all the stress.
Walt walks over and joins me. We look at the stars in the dark sky together in silence.
“I’m sorry,” he finally says, sounding genuinely contrite.
“For what?” I ask.
Clumsily, he puts a hand on my fingers clasping the railing. “I bet you think I’m an arrogant showoff.”
“Yes, I kind of do,” I admit frankly.
His face falls. “Oh.”
“Well, you’re being one.”
“True.”
“But you’re sorry about it?”
“Yes. Because I’m not like that.” He takes a deep breath. “I just don’t know how to behave when I’m around you. So I start acting all tough.”
Oh. I totally hadn’t seen this coming. I shoot him a nervous glance. “Uhm, yes, I sort of recognize that. I, uhm, feel that way too when I’m close to you. So I start acting all snappy.”
Walt nods slowly. The coastline is approaching on our left side. Or the ‘port side’, as the captain calls it. We’re almost at the eastern beach, and the moment of truth is upon us.
“Will you stay by my side when we go ashore?” he asks softly.
I grin awkwardly. “What, and run the risk of you acting all tough?”
He bites back a smile. “I’ll try to restrain myself.”
“Okay. We’re good, then.”
Walt flings an arm around me, pulls me close and kisses me gently on my forehead before walking away to join the captain. His smell lingers in my nose when I watch him walk away. He smells good.
The captain is busy instructing his helmsmen to get the ship as close to shore as possible before lowering the anchor. We have to disembark by using smaller boats – or sloops, as Walt said they were called – to get to the beach. In my mind it takes ages before we’re all standing on the eastern shore. Every moment that I don’t know what happened to Colin and the others seems to last a lifetime. Anything could be happening to them right now, and I can’t stop myself from thinking up all kinds of horrible things.
When we finally leave for Newexter, I lead and keep up the pace. The woods are dark, but I know my way here like the back of my hand. The night is pitch-black, and there’s a certain tension in the air that I pick up on our way to the village. Even before we get to my old village, I know something’s going on. Despite the late hour and the lack of moonlight, everybody’s awake. Agitated voices rise up from the village square. People have lit fires everywhere, and when I reach the square with the Bookkeeper’s army in tow, the Eldest hurries toward me with my mother at his side.
His jaw drops when he sees the others. “Who are they?”
“Fools,” I reply. “They’re here to help us.”
My mother takes my hand and pulls me into a warm embrace. “You’re still alive,” she stammers. “Colin wasn’t sure you…”
Colin. “Where is he? Is he here? Was he able to escape?”
She nods. “He and Pete came to us as fast as possible, and the other youngsters followed not too long after. Colin wasn’t sure you’d manage to get away from Saul’s guards, so he was worried sick.”
“What about Andy?” I look around me. “Where’s Andy?”
My mother shakes her head. “He didn’t make it.”
My stomach turns. “What? Is he...”
“He’s in the manor house,” the Eldest quickly explains. “Saul is holding him hostage. We went there, but Saul’s refusing to give up his position. If we attack, Andy will die, he says.”
“What will happen now?” Walt inquires quietly, lining up beside me. He’s really trying to stay by my side.
I breathe in and out, looking around the circle of people who have gathered here to listen to the conversation between me and the Eldest. I see Mara’s eyes, red and puffy with tears for Andy. I catch my mother looking at me expectantly. I’ve never had people looking at me for counsel, but it feels good. It feels right. I started this, and I’ll finish it, too.
“I suggest we go back to the house and break down all the doors and windows. We’ll keep at it until Saul has no choice but to come outside, let Andy go and surrender. And if he doesn’t, we’ll smoke him out.” My eyes take in the torches that the villagers are holding. The flicker of the flames lends the square a macabre atmosphere. “Let’s burn the place down.”
“Burn the manor house? But where will the youngsters live?” Mara’s mother cries out from the circle.
“Here.” I gesture around me decidedly. “They will live right here. With you, in the village. We belong together.”
I can’t explain why I know this, but I just do. Tony will provide them with all the explanations later. For now, what matters is that we belong together and we have to rely on each other. Deep down, I’d always hoped for this. I’d never said it out loud, like Colin, for fear of being ridiculed – or even worse, being disappointed. As disappointed as I’d felt when my mother wouldn’t look me in the eye that one morning when I moved out. But now, it is no longer hope. It is faith. I truly believe it, and it’s a truth that comes from the inside. A truth not taught to me, but learned by me.
As the men of the village are gathering to join the ranks of the Bookkeeper’s army, Colin comes running toward me. “Andy wasn’t fast enough to hide The Book,” he says dejectedly. “I think Saul stole it back. He might have even destroyed it.”
“It doesn’t matter anymore,” I reply. “Tony told me our ancestors left us a message that wasn’t lost, and never will be.”
“Really? What kind of message?”
“I’m sure he’ll tell us all about it.”
A little later we leave for the house that I’ve spent the past six years of my life in and around. I hate to admit it, but I’m actually thrilled at the thought of it going up in flames. It felt more like a prison than a home, even if the old Luke and Leia lived there. All the things that have taken place in that house would never have met with their approval; of that I’m sure.
Even though there are over two hundred people trudging through the forest by now, it’s strangely quiet. No one speaks. It’s not until the manor comes into view that a buzz arises among our ‘soldiers’. The crowd speeds up like one man, carrying hundreds of torches and muttering curses, and it doesn’t take us long to reach the entrance of the house. The Eldest steps forward.
“Saul, come out of there!” he calls out in a booming voice. “It’s over. You can’t win this.”
Nothing happens.
Just then, I see a stone sail through the air past my head. It hits the front door with a dull thud. It seems to be the signal for an unplanned attack, because more projectiles start being thrown: branches, stones, burning torches.
“Stop!” The Eldest bellows when the door finally opens a crack. “Someone’s coming.”
Saul steps outside, his face ashen. He’s tied Andy up with a rope around his arms and wrists, and he’s holding the rope in a death grip. His other hand is holding one of the bloodied swords from the dining room.
“If I go down, then Andy goes down with me,” he barks back. “Lay one finger on me and I swear he won’t survive.”
“What is it you think you’re doing, Saul?” I plead with him. “What are you trying to achieve with this? What is it you’re fighting for?”
Saul stares at me with a deadly look in his eyes. “This is our world,” he rages, his voice breaking. “A world without help or support from others. A world without parents. That is the truth. And no one will tell us otherwise. Nobody will tell me otherwise.”
“That’s not true,” I argue. “The parents are here for us.”
“Yours, maybe,” Saul snaps. “I have no one. I’m alone.”
He’s right. Only now do I remember that Saul and Ben have no parents. They’re orphans. Nobody has ever really taken care of them. No one in Newexter even stood up for them after my call to arms and sweet suggestion we torch this place.
“You’re not alone,” Tony’s voice then sounds calmly. “None of you are.” He takes a few steps forward, holding up his hands spread out in a peaceful gesture. “I want to tell you about your ancestors. They loved you. They didn’t want you to ever be forgotten.”
“What in Luke’s name are you talking about?” Saul grumbles with a frown. “How would you know?”
“Well, I know more than you do.”
Saul turns red. “Are you here to tell lies, just like that other so-called visitor from across the sea? Do you actually know what we’ve done to him for lying to us?”
Tony nods. “Yes. I do. And I also know that you acted out of fear, and that this fear won’t leave you, no matter how many people you put to the sword.”
Silence ensues. Tony’s words seem to hit the mark. Saul’s shoulders sag a bit and he looks puzzled.
Tony uses Saul’s hesitation to his advantage. He takes a strange device with buttons out of his pocket that I’ve never seen before. Saul eyes it suspiciously, but his jaw drops when Tony presses a green button and the thing starts to speak in a tinny voice. A voice speaking an old language, even more old-fashioned than the great-grandparents in Newexter speak like. Some popping and hissing sounds accompany the voice, but the words are clear.
“Please, whoever you are, whoever will hear this – come to Penzance. Our children have escaped to Tresco by boat. We need help. Everyone’s gotten sick. Please, I beg you, save our children. Don’t abandon them.”
That name... I know it. Tresco. It was mentioned in The Book. An old name for this place that we hardly ever use anymore. Is this a voice from the past?
The message continues and then starts over again. Tony clicks off his device and looks at Saul seriously. “That’s the voice of one of your ancestors. A man who couldn’t make the trip to join his children on this island anymore and decided to broadcast a message on the radio. So that hopefully, someone would hear it and be able to help his kids. And here I am… one hundred and fifty years later.”
“What… what is this,” Saul stutters incoherently, and I don’t blame him. I am equally speechless. Our former leader drops to his knees and lets go of the sword. It clatters on the tiles next to him.
Andy seizes his chance and jumps down the stairs. Mara struggles forward and unties him. She looks up at Saul apprehensively, but he doesn’t seem to pay any attention to his captive. He’s staring at the box in Tony’s hands as if spellbound.
“Can I hear it again?” he asks so reverently that I suddenly see him with different eyes. Here is a little lost boy – not a ruthless dictator.
While Tony replays the message, I tiptoe past Saul and pick up the sword. Little boy or not, you can never be too careful, after all.
We listen to the message, over and over again. Ben, Max and Cal come outside. The men from Newexter have put out their torches and are sitting on the lawn. When Tony finally switches off the device, some have tears in their eyes.
The Eldest clears his throat and wipes his cheeks. “Tell us what happened to them. To the people who left this behind.”
And Tony does. He tells us about his cross-country trip together with Henry, looking for the origin of the radio message they’d picked up on an old frequency one evening. It sounds like a fairytale. Their arrival in Penzance, an abandoned coastal town. The automated message that had kept playing thanks to energy from the sun. The old, yellowed logbooks and diaries they had found at the harbor, the pages filled with our history.
“There once was a group of fifty healthy children and their parents fleeing the city of Exeter,” Tony explains. He is now using the portico as a sort of stage to address the people present. “Those parents came down to the shores of Penzance and sent their kids to Tresco by ship. It was an island that had once belonged to a very rich man who had died of the disease by then. The ship wasn’t large – it could only hold fifty people, some animals and a small selection of useful books. The captain was supposed to drop off the children and the cargo and come straight back to get the others. Or at least the adults who showed no symptoms of the disease yet. But he never came back, and there were no more ships. The childrens’ parents all got critically ill and eventually died. The very last page of the most recent diary was written by the father of a boy who had been brought to Tresco. He was the one who recorded this message, in the hopes of alerting someone to the fact that there was an island full of children waiting for their parents to show up.”
“What were his last words?” the Eldest inquires softly. “In that diary?”
“The last thing he wrote was the phrase: May the Force be with them. Probably because his little boy really loved the stories in which that expression is used.” Tony casts down his gaze. “And your Book… most likely it’s the little boy’s diary. It could be a notebook he brought with him to the island, which he used to write down his own stories about what had happened. He was making a book to give himself and the others around him courage through stories. To tell them that the Force would always be with them, even if their parents weren’t.”
I swallow hard at the word ‘stories’. “How old were those kids?”
“About six or seven years old, according to the log. But the oldest boy was ten. This man’s son.” He holds up the device.
“They had no parents,” Colin says flatly. “They were all alone.”
Walt shakes his head. “They probably had the captain, until he succumbed to the disease. The very first Bookkeeper. The man who taught us about the importance of knowledge in books.” He looks slightly dazed.
One hundred and fifty years is a long time to wait. The children got divided. The Fools stubbornly maintained that help from outside would come, while the eldest boy started to believe his parents had abandoned him and turned into the first Unbeliever. Maybe he’d gathered a group of like-minded children and taken them to the other side of the island to live there and make a clean start. Maybe there had already been a Wall to vanish behind, or maybe he’d built one himself. And they wrote their own history. They were all convinced that parents were not to be trusted. That all children of a certain age had to fend for themselves, without the help of their mother and father. Something we’d believed up till this day.
“They were small children,” Tony continues. “They had to survive, but it was probably also a kind of game for them. They were playful and young, so they made up their own reality. A reality with new names taken from old stories.”
And when he tells of wars between the stars, of Darth Vader and his dark past, and of brave people who learned how to harness their powers and tap into the Force in order to do good, I cry with joy. In the darkness of the night, it’s like I hear their names for the first time, as if the story sprouts wings and takes flight again. It makes our forefathers all the more courageous and strong. And it makes us privileged. They had to go it alone, without their parents taking care of them, but we don’t. Not anymore.
We now have each other.