They live in them.’
‘You don’t know who lives in this one.’
Roxy paused and took a breath, building the suspense. Then she stopped, both of our eyes drawn to a movement inside the doorway.
A woman appeared, framed in the open half of the door, and scanned the bushes and grass where we lay hidden. Instinctively we both shrank back.
I only got a quick look at her before she went back into the house. How old was she? I couldn’t tell. Long skirt, headscarf, sunglasses.
‘That was her,’ said Roxy.
‘That was who?’ I know this sounds like I was being deliberately uninterested to tease Roxy, but I just could not work out why she was so excited about some woman in a house. Big deal.
‘The witch.’
And, at that point, I forgot all about being quiet, and said – louder than I should have, probably – ‘Oh, Roxy!’
I was genuinely quite annoyed. Disappointed as well.
Annoyed with Roxy because I was lying in the grass, a bit scared, and covered in forest gunk and nettle stings, spying on someone’s house, probably breaking some law or other, and all for nothing. And disappointed because, well …
I’d thought Roxy might be a bit different. Someone fun to hang out with. Especially with Spatch and Mo in Italy.
And then she mentioned witches, for heaven’s sake. If I want witches, or unicorns, or animals in clothes, I just need five minutes with my little sister.
‘Shhh! She is, I’m telling you. She’s, like, two hundred years old and she lives in a cottage in the woods. She even has a black cat – look!’
Right on cue, a cat – not entirely black but anyway – strolled along the top of the wall right in front of us. It flashed us a look with its striking yellow eyes, then leapt gracefully down into the yard, mewling loudly, causing a chicken to flap out of its way.
‘Have you tasted it? The house?’ I said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Is it made of gingerbread?’
The glare that Roxy gave me could have melted an ice lolly, but I didn’t care. This was just a silly fantasy.
‘I’m going back,’ I said, and I started to get up.
‘Get down!’ hissed Roxy. ‘She’ll see you.’
‘What? And turn me into a toad? I’ll take the risk, thanks.’
What happened next may have been my fault. I’m not really sure.
As I got to my hands and knees, Roxy grabbed my collar, and pulled me back down really hard, and, for someone so small, she had plenty of strength.
‘Stop it!’ I whispered, and struggled from her grasp and, as I did so, I pushed her. She rolled down the bank, scrabbling for my hand or for grass, or for anything to stop her tumbling into the yard, which was where she was headed.
For a split second, her eyes locked on mine, pure terror etched onto her face, and then she was over the edge of the slope and out of sight.
There was a loud thump as she hit the ground, but no shout, no scream. I had drawn breath to shout her name, and to check she was OK, but the shout stilled in my throat as I saw the back door of the cottage burst open and the witch come running out.
‘Ay, ay, ay!’ she cried. And then something else, something I couldn’t make out, because it was in a language I’d never heard before.
It wasn’t French. I know what French sounds like (third from top in my class, en fait). And it wasn’t Italian, because I’ve heard Spatch talking with his dad at home.
It was like nothing I had ever heard before: a throaty, musical language. The witch – or ‘witch’, I suppose – hurried to where Roxy had fallen right below me. Then, in her language, she called out again, as if shouting for someone.
That’s when I saw him.
He stood in the doorway: a pale, skinny blond boy. A pair of sunglasses hung on a loop round his neck and he put them on before scuttling out into the sunshine of the yard to where Roxy lay.
Was she dead? I was terrified, but I didn’t think it was likely, even though it was quite a long drop. Then I heard her moan. Thank God for that.
Should I stand up? Reveal myself? I was caught in a terrified dither of simply not knowing what to do when the boy picked up Roxy and carried her little body easily into the house, a dripping trail of blood coming from her head.
Both halves of the door clattered shut and I realised I hadn’t breathed since Roxy had fallen.
This is what I know about the life-pearls:
1. They contain a thick liquid which, when mixed with your own blood, immediately stops you from getting any older.
2. If you repeat the process with another life-pearl, the ageing starts again.
That is it. That is pretty much all I know, and all Mam knows too.
As for my father, I am afraid I can hardly remember him, although Mam has told me all about him. One thousand years is a long time to hear stories again and again, but I never get bored of them.
(Sometimes I can almost touch a memory of him. A fuzzy mental picture of a tall blond man; the smell of a ship’s rope dipped in tar; a feeling of fear in a storm; but they are indistinct recollections. They seem thin, as though constantly trying to bring them to mind has somehow worn them out.)
Da’s name was Einar. He was a soldier-turned-trader from the island of Gotland in what is now called the Baltic, but in her stories Mam still called it the uster-shern – the Eastern Sea.
Where did they come from, these ‘life-pearls’? No one knew, not for sure. There was a saga – an ancient poem – that Mam would tell by the light of the fire’s embers, of an alchemist’s manservant escaping from a massive tsunami in the Middle East. He carried a bag of the life-pearls across the desert, to the mountains of Carpathia in Eastern Europe. How much of it was true, though, was anybody’s guess.
Mixing the liquid in a life-pearl with your own blood stopped you from getting older. It did not make you immortal however: you could still be killed in battle, or by disease, or – as Da found out – by accident.
Mam said he had obtained the life-pearls when he
