This is a story that ends as all stories do eventually, in deaths.
When Ada's parents died in the winter of her sixth year, she was sent to the neighboring parish to live with her aunt, Margery. Margery was a widow with three daughters, all older than Ada; and their names were Cruelty, Spite, and Malice. They lived in a narrow cottage with a single room, and rain came in where the thatch had grown thin beside the falling-down chimney. Margery had a garden and a pig and some piglets, and three sheep, though one was old. There was also a coop full of hens with a single rooster. There was no room for an orphan in Margery's narrow cottage, nor in her narrow gray life, so Ada slept in the coop surrounded by the chickens: their feathers and fluff, their earthy smell, their soft nonsense gabbling—and of everyone in that household, Ada's food was scantest but her bed was softest.
Ada loved all the hens, but her favorite was Blanche, white as a pearl and sturdy as a peasant's ankle, with five bright white nails on each ivory foot, and a beak the pink of tender rosebuds in May, and a flat little comb and wattle the crimson of full-blown roses in July. She was as pretty as an enameled jewel made for a duke, yet her golden-black eyes were clever as clever. Blanche's egg-laying days were past, but it was Ada's task to collect the eggs and tell her aunt who was laying and who was not; and so Blanche was not eaten.
There was a day after the hay had been brought in but just before the fringed golden wheat was ready for the sickle. After Margery and the sisters broke their fast, the porridge pot had been nearly empty (and the rest needed for dinner); so once Ada had fed the hens and collected the eggs, she went into the old forest to find something from which she might make her own meal. But she knew it was dangerous to go alone, and so she took Blanche.
The road became a path as it crossed into the shadows of the old forest. Ada was gleaning sweet musty blackberries and bitter-bright burdock greens (too late in the season, but there they were, and thus worth trying) until Blanche saw the feathery little leaves of kippernuts tucked close to an oak tree's roots. Ada squatted to dig the tiny tubers from the ground, and carefully brushed them free of dirt. She had two for each one Blanche took. They agreed this was only fair, for she was bigger and had done the work.
Ada had eaten six-and-twenty kippernuts (and Blanche thirteen) when they heard someone running along the path-that-was-a-road. The news that comes on fast feet is seldom good but is always important, so Ada leapt up, and Blanche scurried from her bug-scratching to press close, peeking around her legs. But it was just a boy that burst into sight, heaving and panting and out of breath: older than she, thin and dressed poorly (for he was an orphan as well), and running on bare feet beaten hard as bootsoles.
When he saw Ada, he paused, gasping until he could speak at last. "Where. Is your father? I have. News that is. Worth. A penny or more."
"I have no father, but I have an aunt. She lives that way." Ada pointed along the path.
"Is there a. Village? I don't want to. Waste my time."
"There's a church and a miller and a blacksmith," said Ada, looking up at him. "What news is worth a penny?"
"Do you have. A penny?" said the boy.
She shook her head. "I have a chicken, and I have this pin. My mother gave it to me before she died." She pulled it from her collar to show it to him: fine as a hair and straight as a thread pulled tight, with a tiny silver knob at one end.
"A chicken's too heavy," he said but plucked the pin from her fingers, though she had offered neither. "It's wastoures! They came through Newton and Blackhill and killed everything. And then they split into two big groups and one turned north, and the other's coming here. I stay ahead of them and earn pennies by warning people."
Wastoures. Perhaps you have not heard of them, you people born a thousand years after Ada and Blanche and this runner—whose name is Hardourt, though his part in this story is nearly over: His name will not matter to you, though it matters to him. In your time they are gone, but in the twelfth century, every child knew of them, and adults as well. Wastoures: scarce larger than chickens but unfeathered and wingless, snake-necked and sharp-beaked and bright-clawed, with little arms ending in daggery talons. For long years there would be no wastoures (except in memory and dread), and then a population bloom, like duckweed choking an August pond, or locusts after a dry spring, or cicadas rising from the ground each seventh year. For reasons unknowable, they emerged in their scores of thousands from some secret cave or forgotten Roman mine, and seethed like floodwater and plague across the land. Eventually they died off, plunging heedless from cliffs or drowning in waters too deep to cross; or else autumn made them torpid, then dead—but not before they had eaten every breathing creature they encountered. They were in everyone's nightmares. Small children feared them more even than wolves or orphanhood. These were dark times, wastoure summers.
Wastoures. At the sound of the word, Blanche had fluttered into Ada's arms. The girl shivered and said, "Take us home! Please, I'm too little to run fast enough by myself."
He eyed her. "You're too big to carry. How far is it?"
"Very far," she said sadly. She had walked all morning and now it was early afternoon. If she ran home—if she could run so far—she would not get there before the midwife's cow began complaining to be milked. And Margery would not notice her absence until dusk, when there would be no one to chivvy the chickens to their coop. The wastoures would catch her before that.
"Then I can't take you," he said.
"You're too slow. They'd catch us both and eat even our bones."
Ada knew hard truths. She was raised in them. "Take Blanche, at least." Blanche clucked and tightened her feet, pinching at Ada's arms.
The boy snorted. "What, that? It's just an old hen."
Ada fired up indignantly. "She's the cleverest chicken that ever was! And she talks."
"Lying is a sin!" said the boy. "You're a crazy little girl" —though he was not so much older than she.
She freed one hand from Blanche and pointed down the road. "At least go to my aunt and my cousins and tell them? And the priest and the blacksmith. I'm sure there are many pennies there."
"Good luck." The boy took off running and did not slow nor look back. And now he is gone from this story.
Ada stood in the path-that-was-a-road, holding Blanche tightly. When the patter of running footsteps had faded, there were no sounds save the humming insects and the air soughing in the trees. She looked back the way the boy had come, but there was nothing to see yet, only trees and plants, and high above them all the towering clouds of August, uncaring about the tiny affairs of people and hens and wastoures.
"What should I do?" asked Ada aloud.
And in her light, sweet, gabbling voice, Blanche said: "We must climb the highest tree and wait 'til they're past. He told the truth. They're coming."
Did you think that Ada had lied to the boy to save Blanche? She is a very honest girl. Because no chicken has spoken within your hearing, do you assume none ever has?
Ada put down Blanche and they looked about. The old forest was dense with staunch oak and shivery beech, saplings and shrubs, coiling ferns and little low groundling plants. Everything was either too big to climb or too small to save them. Ada hopped for the nearest branch of a low-slung oak, but it was much too high.
Blanche said with decision, "Not here, but there will be Somewhere."
Was that a sound? Yes. It was the ripple of running water where a brook ran along the bottom of a clearing clotted with grasses and encircled by young trees. Across the clearing was a pile of stones that had once been a house: French or Saxon or Roman or any of the races that had swept across England's face. Gone now, all gone: absorbed into Englishness, into legend and folktale.
Was that a sound? Yes.
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