Hercufleas by Sam Gayton Page A

snapping its jaws. Artifax leaped on it. Just think – if I hadn’t pulled you up when I had, you’d probably still be in its belly.’
    She chuckled. Hercufleas said nothing. He stared, shivering, into the flames.
    â€˜Know something?’ said Greta, cramming flakes of charred fish into her mouth. ‘It wasn’t just luck. You were pretty heroic too.’
    Hercufleas didn’t feel heroic, although he couldn’t deny that something had changed. Later on, when he began muttering about his fleamily – trying to stop his teeth chattering – Greta actually listened. He told her the story of when Burp drank too much bat blood and spent the next week hanging upside down in the chimney, and she even laughed.
    What had changed in her? Sipping her blood that night, he figured it out. Underneath the bitterness was a hint of something sweet, like caramel.
    Greta had begun to believe in him again.
    Darkness fell quickly, but before the winds came howling down from the north, Greta rubbed Artifax’s feathers with the fish’s fat. The blubber was white and gloopy and smelled awful, but it kept the wind out and the heat in. They slept that night on the frozen lake, snug as seals.
    â€˜Hercufleas, look!’
    He woke in the darkness and crawled from her pocket, rubbing his eyes. From underneath Artifax’s wing, Greta gazed up at the sky. Stars were falling upon the Waste. Bright and glittering, in their hundreds.
    â€˜Shooting stars,’ Greta whispered. ‘Mama said they each bring a new hope to Earth. If you see one fall, you have to name it quick. Then that hope becomes yours to keep.’
    Hercufleas pointed. ‘That star there,’ he said, ‘hopes I never have to be fish bait ever again.’
    Greta grinned. ‘That star there hopes you stop stinking of guts.’
    â€˜That star is going to be disappointed. I’m going to torment your nose until we find the Czar’s fortress.’
    She laughed. ‘Well,
that
star there, then? It hopes we find the fortress tomorrow. Then you can drink the Black Death and we can go home.’
    Hercufleas stopped smiling. ‘Greta,’ he whispered, ‘what does the Black Death do?’
    She looked down at him, a puzzled looked on her face. ‘It kills. Whatever it infects, which is whatever you bite. Thought you knew that.’
    He nodded. ‘I do, I do.’
    They watched the sky together.
    â€˜If this was an adventure in a story, we’d be the heroes, wouldn’t we?’ Hercufleas whispered. ‘And Yuk would be the monster?’
    Greta nodded fiercely. ‘Of course!’
    â€˜I thought so.’ He sighed. ‘In a story, the ones using the Black Death would be the monsters.’
    Greta plucked him up in her hand and held him close. Her odd-coloured eyes shone with starlight.
    â€˜Yuk’s the one that kills,’ she told him. ‘Yuk. Not us. It’s all because of him…’
    She trailed off. Hercufleas waited. He saw her unpacking the grief from her heart, all the sorrow and hurt, arranging it into a story. Something she could bear to tell.
    There, beneath a sky of falling hopes, she told him of her parents.

24
    T hey lived in a cottage where the town met the woodn’t. Coming home from school in the evening, Greta could always hear the
whack-whack-whack
of Mama’s axe on the stump. Like their home had its own heartbeat.
    They had a donkey called Kopotikop, a goat called Potch and a dog called Wuff. Every day he ran to Greta when she rounded the corner with her school book and satchel. Mama would be splitting kindling for the fire, her hair tied back with a scarf. Papa would be inside by the stove, making pies with plumpkin and cheese curdled from Potch’s milk.
    Greta’s job was to make the tea.
    The delicacy of Tumber is nettle tea, which other towns cannot drink because of its bitterness. But Tumber is the Town of Tears, and the folk there