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  The hide scrapes against the rock as he pushes himself the last few steps along the rock ledge, only treading on slime once and gasping as he tips, luckily inwards through the waterfall and not out into the swirling water of the pool.

  He feels the water drench his foot and then stream over the hide and he skids on the other side and tumbles into the hollow head first.

  Rolling sideways, he finds there is space and he can lie belly down on the upward slope of the cave with his face towards the sheet of white water. He manoeuvres an arm up and around and rubs his dented cheek. How long will he have to wait?

  Hark wakes with a start when something raps on the hardened scalp of the ox-head. He blinks out through one eyehole. It’s a slender, pink hand that withdraws through the fizzing curtain.

  He hears giggling, and voices squabbling on the other side.

  ‘Who will kiss Gertie Q?’ someone calls.

  He knows the voice. It’s Plum, from further up the river. The one Dally went all soft over last summer. But Gertie Q? Hark tries to think.

  ‘When we play the gorse game next, who will kiss her? Go on, then!’ There is more giggling and Plum’s hand comes through the water again and bangs the ox-head but he can’t shift out of the way. He almost shouts ‘Oi!’ but remembers himself just in time. His head is all foggy, he can’t think who that Gertie Q is, but they’re laughing out loud and now he wants more than anything to be rid of them.

  ‘Gertie Q won’t never get a kiss, for she’s a rattle-head.’ Hark winces, he doesn’t sound clever or scary, but then an idea comes and he adds, ‘And anyway, no pretty dresses is going to fool nobody for she’s that boot UGLY.’

  There’s no more giggling. Plum’s voice calls, ‘Gertieeee! Gertie!’ There is scrabbling near his head and then Hark is left once more with just the hissing white waterfall.

  Nobody else comes. While Hark lies in the ox-hide, which really is stinking worse and worse the damper it gets, he tries to think who Gertie is. There’s nobody in Neverness he doesn’t know, or at least know about, and as he wanders around the village in his head he sees her all in a rush. Gertrude from the Quirk mill on the marshes, who’s shorter than her younger sister. Gertrude whose hair is all in short black tufts where her ma hacks it off so the wind won’t blow it into knots. Gertrude whose little thin back is skewed bent far worse even than Verlyn Webbe’s, and she has to put a box on the school bench to get her nose above the books.

  Hark feels all of a sudden how cold he’s got in all that waterfall vapour.

  It’s a bigger battle getting back out than it was falling in, but at least the struggle warms him a little, and he doesn’t care about the dark that knits the wood together now because he’s on his way home. He knows the path blind, but the sight of the small window full of yellow light makes Hark feel a bit whimpery again.

  He hurls himself and the ox-hide on to a pile of hay in the barn and crawls out backwards. He reeks all over and the sharp stench follows him into the house where they are all waiting, Dally and Pie and Ma and Pa. He is proud as punch when Ma pours the tot of whisky all grandly in his steaming tea and they each slap him on the back, even if Pie does wipe his hand on his trousers after.

  Ma leads the toast, ‘To Hark, our newest Ox-man!’ and her cheeks are still red when she doles out the special stew she’s made, with sausages added like he asked for. Hark chews through the juicy, fatty meat, feeling like he is nearly at being a man, now that he can do the waterfall like the rest of them, and maybe he’ll even beat Dally at an arm wrestle soon if he keeps practising. He tries not to think about Gertrude and her bent little back.

  After the sausage and the whisky and being warmed thoroughly through, Hark is so sleepy that he can’t even stand for a scrub-down and Ma lets him fall into bed as he is. He drifts away thinking of the cleverest things he will say next time he’s in that ox-hide, all about babs and marrying and girlies and dresses.

  When Hark wakes in the dark, he thinks it must have been Pie’s grizzling snores, or Dally’s whistling ones, that did it. He huddles down deeper under the blankets, catching a whiff of hide that makes him grimace, when a thump comes from below. There are voices bobbing about down there. Opening one eye, he sees the moon peering back at him through the pane.

  The stair creaks and Pa’s whisper darts into the room. ‘Pie, get up and find yer boots.’

  Pie grumbles out of sleep and away down the stair.

  Standing at the window, Hark sees two lanterns swooping away from the house like will-o’-the-wisps. Why have they gone off without him? He’s a man now, nearly; an Ox-man anyway. Dally might be as useless as wet pastry, but not him.

  Ma is at the hearth, digging her heels into the embers and rubbing at her arms, though it’s not so cold for night-time.

  ‘What’s they all up to?’ he asks her, trying to sound serious like Pa.

  Ma sighs. ‘A bitty girl’s gone missing and there’s a search out. Sent your pa and Pie along to help, though it’s likely nothing but high-jinks.’

  ‘Who’s that then?’

  ‘Quirk’s child from the mill. She’s at the school house with you, Pie said. Not Bryony, the other one.’

  ‘Gertrude?’

  ‘That’s her.’

  The puff goes out of him a bit and he feels a heavy weariness in his bones like he could fall in his bed and sleep for a night and a day, but he throws the blanket from off his shoulders and declares he’ll join the hunt.

  ‘You’ll do no such thing,’ Ma growls. She is just like a bear sometimes and she knows it.

  ‘I must,’ says Hark. He can’t tell her about the little cold egg of ache that lodged in his stomach after the waterfall and has been growing, until now, at Ma’s news, it feels like it has hatched into an ice-dragon that is sweeping its icicle tail around inside him. He was just trying to scare the girlies, like Pie said. And they were goading him, putting their hands through, rapping on his ox-head and giggling, and he had to think too fast and he hadn’t thought who Gertie was before he yelled at them. All this stays stuck in his throat.

  He climbs the stair without saying a word, pulls his boots and his cap from under the bed as silently as he can while Dally whistles away in his sleep. Then he climbs up on the bedstead, pushes the hatch to the loft and hauls himself up.

  At the back of the house there’s as much holes as there is roof, and Hark can see the stars beckoning him out into the night. He ducks through an easy hole at the bottom, and with a quick dangle from the cornerstone he drops into the dew-wet grass.

  He blunders into a bucket halfway round the house and it clangs like a church bell. One thing the others have got that he hasn’t, he thinks, is lanterns. But it’s too late now. He’s out, he’s helping the search for poor Gertrude Quirk and that’s all, so he follows his feet, which take him along the path he knows blind, through the woods towards the waterfall.

  The invisible trees along the path are so quiet that he can hear the water whispering from far off. It confuses the wood, makes the waterfall closer and then far away, and the familiar root shapes and winds in the path mix about so he stumbles once, and then again. How do you search for a bitty thing in the pitch dark? He should shout her name, but he feels daffy when he hears his voice so small and muted, swallowed up straight away by the wood.

  When he enters the clearing, he sees the pool made silvery by the moon and feels his cheeks getting damp with mist. Hark sits on the soft moss that soon soaks a wet patch into his trousers, and tries to think.

  There are so many water sounds in the dark: drips from the creeper, the stream like girlies’ giggles, the white water rushing over the cave. He stares at the silvery black eddies in the pool, the ribbons of moon water that keep sliding about under his eyes.

  Where would Gertrude, with her little bent back and her blackbird-chicky hair, go in the middle of the night? Maybe, if you’re a girlie and you might be crying – for that is how he pictures her now – you want to go where there’s other wet things drippi
ng water, so as not to feel so alone.

  Maybe, if it’s worse than a girlie crying and she is so sad and ashamed and never wants to see anyone ever again in case they call her boot ugly, she’d come here too. Hark stares into the water. He knows how deep the pool is. You wouldn’t even have to be small to get lost down there. The water sounds of smashing and slapping seem to get louder and louder until he can’t stand it any more, he can’t think any wise thoughts, only black, night-time, deep-water ones, so he jumps up and begins edging around the slime ledge towards the waterfall.

  Hark skids, grabs some overhanging creeper and practically swings through the wall of water, landing in a slithery tangle on the smooth rock behind. In the untangling he realises not all the arms and legs in the knot are his own. Hark yelps. Something yelps back, but it’s not his echo. He pedals his legs and windmills his arms, trying to push himself back up the slippery rock, grazing his elbows, frantic with trying not to feel whatever the soft, lumpy thing is that he has touched.

  ‘Ow!’ it says. It’s more whimpery even than Hark. ‘Stop kicking me!’

  He catches his breath. ‘Who’s that?’ he says.

  ‘Who’s that?’ the thing sniffles.

  ‘Hark.’

  ‘Hark what?’

  ‘Hark Oxley.’

  ‘Oh,’ it sniffs. It sounds like a huffy girlie.

  ‘I’m hunting for Gertrude Quirk,’ he says, importantly.

  ‘Well, bully for you then. Here I am.’

  Hark blinks in the dark but he can’t see a thing. He tries to rub his sore elbows and slides back down the rock where his knees hit some other, smaller knees.

  ‘Ow! Stop that!’

  ‘What are you doing here?’ he asks, scrambling backwards.

  ‘I came to see what’s behind this dog-stupid waterfall,’ she says, ‘and give it a piece of my mind.’ She sounds a bit like Hark’s ma when she is being a bear.

  ‘Are you sure you’re Gertrude Quirk?’

  ‘What sort of dog-stupid question is that? Just what I’d expect from things that lurk in caves.’

  Hark is vexed. This is not what he expected to find. This is not at all what he thought Gertrude Quirk would turn out to be either, who never makes a squeak on the school bench, and what’s more, she has just called him stupid, twice. The vexing feeling pinches at him until he yells at her, ‘I’m not stupid! Not now and not today neither. I had to say something to scare girlies and so that’s what you got.’

  He pulls a face at her in the blackness and feels better, for a moment, until she replies, ‘You? It was you, Hark Oxley?’ She laughs a loud, cackly laugh while Hark’s heart sinks like a cold stone into his belly.

  ‘Well, no wonder, then,’ Gertrude manages between cackles. ‘No wonder it weren’t scary at all!’

  Hark blurts, ‘You mustn’t tell. Never, never ever until the moon turns blue, or it drops out of the sky, you mustn’t.’

  Gertrude stops laughing. ‘Why not?’

  ‘You know straight why. Nobody but an Oxley’s supposed to know who’s in there.’

  ‘I don’t see why I should keep it hidden,’ she says. ‘How’ll I ever keep a serious face in the school house?’

  ‘You’ve got to. Please, Gertrude. I’ll do anything you want. I’ll give you rides on the dray, and I’ll let you up into Dally’s tree-hut and you can have my ma’s honey bread she gives me for my school tea any time you want.’ He regrets that last one, but it’s too late. This is bad enough that he’d be giving up a lifetime of honey bread if his ma and pa found out.

  ‘All right,’ Gertrude is saying, ‘I won’t tell if you let me try.’

  ‘Try what?’ He hopes she means riding the dray horse.

  ‘Let me wear that ox-hide and let me sit in here telling people horrors about their fates like you do.’

  ‘You can’t. No girlies can and specially ones that aren’t Oxleys neither.’

  ‘Of course I can. And if I can’t, I’ll tell.’

  They sit in the endless rush and splash of the waterfall, in the bottomless black of the cave, and Hark knows he is defeated by little Gertrude Quirk.

  It’s a week before Hark gets another turn at the waterfall. He finds Gertrude waiting by the pool, and he warns her about the stink but she doesn’t whinge like he supposed a girlie would, not about that or the hard scratchy skin. She doesn’t even slip on the slimy rock.

  There’s not much room for the two of them stuffed inside the ox-hide and Hark is nervy at feeling Gertie so close. They lie in the cave, listening to the drips and splashes.

  ‘If it’s girlies that come,’ he says, ‘you’ve got to scare them about getting married and babs.’

  ‘Bog water,’ Gertrude replies. ‘What’s scary about that? There’s much better things to put them in a spin. I know. I’ve been practising on Bryony for all my life.’ Her little dark eyes are looking wily.

  ‘Well, that’s what they’ll ask. It always is,’ says Hark.

  They are arguing about what noises a fortune-telling ox should make, growls or snorts or gnashing sounds, when they hear voices on the other side of the whitewater curtain.

  ‘I’ll ask for you and you ask for me,’ a girlie’s voice is saying, all singsongy.

  ‘Well, don’t ask silly then, or it’s wasted. And I’m asking first.’

  ‘No, I’m to ask first, I’m eldest.’ They sound uppity as a pair of magpies.

  ‘That’s Plum,’ Hark whispers.

  ‘And Madden Lightfoot,’ Gertie hisses in his ear. ‘Her sister Clotha says she’s soft in the head.’

  ‘What should we do—’ Hark begins, but Gertrude interrupts with a roar that makes his ears rattle. The girlies outside squeal. ‘You’re supposed to just whisper what to say,’ says Hark, feeling vexed again. ‘I’ll do the ox voice.’

  ‘You said you’d let me,’ mutters Gertrude.

  ‘Ox! Oh, ox!’ Madden’s voice calls. Gertrude smirks. ‘Tell us, oh ox, who will kiss Linnet Lundren in the gorse game? And fall in love and marry her forever? Will it be... Drake Webbe?’

  Both Hark’s brothers are moony over Linnet Lundren and her long yellow hair. And he knows Drake too, the handsomest of all the Webbe brothers who dive in the sea like black-headed seals. If anyone was going to marry Linnet Lundren, it would be Drake Webbe.

  Gertrude roars again and before Hark can stop her she is bellowing with all her might.

  ‘Linnet Lundren’s hair will all fall out. Her teeth will turn black and the smell of her breath will turn to rotten eggs.’ There is a shriek from outside. ‘And Drake Webbe won’t marry nobody for he’ll go so mad from diving deep that he’ll think he’s a real seal and he’ll get chewed up by a whale.’

  Hark stifles his laughter as Plum and Madden howl on the other side of the waterfall.

  All day Gertrude and Hark make up nasty fates for their visitors, and they become more wild and grisly the more practice Gertrude gets.

  The hide is soon heated with their laughing, and Gertie makes Hark jump when she pokes him in the ribs, so he pokes her back, though not as hard as he pokes at Dally and Pie. They are still there when the dark lays its felt through the wood and the moon’s eye lights on the clearing, turning the waterfall into a wash of silver. It gleams as it gushes beyond the warm ox-hide, sending its ripples shivering across the deep, black-water pool.

  ‘If you swear you’ll never tell, you can be a secret Ox-man, long as you want,’ says Hark.

  ‘I’ll be the first Ox-woman,’ Gertie replies.

  ‘All right. But swear you’ll not tell my ma. Nor your sister, neither.’

  ‘Never.’ Gertie roars once more, and they listen to its echo in the dripping cave, until it’s time to begin the tricksy journey out over the rocks and into the wood.

  ‘Once upon a time, there were two sisters,’ said the teller. ‘Neither was a very good girl, but their mother loved the younger sister best. Even in winter, when the sky filled with feathers and the water turned to glass, it was the older
sister who had to do the chores.

  ‘“You’ve sharp elbows,” their mother said. “Go and crack the ice and bring me water.” When the girl came back with a full pail, their mother said, “You’ve toenails like claws. Go and kick up the turnips from the garden.”’

  Squashed under the beams at the back of the bard house, the girls of Neverness sat in a row, so they might whisper and nudge and pass their secrets. Amongst them was Grey, jiggling her knees in the gloom beside March. They sat far from the fire and the teller, but still her older sister’s cheeks glowed. Grey looked about at the rapt faces of Linnet, Plum, Madden and Werrity. None glanced back. Then she pinched March’s thigh and leaned close to her ear. ‘When the girl came back with the turnips,’ she sang, matching the teller word for word, ‘her fingers all black, their mother said, “You’ve a fire in your head. Set the hearth and make us warm.”’

  ‘Shhh,’ March hissed, pinching her sister back. ‘It’s not your tale.’

  ‘Every winter, the same ones.’ Grey rolled her eyes. Madden elbowed her from the other side.

  ‘Who’s that?’ came the teller’s voice from the far side of the fire. ‘Who has broken the tale, when I’ve begun?’

  Grey waited as heads turned, the crowd looking back into the shadow where she and March had settled near the door. The other girls looked down at their laps.

  ‘It was her.’ Grey pointed. With her other hand, she yanked March’s red plait down her back, so her face tipped up for all to see.

  ‘One more trick, you’ll be out,’ said the teller, squinting into the dark. ‘Now, I’ll begin again. This is the Tale of Jack Frost.’