Gool by Maurice Gee Page A

must feel – their need, after the terror they had known, and the living dead thing that had dragged them to its mouth, to stay with each other forever.
    Yes, Lo whispered, agreeing.
    They sent out their call: Blossom, Hubert – and in a moment their intertwined voices replied: Xantee, Lo, where are you?
    In the mountains. We mightn’t be able to speak from the other side.
    But we’ll reach you, and we can feel you, and we’ll know . . .
    They did not go on. They would know if Xantee and Lo died. They would feel it like a missed beat of the heart or a breath that could no longer be drawn.
    How’s Hari? Lo and Xantee said.
    He doesn’t change. We feed him honey and milk. Pearl washes him. She sings him songs and plays her flute to him. We can find a little bit of him not sleeping. He hears but he doesn’t understand.
    Is Pearl all right?
    She’s sleeping. She’s been up all night, watching him, and watching the thing on his neck. Xantee, Lo, she’ll die if he dies. Find the gool and kill it.
    We will, they breathed.
    And come back to us, because . . . you must.
    They heard the childishness of the command, and answered with a confidence they did not feel. Then Duro sent a message for the twins to tell his mother: Hi Ma. Go easy on those pancakes. Save some for me. And here’s a kiss.
    Their talking was done. Painfully – it was always painful – they unclasped their minds, envying the twins for whom everything was easy. Then they shouldered their packs and went between the drawn-back serpent head and the thrusting fist. When they looked again the wide view to the north was gone, closed off by granite walls slick with water. It was a place, Xantee felt, where a gool might find its way into the world after its journey along birthing veins deep underground.
    The people would have told us, Lo said.
    The people don’t come here, they wouldn’t know.
    Let’s get through it quick, Duro said.
    But the way through was long and hard. They waded waist-deep through pools made by water oozing from crevices plugged with stringy moss, and emerged shivering, with no feeling in their legs. It was more ravine than pass. In places the walls leaned inwards, blotting out the sky. It was as though the body of the serpent and the arm attached to the fist rippled their stone muscles, keeping their contest alive. Yet there was no life – nothing in the pools, nothing in the hollows opening in the walls. The threat came from the cold and they forced themselves to jump and climb, and run where they could, to reach the end of the pass before nightfall.
    The sun was hidden west of the mountains when they came out but sent shafts of light across the jungle confronting them. It lay in a wide basin rising at the far rim to another mountain range where snowfields shone pink and ice peaks gleamed. Rivers bent like knives, with flowering trees at their edges, coloured like rust.
    Do we have to cross there? Lo whispered.
    The Dog King’s on the other side of those mountains, Xantee said.
    Our grandfather, he said. I wish we could meet him halfway.
    You can give up wishing. Let’s get in those trees and make a fire, Duro said.
    They slid and scrambled on scree slopes but soon found it too dark to keep on. There was nothing for it but to build a platform by scraping stones away and piling them up. They made a fire of branches hacked from mountain scrub, ate warmed strips of meat and drank water. Then they huddled close and slept as well as they could in the chill air.
    Sun on their faces woke them. They stood and stretched and looked at the jungle they had to cross.
    There’s a gool in there somewhere, Lo said.
    They strained their eyes, trying to see the cone of coldness the beast would make, but mist from swamps and slow-flowing waterways, and the sun’s rays widening and diffusing, and the largeness, the lazy stretching out of the jungle, made the task impossible.
    It’ll take us weeks to get across, Duro said.
    So, you want to turn back?