The Ice Whisperers by Helenka Stachera

Author:Helenka Stachera [Stachera, Helenka]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241491294
Publisher: Penguin Random House Children's UK
Published: 2021-09-06T00:00:00+00:00

The child who is both you and me

Bela woke from her vision to the sound of a screaming storm.

She could just make out Ren-ya’s hunched outline. Her huge black eyes looked back at her, shining in the gloom. ‘It is only the wind,’ Ren-ya said. ‘There is nothing to fear.’

Bela tried to sit up, but her whole body was stiff, as if the cold had calcified her bones.

Ren-ya helped her up. ‘Everyone feels a bit weak after their first time with the smoke. Here –’ she passed Bela the water bottle – ‘have something to drink.’

Bela gulped down a few mouthfuls. The water had thickened in the cold and was full of tiny ice crystals that burned her throat and made her cough.

‘Hot root tea would help,’ Ren-ya said, ‘but I cannot light a fire in this blizzard. We are stuck here until it blows over.’

‘How long will that be?’

‘Who knows?’

‘Shouldn’t we get going? Won’t the professor’s men be following?’

Ren-ya made a dismissive sound in her throat. ‘They have lost our trail and will never find it now.’ She pulled aside the flap of hide covering the opening to the shelter and a freezing blast of snow blew in. ‘Not even a wolf goes hunting in this.’ She closed the flap again, tucking the edges of the hide together to keep the weather out. ‘All we can do now is eat, rest and do our best to stay warm.’

Ren-ya shared out the meat and berry cake that Hebera had given them. As they ate, neither spoke and the only sound was the shrieking of the wind, but Ren-ya’s eyes did not leave Bela’s face. When they had finished eating she said, ‘Tell me about your home.’

Bela shrugged. ‘I didn’t think you were interested.’

Ren-ya gave her a tight smile. ‘Well, what else is there to do during a storm but tell stories?’

Bela thought for a moment. It would be difficult to get Ren-ya to understand how different the world had become since the Last had walked the earth tens of thousands of years before. ‘So much has changed,’ she said. ‘Remember that morning when we left for your village? We looked out across the plain and all we could see was wilderness. No roads, no houses, no people.’

Ren-ya raised an eyebrow. ‘What are roads?’

Bela sighed. Explaining was going to be even harder than she’d thought. She decided to try a different approach. ‘If you want to go somewhere, what do you do?’

Ren-ya rolled her eyes. ‘I walk there.’

‘Well, in my world it’s different.’

Ren-ya looked at her as if she was mad. ‘You have legs but you don’t walk?’

Bela smiled. ‘We do walk, but we don’t have to.’ She wondered how to begin to explain the many ways people could travel in the waking world. Maybe, if she started with something that would be familiar to Ren-ya, such as horses, she could work up from there. ‘It all began when people realized they could go further and get to places faster if they rode on the backs of horses, or in carriages pulled along by many horses.

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