« Felix, Net & Nika and Orbital Conspiracy | Home | Kreska and The President - fragment 1 »
Cutie from the Black Forest - fragment
2009/01/26
“Trrring! Trrring!”
If you’re floating on the peaceful waves of slumber, carried away by a dream about eating hawthorn berries, and a terrifying noise like that one comes crashing in from reality, you might not instantly know where you are, what’s happening or where to run to.
“Trrring!”
Cutie leaped out of bed as if he’d been stabbed with something sharp and, still woozy with sleep, rushed headlong towards the way out of his burrow. He ran at the door, wailing, and with trembling paws he pushed away the stone and fell
“Trrring!” roared the monster behind him. “Trrring!”
And suddenly something struck him with full force. With a frightful scream of pain and terror he plunged into darkness…
First he felt the pleasant coolness of a compress on his brow. And then he heard a voice above his head:
“As you can see, gazing at the moon can come in handy sometimes. And you said it couldn’t.”
The voice belonged to Cheeky. As Cutie struggled to unglue his eyelids, he saw her and Pakosh, one of the Kibaks. She adjusted the damp white dressing so it wouldn’t get in his eyes.
“What happened?” asked Pakosh, looking at Cutie anxiously. It’s not every day someone is found outside his own burrow with an injured head. If Cheeky hadn’t been out looking for romantic highs in the moonlight, and if she hadn’t been doing it quite so near Cutie’s burrow, who knows what tragedy might have occurred?
“I was chased by a horrible voice,” wailed Cutie. “I was asleep, and it came into my burrow and…” At this point he fell back against the bedding in a faint. Anyway, he didn’t actually know what had happened after that – all he could remember was that noise, a monstrous blow and then pain.
Pakosh went to see who had occupied Cutie’s burrow. Meanwhile the worried Cheeky held Cutie’s paw. He had to admit her fur smelled very nice. And besides, it was a long time since anyone had held his paw, and he really liked it.
It was quite a long time before Pakosh came back, with a rather strange look on his face.
“It’s just as I thought…” he muttered. “It must have been the telephone Cheeky put up to decorate your burrow. Sometimes they ring all on their own. So it wasn’t broken after all,” he added, after a pause for thought.
Cutie just sighed.
How had Kalladin put it? That’s what Cheeky was like. And the ringing telephone was just an accident.
“You know what, I’ve been thinking about that girl,” Cutie began as soon as he saw Hisser the next day. As usual, Hisser was in a hurry to get somewhere. He was running along, humming to himself, when he almost bumped into Cutie.
Now he was gazing at him, finding it hard to return to reality. As Cutie had noticed, the Kibaks weren’t the sort of creatures that like getting up early. At that time of day they were pensive and sleepy, so it was hard to communicate with them, almost as hard as with the ponderous Haplik. In fact they were so dozy in the early morning you could even beat them at draughts!
“Shhh…” he whispered conspiratorially.
He looked around. But they were alone on the path. Cutie had gone out for a walk, unlike all the other inhabitants of the Black Forest, who were hiding from the heat.
“So what were your thoughts?” yawned Hisser.
Cutie hesitated, not entirely sure if the idea that was forming in his tawny head was suitable for broadcast.
“Might there be some way to help her?”
At that Hisser opened his mouth in amazement. It had never crossed his mind before.
“But how?”
They both fell silent. The only sound was the wind combing the tree tops to make them look prettier.
“I don’t know,” admitted Cutie at last. “It just occurred to me…” Now he was sure he had let out his idea too soon, like people who let go of kites that fall to the ground.
“Maybe…” replied Hisser half-heartedly. And ran onwards.
Kalladin would surely have written that it was the shock caused by the ringing telephone and bumping into the tree that was responsible for this decision. He would have sought out an advance omen in the form of a rainbow or something equally striking.
In fact it was all very simple. As he looked at the inhabitants of the Black Forest who had taken him in so hospitably – a stranger who had strayed onto their territory, Cutie had decided to pay them back. And as he couldn’t be more hospitable to his hosts than he had been until now – with the exception of Cheeky – he had decided to help the girl, Marta. Hisser’s lack of enthusiasm did nothing to change his mind. Ever since the young Kibak had shown her to Cutie, she had become his secret too.
But how was he to do it?
Talking of Cheeky, she too never let herself be forgotten. She came by, full of remorse, and asked if Cutie wanted to take the telephone off the wall. “Because I won’t be offended if you do,” she added understandingly. Rubbing a bump the size of a plum, Cutie promised to think about it.
Kalladin the chronicler had no such problems – he was in his element at last. His black pen raced madly across the pages as he deleted, corrected, added and expanded. Anyone would think hordes of barbarians must have moved in on the Black Forest, forcing its inhabitants to confront them bravely in a series of fierce battles. Or that a fire had started to devastate the Forest, and if not for the inhabitants’ heroic defence…
Obviously, no such tragedy ever happened. Kalladin had merely compiled a new entry for his chronicle, epitomising the story of Cutie’s horrific awakening.
However, when he proudly brought him the great volume to read, he was doubly disappointed.
First he found out his handwriting was illegible. No one had ever told him anything like that before!
It was a while before Kalladin stopped feeling indignant, when he suddenly remembered that Cutie was the first one to read the chronicle. From then on he decided to write out the entries so carefully that anyone, meaning anyone, absolutely anyone would be able to read them. Because otherwise even the most fabulous chronicle will never be read, and if that happens, it’s all a waste.
The second disappointment was far more upsetting.
“But it’s not about me, is it?” said Cutie in a slightly embarrassed tone of voice, putting the chronicle down on a small table by the wall. “I don’t remember the hour-long fight with the terrifying invisible monster before relief arrived in the form of Cheeky.”
“Oh dear, so what was I supposed to write?” said Kalladin, sounding annoyed as he nervously got up from the table. “That you ran out and bumped into a tree?”
“But that’s just what I did,” said Cutie, opening his mouth in amazement. “There was no roaring monster – it was just Cheeky’s phone ringing.”
Kalladin reached for the chronicle. He pressed it to his chest like a mother hen protecting her chicks.
“You don’t know much about writing a chronicle,” he muttered in disappointment, and left Cutie’s burrow.
Cutie shook his head.
“Maybe that’s for the best,” he thought. “It must be hard improving real events like that to make them more interesting.”
Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
<< back to Cutie from the Black Forest