Read Online The Road of Bones by Anne Fine - Free Book Online Page B

trodden here before. I found myself meandering this way and that. What little of the moon I could still see kept slipping behind cloud. The forest here seemed blacker, and the squawks and rustlings from all the creatures around seemed to get louder and become more threatening.
    Whoomph!
Out of nowhere came a blow. It hit me in the stomach, winding me so hard I fell.
    I heard a scuffle and a rustling. The moon slid out to light a bent old man, as gnarled and skinny as the stick with which he still threatened me. Hard to believe this ailing greybeard had dealt me such a blow and was clearly so ready to give me another.
    The voice came out as a snarl. ‘Who are you? Why are you creeping around here so late at night?’
    I rubbed my belly, fighting for breath to answer before the stick came down again. And maybe because this was the only day in my whole life when I’d been free to choose my own paths and go my own way, I found myself – since I had nothing honest totell him – falling back on the answer of the schoolroom.
    â€˜I’ve been sent.’
    â€˜Sent?’ He peered as though mystified. ‘Sent? Who by?’
    Still on my knees under the threat of his stick, I found that my wits were sharpened. I offered the only answer that might allay his suspicion that I was some runaway.
    â€˜Sent by the commissar.’
    His face constricted from fright. He dropped the stick as if it scorched him, leaving me sure that, had I been daft enough to say anything else, he would have used it again and again, till he had beaten me to a pulp and so been rid of me.
    But it was as if the very word ‘commissar’ had defeated him. He waited warily while I pulled myself to my feet. I stood like a foolish block of wood, and in the end, clearly at a loss himself, he muttered, ‘Then I suppose you’d better follow.’
    I reached for the stick he’d tossed aside so fast. In the strange silver half-light I saw a tremor run down the scraggy lines of his face. He watched me heft the stick’s weight from one hand to the other, and only after I’d offered it back did I realize that, in his eyes, I was a dangerously fit young man, not somefraught lad scared to be travelling without permission or papers in the wrong province, and trained in good manners by a grandmother as old as himself.
    I fell in behind him on the narrow path. Soon we stepped out of the shadows into a flood of watery moonlight falling on a patch of cleared land. To one side, deep in the shadow of the woods, was a cottage so tumbledown it looked as if it had already sunk half into the earth.
    A few feet into the clearing, the old man stopped and turned. His eyes were glittering. Then, as if some festering bitterness had fuelled a burst of courage he didn’t even know he had, he pointed with his stick.
    â€˜So there he is! The boy you’ve no doubt come to chase, lying as idly as your commissar suspected. Feel free to dig him up and drag him back.’
    For a moment I was baffled. Then, looking where he pointed, I saw a long thin heap of freshly tossed earth.
    Somebody’s grave.
    Not knowing what to say, I waited. Perhaps I stood so still I looked like one more shadow, for suddenly, hobbling towards us from the broken-backed cottage, came a sparrow of a woman as old as the man at my side.
    Her voice was quavering. ‘Pavel?’
    I took her to be speaking to her husband, but as she came closer it was clear that her eyes were set on me. ‘Pavel?’ It was a note of disbelief. ‘Can it be you?’
    The moment she made out my face, the strange look of hope on her own snapped into one of suspicion. Pulling the old man close, she hissed in his ear, ‘Who’s this? Why is he here?’
    The old man whispered a warning. ‘Take care! The boy comes from the commissar.’
    She turned to face me. Now moonlight picked out her eyes as clearly as I’d just seen his. But where the old