Dream Land by Lily Hyde Read Free Book Online Page A

sight of the eye in the rock.
    “Off you go,” Refat said encouragingly as he set off towards the pond. “Don’t get lost, mind. Take Lutfi with you.”
    Lutfi was in a bad mood. Safi was the only one who knew why; he’d been hoping to go to Bakhchisaray as well, to post a letter he’d written to his girlfriend, Larissa, in Samarkand. Safi found him sulking in the house, reading over the closely scrawled pages.
    “Maybe there’s a post office in the next village,” Safi offered, after a while of sitting with him in sympathetic silence. “You can always ask Refat.” She was trying to make Lutfi laugh; Refat’s daily letters to his mother, and her grumpy answers that she sent via friends in Bakhchisaray, were legendary.
    “When am I going to get a chance to go there,” Lutfi growled, “when we’re so busy building this hovel?” All his enthusiasm for the house had disappeared. He aimed a kick at the wall, and a chunk of mortar fell out from between the stones.
    “Larissa will wait for your letter; she won’t mind.”
    “What do you know about it?” Lutfi hunched his shoulders away from her, ignoring her hurt face.
    This was so unfair. Safi was the only one who knew about Larissa, and she knew because she’d carried messages between them and covered up for Lutfi when he was out with her instead of at the sports club or Tatar language classes. Papa and especially Grandpa didn’t approve of Lutfi meeting Russian girls; they wanted him to find a good Crimean Tatar girlfriend, and he hadn’t been allowed out late even with a Tatar girl. They didn’t understand love.
    Lutfi seemed to realize he’d been mean, because after a moment he turned back to Safi and pulled one of her plaits. “What d’you want then?”
    “Refat said you should come with me exploring up the mountain.”
    “To those old caves?” Lutfi looked through his letter one last time, with his sad faraway face on, and then put it in his pocket. “All right.”
    Along the track past the spring they came to a chalky path leading off to the right into the woods and up between two of the ridges of rock.
    “Let’s go this way.” Safi was anxious to get off the track, away from the eye in the furthest outcrop.
    Lutfi peered up the path sceptically. “I suppose it goes to the top. Have you noticed, Safi, that in all Grandpa’s stories about the village, he never talks about Mangup-Kalye?”
    Safi pondered this as they walked into the wood. She knew all about the houses in Adym-Chokrak, the fountain and the mosque, the tobacco field where Seit Ahmet had met her great-grandmother; she knew so much that she’d always thought when they came back to it, she’d be able to make her way around as if she’d lived there all her life. But about where this path went to, she knew nothing.
    “You’re right. And now the village has disappeared, but the mountain is left.” She glanced up at the slopes above – a spiteful look. “Maybe that’s why I don’t like it. It shouldn’t be here. It’s not fair that it’s still here.”
    “Don’t you like it? It’s just a mountain.”
    “It’s spooky.” Safi tried not to sound too serious, because it was silly to be scared by a mountain, she knew.
    Lutfi gave her a quizzical look. “Nutty little sister. It’s not spooky. It’s just boring. This whole flipping valley is so boring: no one around; nowhere to go.”
    It wasn’t exactly a mountain, Safi realized as they walked on. Their valley lay deep between high grey plateaux of rock. The spines of Mangup-Kalye were really more like the knuckles of four great fingers digging into the wooded slopes. The whole of Mangup was a clenched fist, and they were walking up between the first and second knuckle.
    “Lutfi, what did Mama say about the police when she came back from Simferopol with the container?”
    “I’m not supposed to tell you.”
    Safi just waited. She knew he would; Lutfi was hopeless at keeping secrets from her.
    “She and Mehmed got