Strange Star by Emma Carroll Read Free Book Online Page B

I watched as Mam walked a wide arc around the cattle, her arms held open. The beasts stayed very still, allowing her to get close. Then, in a finger snap, they leapt away. Some went left, some went right, the ground thudding with their hoofbeats. When finally they did stop, they stood wide-eyed and nervous, scattered across the field.
    Peg frowned. ‘They aren’t behaving, are they?’
    They weren’t. Nor was the weather. The sky had gone a sickly shade – a sort of grey tinged with yellow. Snow fell faster now. Little hard grains of it whipped and spun before my eyes. At our feet, the grass was turning white.
    Mam came striding back across the field, red-cheeked and irritable. ‘Right, girls, listen to me: this isn’t working. We need to try another way.’
    The wind blew so hard it was a job to even hear her. Then came another noise, so unexpected I didn’t think it real. It rumbled above our heads like an animal growling, or something heavy dragged across a flagstone floor.
    Peg’s mouth turned down at the corners. ‘I don’t like it, Lizzie,’ she wailed.
    ‘Don’t fret, ’tis only thunder,’ I said.
    But I didn’t like it either, not after what folks in the village had been saying about this freakish weather being the comet’s work. I’d certainly never heard thunder with snow before.
    Mam, I hoped, would see sense and say we’d try again tomorrow. Or at least go home and wait for Da.
    But no.
    Instead, we had to walk behind the cattle fromopposite sides of the field. Peg, being smaller, was in charge of the gate.
    ‘As soon as you see us coming straight towards you, Peg, you must open it wide,’ Mam said. ‘And don’t pull that face. You’ve to concentrate.’ Then to me, ‘Right, Lizzie, let’s get shifting.’
    We started at the top of the field, Mam on the left, me on the right. Wind blew the snow almost horizontally. It had got darker too and as the grass grew steadily whiter, it was hard to see more than a few feet ahead. Bit by bit we moved down the hill, following the lie of the hedge. There was a knack to it. Keeping yourself quiet and low meant the cattle grew calmer, except I could barely see them any more.
    As I stopped to push the hair from my eyes, I realised I’d gone way off course. Just to my left stood Mam.
    ‘Get back by the hedge,’ she said, waving me off.
    ‘Can’t we stop until the snowstorm passes?’
    Above us, flickers of lightning lit the clouds from underneath. It made the whole sky look strange, like milk trembling on a stove. Mam, though, didn’t even notice: her gaze was fixed on me. ‘Remember the deal, Lizzie – the one what we shook on at breakfast?’
    I did.
    ‘Good. I’m not scared of a bit of snow, nor should you be. Now move yourself.’
    So we kept going, first along the shortest side of the field, then slowly up the other, longer side. Soon we had four cattle walking before us.
    Then the thunder cracked.
    It was louder this time, making the cattle break into a nervous trot. All the while, it grew colder still. My fingers burned red and my chest ached from breathing the icy air. If Mam suffered the same, she didn’t show it. Head down, arms out at her sides, she walked like a machine. It was the devil’s job to keep pace. Mercy’s Midwinter’s Eve prediction seemed such silliness now. Mam had more chance of becoming queen of England than she did of dropping down dead.
    Yet I still felt a growing unease. Tall trees flanked the top of our field. The rest of it was wide, wide open, and I knew a bit about storms – how trees got lightning-struck, and sometimes cattle too. Now that Mercy’s vision had loomed into my head again, I couldn’t ignore it.
    ‘Mam!’ I yelled. ‘We won’t manage this when it’s thundering.’
    ‘Stop fussing,’ she yelled back. ‘The quicker we round them all up, the quicker we’ll go home.’
    We’d reached the bottom of the field by now. Our four cattle had stopped, legs splayed, eyes bulging, in front of