so I stayed up here. Been here ever since.’ She looked over her shoulder. ‘I could go back. It would be as if I never came in the first place. But I don’t want to be teased again.’
‘But a hundred years!’
‘I know.’ She sighed, adoring him for his sympathy. ‘I know you think it’s horrid. A hundred years in a dusty attic. But it’s my home and I love it here. You wouldn’t understand.’
Alex blurted, ‘But I do.’
‘I might go back, one day.’
‘You should. Your mother will be missing you.’
‘Not really. That’s the beauty of it. I’ll only have been gone a few seconds. Strange isn’t it, this time stopped. You think there would be a great hue and cry the length and breadth of the land.’ Her voice suddenly changed to a falsetto. ‘Where is Amanda? Oh, where has she gone, my darling girl?’ Then back to her normal tone, ‘But no one calls, no one knows, because no time has passed since I left. Here we are in a place stuck between two minutes, not moving, still as dust in a box.’
‘Amanda. That’s a very nice name.’
She hugged her knees. ‘And what’s yours?’
‘Alex. Alexander.’
‘Alexander, don’t you miss your parents? Why do you want to stay up here?’
He shrugged. ‘Oh, I don’t know. It’s exciting, isn’t it?’
‘Will you stay? Will you?’
He became almost as deflated as one of those bagpipes he had pierced earlier with his sword.
‘I really don’t know. I think I want to. I thought I did.’
She smiled. ‘It’s not all magic dust and moonbeams, you know. It’s very, very lonely.’
‘I’m beginning to learn that.’
‘Loneliness can gnaw away at you, or come up on you suddenly and suck all the spirit out of you, so you feel hollow and wasted.’
He shuddered and nodded. ‘I guess it can.’
‘You should think about it very carefully. If you wait too long to make a decision, it becomes so that you can’t go. The attic increases its hold on you. It grips you with soft unseen hands. Firm hands. You’re speaking with one who knows, Alexander. It seems to me I’ve been here almost as long as the dust. If it weren’t for my collection …’ Her voice had grown very dreamy. ‘… I might go home tomorrow.’
The pair of them spent the next few hours together. Amanda said there would be no attack from the Organist’s regiments for some time to come, because of the heavy defeat the pair of them had inflicted on them. Thus they had time to enjoy each other’s company, which was wonderful for the board-comber and would be remembered forever by the novice bortrekker.
‘Can you sail?’ she asked him.
‘Sailed all the way here,’ he answered.
‘Yes, but on a raft you said. Can you sail a small boat?’
‘Never tried.’
‘Come with me.’
She took him out on the waters of the tank in a small sailing boat. Probably in order that Amanda could move about swiftly and without hindrance, the owl left her head for once and perched on the bowsprit. Once on the great lake, however, Amanda became a tyrannical captain, yelling at Alex to pull this sheet or reef that sail. He might have guessed he would become a slave to her commands in such a situation. When he complained that he was being treated like a drudge, she explained that unless he obeyed orders to the letter and very quickly, they might capsize.
‘You are the deck hand. You have to learn to react quickly. Now jump to the jib …’
He jumped, wondering what the heck a jib was, but Amanda was not a girl to be ignored.
Nevertheless, Alex enjoyed her company, and so far as he could tell, she enjoyed his. But as the days progressed he began to seriously consider whether this attic life was for him. Even though it was a thousand times better than being completely on his own, he grew bored. He was not content within himself. It was no wonder the bortrekker he had met and who had influenced him kept moving. Just as all bortrekkers were restless souls. They had to be in order to interest themselves. New landscapes, new adventures, new horizons were necessary to ward off that corrosive boredom.
‘There are those who’re born to the attic and those who hope to grow into it,’ she told him one day, after looking into his eyes and seeing emptiness there. ‘You are the second kind. Oh, I do not doubt you’re sincere about wanting to stay, and perhaps if