CHAPTER THIRTY NINE

Then Jane heard it … a roar from the south.

A pillar of twisting air raced across the fields of corn, a funnel that bounced on the ground and bounded into the air. As it moved it pulled up fists of soil and stalk and grass and rodents, gathering them into a wrenching howling twist of pure terror that roared toward the trio on the horses.

Trinket shouted ‘Ride!’

An almighty whoomp of wind shoved Jane, and nearly dropped her from the horse. She leant with her chest hard against the horse’s withers. Trinket had urged her horse into a furious gallop and Jane’s horse followed unbidden. The snout of the tornado bounced against the ground, and tore the soil like an iron share. Behind the tornado, another twister moved faster than the first, as though racing.

The horses ran, their manes streaming, their heads lowered, their bodies flattened out, their legs blurring.

The dwarf’s horse pulled away. The large black stallion had power that the mares couldn’t follow.

For a moment the twisters moved adjacent to the horses and at roughly the same pace. The horses leaned against the vortex, their legs skating out sideways, straining to stop the apocalypse from inhaling them.

A sound as large as an exploding bomb was made by a farmhouse losing its gravitational grip on the land. The house lifted as the big tornado paused and thickened, its black wind belly bloated with debris. The tornado swayed and heaved as it sucked the farmhouse into its guts, spitting out timber and tiles.

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Still the horses ran.

The rain had started again and Trinket appeared and disappeared in the intermittent sheets of grey, rocking in the saddle, shifting her weight across the horse for balance.

Jane had a different technique. She hugged the horse like a person drowning.

Lighting flared.

The large tornado lifted again, its spinning tail momentarily losing touch with the ground. Now the dwarf on the stallion was directly in its path.

The dwarf flattened his little body and kicked the stallion repeatedly, his feet in a staccato of motion. Then the tornado stabbed its tail down and the dwarf and the black stallion disappeared.

The tornado moved on, a roiling mess of destruction. It bounced like a ball until suddenly, as if by magic, the tornado stopped spinning and began to dissipate. A moment later the twin tornados vanished into the black clouds.

For the next few minutes the clouds rained debris. Soil and corn-stalk and grass and timber and stone and a cow and hogs on hogs on hogs. So many swamp hogs fell, most of them still squealing on the way down, the sound even more horrifying than the shriek of the storm.

The dwarf and the stallion had disappeared.

The clouds fell apart now and long strands of sunlight reflected off the waterlogged world, big lemon slices of overbright light.

The sky remained black to the east, where a long rainbow stretched thinly, one end in the cornfields, the other end crossing the Milkstone river and bouncing on into the scrubby area to the north.

Ahead in a misty line of willows and horse chestnuts was the Milkstone river.

Jane wondered about the ship they were meeting. How had it fared in the storm?