It was the cruel Hand of Fate
—wrote Togger Chorp on his school-issue composing pad, as he began the closing paragraph—
that had guided the inquisitive bird through the half-opened bedroom window. Axus recognised at once those rufous cheeks, so distinctive against the rest of its glossy black plumage. With perky insolence it stepped on to the inner sill, clacked its black beak, and surveyed his room with an unembarrassed demeanour which quite belied its name.
Pausing for the duration of a silent drumroll, Togger savoured the dénouement with an inward glee which he hoped would be shared by Miss Farfyle when she came to appraise this latest offering.
For Fate had dealt him a blushing crow.
Togger switched off the pad and slipped it back unobtrusively into his schoolbag. He was not supposed to be writing stories during a Science lesson, but the compulsion, when it came, could not be ignored. Miss Farfyle understood. Keggrel, the science teacher, was less tolerant, and had once threatened to confiscate his pad unless he paid attention.
What Keggrel did not know was that Togger’s apparent distraction did not signify a lack of interest. Togger was remarkably good at absorbing information. He had already privately worked his way well beyond the school’s science curriculum, and after school hours was currently engaged on a project of his own which, had they been aware of it, the mature, law-abiding citizens of Snoak would have looked on with some apprehension.
Among the less mature and potentially seditious citizens were Togger’s part-time accomplices, Perric and Tredge. They were a year or so older than Togger, lived in East Snoak, and intermittently attended Frakewaders School. He knew them from his explorations in Sparrink’s Yard, a place which attracted not only feckless opportunists, but also hobbyists, frugal engineers, and other dedicated recyclers.
In contrast to his reticence they were raucous and street-smart. They were not exactly his friends, but Togger had curbed their their jibes and piqued their curiosity by revealing a startling idea, one that presented a level of risk the two practised scavengers had never before considered. Perric and Tredge found themselves co-opted into helping gather some of the components he needed – for Togger Chorp wanted to build an exploding airpod.
Adults (including Seramanda, his mother) generally assumed his customary reserve to be no more than diffidence. He could be moody, but was not bad-tempered or malicious. At home he cared for his jarful of ants with affectionate attention, providing them with a regular diet of food scraps, insects and sweetened water, reserving a drop of honey for the occasional treat. This miniature world was his private entertainment, arguably more instructive than the vids which occupied much of his parents’ waking hours.
Togger had no clear memory of Oaden, his biological father. Oaden had “gone travelling” (so he was told) when the boy was still an infant, and had not bothered to return. “Too big for his boots!” his mother muttered with undiminished resentment whenever the subject cropped up. Togger remained puzzled by the expression, picturing the outgrown footwear sprawled forlornly on the back doorstep, next to the big mossy flowerpot in which he’d once been startled to see a small frog. That unbidden recurrent image induced a melancholy restlessness which he found hard to shake off.
The absent Oaden had been replaced after a couple of years by the now ever-present Uffer Ambax: a hulking, bluff, workshy widower hailing from Trevury, who purported to be “in removals”. Scowling in his wake came Jeppo, whom Seramanda at first took to be some kind of apprentice until she realised that this sullen youth was Uffer’s pubertal son. It transpired that Jeppo was also Uffer’s unpaid assistant, compliant in whatever surreptitious activities led thereafter to the house becoming a storage facility for quantities of marketable goods, ranging from commemorative crockery to supposedly authentic ethnic artefacts.
Uffer succeeded in ingratiating himself with Seramanda, but baulked at becoming involved with the practicalities of further child-rearing, having exhausted whatever capacity he may once have possessed with his first attempt. Jeppo, the unfortunate product in question, had similarly no interest in forming a brotherly relationship with the resident child. To him the boy was an irritant, at best a distraction. He would find ways of teaching the little pest who was boss.
Over the next few years Togger, obliged to adapt to the new domestic arrangements, became the target of Jeppo’s needlessly inflicted pokes, punches, taunts, and sneaky spitefulness: toys unaccountably damaged; puzzle pieces missing; a lost scarf or shoe found mouldering under a hedge. Togger learned to take precautions, creating ingenious hiding places for the things he most valued, deliberately leaving some outwardly more attractive objects as relatively expensive decoys. Still, it was no less hurtful when one of these showed signs of having been handled clumsily, or mysteriously vanished, but circumstantial evidence could not be ignored.
Togger would inevitably be accused of being careless or irresponsible by his unwitting mother or uncaring step-father, while Jeppo was always ready with a convincing repertoire of plausible alibis. Intimidated into silence, he would retreat to his ant sanctuary, where (taped to the underside of a stool) he now kept a coded record of suspicious incidents, each numbered on a scale from zero to ten, depending on how annoyed he had been made to feel.
Such had become life.
Then, upon one school holiday, Togger sat in his room nibbling at a sandwich, idly doodling on his pad as he allowed his thoughts to wander. He drew a monogram, interweaving his initials, adding a few decorative details until it resembled a caterpillar hanging from a twig.
There must be some way to expose Jeppo, he thought for the umpteenth time, a way to shame him so publicly he would be forced to stop.
The padscreen began to fill with delicately morphing images: nets, claws, wings, clouds, wheels, waves, flames… He frowned, deleted the page, put aside the sandwich and began to draw again, this time with conscious deliberation.
The new images were distinctly technical.
He spent prudently, in that handful of special places that would satisfy his needs.
Details of the propulsion system were gleaned from sunfaded copies of a model-making magazine he had found in the ‘Bargains’ box on the stall outside Morg’s Bookery in the market. He treasured these, having spent so long poring over them he had memorised the specifications. Togger kept the magazines safely hidden away from prying hands at the back of his lowest shelf. Each issue had the name ‘M Belk’ neatly written at the top of the cover. He wondered who that previous enthusiast had been, and found it comforting to imagine having whoever it was as a friend.
One of the few people with whom Togger could discuss ant behaviour was Sel Maquatret, the friendly supervisor at the nearby suntunnels in Whissit Fields, an environment in which the boy felt secure and unthreatened. Sel had been impressed by Togger’s grasp of the complexities involved in promoting optimal growth of fruit, vegetables, and herbs, and welcomed the lad’s company on his inspection tours of the products under his care. So when Togger ventured to ask whether Sel could possibly spare a spoonful of weed-suppressant, “for testing”, Sel was quite happy to oblige, assuming the purpose to be herbicidal.
The herbicide also happened to be an oxidizing agent which, when added to the contents of several long-secreted fireworks, would greatly enhance their explosive potential.
As a young hobbyist, Togger was already a familiar customer at Greeming & Trulph (Accessories) in Welfage Road, from where he was able to obtain some more essential components without his intentions being questioned.
What if he had discovered that, in the basement of that very firm, currently examining the biomimetic elasticity of a robat wing, was a former Senior Airtech of some repute, whose name Togger would surely have recognised? Perhaps the shock of that transition from figment to actuality might have changed his plans, leading to a totally different pattern of events.
Who can say?
Togger meanwhile had made free use of the library near Fountain Square, where after diligent searching he had found useful articles on guidance, navigation, and control, and on simple, effective detonation devices. With help from Perric and Tredge, his trips to Sparrink’s Yard yielded an almost intact payload cradle and a choice of discarded podframes. He selected the smallest, which was least damaged, meticulously restoring the chipped surface using a combination of aluminium powder and fast-setting glue, and smoothing it off with his fine barette hand file.
And throughout, the quantity of annoyance points rose steadily. Every so often Togger derived a grim satisfaction from his habit of counting them. He found it hard to decide on a specific total that would be the ‘Go!’ signal, until he suddenly remembered about primes. On the next random counting day, ‘Go!’ would be triggered only if the total was a prime number.
Keeping to this imposed rule (434) he was both disappointed and (519) nervously relieved when the next few totals (564) were no-goes. By the time the tally approached six hundred he realised that he (593) had endured almost two years of Jeppo’s casual cruelty.
593. He re-counted very carefully. Heart thumping, he double-checked for factors. There was no doubt. 593 resisted division!
Togger was ready for retribution.
The flight would last less than twenty minutes. Launched from the protection of the derelict farmhouses near the old quarry, Togger’s customised airpod would ascend in an anticlockwise spiral above Snoak, release its freight in a burst of brilliance over the heart of the city, then arc westwards with an immolating trail of glory towards the empty scrubland of Smatparrox.
The cradle had needed only minor repair, and he was confident that the release mechanism now operated flawlessly. Once the main build was completed, and he was satisfied that no further tweaking would help, Togger turned his attention to the payload, without which the project would have lacked purpose.
Among his Greeming & Trulph purchases was a small mechanical printer, basically a child’s toy dating from an earlier age, designed to create simple labels on strips of paper and easily modified to accept the biodegradable foil he was using. Once the appropriate letters were keyed in, all he had to do was crank the handle repeatedly until enough strips were produced to match the required payload weight.
It took him almost a week, working at it when it was safe to do so, with frequent pauses to allow cramped fingers and aching wrist to recover.
The delivery had been spectacular, but the message was blunt, and there were residents of Trevury acquainted with the Ambax family to whom its advice would have come as no surprise. Uffer and his son, relative newcomers to Snoak, had barely begun to earn the same degree of notoriety in this city before that multiplicity of warnings fell from above and became a subject of largely mystified debate.
Nart Gagel, a sharp reporter for ‘The Enwitter’, collating information from timed interviews, was first to spot a probable link between the admonitory shower over Snoak and the crash of ‘an unidentified flying object’ not far from Smatparrox podport, which was ‘still under investigation by authorities’.
On the day in question, just home from her shift at the Multimart, Ebby Blates, on removing her most recently crafted hat, noticed one of the silver slivers lodged within its baroque entanglements. Extracting it with tweezers she read the imprinted message:
DO NOT TRUST JEPPO AMBAX – HE IS A BULLY AND A LIAR
“Ha!” she exclaimed, in a tone which suggested some private knowledge, “serve that little blighter right!”
Then, in response to an aesthetic prompting she would have been unable to explain, she tucked the strip of foil back between a sprig of rosemary and the tines from a curved section of tortoiseshell comb, securing it with a neat dab of home-made fish glue.
Yethne considered, head tilted, chin cupped, a mannerism indicating serious reflection, which Strag still found endearing. “I’m not sure. He’d seemed so preoccupied of late. Not that it was affecting the quality of his work, or his touching desire to please, but I noticed a little while ago that he suddenly took to hurrying home after school.”
“I remember your telling me that was a rather difficult situation, aside from his passion for… what was it, beetles?”
“No, ants. Anyway, today was unusual. After the bell rang, he didn’t rush. He sauntered.”
“Sauntered?”
“Not only that. He actually turned to wave as he left, called ‘Bye, Miss Farfyle!’ And what was even odder…”
Yethne shook her head, not entirely convinced by her own recollection.
“I think I saw him smile.”