Noah Barleywater Runs Away Read Free Page B

coming out here, sections peeping out there, none of it making any sense at all. And while there was certainly a roof on top in roughly the correct place, it wasn’t made of slate or tiles – or even thatch like his friend Charlie Charlton’s house. In fact, it was made of wood. Noah blinked and looked at it again, cocking his head to the side a little and wondering whether it would look more normal if he looked at it askew.
    But as curious as the building appeared to be, it was as nothing compared to the enormous tree that stood outside it, blocking his view of the sign above. Through the branches he could make out a few letters – a pair of Ns and an I in the first word, an O and a Y close together in the second, a final P in the third. He stared at it, trying to use his X-ray vision to see through the branches until he rememberedthat he didn’t have X-ray vision – that was a boy in one of his books. But still, he wanted to read the sign and couldn’t take his eyes off the tree. Without being able to say why, he found that it had entirely captured his attention.
    Yes, it was tall, but no taller than many of the other trees that he had seen over the course of his life. (He did live at the edge of a forest.) They’d all been around for hundreds of years, or so he’d been told; it was no wonder they grew to such sizes. Trees, after all, were the opposite of people; the older people became, the smaller they seemed to get. With trees, it worked the other way round.
    And yes, the bark was a healthy shade of brown, more like a block of rich, delicious chocolate than regular bark, but still, it was nothing more than the bark of a good, healthy tree and hardly anything to get over-excited about.
    And it was clear that the leaves that hung from the strong branches were a lustrous shade of green, but they were no greener than any of the other leaves that fluttered in the summer breeze on trees around the world; no different to the leaves he could see on the trees that stood outside his own bedroom window.
    But there was something extraordinary about this tree that he just couldn’t put his finger on. Something hypnotic. Something that made his eyes grow wide and his mouth drop open as he forgot, for a moment or two, that he wassupposed to keep breathing.

    ‘You’ve heard the stories, I suppose?’ said a voice to his right, and he spun round quickly to see an elderly dachshund trotting towards him, a half-smile on his face, accompanied by a heavy-set donkey who was looking around the forest floor as if in search of something he had lost. ‘I can always tell when someone’s come to take a look at her. You’re not the first, young man. Won’t be the last either. WOOF!’ The dachshund let out a tremendous bark at the end of his remarks and looked away, raising his eyebrows haughtily with the air of a man who has just made a rude noise in a lift.
    ‘I don’t know anything about it, sir,’ said Noah, shaking his head. ‘I haven’t heard any stories. I’m not from here, you see. I was just passing through, that’s all, and I noticed the tree standing in front of that funny-shaped building and it grabbed my attention.’
    ‘You’ve been standing in the same place for almost an hour,’ said the dachshund, laughing a little. ‘Didn’t you know?’
    ‘You haven’t seen a sandwich around here, have you?’ asked the donkey, looking up and fixing him with a stare. ‘I heard rumours that someone had lost a sandwich here. It contained meat of some description. And chutney,’ he added.
    ‘I haven’t, I’m afraid,’ said Noah, wishing he had.
    ‘I have a hankering for a sandwich,’ said thedonkey in an exhausted tone, shaking his head sadly. ‘Perhaps if I keep looking …’
    ‘Don’t mind him,’ said the dachshund. ‘He’s always hungry. It doesn’t matter how much you feed him, he still wants more.’
    ‘You’d be hungry too if you hadn’t eaten in more than twenty minutes,’ sniffed the donkey,