The Destiny of Minou Moonshine by Gita Ralleigh ~ Blog Tour

It’s my stop on the blog tour for The Destiny of Minou Moonshine by Gita Ralleigh. I’m delighted to share an extract from this magical middle grade adventure.

Chapter One

The gunshot’s crack and boom woke Minou with a start. She blinked in the darkness, thinking at first she’d been dreaming. But the air was hazy with smoke and she could smell the acrid burn of gunpowder. Outside, wildfowl on the river squawked and beat their wings in alarm and a troop of monkeys shrieked noisily from the treetops. Minou yawned, pulling herself up out of her hammock and calling to her grandmother, a dark outline at the entrance to their houseboat.

‘Dima? What was that noise?’

‘Nothing. Go back to sleep, child.’

Minou collapsed back into her hammock. Dima had most likely scared off a crocodile again, she decided, her eyes growing heavy with the sway and dip of the water. If only she’d been awake to see, for it was a rare thing to see the great muggers in the city. She remembered the last time one of the armoured beasts had ventured this far, though she’d been tiny. She’d stood on deck, clinging to her grandmother’s legs and watched its wide snout drift through black water, like a monster from an old tale. Dima had told her to cover her ears and then fired her old pistol in the air to scare it off.

Dima was Minou’s adopted grandmother. She had been a foundling, an abandoned infant, discovered after the great storm thirteen years ago. Father Jacob, the Whitetown priest, had found a rowboat washed up on the muddy bank, Minou a helpless baby bawling inside. Thinking her parents had surely drowned, he’d taken her to Dima’s floating shack which, though battered, had miraculously survived. The two of them had lived on the Lally River ever since.

Next morning, Minou stirred in the stifling heat. She’d overslept. Both she and Dima usually woke at dawn when the air was cool, disturbed by noisy parakeets stealing guavas from the trees. She peeled herself out of her hammock and swung down, crouching over the copper bowl of water to splash sweat from her face. Today was Sunday and there was no school. She didn’t want to waste a single moment of freedom.

Minou and Dima’s home, lodged like flotsam at the riverbend, was not strictly a boat or a house, and houseboat was much too grand a word for it. Dima had built it herself. The base was wooden planks, nailed together and tarred to make a deck, the roof an upturned boat, with canvas tacked over it. The wooden walls of the cabin were patched with packing cases, gaps sealed with mud, baked hard by the scorching sun. A rusted metal pipe was their chimney, and six car tyres roped to the deck kept it afloat. The shack was firmly anchored and chained to the trees, so it wouldn’t be swept away by the current. On the wooden cases, a faded image of a baby, with shiny black curls, advertised: MIGNON EVAPORATED MILK. Mignon was the name Dima had given her and one she did not like. She preferred Minou, which she’d called herself as a baby. Her second name, Moonshine, came from the old Whitetown name for their city: Moonshine-on-the-Lally.

Minou pulled the hessian curtain aside and stepped on to the freshly scrubbed deck. Dima was sitting cross-legged, gazing peacefully over the green water and puffing at her pipe. A wreath of smoke hovered in the air. For a moment, Minou wondered if she’d dreamed the gunshot. Then she saw Dima had taken apart her ancient Hungama 19 flintlock pistol to clean it, the parts neatly arranged on a cloth before her.

‘What happened last night, Dima? Did you scare off a crocodile – was it a big one?’

Her grandmother shrugged. This might have meant yes or no or simply don’t ask so many questions.

‘How come you have that old pistol, anyway?’ Minou asked. Dima sniffed.

‘Tigers.’

‘From when you were a postie in Rangila district?’

Dima had once been postmistress of an area of scattered villages in deepest jungle. Armed with her antique pistol and a boneshaker bicycle, she hadn’t let wild dogs, snakes or the odd tiger hold up the mail once in forty years. Her grandmother nodded curtly, and took the pipe from her mouth. ‘Go and eat breakfast,’ she ordered. ‘It’s late.’

Minou sighed. She wouldn’t get another word out of Dima, not until her grandmother was good and ready. And she was famished. Her stomach yowled like a stray cat. She swallowed the rice porridge that Dima had left on the iron stove and rinsed her battered metal bowl in the river, leaving it in the sun to dry.