Gullstruck Island

by Frances Hardinge

  Prox ran blindly after the faint sounds of trills and whoops. There – was that a clatter of rocks further up that slope?

  ‘Ugly, stupid, hopeless . . .’ chanted Prox under his breath as he staggered onward. He hated elephant birds’ imbecilic belligerence. At the moment he particularly hated this individual bird, which seemed determined to lead him away from the path and into the Ashlands.

  Prox spent the next quarter of an hour slithering up and down the uneven ground, haunted by fleeting glimpses of the bird’s bristle-browed head. He lost his bearings almost immediately, for over the centuries the Ashlands had become far larger than Sweetweather, swallowing all the lush land around the town and along the headlands. The sun blinded him, and everywhere weather-bleached spirit houses tilted and clustered.

  At least the dead around him were not Lace. Prox found the idea of the Lace scattering the ashes of their dead to the winds horrifying.

  That’s why the Lace suffer and go hungry, went the whisper among the non-Lace. That’s why they go missing, why they are taken by eagles, and by the volcanoes and the strong sea currents. They let the spirits of their dead be torn apart on the winds so they have no ancestors to protect them or give them good luck. They bring everything on themselves.

  It was said that the Lace did not even mention their dead by name once there was nobody left alive who actually remembered the dead person. They had no tales to tell of their heroic ancestors – just countless legends of the island’s weird man–bird god, the Gripping Bird.

  Prox tried to imagine his own ancestors invisibly rallying around to protect him, but the old woman’s words kept repeating in his head until his mind held only a gallery of abandoned portrait frames, their denizens running wild in this wilderness of black rock and golden grass, their pockets full of pebbles.

  At last he found the elephant bird thumping its beak into the undergrowth in search of some small animal. He was reaching for the leash loop that lay on the grass when his eye fell on the leaves of the white hang-head orchids around him. All of them were pockmarked with small circular holes.

  The next moment he was stumbling down the slope with all the speed he could muster, his fingers pushed firmly in his ears. Even as a towner, Prox knew what those holes meant: blissing beetles.

  Blissing beetles were only near the western mountains, but they were notorious. When the young beetles left their cocoon they ate out such circles spiral-wise. Completed circles with no young bugs in them meant that the beetles had finished fleshing themselves out and that their wings had had time to harden. The plump little insects had only one defence against the dagger-like beaks of hungry birds, but it was a deadly one.

  On either side the sunlit world lurched and burned past him. Rocks and hidden briars bit his shins, but he did not stop for them. For all he knew, the air was already humming with tiny agate wings. For all he knew, birds might be thudding out of the air behind him, too entranced by the beetles’ hum to remember how they should fly or think or breathe. They said you felt the hum before you heard it, as a throb behind your breastbone. By the time it became a sound in your ear it was too late. Nobody really knew what the blissing song actually sounded like, only that it was beautiful enough to put a smile on the dead face of all who had heard it. Prox was running for his life.

  Only when he reached the path did he pause to recover his breath, stooping to clasp his knees. His shoe buckles were knotted with grass. He kicked a stone in frustration.

  I could be a Revered Clerk at Port Suddenwind, he thought bitterly as the hammering of his heart started to slow, ‘but no. I have to be here . . .’

  ‘Why weren’t you here?’ Mother Govrie snapped as Hathin barrelled into the cave. ‘You know she won’t let anyone else paint inside her ears. The Inspector will be here any moment, and she has be ready.’

  Hathin could only nod mutely as she struggled to regain her composure.

  Mother Govrie regarded her for a few moments. ‘Everything will be ready, won’t it?’ she asked after a moment. Hathin nodded, and her mother briefly rasped her rough fingertips across the shaven patch above her daughter’s forehead. Hathin sensed the affection and approval the gesture represented, and felt almost sick with the desire to be worthy of it.

  Mother Govrie, never cold, never cruel, but calloused by necessity. To her the world was just a great, recalcitrant clod of dough, waiting for her to drive her warm, vigorous knuckles into it until it gave in and became what it had to be.

  Arilou consented to have her ears painted the same marble-white as her face, and then Hathin ventured out.

  With some trepidation she noticed that the Inspector was in the village and was caught in conversation with Whish and one of her daughters. There was a long-standing rivalry between Whish and Eiven, the two finest pearl-divers in the village. Diving had always been the prerogative of the women – men’s lungs were smaller, it was said – and every diver in the village was fiercely territorial about ‘their’ corner of the reef. For many years Whish had enjoyed the choicest hunting grounds, and the appearance of the younger Eiven as a rival had been a bitter shock. However, the final straw had been a family matter.

  Two years before, Whish’s youngest daughter had been killed by a visiting landowner. The magistrate had called it an accident, and so the landowner had paid a fine and left town. And nothing more than grief might have come of it, if Eiven had not persuaded Whish’s eldest son, Therrot, that something should be done. One morning Therrot had marched away from the village with a small pack on his back and a strange, distant, tight look to his face. Only afterwards did his distraught mother learn that he had gone off on a ‘revenge quest’, giving up his old life to hunt down the murderer of his sister. He has gone to join the Reckoning, was the whisper. The revengers are his family now. And Hathin knew that they were speaking of the secret confederacy of those Lace who had sworn revenge oaths and who helped bring one another’s quests to their bloody conclusions. Therrot had never been seen again and most of Whish’s family had never forgotten it. While they played along with the deference owed to Arilou’s family, there was a dangerous undercurrent of cold, resentful contempt.

  Whish’s remaining son, the fourteen-year-old Lohan, surprised Hathin by kicking a plume of warm sand across her toes. He grinned when she jumped.

  ‘Are you going to be receiving the Inspector like that?’

  Hathin suddenly knew how she must look, peppered with red dust, and with little fly stowaways in her hair. Embarrassment scalded her.

  Lohan reached across, pointedly picked something off her clothes and perched it on his thumb-tip to study it with a smile-frown. Then he licked it and, before Hathin could recoil, stuck it on to the end of her nose.

  ‘Get yourself cleaned up,’ he said, before sauntering away.

  Plucking at the end of her nose, Hathin found herself holding a tiny circle of leaf, and at last she understood Lohan’s meaning. The dust, the splashes of golden pollen like fireworks against her dark skirt, these were evidence that she had been up on the cliff that morning. If he saw her that way, Prox might start to suspect that the two boys he had met there had chased his elephant bird into the Ashlands deliberately, and at her request. And if Prox saw little moons of leaf scattered on her clothing, he might realize that the polka-dot holes which had scared him away from his luggage for a critical ten minutes had been picked out not by young blissing beetles but by young, cunning Lace fingernails. In short, it might occur to him that his recent misfortunes had all been part of her plan to rummage through his bags in search of clues to the tests.

  She found a place among the rocks to splash her legs with sea water and brush her clothes down. When she emerged she saw a perspiring and harassed-looking Prox urging his recalcitrant elephant bird down the path. Her sting of pity was swept away by a tide of panic.

  There was now nothing to stop the tests beginning.

  Arilou did not raise her head as Skein walked into her cave, and seated himself before her. He wait
ed there in his own uncanny pool of silence, in no hurry to speak or begin.

  Hathin kept her eyes lowered and her hands clasped in her lap to stop them trembling. Her quick search of the elephant bird’s panniers had discovered the three boxes and three corked bottles, but the three jars for the smell test had been nowhere to be seen. She could only guess that they must have been tucked in Prox’s pockets. Even now he was probably burying them somewhere outside. She could only hope that the village boy she had sent to spy on him would not fail her.

  At last the curtain twitched again and Prox entered, his hair bearing the grooves of hurried combing. There was no sign of Hathin’s spy. In spite of the morning’s hurried activity, she was still unprepared for the first test.

  Suddenly there was the racketing sound of somebody raking a stick down the reed curtain at the cave mouth. Neither Skein nor Prox looked up as Hathin rose unsteadily and went to the entrance of the cave.

  Her ‘spy’ was waiting outside. Hathin felt her throat thicken with relief as she scrambled down the rope ladder and drew him away from the cave.

  ‘In front of the Scorpion’s Tail,’ was all he said. This, then, was where Prox had buried the three scent jars.

  There was no time for caution. She pressed her face close to the boy’s ear to whisper.

  ‘Did you dig them up and look in them? Which colour stone was each thing buried under?’

  ‘There wasn’t time,’ he muttered with a shrug.

  Doused in renewed panic, Hathin clapped her hands to her mouth and then with terrified eyes beamed at him through her fingers. For all she knew, Skein’s wandering vision might settle on them – she could not let this interview look like anything more urgent than a furtive boy–girl meeting . . .

  ‘Kick them!’ she smiled into his ear after a moment’s thought. ‘Go back! Kick all the stones around! As if you’re looking for shells! Quickly!’

  Shakily Hathin returned to the cave, half-expecting to find Skein waiting in silence, his countenance and sidelong eyes turned to confront her. But he was talking to Arilou and barely seemed to notice Hathin’s reappearance.

  ‘So, Miss Arilou, where are you now?’

  Hathin stealthily leaned over to her sister and paddled her finger in Arilou’s palm. She could not speak unless she appeared to be translating for Arilou.

  ‘Please, Arilou,’ she whispered right into her ear, ‘say something, please . . .’ As if in response the older girl frowned a little and a soft stream of molten words spilled into the air.

  ‘I am in this room.’ Hathin answered in cold, confident Doorsy, as she always did when speaking for Arilou. ‘I hope you will pardon me if I do not wear my body. I find it very tiring and would prefer to remain alert.’

  ‘I understand,’ Skein said, and there was a smile in his voice if not on his face. ‘Are you ready?’

  No, thought Hathin, nonono . . .

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘The first test will be that of your ability to move your sense of smell. We will allow our minds to flow through the curtain . . .’ Skein’s voice sank into a calm monotone. No doubt he was drifting his mind out of the cave as he spoke, but there was no change in the unflinching erectness of his seated figure. ‘Move to the cliff-face. Now pass your senses along it until you come to a big curved fissure in the rock. Now look for a large slab of blue slate . . .’ Skein trailed off. Once, twice Skein’s eyes quivered from left to right, and his eyebrows twitched. ‘Prox,’ he said in a different tone, ‘there’s a boy there, picking through the stones. Go and ask him to stop, will you?’

  ‘I have found a blue-grey stone,’ Hathin allowed a note of doubt to creep into her Arilou voice, ‘but it is standing on end, I am not sure it is the right one . . .’

  ‘Miss Arilou, let your senses sink down through the sand, beneath the stone – you are searching for a jar –’

  ‘I sense nothing but sand and rocks . . .’ Hathin noticed that Arilou’s head was turning as though she really was searching. ‘Wait . . . a few feet away I think I have found a jar but . . . but there seems to be more than one . . .’

  ‘Enter the jars one at a time. Tell me what you smell.’

  Hathin breathed a small sigh of relief. Thanks to the work of her spy, Skein no longer expected her to know which jar was where, only what was inside them. And, thanks to the Pearlpit porters, she already knew that.

  Taking the greatest care not to rush, Hathin described each scent in turn. The fish she let herself guess easily. The cinnamon she hesitated over for a while. She made herself take some time over the last, talking of perfumes, spring-like smells and only eventually recognizing it as hang-head orchid.

  ‘Very good,’ Skein said, sounding like he meant it. ‘Return to the cave, please.’

  Next, as expected, Skein produced three boxes for the ‘finger-feeling’ test. Hathin had memorized the grain pattern on the wood of each box and had no trouble telling which of them held the conch, the rag of fur and the mouse skull.

  When the corked bottles for the taste test were produced, Hathin felt herself turn pale. She had etched a mark into the cork of the bottle of sweet liquid with her fingernail – but where was it? The dent must have healed in the meanwhile, the soft cork rediscovering its original shape. What could she do?

  She was on the verge of closing her eyes and trusting to her one in three chance, when she noticed a tiny fly floating in one of the bottles. It must have flown in when she had unstoppered the bottles to taste the contents. It was all she could do not to stab a finger at it and call out, ‘That one!’ Just in time she remembered to wait for Arilou’s murmurs, and then cautiously chose the bottle with the fly.

  ‘Correct.’ As Hathin had hoped, the fly had found out the sweetest bottle.

  Now Skein asked Arilou to let her senses drift with his up the cliff path. Hathin carefully described features of the area she had known since her birth, and then at the mouth of the natural limestone maze of the Lacery she allowed her voice to falter.

  ‘Strange,’ she said, ‘there seems to be a w—’

  ‘Prox!’ Skein exclaimed sharply. Prox, who had only just stooped his way back into the cave, looked a question. ‘Your marker is gone.’

  There seems to be a white ribbon tied to a spike of rock, Hathin had been about to say. She had followed Prox and seen him tie it just before she had sprinted down the cliff-face to reach the village before him. She had been tingling to describe the ribbon, terrified that en route Skein would ask her to describe some other fleeting feature that she could not guess, like the shape of the clouds or the colour of a bird. She had almost blurted it out, desperate to end the test . . . and those words would have betrayed her utterly and hopelessly.

  ‘What were you saying?’ asked Skein.

  ‘There’s a wind,’ Hathin stammered. ‘A wind rising. A perilous . . . perilous . . .’ She felt she had halted on the edge of a precipice, her toes touching air, crumbs of rock falling from her soles into forever.

  ‘No doubt that blew away the marker.’ Skein stirred carefully, systematically clicking joints that he had left to stiffen. ‘You are tired and will wish to talk to others in the village about the rising storm. Let us meet again this afternoon.’

  Hathin’s mind fell into numb exhaustion as the two men left the cave. There was still nothing but gaping void at her feet, and she had no idea how to take her next step.

  5

  Current-caught

  As soon as the Inspectors were out of the room, Hathin’s mouth turned to sand. ‘Arilou’ had passed three tests. That was enough to avoid failing outright . . . but there was still the test of hearing to come, and afterwards they would probably want her to retake the test of sight. If she failed both of them completely, would the Inspectors not become suspicious? Perhaps Prox would think to mention that his luggage had been out of his sight for quarter of an hour? And even if they agreed to give Arilou a complete retest, what then? No, she had to pass all five tests, there was nothing else for i
t.

  Out on the beach she found everybody dragging their boats away from the water, tethering the huts and moving valuables up to the caves in preparation for the coming storm. The sky was still blue, but its colour had deepened and dirtied. As she passed, everybody in turn gave her a quick questioning glance. She gave each a small bitten smile, and saw it reflected in every face. Things are going well, but not that well.

  Skein sat on the edge of the Lacery with his face towards the sea and his eyes turned to look along the beach. Hathin guessed that he was looking at neither of them.

  ‘He says he has gone to see if a friend has left a note for him.’ At the sound of the familiar voice Hathin turned and found Larsh had scuffed his way to stand beside her. Even she, it would seem, had learned not to notice him. She smiled up at his rapid blink and felt a warm rush of fellowship.

  ‘And the other Inspector?’ asked Hathin. It had suddenly occurred to her that Prox might be tying up another marker for her to find.

  ‘Over there, arguing with your sister,’ Larsh pointed. He looked even older by daylight.

  Eiven had her hands on her hips while Prox’s face was brick-red with frustration and confusion. Between them lay a boat, its rope in Prox’s hand. Beside them stood Mother Govrie, arms folded, biting at her full lower lip.

  Hathin guessed what they must be doing. Stalling. Delaying Prox so that she could carry out her next plan. The plan she did not have.

  Minchard Prox did not even notice the pad-footed approach of the snub-faced girl with the nervous mouth. He was too busy sweating under the gaze of the two women.

  ‘You will be reunited with your boat.’ Feeling outnumbered, he had slipped out of Nundestruth and into Doorsy, hoping to borrow a little stature from the noble cadences as if they were high-heeled boots. ‘I must ride the waters in it for the test, that is all. Do you understand? I am to whisper a word for your Lady Lost to hear, and I must be away from all ears.’