Gullstruck Island

by Frances Hardinge

  Since the storm, the village of the Hollow Beasts had drawn into itself defensively. So it was that the first they knew of Jimboly’s return to the coast was a loud long whistle and a swishing rain-on-a-bonfire noise. And a few minutes later there she was up on the clifftop, still swinging her dry pig’s bladder full of peas above her head and whistling between her fingers.

  She bounced her way down the rubble-face like a local and stood there gasping and grinning, her lanky limbs and loose clothes painted with the fresh red mud left over from the storm, her pet flickerbird fluttering about her head at the furthest extent of its leash.

  ‘Jimboly!’ Mother Govrie tried to sound disapproving. ‘One of these days the volcano’ll hear you whistling and he’ll wake up and snatch you away to nursemaid his children . . .’

  ‘And a very fine nursemaid I’ll make. Anyway, I was at a party with the mountain last night and he filled his crater with rum – he won’t be awake for days.’ Jimboly grinned, and because she was one of the few outsiders who knew how to smile, nobody could be angry at the little blasphemy.

  Jimboly’s long face was admired by the Lace women, who always shaved their foreheads to make their own look longer. The angularity of her jaw somehow made her look more mischievous, and black hair with blue lights escaped from under her dark red bandanna. You seldom saw her without a smile. And when she smiled it was almost impossible not to like her.

  Her smile was her shop window. Set amid the strong white teeth were teeth of tortoiseshell, coral, turquoise, jade, pearl and even gold. One jade tooth even had a peacock engraved into its surface. Jewel-toothed, but not Lace – you could see that at a glance. Lace placed delicate studs in their teeth, but did not replace the teeth entirely. However, non-Lace were interested in whole teeth to replace those lost through age or accident. Usually Jimboly sold them fixed-up pulled ones, but the richest non-Lace would sometimes buy replacements made of metal or gems. All the teeth in Jimboly’s mouth were of this last sort.

  Jimboly herself was not Lace, nor did she quite seem to know what she was. ‘A spoonful of a dozen bloods, most of them curdled,’ was the way she usually described herself. Her roaming had given her a knack for languages, and she was the only non-Lace Hathin had ever met who could make a decent stab at speaking Lace, though without the subtleties.

  She pulled teeth for free, taking only the tooth as payment, and she drilled Lace teeth and inlaid plaques so swiftly and surely that many Lace preferred her work to their own. Jimboly was everybody’s favourite tooth fairy.

  She was always valued as a source of news and gossip too, her tales more whimsical and amusing than the dry facts surrendered by the Lost’s tidings huts. This time, however, her news was neither.

  In the last week, she had travelled from Knotted Tail, through Leaping Water and past the little outposts of High-leap, Lame Cape, Seagrin, Eel’s Play, Jumping Rock . . . and everywhere the Lost were dead. They had all drifted away silently in the night, apparently at the same hour as Milady Page, leaving their bodies like snakeskins.

  ‘People are saying it’s a plague,’ Jimboly informed them. ‘Some people are hoping that maybe their minds have all been swept out to sea in the storm and they’ll come back. Some people are still propping their lordships and ladyships up on pillows and trying to feed them soup. But they’ll stop that when they start to smell in the heat, I guess.’ She grinned around her at the villagers’ gasps and murmurs.

  Jimboly was the first person to visit the village since the ill-fated Inspectors, and so the villagers crowded around her, eager to have word from a friendly source. There was something queer in the air of Sweetweather now, and the Lace were becoming even warier about visiting it.

  ‘And no marks on them?’ asked Mother Govrie, her voice as brisk and practical as if she was asking for a recipe. ‘No sign of a bite or scratch? No trace of poison?’

  ‘Ooh, you have such a grisly mind, Mother. If I was a child of yours and heard your bedtime stories, I’d be like this all the time.’ Jimboly bugged her eyes and pulled her hair straight up as though terrified, then laughed. ‘No, apparently, not a scratch. And no sign of strife either; nearly all of them settled down comfortably. They fancy that even Milady Page was only face down in the mud because she fell out of her hammock. She had her brocade shawl under her, you see – the one she always used to flop across her face when she was resting, to keep off the mosquitoes.’

  ‘How do you find out all these things, Doctor Jimboly?’ asked one young woman.

  ‘Ritterbit brings me the best titbits.’ Jimboly answered the question as she always did, and paused to stroke the head of her little pet. ‘Don’t you, Ritterbit?’

  Ritterbit had been riding on her shoulder for the better part of a year, as far as anybody could tell. He was a beautiful black flickerbird, with a splash of gold on his tail that was only visible when it flared. The tiny red leather collar around his neck was linked to Jimboly’s coral necklace by a slender chain of bronze links and tiny bells.

  ‘I caught him pecking at my shadow,’ Jimboly explained to a little boy who stood watching Ritterbit with fascination. ‘He looked pleased with himself, so I knew he already had a thread of my soul inside his little gullet. I caught him in a wicker trap, but then what was I to do with him? Could have wrung his neck, I suppose, but he’s such a little beauty, isn’t he? I suppose I fell in love. Well, I couldn’t let him fly off and unravel me, so the only thing for it was to keep him close so he couldn’t start pulling my threads loose.’ Hathin thought that this was probably one of Jimboly’s jokes, since Ritterbit seemed suspiciously tame, as if petted from the egg, but you never could tell with Jimboly.

  ‘They say that someone who dies from a flickerbird dies unmarked,’ remarked Larsh, who had joined the group without anyone noticing. ‘Perhaps the Lost—’

  ‘No, no, if a flickerbird unravels you, it takes weeks, even months,’ Jimboly cut in. For some reason she was always sharper with Larsh than with anybody else. Perhaps she guessed that if he wished he could carve tooth plaques even finer than hers. ‘Months of waning and weakening and weeping. To die in a single night like that, you’d need seventy of Ritterbit’s cousins to swoop down and carry off your shadow like a piece of whole cloth. Anyway, the governor doesn’t think it’s flickerbirds, or the storm, or plague. Minds of men are behind this – that’s his thought.’

  Jimboly busied herself cleaning her round-headed bow-drill, aware of the attentive ears that ringed her.

  ‘Has he said as much?’ asked Eiven.

  ‘Yes, and he’s not the only one that thinks so. There’s an Ashwalker prowling around. Hoping he’ll be called in for a manhunt, from what I hear. Well, the governor has to do something, doesn’t he, since one of them’s dropped dead in his district? Wouldn’t surprise me if he did call in the Ashwalker.’

  The Ashwalkers were all descended from the tribe of the Dancing Steam, who hailed from the inland hills around the volcano Crackgem, amid the orchid lakes with their choking smells and eerie colours. Even these days many of the Dancing Steam still wore a token blue-black sash or garment as a sign of their lineage, dyed using the wild indigo that grew in the hills, and fermented with wood ash not from bonfires but from cremation pyres. It was said that every dead spirit thus bound into the Ashwalkers’ clothing served them by giving them magical powers.

  Needless to say, the Ashwalkers had been delighted when the colonists had originally turned up, bringing entire shiploads of dead people’s ashes, all in convenient little pots. The colonists had been considerably less delighted to find blue people raiding their settlements and packeting their ancestors. However, since that time a truce had been struck and the Ashwalkers had earned a grudging respectability as last-resort bounty hunters. If given a licence to chase down a particular felon, the Ashwalker was then allowed to claim the ash from their pyre. This was more than execution. This could mean spending eternity dyed into a bandanna or a sock.

  Everybody knew that there was an Ashwa
lker living alone in one of the wild local valleys, but he was hardly ever seen and most people were thankful for that.

  Jimboly quietly ground a workmanlike hole in the front of a ten-year-old’s incisor, slipped in a snug little plaque of pink coral and then looked around her.

  ‘Why so silent? All this might be bad news for the Lost . . . the other Lost, I mean . . . but it’s festival time for you lot, isn’t it? You have the only Lost within a day of Sweetweather, probably the only Lost this side of Sorrow . . . maybe the only Lost on Gullstruck Island.’ Jimboly glittered a grin and took her measure of them. ‘So the next time folks in town get fangy at you, you can just look them right in the eye and say, oh, I don’t think our Lady Lost will be so keen to find your goat when it goes wandering or, hmm, didn’t you want to know if a storm front was coming, and don’t you need our Lady Lost for that?’

  Hathin could see in every face the effect of Jimboly’s words. Until now the Hollow Beasts had been caught up in trying to guess which of them had cut Prox loose, and whether Skein’s death was linked to that of the other Lost. They had not properly considered how all their lives might change with Arilou as Chief Lost. But now they gingerly let their minds sneak a peek into a foreign world, a Doorsy world. Good food and a house and goats and a front door and people willing to knock on it. Wealth and respect.

  As people were starting to chatter in a cautiously, hopeful way, Hathin listened, overcome by cold horror. All the Lost had died. Arilou had not died with them. Soon the world would ask why. Hathin could think of only one answer. Underneath she had clung to a shred of hope that somehow, miraculously, Arilou would turn out to be Lost after all. Now that last hope had died, and she was left staring at the village’s threadbare myth of their Lady Lost, seeing how easily it could be torn apart by a few good questions.

  Even worse, right now Arilou was barely fit for company, let alone fit to take over as Chief Lost. For a few days after the death of Skein, Arilou had kept up the same twitching, restless intentness of manner, until Hathin started to wonder if she was tick-infested. That morning, however, Arilou’s face had been crumpled with petulant exhaustion, as if she had spent a sleepless night. For once she deigned to pay some attention to her surroundings, but only to show her annoyance with it. She had spent the morning lunging for fruit, kicking out at bowls of water, striking away helpful hands. How could they let her be seen like that?

  Watching from a distance, Hathin saw Jimboly stroll off to barter with Larsh. Their negotiation, never cordial, today seemed almost hostile. As well as her dentistry tools, Jimboly always carried with her assorted oddments for sale, and these sometimes included small birds and animals. Whenever she visited the Hollow Beasts there seemed to be a scrawny pale-necked pigeon, poking its beak disconsolately through the wicker of its cage. People wondered why Larsh bought them, since there could be little eating on them. They always had a skinny look. Hathin, however, had once seen Larsh releasing one on the beach and could only guess that he felt some pity for their imprisonment. She told nobody, for she did not think anybody else would understand.

  Jimboly seemed to guess the truth, of course, but that just made her grin and come back with more pigeons.

  Ah, and now Jimboly was off to play with the younger children as usual. How did she always manage to become an instant insider?

  By the looks of things, Jimboly was leading the children in a throwing game. There was a high rock on the edge of the Lacery with a beautiful smooth hole running right through it, like the eye of a fat needle. The children were standing behind a line Jimboly had drawn in the sand and trying to throw small rocks through the hole. All the while chattering away . . . What was she asking them? Hathin ventured closer in the hope of overhearing, but it was not their words which caused her to break into a run.

  She suddenly glimpsed two figures on the far side of the ‘needle’. Hathin’s own mother was stooping to splash the slopping sea water against Arilou’s dusty legs. Both had their back to the needle. As Hathin neared the Lacery she saw a sharp-looking stone flit at last through the hole, on a course for the nape of Arilou’s neck. Hathin tugged air into her lungs for a scream . . . and Arilou suddenly threw up her arms, lolled her head forward and sank clumsily to one knee. She had been hit. No, she had not been hit. The strange motion had dropped her beneath the path of the stone.

  And when Mother Govrie rounded the corner to confront the culprits there was shouting, and children scattering, and Jimboly standing aghast amid dropped pebbles with her hands clapped to her mouth.

  It had an odd beauty to it, Hathin decided, both devious and direct. If you want to know if somebody is a Lost, why bother with buried bottles and white ribbons when you can throw a rock at them from behind? Perhaps they don’t duck, and that leaves you none the wiser, but if they do duck . . . well, you are probably looking at a Lost. Hathin could no longer hope that Arilou really was a Lost, and yet through some freakish chance, she had managed to duck.

  Hathin ran to her sister’s side. Arilou’s beautiful mouth was pulled into a rubbery, pained gape. Her knee was grazed and glossy with sea water.

  ‘I won’t let her do that again,’ whispered Hathin in Arilou’s ear. ‘I won’t let her do anything you don’t like, ever again.’ The promise was made in a rush of protective anger, but there was also a sting of guilt. Back when she was much younger, something had happened that meant Hathin could never, ever tell anyone how she disliked and distrusted Jimboly, whom everybody else loved.

  When Jimboly had first visited the village Hathin had been six years old, and for a time it had seemed that her arrival was the most wonderful thing that had ever happened. Jimboly had played at being a gull-witch, chasing the children among the rocks. Hathin had watched sadly from the sand, her hand curled around the unresponsive hand of Arilou.

  Jimboly had shrieked her way up to the pair of them, waving her arms wildly, her hair falling across her face, then had halted panting when Hathin and Arilou failed to flee.

  ‘I’m really sorry . . . we can’t play.’ Hathin had felt miserably embarrassed. ‘It’s . . . It’s Arilou.’

  Jimboly had glanced up and down the beach, and then her mouth had spread in a mischievous multicoloured smile. Before Hathin could react, she had stooped down, wrapped her strong arms around Arilou’s waist and lifted her.

  ‘I have your Lady Lost!’ she had screeched in her witch voice. ‘Come and rescue her if you can!’ And off she had run with Arilou draped over one shoulder, closely pursued by Hathin, who had been bewildered, then frightened, then exhilarated as she found herself chasing alongside other wild-eyed, sand-cheeked heroes of her own age. For once, just for once, she had been in the game . . .

  Afterwards Jimboly had taken all of the children back to her little goat-hide tent. She had shown them ritual wooden dolls with real teeth, and fearsome rows of human and animal fangs along arcs of wire, for those who had lost their own teeth.

  ‘What about you lot?’ Jimboly had asked through her grin. ‘Anyone here got wobbly teeth?’

  There had been several, of course, and Jimboly had rated them like cocks for a fight, while the competitors strove to show her how far they could twist them. It had turned out that her pockets were full of spiced fruits and wooden toys, and before long she had made bargains for all the teeth, if they ‘happened’ to come loose by morning.

  ‘What about you, Hathin?’ Jimboly had asked. ‘Anything loose behind your smile? No? Well, what about Arilou?’ To Hathin’s dismay, Jimboly had prised Arilou’s mouth open. Arilou apparently had a wobbly tooth.

  ‘I don’t think she cares about her tooth much, so she won’t miss it – how would you like a reward for bringing the Lady to me?’ In Jimboly’s hand there had been a little slab of black rock painted to look like a squatting toad. It would have fit snugly in Hathin’s palm, but Hathin had shaken her head.

  It was only as the children were leaving that Hathin’s attention had been drawn by a large maraca-like object made of stitched l
eather patches, with a beaded handle. It had been tucked away in a pocket of Jimboly’s travelling pack. As the other children scampered off, Hathin had lingered to look at it.

  ‘Sharp eyes.’ Jimboly’s voice behind her. ‘You’ve spotted my little rattle.’

  ‘What . . . what is it?’ Hathin had asked, startled by her own boldness. Jimboly had watched her for a few seconds, eyes a-glitter. Then, apparently reaching a decision, she squatted down and brought her grin close to Hathin’s ear.

  ‘In it,’ Jimboly had whispered, ‘are twenty-nine white teeth, polished inside and out so they’re as bright as a governor’s china. The owners of the teeth are all dead – they have to be, or the rattle doesn’t work.’

  ‘What’s it for?’ Hathin had felt a burning need to know.

  ‘Well . . . you take it by the handle, and you think hard about somebody . . . and you shake it. And that’s all I’ll say. Goodbye, little sharp-eyes.’

  That night Hathin had not been able to sleep for thinking about the strange rattle. It frightened her, but her mind wouldn’t leave it alone, any more than her friends could leave off fiddling with their loose teeth. In the early hours she had decided that she would promise to collect any teeth Arilou lost for Jimboly’s next visit – and in exchange ask for the secrets of the rattle.

  Hathin had ventured through mists to Jimboly’s little tent, eager to find her alone. To her surprise, the door flap had not been tied shut and nobody was resting on the bedding mat. Instead, her eyes had been drawn to the mysterious rattle. No longer tucked away in a pocket, it had lay in full view, nestled up against the wooden pillow.

  Hathin had entered. Her mind had seemed full of heat haze as she had stooped and picked up the rattle. She had raised it gingerly and shaken it once. It had given an angry rattle, a bony chitter.

  Something had instantly swooped from the door of the tent, and the rattle had been knocked from Hathin’s hand.