‘Friendly.’ It was the gruffest, unfriendliest-sounding ‘friendly’ Hathin had ever heard, but it was a relief to hear Nundestruth at last. ‘Want . . . go . . . tower way?’ It soon became clear that the girl’s Nundestruth was not good, and that the frown on her face was partly due to concentration and uncertainty.
Jeljech was evidently to be their guide to the Beacon School. Her green leggings were already spattered with mud, and Hathin guessed that she had arrived back in the village only that morning. Evidently the other Sours had decided to delay everything until the return of their only Nundestruth speaker.
As the Lace prepared to quit the village, two things became clear. The first was that Arilou had no intention of leaving. Attempts to lead her to the edge of the village were rewarded by a ragged screech so very like a bird of prey that several villagers ducked and looked about for the great eagle they assumed to be swooping down on them. The second was that the Sours had no intention of letting Arilou leave.
Jeljech hurried to translate.
‘Her stay here. We go tower. You go city. You comeback village.’ She tapped the slightly trodden sketch of the barrow with her foot. ‘Food. You comeback here. All you go after.’
‘That conversation we had yesterday wasn’t the one we thought we were having, was it?’ Tomki managed a wincing smile despite the swelling of his left eye.
As far as the Sours were concerned, their visitors had agreed to bring them a barrowful of food and other useful supplies in exchange for a guide to the Beacon School. And to make sure that the Lace carried out their part of the bargain, Arilou would stay with them. The Sours were adamant that she had agreed to it.
‘But . . . we can’t leave her behind!’ Hathin felt a surge of panic. ‘She can’t defend herself! And the Sours don’t know how to look after her!’
‘I’ll stay with Arilou,’ declared Jaze. ‘And I’ll keep Tomki by my side – if there’s any trouble or treachery he can get Arilou to safety while I make life unpleasant for people. Therrot, you look after Hathin.’
Still full of anxiety and reluctance, Hathin finally consented to join Therrot in following Jeljech up a pitted, zigzag path. Their route made no sense to her. Sometimes they seemed to be travelling directly away from the beacon tower, and twice they ducked into narrow caves and crawled out through sinkholes. After an hour of this mad weaving, the beacon tower suddenly reared up behind the approaching ridge, so close that they could see the charred timbers jutting from the dead pyre at its summit.
Jeljech abruptly sat down and refused to go further, her face tense and wary. She would say nothing more, but waved towards the tower beyond the ridge, then absorbed herself with plucking leaves and tearing them into strips. Hathin and Therrot took the hint and trudged on without her.
Beyond the ridge, they found themselves on a broad, grass-covered shelf of land strewn with blackened wood stubs from the pyre. All around were little stone huts perched on high granite pedestals, presumably to keep them safe from sudden rushes of lava or hot mud.
Therrot pursed his lips and gave a curling whistle. There was no answer. No sound at all, Hathin realized suddenly, except for the stutter of distant geysers.
‘There should be insect sounds,’ she whispered. ‘There should be birds . . .’
Therrot suddenly stooped to peer between his feet.
‘There are,’ he muttered under his breath. The burrowing bird that lay in front of him looked unharmed, but was quite dead.
They advanced cautiously to the base of the nearest pedestal, where a few reddish-brown rounds bulged above the grass like oversized mushroom heads. Therrot turned one over with his foot.
‘Clay pots,’ he said, bemused. ‘Look, the cork stoppers are lying on the ground next to them.’ He straightened and stared across at similar terracotta bumps scattered around the other pedestals. ‘There’s dozens of them. They’re everywhere.’ He lifted one, upended it and shook it. ‘Seems empty.’
‘Therrot can you give me a hand with this?’ There was a heavy wooden ladder lying on the grass. Therrot helped Hathin raise it to lean against the pedestal, then held it steady as she climbed up. Clambering on to the stone ‘sill’ before the hut, she put her head in through the open door.
‘I think it’s some kind of storeroom,’ she called down.
She picked up a wooden doll with a long string stretching from its belly button. There was a finger-ring at the back, and when she pulled it the string drew back into the doll, pulling towards it a shiny piece of shell attached to the other end of the string. The doll game. The old way of training Lost children to find themselves.
There were wooden blocks painted in different colours, some with symbols raised in ridges on their surfaces. Candles were stacked next to bundles of pink and yellow incense sticks. Against the walls rested paintings of faces with different mouth shapes, musical instruments. All of these must have been used for the lessons of the Lost children, helping them to master their different senses.
A quick search revealed that there were no less than seventeen of these raised huts. Some were storerooms, some tiny studies, some appeared to be living quarters. In one a set of wooden bowls sat upon a wooden board, and beside them a dried-out cauldron of unserved soup. In another of the otherwise tidy little huts two green glass bottles had been smashed and left.
‘Everybody’s gone,’ said Hathin as she picked up a single ivory hoop earring from the floor. ‘It looks like they all just suddenly . . . left.’
‘Left, did they?’ Therrot stooped to peer at the damp ash that covered the ground around the tower. ‘If they left, I don’t think they did so willingly. Someone’s been dragging something heavy through the ash – dragging it that way, towards the orchid lakes. Yes, here’s another trail. And . . . wait.’ He stooped and picked up something tiny and metal. ‘A crossbow bolt.’
‘You think the people here were attacked? And then . . .’
Neither needed to complete the sentence. Hathin knew that, like her, Therrot was visualizing a dozen or so bodies being dragged downhill and dropped into one of Crackgem’s seething multicoloured lakes.
While she was thinking about this, a droplet of something hit her above the eyebrow and ran into her eye, making it burn. Shielding her face, she looked up, in time to see another drop swell beneath a crack in the roof and fall gleaming past her vision. She wiped at her brow, and when she examined her wet fingertips they were tinged with red.
The outer walls were rough granite, offering lots of toeholds to Hathin as she clambered to the roof.
‘Therrot . . .’ Hathin crawled gingerly over the broad, fragile slabs. ‘Somebody’s spilt something up here on the roof. Something red.’
‘Is it . . .?’
‘Not blood. No. It’s some sort of crumbly powder. The rain’s washed away a lot of it, but there’s still traces clinging. And somebody spread it deliberately. It’s like they drew a big circle or something. No . . . a crescent.’
Hathin sat on the roof, feeling as she had when staring at the Doorsy writing in Skein’s journal. She tried to imagine the people who had lived in these tower-like huts, spending their days piling timber for the pyre or painting the strange lesson toys. She thought of them standing every night amid rings of incense, calling lessons aloud, giving their lives to the vapour-like congregation of invisible Lost children who floated around them. Were they like the strange old woman back at the tidings hut? Did they sense the cold touch of hundreds of youthful eyes – brown, black, green, grey – or did they just speak their lines to the empty sky and weird spitting hillside?
What had Hathin hoped to find here? Someone with answers. But the school was just another heap of abandoned riddles.
Hathin climbed down to join Therrot. She found him sitting on the ground, staring into his palm.
‘I’ve found someone to interrogate. Look – it’s one of your little friends.’ He held up a small, bright yellow object on his palm, and Hathin saw it was a frog, like the one she had hid
den in her hat. After a moment she realized that it was made of wood, and that Therrot’s face wore a wry little smile. He drew a wooden baton down the sharp ridges that lined its back, and it made a crrrrk noise not unlike a living frog. ‘Well, that’s more answer than we’ve got out of anyone else.’
‘Why’s it got shiny silver crescents on its back?’ she asked.
‘You heard the lady. What do your crescents mean?’ A stroke of the stick, and the frog gave another enigmatic crrrrrrk. ‘Did you get that?’
‘Where’s everyone gone, frog?’ Hathin glared it into submission.
Crrrrrk.
‘Who dragged them away down the hill?’
Crrrrk.
‘Why do we always get everywhere too late?’
‘Why did the Lost die?’
‘Why does everyone want to kill us or send us up volcanoes?’
Therrot and Hathin looked at each other, and their mock stern expressions suddenly spread into grins of helpless, hopeless hilarity. Everything was too grim, too horrible. They dropped eye contact, but it was too late. In her peripheral vision Hathin could see Therrot shaking with helpless laughter.
‘Soap!’ spluttered Therrot in a small, high-pitched voice unlike his own. ‘They sent us up here with soap . . .’
‘A blue man wants to turn me into a sock!’ squeaked Hathin. They looked at each other, threw themselves on to their backs and cackled.
And it was wonderful to let go, to unbraid her mind and let it blow loose. There was a lightness in Hathin’s head and a warm throb behind her breastbone. All her usual worries melted away. Just for once she could almost ignore the tiny, tyrannical part of her brain that still yanked at her worry-leash, trying to pull her together, to tell her something . . .
There was a rising rushing sound like a cauldron coming to the boil but she barely noticed it, and so the echoing bang took her completely by surprise. Reflexively she slapped her hands over her ears, and watched uncomprehending as a boulder the size of her head bounded down the slope past her. The next instant her face was tingling and she was dragging in her breath in great squeaking heaves, suddenly realizing that her lungs were desperate for air. Desperate because only moments before she had not been breathing, and had forgotten that she even needed to do so.
There was a warm throb behind her breastbone, and at last Hathin could remember what that meant.
‘Therrot! Cover your ears!’ In desperation she stood and kicked out at his ribs while he giggled at her. ‘Therrot! Can’t you feel it? In your chest? There are blissing beetles here!’
Seriousness seeped back into his expression. He hastily stopped up his ears, and immediately gasped for breath. As he staggered to his feet, Hathin was suddenly aware that the land and sky were pulsing and wavering with each beat of her heart.
They sprinted and scrambled and tumbled down the mad, flexing mountainside. They hurdled a pile of kindling, leaped steaming streams, and finally lost their balance to slither into a heap on the rough ground. There they lay panting until their blood was no longer thunder. Hathin felt drained and sick.
‘Poor frog,’ she said after a long time. ‘He told us everything he knew – we just didn’t understand. He had the answer: crescents. It’s so obvious what a crescent means really – it’s the moon. Untrained Lost follow light, so one of the first things you teach them is not to fly towards the moon or they’ll be wandering in darkness forever. For Lost, the moon is danger.’
‘So the frog was marked with crescents because it was poisonous. But then the crescent on the roof . . .’
‘I think someone managed to hide when the school was attacked, saw what was going to happen, and had time to get on to the hut and draw the symbol, hoping it would be visible by the light of the beacon pyre. But I guess it wasn’t.’ Hathin hesitated and wound her arms round one of Therrot’s. Once again she felt a sadness that seemed to belong to someone much older than her. ‘The Lost children’s minds would have flown in from above – the symbol was meant to be a warning for them.’ She sighed, and rested her cheek against Therrot’s rough sleeve.
‘The enemy must have brought the blissing beetles here in those clay jars, all the way from the Coast of the Lace, and then set them free. The Lost . . . you kill them like farsight fish. You can’t get to them all, but you don’t have to. You just need to know where their minds will be.
‘The night the adults died, everybody knew they’d be checking the tidings huts for news. You’d only need to fill one hut with beetles, and then, all over the island . . .’ Milady Page tumbling from her hammock. Skein lolling back with a smile on his face. ‘But that still left the children.’
All over Gullstruck, children receiving goodnight kisses from their parents, then lying in bed or sitting cross-legged on wicker mats and sending their minds out to the Beacon School . . .
‘But then, Arilou . . . why not her?’
‘She can’t have been at school. I shouldn’t be surprised really. School would have been full of people telling her what to do and giving her homework, and I guess she didn’t like that much. So maybe she just stopped going and stayed with the Sours instead . . . I don’t know, I don’t know. I ought to cry and I want to, but most of all I just want to go to sleep. Is that horrible?’
‘No, no. You sleep, little sister.’ Therrot stared up at the sky with a look at once distant and dangerous, as if warning it against troubling her.
‘Therrot? Whoever did all this . . . they’re so much cleverer than we are.’
‘Maybe. But we’re still alive, still breathing.’
‘Only because Crackgem threw a rock at us to wake us out of the beetle-trance.’
‘Yes.’ Therrot almost smiled, and ruffled the tufted hair above Hathin’s forehead. ‘Lord Crackgem has a soft spot for those with weak minds.’
She drifted into sleep, but the breath of Lord Crackgem seemed to have drugged her dreams into madness. She tried to stagger away from him down the hillside, while underfoot crescent-marked rocks snarled like jaguars.
Far below Hathin could see the people of her village gliding silently into a cave, heads bowed. She called and called to them, but they did not respond. Do not worry, said the giantess beside her. I will go after them for you. And Dance was bounding away down the slope towards the cave of Death, heedless of Hathin’s desperate cries behind her . . .
Hathin jerked herself awake, almost knocking heads with Therrot.
‘Therrot, we have to get word to Dance! She’s heading to the Smattermast tidings hut! That’s the hut Skein was checking for messages when he died – that’s why he died before the rest of the Lost adults! She’s running straight into a pit of blissing beetles!’
22
Dangerous Creatures
When Therrot and Hathin staggered down to join her, Jeljech scrambled to her feet. There was, Hathin noticed, a touch of wary defensiveness in her frown. Their shaken and dishevelled state did not seem to come as a complete surprise to her, but there was undeniably a question in her hard, defiant eyes.
‘Jeljech? We go village belong-you. Scamperfast.’
When they reached the village, the Sour that welcomed the revengers wore the same expression as Jeljech. Inquisitive, cautious, slightly furtive. In return they received two haggard but unflinching Lace smiles.
‘We speak friends belong-us. Yes?’
When all of the Lace contingent except Arilou had formed a huddle at the edge of the village, Therrot and Hathin quietly spilled the news of the blissing beetle murders. There was a horrified silence.
‘It’s too big,’ Tomki said at last. ‘It’s so big I’m standing on it and I can’t see the edges. I can’t even look at it properly.’
‘Dance,’ said Jaze. It was the first time Hathin had seen Jaze look almost frightened. Dance was his idol, his guiding star.
‘Yes,’ agreed Hathin. ‘We have to warn her – but first we need to warn the Sours.’ She tried not to let her gaze flit to the villagers standing barely out of earshot. ‘
They clearly know something . . . but not that they’re sharing a mountain with a horde of blissing beetles. They’d never have let Jeljech come with us to the school if they’d known. Come to think of it, they’d never have let us go there either, if they really want their barrow of food.’
‘You’re right.’ Tomki looked horrified. ‘We can’t have them dying, now that I’ve finally got myself properly wronged.’ He ran fingertips over his bruised eye with an air of pride. ‘What would I do if I came back with the tattoo and they were all beetled? I’d – ow!’
Hathin had grown better at spotting Therrot’s danger signs. However, on this occasion there was simply no time to react before Therrot gripped Tomki under the arms and flung him aside like a bundle of straw. Tomki stared up at him, his eyes round but not yet afraid.
‘Wronged?’ erupted Therrot. ‘You threw rocks at them, and nearly got us killed!’
‘Jaze!’ Hathin looked to the taller man, but Jaze held back. Evidently he saw no reason to stand in Therrot’s way.
‘You really want to be wronged, Tomki? You want a wrong that’ll keep you awake at night?’ One could almost hear the self-control hissing out of Therrot like grain from a split sack.
Hathin ran forward to place herself between Therrot and Tomki, who was gingerly getting to his feet. Then, before Therrot could move or speak another word, she turned her back to him.
Tomki flinched too late, and Hathin’s slap caught him across his nose and upper cheek. He sat back on a rock, clutching his eye and looking at her like a pained puppy.
‘It’s not a game!’ All the others flinched as Hathin’s voice echoed with cold clarity from the surrounding crags. ‘The tattoo isn’t something you wear to impress girls, like a . . . a . . . a hat! You see this?’ Hathin pulled off the wrapping around her forearm. ‘You see these? These?’ She dragged back the sleeves of Jaze and then Therrot to show their tattoos. ‘We didn’t want them, Tomki. They mean we’re . . . we’re broken. Broken so badly we can’t ever be fixed . . . and . . . and all that’s left to us is breaking something else.
Gullstruck Island Page 24
