Gullstruck Island

by Frances Hardinge

  ‘You want to be with Dance? Go then. Find her and warn her. Then you can show your bruises to your priest and ask for your tattoo and do whatever you like. Just don’t bother coming back to us afterwards. If all you care about is getting the tattoo, then you’ve got no place with us. And you never will have.’

  After a shellshocked Tomki had ridden off on his elephant bird, it took a few minutes for the Sours to overcome their alarm at seeing their visitors smiling broadly while yelling and hitting each other. But Jeljech and Arilou were brought out again, and with painful slowness the dangers of the blissing beetles were made clear.

  The Sours boggled and scowled at the news and argued bitterly among themselves. At last they seemed to come to a decision, and after an awkward pause Jeljech began a slow, defensive account of the night the Beacon School’s fires went cold forever.

  A group of heavily armed men had turned up unexpectedly at the Sours’ village, having followed an elderly Sour woman whose twisted leg left her unable to outpace them. These men had brought a map with them, but there were no paths drawn on it between Jealousy and the Beacon School. They held out a quill, inviting the Sours to fill in the blank space. When the villagers shook their heads and pretended ignorance the strangers had pointed to the flag, and then out to the Ashlands to show that they knew where the ash had come from.

  The implied threat was clear, and two of the villagers had shown the men the way to the Beacon School. That night the beacon was lit as usual, but when the Sours dragged their timber to the school the following day, they found it deserted. Their main livelihood had literally vanished overwright, leaving only sinister traces. And so they had withdrawn distrustfully like a hermit crab, certain that whatever had happened, they would get the blame.

  Those men you showed to the School – were they carrying anything?

  Yes came back the answer. Backpacks of corked jars. Some of them carrying so many jars it seemed their legs should give way.

  ‘The jars were probably sealed with nothing but air and the beetles inside,’ murmured Jaze. ‘No wonder they were so light. And then when the men reached the school they must have pushed plugs in their ears and pulled the corks out of the jars . . .’

  ‘Wait!’ Hathin was suddenly struck by a recollection. ‘I’ve just remembered – the Superior talked about some men who came to him asking for guides to the Beacon School. Perhaps he’ll know something about them.’

  There was one other person who might know something, Hathin realized, and that was Arilou.

  Poor Arilou. Hathin no longer held out much hope that Arilou would be able to cast light on the fate of the Lost Council or the end of the Beacon School. It was all too clear that in her wilful way she had taken no interest in either her studies or her Lost comrades. However, it seemed she had been watching the Sour village religiously all her life. There was the tiniest possibility that she had seen these ominous armed visitors, and that her strange Lost perspective had allowed her to notice more than the Sours had.

  Hathin cast her mind back to the day of the storm, of Skein’s death, even though her soul flinched from the task. The men had visited the Sours in the late afternoon, at about the time Skein was trying to test Arilou. Yes, she recalled with a throb of excitement, Arilou’s behaviour had been a little stranger than usual. During the test of hearing, Arilou had not been pouring out the usual indistinguishable babble but a particular phrase, repeated over and over.

  ‘Jeljech, what mean “Kaiethemin”?’ asked Hathin. She had to repeat it a few times before the Sour girl understood. Then Jeljech linked her thumbs fingers and flapped the rest of her hands as wings.

  ‘Bird. Bird many fly.’

  Hathin’s excitement subsided into tender, bitter disappointment. The infamous Lady Arilou, hunted all over Gullstruck by a league of killers, all for fear of what she might have seen or heard. And what had she been doing while a deadly trap was laid for Lostkind? She had been watching birds, watching their flight like a fascinated infant.

  ‘I can’t believe the Sours still won’t give us our Lost back,’ muttered Therrot darkly as he bounced their barrow back down the path towards Jealousy.

  ‘She’ll be safe there,’ Hathin said in a small voice. Leaving the village, she had seen the two daughters from Arilou’s ‘other family’ settling down to comb the seed husks out of Arilou’s hair, and had felt a sting of something like jealousy. ‘Besides,’ she added sadly, ‘it’s where she wants to be.’

  ‘The Sours have decided that she’s kin,’ Jaze summarized calmly. ‘As for the rest of us, they want to like us, they almost trust us, but we know a dangerous amount about them. Holding Arilou is the best way to make sure we come back with that food.’

  ‘Yes, that food.’ Therrot sighed. ‘How are we going to find that?’

  ‘Um . . . I think I’ll have to go back to Jealousy and talk to the Superior,’ Hathin suggested timidly.

  Therrot said nothing, but the colour drained from his face.

  ‘I must, Therrot. It’s our only chance of keeping the Ashwalker at bay. And of finding out more about the men who brought the beetles. The Superior met them, and he might be able to remember something about them, or other people might have talked to them . . . I . . . I have to go and find out more. It’s my quest . . . it’s why we’re here . . . so I think . . . I think I’ll have to tell the Superior that I’m willing to carry on taking his sacrifices to the dead.’

  Therrot did not look at her, but took her hand. If you do this, then you will not do so alone.

  ‘Risky.’ Jaze looked meditative, but did not discard the idea out of hand. ‘And the Sours won’t be pleased if we turn up with soap and tell them to eat that.’

  ‘No . . . but, you see, we can give them the soap to sell . . .’

  ‘What if they can’t sell it? What if there’s nobody in Jealousy who wants to buy a big barrowful of soap?’

  ‘Um . . .’ Hathin looked up at him with the tiniest of smiles. ‘Well . . . I’ve thought about that and there is someone. There’s the Superior.’

  ‘Wait.’ Jaze’s velvet brows twitched slightly. ‘So . . . You’re saying we carry the Superior’s soap up the mountain and give it to the Sours. And then they carry it back down the mountain to Jealousy. And then we buy it off them using the Superior’s money, so they can buy food. And then we carry it back up the mountain . . . and they carry it back down . . .’

  There was a long pause, and then the sound of three Lace snorting and snickering helplessly.

  ‘It could work,’ Therrot said wonderingly. ‘Providing Lord Crackgem doesn’t decide to boil us alive for impudence, that is.’

  ‘They say Lord Crackgem loves anything crazed and crooked – if it’s true we have nothing to fear.’ Jaze wiped his eyes and his smile opened like a razor. ‘You’re a dangerous creature, Doctor Hathin.’

  Hathin and Therrot arrived outside the Superior’s palace a little before noon, and were admitted despite the dust in their clothes and the tufts of foliage in their hair. Perhaps because she had acted as spokesperson before, it was Hathin once again that was shown to the Superior.

  ‘You’re alive!’ The little man seemed astonished and exultant. ‘The mountain farmers have been fleeing the foothills and bringing with them the most frightful rumours – landslides, rocks bursting from crannies, steam erupting and cooking farmers like lobsters. You were gone so long I started to fear the worst . . .’

  Hathin hurriedly reassured him that his sacrificial soap had been delivered safely into the ghostly hands of the ancestors. However, the news of the blissing beetles on the mountainside came as a severe blow for the Superior. Reflected in his welling eyes, Hathin seemed to see a calamitous future in which wave after wave of living underlings slumped over their barrows of ritual offerings and joined the ranks of the demanding, toiletry-less dead.

  ‘But you and your . . . friend . . . brother . . . survived?’

  ‘By the grace of Lord Crackgem,’ Hathin answered, with a degree of
truth. ‘I . . . I think His Lordship’s taken a liking to us. Perhaps it’s been a while since he had someone to talk to, someone who spoke Lace. Anyway, that’s why we took so long to come back – Lord Crackgem didn’t want us to go.’

  The Superior’s face took on an expression of surprise and something like avarice.

  ‘You can talk to volcanoes! I’d heard that the Lace could, of course, but I thought it mere folklore. And just when I really need somebody who has a way with volcanoes . . . So – what did Lord Crackgem say?’

  Therrot was kept waiting in his little room for three hours. By the time Hathin reappeared, he was pacing like a caged jaguar.

  ‘What happened to you?’ He took a step back and looked her up and down. ‘What did happen to you?’ His wondering gaze took in her new leather boots, her red hat with braid on the broad brim, the satchel slung from her shoulder, the boyish jerkin and neck-smock.

  ‘I talked to the Superior – and this is my new disguise. He’s got one for you too. He says that now we’re working for him we can’t “shamble around looking like vagabonds”.’ Hathin reddened. ‘I’m . . . I’m a diplomat.’

  ‘I’ll say,’ murmured Therrot.

  Hathin was not simply the Superior’s new diplomatic envoy to Lord Crackgem. While the land around Crackgem was too dangerous for his people to venture into at all, she was to organize hit-and-run missions between the orchid lakes to bring supplies to the now-stranded community of dead. In exchange, the Superior would shelter them and remain blind to their identity.

  Therrot was also fitted with new clothes. He looked younger and more ill once the villainous sprout of stubble had been shaved from his narrow chin. He glowered his way after the Superior and Hathin as the little man led them through room after room of his palace, trying to decide what else to send to the dead.

  ‘And so you think that, suitably equipped, the Lace bodyguard might be able to lead an expedition to another city of the dead to trade? What would they need?’

  ‘Good boots and travelling clothes,’ Hathin said quickly. ‘Maybe elephant birds to carry packs. Tents. And provisions, lots of provisions.’ Who could say when she and her friends might find themselves on the run again?

  ‘And armour, maybe? Just in case of dead brigands out on the heights? Perhaps . . .’ The Superior faltered before a suit of armour that seemed to have been designed for an elephant bird, complete with beaked helm. Above it a tapestry showed a stormy-browed duke at the head of a wave of sabre-wielding cavalry, all straddling armoured birds. ‘Artistic licence,’ he murmured under his breath. ‘Sadly, the birds could never run in that armour. Or walk, actually. In fact, anything beyond lying on their side and clanking was a bit of a triumph.’

  When the Superior handed Hathin one of his signet rings and told her to walk through the market and collect further emergency supplies for the ancestors, she guessed from his smile that this was a great honour. Perhaps all ‘honours’ were like elephant bird armour, and looked better from the outside.

  Hathin cleared her throat. There was no obvious way to lead into the questions she wanted to ask.

  ‘Sir, I was wondering. Those men who came here, asking for the Beacon School. You . . . You don’t remember what they were like, do you, sir?’

  ‘Like?’ The Superior wrinkled his brow in perplexity. ‘How would I have time to notice what anyone is like? They were just . . . fellows . . . usual number of arms and legs . . . rough clothes . . . but spoke decent Doorsy, thank goodness. I told them to talk to Bridle, of course, but I doubt that he’d have helped them.’

  Bridle. Amid all the dangers and discoveries of the last couple of days Hathin had almost forgotten the mysterious entry in Skein’s journal. What was it? Bridle believes that Lord S will return when the rains end . . . Another trailing clue in the mystery of the Lost deaths – a clue in the hands of someone named Bridle.

  ‘Who is Bridle, sir?’

  ‘The best mapmaker in Jealousy.’ The Superior looked inexplicably annoyed, but not apparently with Hathin.

  ‘Could you . . . ? Could you tell me where he lives?’

  ‘Lives? Drat the man, he does nothing of the sort. Bridle was a Lost – do you think I would hire a mapmaker that was anything less? He wouldn’t have helped those men – the Lost were always so secretive about their precious school – and now he’s no help to anyone.’ There was a small pause during which the Superior fiddled with his moustache. ‘Maps. Young lady, do you think our dead Lace will need maps for his trading expedition?’

  ‘Er . . . yes! Yes, sir. Yes, I’m sure he would. Perhaps . . . Perhaps my friend and I could go to Mr Bridle’s house and look through his maps.’

  Five minutes later Hathin and Therrot were slipping through the streets, suppressing their smiles, the military cut of Therrot’s new jacket causing the crowd to part before them.

  ‘At least we’re safe for now,’ Hathin murmured, as much to reassure herself as Therrot. ‘Well, as safe as anybody can be while running up and down a volcano every couple of days.’

  The Superior had told them that Bridle’s house and shop were to be found in the craftsmen’s district, and so the two revengers wove their way in that direction, Therrot pushing their barrow. Very soon it became clear that finding Bridle’s house would be no easy matter.

  The craftsmen’s district was huge, bigger than Sweet-weather in its entirety. Although Hathin and Therrot did not know it, for years Jealousy had drawn in the finest craftsmen and artisans on the island. Thanks to the Superior’s obsession with his demanding ancestors, there was a thriving market in exquisite offerings for the dead. Not just intricately painted ‘dead man’s bonds’ of different values, but all manner of luxuries reproduced in miniature. Little sedan chairs carved from bone, beautiful moon-faced courtesans made of jade, sumptuous banquets painted on to banana leaves

  ‘We should probably buy some things as we go,’ whispered Therrot, ‘just to look more natural.’

  They did so, but managed not to get carried away, despite the novelty of having money. After all, even though they did not have to pay for their purchases, they knew they would certainly have to push them up a mountain.

  At last they found a street in which maps hung like flags. Bridle’s house was the largest, and easily identified by the shield that hung over the door. On it a bridled horse’s face was painted. Therrot unlocked and opened the heavy wooden door, and the two revengers stared into the shop beyond.

  Bridle had clearly been a very busy man. He had not, however, been a tidy one. Maps hung from every rafter. Every flat surface was a litter of half-painted maps, pestles and mortars tinted with different dyes, brushes, sticks of charcoal, ink bottles and banana leaves. At the back of the room, bundles of papers were stacked like hay bales.

  The maps were drawn with the accuracy of one who can float above the land and see it laid out before him. The paintwork had a finesse unusual for a Lost, suggesting that Bridle had had good control over his own body. One map showed the back and wings of an eagle in the foreground, making you feel as if you were looking down past it at the land below. It made Hathin giddy.

  There was a chair set before a low easel. Hathin ran her fingertips over the worn wood, and wondered whether Bridle had sat there with his sight sky-high, sketching what he saw by touch alone.

  Therrot hefted down one of the bundles of parchments stacked against the back wall.

  ‘They’re all pictures of Crackgem seen from above – and they’re all the same. Why paint dozens of identical maps?’

  ‘Perhaps that particular map sold really well?’

  ‘Perhaps . . . wait.’ There was a long pause, interrupted by occasional rustles of parchment. ‘Wait. They’re not all the same. Come and look at this.’ As Hathin joined him, Therrot pointed at the bottom-right corner of the map at the top of the bundle. ‘You see those squiggles? They’re numbers. And this symbol that comes before them means the numbers spell out a date. There was a symbol like this on the papers they gave me
when I got out of prison. So each of these maps has a date on it, and it’s a different date each time. Now look at this.’

  Therrot turned the stack upside-down, and turned over the first map. A picture of Crackgem amid his iridescent lakes, his long crinkled line of joined craters like the mouth of a clam slightly agape. Then with swift fingers Therrot slapped the next map on top of it, and the next, the next, the next, and on, and on. Before Hathin’s eyes the clam-mouth gradually opened, tiny cracks and furrows appearing and tracing their way down the mountain’s sides.

  ‘Stop!’ It was almost too much, watching a volcano changing shape before her eyes. ‘Therrot, what does it mean?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  The other bundles also held sequences of maps, depicting the other volcanoes. As before, the same view had been painted over and over, the sequence of maps revealing almost imperceptible changes in the volcanoes’ outlines. Sorrow seemed unchanging for dozens of maps, and then her crater suddenly altered its shape and became larger. New speckles kept appearing on the flanks of the King of Fans. More disturbing still, Mother Tooth developed strange blots and blemishes, like bruises on a fruit, several of which looked oddly rectangular.

  The pictures of Spearhead were generally very indistinct, doubtless because of the cloud that nearly always wreathed his head. Peering at the smudges of charcoal, however, Hathin was sure the vague pattern of light and shadow within his crater was changing slightly. In some, she thought she glimpsed a dim bulge like a puffball inside the crater.

  ‘Perhaps it means nothing,’ suggested Therrot. ‘After all, is it so strange if the volcanoes stir in their sleep?’

  But his words convinced neither of them, and they were glad to leave the house, despite being not much the wiser for their visit.