Gullstruck Island

by Frances Hardinge

  Scramble back to the air, bruising mind on stones. Can’t do it again can’t can’t can’t.

  Do it again.

  Must find Hathin.

  Afterwards, when people talked of the day following the great rage of Spearhead (or Broken Brow as he was afterwards known), Arilou’s name was spoken with reverence. It was she, the last Lady Lost, who searched through the earth with her mind and found many who had taken refuge in cellars or hollow trees and been buried alive. No longer Arilou the treacherous, Arilou the murderous. Now she was Arilou the heroine.

  She was tireless, sleepless. Again and again she staggered to her feet like a new calf, and led the way at a lurch to some other buried victim, her mouth hanging loose and forgotten. Every time someone was found alive there was celebration, and yet behind the eyes of every would-be rescuer lurked a question. Where is Hathin?

  By the end of the second day, however, the few bodies that were being dug out no longer held the spark of life, and it seemed probable that the rescuers had saved all who could be saved. None of the Reckoning would say as much out loud, but they shared a fear that Hathin, child of the dust, had quietly slipped back into dust. It was as if she had held centre stage only as long as she needed to, and then had shyly crept back into invisibility, this time forever.

  And yet nobody was willing to give up the search. Lace and townspeople alike struggled across the grey plain, calling out, looking for prints, shifting the fallen trees, their footprint trails furrowing the deep ash.

  On the second evening, as Arilou rose unsteadily, eyes red from the sting of the ash, Therrot sprang to his feet, only to find his legs unwilling to support him. He was caught by Jaze, who carefully lowered him to the ground.

  ‘Therrot . . .’ Jaze’s tone would have been gentle if it had come from someone else.

  ‘I know what you’re going to say. Don’t tell me to prepare myself. I don’t want to be prepared.’

  Jaze studed Therrot’s face and then gave a long, deeply saddened sigh.

  ‘There might be a time when you have to let go. You still haven’t learned how to do that, have you?’

  ‘No,’ said Therrot bluntly as he staggered to his feet again, cupped a supporting hand under Arilou’s elbow and let her lead him away for the twentieth time along the colourless plain. And Jaze, for all his talk of letting go, followed them, as did Tomki and Jeljech.

  Hathin was nowhere. Hathin was everywhere. Everything in the deathly landscape had her secretiveness, her careful blandness, her quietness, her stubborness. Hathin, whispered the wind-borne dust as it settled on the slopes. Hathin, lisped the ash as it rained upon the plain.

  ‘You hear that, Arilou?’ Therrot muttered with fevered intensity. ‘Your sister must be still alive. The mountain is still talking to her. All the mountains talk to her.’

  Exhausted and stumbling, Arilou led them along the route the fugitives had taken from Mistleman’s Blunder, up the side of the valley. There, quite abruptly, she slumped as if in a faint. Nothing that anyone could do would make her rise from where she lay, resting her chin on a ridge sticking up from the ash. And for a while everyone was too glazed with exhaustion and frustration to realize what the ridge was. It was the angular spine of a half-buried slanting tiled roof.

  An instant later, willing hands were scooping away the ash, lifting fractured timbers, picking out tiles. Jaze called down to the plain and soon more figures were struggling up the incline to help. At last a small boot became visible, then another, and everyone picked up the pace until a diminutive figure was uncovered. Hathin was half-curled, as though she had made herself as small as possible so as to be no trouble to anyone.

  They almost failed to notice Prox at all. At the instant that half the roof had collapsed he had flung himself across to push his small companion out of the way, and the worst of it had fallen on to him, burying him completely. But by chance Jaze noticed some pale fingers through the rubble at a little distance from Hathin, and they set themselves to clearing the rest of the debris away. And if there were some among the Reckoning who recognized him and suggested that he should be left there under the wrecked hut . . . perhaps it is best if such words lie buried.

  Hathin looked for all the world like a child of dust, white and still, as if a careless hand might crumble her. For once she had the serene, angelic strangeness of her sister, the ash powdering her face like the chalk dust Arilou wore for formal occasions. But Therrot rubbed at the ashen face and found pinky brown skin underneath, and poured water over her clamped mouth until it went up her nose and resulted in a far from angelic sneeze. And then Therrot flung himself backwards on the slope and howled at the hills, for true joy like true pain does not care how it looks or sounds.

  When someone thought to check a little while later, it turned out that Minchard Prox also had a pulse.

  It was not a good time to be Minchard Prox. Half the island wanted to blame him for everything, half of them wanted him to tell them what they should do. Everybody wanted answers from him. And the answers he had to give did not really make anybody happy.

  There has been a colossal and terrible mistake, and I have made it. Lady Arilou and the Lace are innocent. Every Lace who has died at our hands was murdered. Those who killed the villagers of the Hollow Beasts and other innocent Lace must be found and put on trial. All the Lace who have been held prisoner in Safe Farms and secret labour camps must be set free. All the Lace villagers who were robbed of their homes must be built new ones. And I, who am the most guilty, will make sure this happens, and then submit myself for trial.

  Those who truly murdered the Lost and framed the Lace must be tracked down. They killed the Lost because they did not want them to tell us that the volcanoes are waking up. They were afraid that if we did not build on the mountains we would starve. They were right. We will. Unless we do what we should have done many, many years ago, and start reclaiming the land from the dead.

  There was utter uproar. Prox was a blasphemer, a murderer, a defamer, a rabble-rouser. But what could be done about him? After all, who had set up bird-back messenger networks to take the place of the tidings huts? Prox. Who was even now setting up a new carrier-pigeon post and a system for food distribution? Prox. Who had been organizing patrols to round up bandits now the Lost could not look for them? Prox. And who was working with the last Lost left alive? Prox. There was no point in looking to Port Sudden-wind for such things.

  So he remained at large, but abhorred by many. He grew used to the sudden jab of a flung stone against his cheek, to the lowering of voices when he entered the room, to hearing his own windows smash. A few attempts were even made on his life, but somehow none of them quite reached him. A man who had been squatting on a roof with a pistol aimed at Prox’s heart somehow managed to fall two storeys on to his own head. Two attackers who broke into his house with hatchets fled again almost immediately with bleeding crowns. Prox thought as he peered out of his bedroom window that he glimpsed a third figure in pursuit of them, a large figure with long loose dreadlocks thumping against her back as she ran, a spiked club in her hand.

  Dance had disappeared shortly after the discovery of Hathin and Prox, taking with her Jaze and many of the other revengers who had survived the rescue raids. After a little thought Prox had thought it best to record them as ‘lost during the events of the Spearhead eruption’. It was not quite a lie.

  Prox did find support from an unexpected source. The Superior of Jealousy, still exulting in his new freedom, declared that he was quite willing to move his ancestors’ urns and let his people farm the Ashlands. But others were slow to follow suit, and the Superior himself was too busy with wedding preparations to offer Prox any more practical help than this. He had discovered to his delight that he did have a housekeeper. And his housekeeper, who had patiently and loyally looked after the irascible little man for decades without him noticing her, had been surprised but pleased by his offer of marriage and had accepted immediately.

  The only person who su
ffered as much as Prox was poor Arilou, everyone’s heroine. No longer could she retreat into her private world to flit her mind where she chose like a butterfly. Everybody had found her out. She was no imbecile, she was the only living Lost, and suddenly all the problems of the island were laid at her feet for her to solve. Someone had to watch for storms, hunt down the rest of Camber’s allies . . .

  And there was no Hathin to help her. For Hathin seemed to be capable of nothing but sleep. From time to time she would wake, look up from her bed at whichever room or tent she found herself in, and feel nothing in particular. It was not unpleasant, but her body felt empty, like a kicked-off slipper. And so she would close her eyes and go to sleep again, to wake up on another day.

  Then at last one day she woke up and she felt she might get up. She stood, and ducked her way out of the tent, and found herself watching blue silk waves lollop and sparkle, rending themselves softly on the hidden reefs. She did not need to see the dark-stained sand, the tooth-like fragments of coral in the shingle. One taste of the air was enough to tell her that she was on the Coast of the Lace.

  And so it happened that on a bright morning some two months after the destruction of Mistleman’s Blunder a young man with a scarred face and a small girl with snub Lace features could be found sitting on a clifftop, watching soft blue waves frothing through a limestone lacework full of ins and outs and twists and turns and sleeping lions pretending to be rocks. Both looked tired, because putting the world back together is very hard work.

  ‘He was extremely clever,’ said Prox. He had been spending a lot of time with the Lace over the previous weeks and had fallen into their hesitancy when naming the dead. But Hathin, with her Lace gift for guessing the hardly spoken, recognized the combination of recoil and admiration, and knew that he was speaking of Camber. ‘He made himself invisible. The government knew of barely any of the things he ordered in its name. He sat in the middle of the paperwork like a spider, sending out an order this way, a request that way, always making it look like it came from someone else. He claimed to be just a middleman – but everything was really being run from the middle. And nobody noticed. So many people knew a small piece of what was going on, yet nobody but he knew all of it. We’re still discovering arrangements he had in place, with the help of Lady Arilou.’

  Arilou had been able to track down most of the other ‘pigeon men’, many of whom had continued sending desperate messages to one another after Camber’s death.

  ‘Nobody else will come after you, will they?’ he asked after a moment.

  ‘I don’t think so.’ Hathin sighed slightly. ‘The Ashwalker is gone. The dentist who wanted me dead is no more. She . . . The volcano took her name.’

  If Prox picked up something odd in her voice, he said nothing. Yes, thought Hathin, he’s almost becoming Lace.

  ‘And the traitor? Is it true about the traitor?’ He glanced across at Hathin’s profile and saw the little patch of troubled water briefly crease her brow as she ducked her head to tuck some stray hairs into her hat. Her other forearm she carefully turned over so that the fresh tattoo on the skin was hidden from sight.

  She watched two butterflies waltz, and wondered if Prox would smile at her so kindly if he had seen her two weeks ago, standing in the dark cavern at the far end of the Path of the Gongs.

  Larsh kneeling at her feet, and all around them the white of stalactites, the green gleam of glow-worms, the watching figures of the Reckoning. Larsh gazing in alarm as Hathin dropped a cord with a wooden amulet around his neck. Her knife was out before he had time to react, and he could only watch as she cut through the cord so that the amulet dropped into her hand. She lifted it up before his face, and he blinked, bewildered, at the cluster of Doorsy letters carved there.

  ‘It’s your name, Uncle. I’ve cut it away.’ His face, confused by the sadness and pity in her voice. ‘I told I’d make sure nobody killed you, but I promised Dance I would take your name myself. Now you have no name. You will be nobody until you die and join those others who have no name. Nobody will know you or speak with you. You will be invisible forever.’

  ‘Yes.’ Hathin snuffled the answer into the back of her hand. ‘It’s true.’

  Prox watched the sea for a bit. ‘I suppose we had better have a description of him then. So that if we see him . . . we don’t see him.’

  Hathin gave him a sideways glance, watching how the youthful brown hair flickered in the breeze and brushed against the scarred forehead. Prox’s blisters were healing, but he still looked like he was wearing a mask.

  ‘Will it . . . ?’ Hathin waved a hesitant hand towards Prox’s face. ‘Will it ever get better?’

  ‘This?’ Prox ran his fingertips over one puckered cheek. ‘Probably not – that is to say, I’ll be scarred. It doesn’t matter. The important thing is, when I look in a mirror now at least I can recognize myself. It’s the eyes – they belong to someone I know. They didn’t for a while.’

  Both of them stared down at the beach. The last time Hathin had crouched here, she had seen her world dying in flames. Now with gentle cruelty the sea had washed away every trace of her village and the tragedy that had claimed it.

  The beach was not empty, however. After all, there was good fishing in the cove in spite of the current, there were pearls to be dived for, there were caves to offer shelter. The people of Sweetweather had avoided the beach out of guilt and superstition but, as if following some silent summons, families of Lace had turned up over the last week, bearing their stilted homes on their backs. Leave a hole in the Lace, and the hole will quietly fill again, like mud oozing back into a footprint.

  But these newcomers knew what was due to the living and the dead. On the beach Arilou sat enthroned in a litter, face painted with powdered chalk and sapphire feathers in her hair, her face crumpling with fatigue and the heat as she watched the dances in her honour. Around her stood a perplexed gaggle of Sours, who had travelled to the Coast of the Lace with her, and who would escort her back again when she returned to live with her Sour family in the mountain village.

  The new Lace were performing the Dance of Change. A dozen or so seriously smiling dancers took it in turn to wear a wooden bird mask and become the Gripping Bird of legend. It was an unpredictable dance, for whoever wore the Gripping Bird mask could change everything just by clapping.

  Clap! All change! A new tempo.

  Clap! Clap! All change! A new direction.

  Clap! Clap! Clap! All change! New partners.

  It was a dance of joyful new beginnings, but also a tribute to the dead, to the village of the Hollow Beasts.

  Hathin thought of the old legend of the cunning of the Gripping Bird, who had frightened attackers away from the village with grass jaguars on the clifftops, while he led the villagers to safety through the caves. She imagined a bird-headed figure with a human body dancing into the cave of the Scorpion’s Tail, with a queue of familiar figures following behind him into the darkness. This time, however, as they reached the darkened opening, each turned and seemed to look up at Hathin just for a second.

  Mother Govrie, beaming with a berry-swell in her lower lip that spoke of stubbornness, warmth and true affection. Eiven’s knife-slash of a smile, her angular face softening for an instant as she looked at her younger sister with something like pride. Then came poor, sad, foolish Whish with her narrow, scarred face, and even she managed a real smile, like one that Hathin half remembered from the time before Whish lost her youngest daughter and eldest son and sank into bitterness. And a step behind his mother came Lohan, who had liked Hathin so much that he had helped bring destruction down on all of them, Lohan still looking stricken and aghast. And Hathin gave him the wave and smile that she had been too slow to give him that last night on the clifftop, and saw his face smooth with the relief of forgiveness.

  They walked into the darkness, and something tight in Hathin’s chest loosened, leaving her feeling suddenly weak, cold and alone. She collapsed into sudden helpless tears and felt
Prox’s concerned gaze on her.

  ‘It’s gone . . .’ She tried to explain. ‘They’ve all gone . . . I think I was carrying the dead around with me, and they were so heavy, with everything they wanted me to do. But now it’s over, and I did it, and they’ve gone . . . and . . . I . . . don’t know what to do any more . . . I mean, Arilou doesn’t . . . Arilou doesn’t need me any more . . . What do I do if nobody needs me?’

  ‘What do you want to do?’ Prox asked quietly.

  Hathin opened her mouth, took a breath and managed only a small uncertain cheep. It didn’t seem to answer much, but she couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  ‘Hathin!’ Therrot appeared on the cliff path. ‘Will you come and get Tomki out of my hair before I “wrong” him with a rock? It’s always, “Where’s Hathin? Are we going to meet Hathin? Hathin, Hathin, Hathin.”’ Therrot’s expression changed as he saw Hathin’s face, and he came to sit next to her.

  ‘There now, little sister.’

  But Therrot was not her brother, and he was going to travel back to Crackgem with the Sours. At first he had thought he would vanish like Dance and Jaze, but when he had said so, Jeljech had hit him, twice as hard as she had when he had let Arilou fall into the hands of Jimboly. And she had run away, and he had run after her, and she had hit him again but less hard, and now Therrot, who had never been very good at being dead, was likely to give up on it altogether. He would go to the Sour village and wear green, and fling himself into life as he had into battle, until his nightmares started to fade.

  ‘I’m fine,’ Hathin said, and gave her two companions a rainy smile, ‘but I’m going down to the beach – is that all right?’

  She stood up gingerly and picked her way down the sloping path. The two men on the clifftop said nothing until her wide-brimmed hat had bobbed out of sight.