by Maurice Gee
I’m all right, she said urgently to Duro. He might come charging up the path.
The chair-carriers had turned the Clerk to face her. ‘Who were you talking to, girl? Was it Keech?’
She rose to her knees, miming pain, and whispered just loud enough for him to hear: ‘I was hunting the gool. She lives up here.’
‘Ah, so you’re back with your tale of monsters. You’re a fool, girl. You’re a child. You belong in the nursery.’ He waved at the chairmen to turn him round, called to the bowmen: ‘Watch her. Shoot if she tries any tricks.’
‘Are you all right, Xantee?’ Tarl said. She was pleased to hear him use her name. Usually it was ‘girl’, like the Clerk.
‘I’m all right,’ she said, and added in a whisper: ‘He can’t hurt me. I was pretending.’
‘Then teach me to pretend.’
‘There’s no time.’
They crossed the wide street and the Clerk was alert again, searching for an ambush in the brushwood smothering the lawns. They went past a mound of charred timber and in a moment broke into an open space, behind a house leaning like a tree in a gale. Xantee knew, from Pearl’s stories, that it was the Ottmar mansion, the only house to survive the wars. The lower part of the back wall was torn off, exposing staircases and water-ruined walls once lined with tapestries or painted with murals. Yet there was enough grandeur left to make the two petty kings choose it as their meeting place. They must feel puffed up here – although the reminder of luxuries they could not have must also increase their savagery.
A space had been chopped in the scrub. The ornate rim of a fountain showed through tangled vines. Frogs croaked inside, but fell silent as the Clerk’s party approached. The bearers put down the chair and cage. They backed away round the side of the house, leaving the guards and prisoners and the Clerk, with his nurse crouched humbly at his side. He nudged her away with his toe.
‘See, girl, Ottmar’s house. See, dogman. Here is where your dogs killed Ottmar. And here is where you’ll die, when I’ve shown you to Keech. He’ll want you for himself, but you’re mine.’
Tarl shook his head and made no reply. A stillness had fallen on him. He was remembering Hari, who had jumped from the cliff beyond the trees, holding Pearl’s hand; who had died that day, and come back to life, and now lay dying again.
Xantee felt a whisper from Duro, circling clear of the Clerk: Are you all right?
He and Danatok had crept round the open space and hidden in trees by the cliff. When she had answered him – Yes, I’m all right – he sent her a picture of the marble hand that stood at the cliff-edge – shining white in Pearl’s and Hari’s tales, even when shattered by a cannon bolt, but now stained yellow and half-clothed in moss. She saw it was a place the gool might live, but hid the thought because she did not want Duro distracted. The Clerk and Keech must be dealt with first, then the gool.
The Clerk was alert. Xantee felt his distrust and his hatred of Keech. She felt schemes wriggling in his head, schemes for ambush, schemes for murder, but he could not make them settle and take shape. The Clerk was afraid of the burrows man and unsure that he could master him. It made him pucker his face and look at Tarl like a hungry child. Tarl he could master, he had no doubt of that.
‘Clerk,’ said the bowman leader, ‘Keech is coming.’
‘I can feel him. Who does he bring?’
Xantee felt Keech too and felt, like a punch, the prisoners he brought, and although sick with horror, was ready when he stepped from the scrub, behind his knife-guard. He led Sal and Mond on ropes tied around their necks. The cousins were bedraggled, beaten, bruised, but they still held hands.
Keech’s eye found Tarl with a click-beetle jump and his hand fell to his knife, but the Clerk cried, ‘No, Keech. He’s mine. I branded him. See the name on his forehead. I put that there in Blood Burrow, in Ottmar’s time, and it makes him mine. And see the girl. She runs with him. Runs with his dogs. I will punish Tarl but you can have the girl. She’s my gift, but watch her, Keech; she can sneak inside your mind if you let her. She’s a pretty thing, don’t you think?’
Keech still had his eyes fixed on Tarl. ‘I want no girl,’ he said. ‘Throw her off the cliff. But I’ll give you these two as slaves’ – jerking the ropes and making Sal and Mond stumble. ‘They came to spy on me. They have a voice, the same as the girl, but feeble, like new-littered rats. I took them, Clerk, no trouble, and I’ve brought them here to show you – and now you show me Tarl in a cage. He’s the one I want. Give him to me.’
They quarrelled like children, while the bowmen and knifemen eyed each other, ready to spring into action. Xantee was forgotten and she took the chance to speak with the cousins: Sal, Mond, listen. Duro and Danatok and the dogs are in the trees. Be ready when I call. Soon I’m going to talk with these men. You remember Barni’s tale? The Clerk and Keech are the red star and the white. And the gool lives here, on the hill. Can you feel her lapping at them? Lapping the poison? I’ll get them to help us and we’ll send her back –
You can’t, Sal and Mond said. They’re not men any more. They’re gools themselves. Kill them, Xantee. Kill them both. The gool will die.
No –
‘Girl,’ the Clerk cried, ‘who are you talking to?’
‘No one –’
Again he struck at her and again she writhed and howled. This time he kept on longer, to impress Keech. She knew that Duro, hidden in the trees, would hear her cries, and she risked sending a message: I’m all right. Stay hidden. Then she felt a burning behind her eyes, and realised that Keech had joined the Clerk. They were competing to see who could hurt her most and some of the pain was edging through her defences. She concentrated, pushing it out, keeping it out, but the effort was so great – the attack coming, red, white, red, white, and sharp one moment, blunt the next – that she had no energy to writhe and scream . . .
‘She’s fainted,’ said the Clerk. ‘You thrash around like a beached whale, Keech. You hit with a club. The mind is a spear –’
‘You’ve got nothing to teach me, Clerk. Let me have Tarl. Then you’ll see how I make men howl.’
Again they argued.
Tarl was kneeling beside Xantee, brushing hair from her eyes. She felt for the first time that his mind was open to her, and she said silently: Tarl, I’m speaking to you. Say nothing. I’ll stay like this for a moment. You can talk to me. Think what you want to say. Talk into my head.
She heard a whisper, as faint as an insect’s wing brushing a curtain: Girl, Xantee, I can’t do this.
Yes you can. Don’t try, don’t think, just talk inside your own head and mine at the same time.
I can’t . . .
I can hear you. I’m going to wake up in a minute. I’m going to tell them about the gool. I can hear her feeding on them. If I can make them understand –
You can’t. They don’t care who dies, or if the world dies. They only care about themselves.
I’ll try anyway.
And after that I’ll kill them.
How, Tarl . . . ?
There was no more time. Keech and the Clerk had finished their snarling. Xantee let Tarl lift her to her feet.
‘So, the dogman helps his sick bitch,’ the Clerk said. ‘Pull her out, bowmen, so I can give her to Keech. I’ve no use for the other two. Keep them, Keech. But tell me, why do you want this meeting? To show me your prisoners? Mine are better, the dogman and this girl, who’s my gift to you. She looks like that Pearl who jumped with the dogman’s son off the cliff. Blue eyes, see. Your two are vermin. They’re slant-eyes. Use them to scrub your latrines.’
‘It was you who wanted a meeting, Fat One. And I want no gift from you. Keep her to rub ointment on that claw you call a hand –’
‘Stop,’ Xantee shouted. Two men had hauled her from the cage, while others aimed their bows to keep Tarl inside and clanged the door. She stood up from the chopped scrub-stumps where they had thrown her. ‘Stop,’ she said more softly, but threw a hard command, like a stone, at e
ach of them: Stop your talking. Listen to me.
The Clerk leaned forward in his chair, fixing her with his gaze, his good hand gripping Tarl’s knife, which he had picked up to taunt Keech with; and Keech swivelled round on his bandy legs, like a wooden puppet, and clicked her into focus with his beetle eye.
‘No woman talks to Keech like that,’ he said, and slid his knife out of its ratskin sheath.
‘Wait, Keech,’ the Clerk said. ‘She has a story to tell. You believe in monsters from the other world. You can listen to her around your fires at night, you and your men who tremble at the dark –’
‘Clerk, I’ll kill you soon.’
‘Look at my men. Every bolt is aimed at you.’
‘And my knife men have their blades ready to throw –’
‘Stop,’ Xantee repeated. ‘You’re doing the gool’s work. Listen while I tell you Barni’s tale. You Clerk, and you Keech, you’re not monsters, you’re men. This is your world. But you’re letting this creature feed on you and make it hers. Her children are in the forests and the mountains. Every day they grow stronger. The forests fall before them, the mountains turn to dust, they drink the seas, they’ll kill every living thing – and it all starts here, on this hill, with Keech and the Clerk, with your hatred and cruelty and malice and greed. That’s the poison she feeds on. Can’t you feel her sucking it out of you? You’re the red star and the white. Barni’s tale –’
‘Enough,’ said the Clerk.
‘Shut the slut’s mouth,’ said Keech. ‘You, One-eye, use your knife on her.’
When she thought about what happened next, Xantee could never place things in a sequence. Often she thought, yes, Duro, then Tarl, then the dogs, and Sal and Mond, but she could never decide who acted first. Her own part was to try and stop the killing, but she managed to save only one life. She remembered plainly, and always with horror, the man, Richard One-eye, advancing towards her with his knife balanced in his hand, his eye-socket hollow, with eyelids stitched together, and his good eye slick with anticipation. For a moment her mind failed to work, and she felt Keech and the Clerk, both aware of her strength, working to hold her – but she managed a command: Stop. Then everything happened at once.
One-eye stopped. Perhaps it was Xantee’s command, perhaps Duro’s knife, thrown from the trees, thudding into his side, up to the hilt, below his raised elbow. That was what she remembered first: the thud, the red squirt of blood painting One-eye’s arm. But the dogs, Him and Her, materialised in the same moment, streaks of yellow and brown racing across the open space and leaping on the bowmen who kept Tarl covered. Too late. Both had released their cords. One bolt was deflected by a cage bar, but the other took Tarl – who had already jerked Xantee’s knife from his sheath and thrown underhand between the bars; and quick as light the blade sped across the open space, over the head of the nurse at the Clerk’s feet and struck the Clerk in the throat, high under his chin. The Clerk’s eyes sprang wide with astonishment and his glasses slid down his nose. He toppled – but Xantee did not see him fall, or Tarl fall, or see the dogs biting the bars of the cage. Sal and Mond . . .
Keech had handed the ropes that held the cousins to the man Ratty, who dropped them when Duro’s knife struck One-eye. All around, the guards began fighting, knifemen and bowmen attacking the enemies they knew; and Keech was using his knife, slashing at a man reloading his crossbow, driving him back. Sal and Mond snatched up a fallen rope, each one-handed, bent it in the air with a flick of their wrists, using the rope-skills of their people, jumped at Keech as though their limbs answered one set of commands, looped his head, thrust a foot each into his back, while jerking the rope, and broke his neck. As the Clerk toppled, Keech fell. (And somewhere close, yet far away, Xantee heard the gool’s cry of agony and loss.)
Duro and Danatok were among the fighting men, stilling them; and Xantee seized those left, until they stood vacant-faced, with their weapons hanging at their sides.
It was only then that Xantee heard the howling. The dogs howled at the cage door. Inside Tarl lay dying. The nurse wailed, cradling the dead Clerk in her arms. And Sal, lying beside Mond on the ground, raised her voice in terrible grief. A crossbow bolt had taken Mond in the back, and she had whispered one word, ‘Sal’, before she died.
What happened next? Xantee’s memory played things in a different order each time. She was kneeling beside Sal, comforting her, but Sal bit the hand that stroked her face, driving Xantee away. She was digging in the doublet of the dead leader of the guards, finding the cage key, flinging open the door. The dogs reached Tarl before she could move. They licked his face, they licked his wound, and snarled when she tried to pull the crossbow bolt from his chest. It would not have helped. Blood bubbled from Tarl’s lips and he died. The dogs raised their muzzles and howled. Then she was struggling with the Clerk’s nurse, who had found Tarl’s knife beside the Clerk’s body and was trying to plunge it into her own breast. Xantee could not get the knife from her so she stepped back and commanded: Sleep, and the woman slumped to the ground. Hers was the life Xantee saved.
Then, with Danatok helping, she entered Sal’s mind and found it turbulent with grief that would destroy her. She and Danatok shut down the girl’s consciousness and left her sleeping beside her cousin. They did not try to loosen her grip on Mond’s hand.
The sun was high over Mansion Hill. A breeze came from the sea. But still the air was thick with the presence of the gool. And now something was added: the creature’s smell.
It must mean she’s dying, Duro said.
There was no time to hunt for her. Wounded men were groaning on the ground. Xantee and Danatok disarmed the guards they had immobilised, then woke them and set them to work. There was nothing for dressing wounds and no medicine for pain, but they tore rough bandages from the clothing of dead men, and by mid-afternoon had sent the surviving guards and the wounded down the hill. Ratty, with a crossbow bolt in his stomach, rode in the Clerk’s chair. The nurse, half-woken from her sleep, trailed after them.
Xantee looked around. Tarl’s body lay in the cage. The dogs would not let anyone near. The Clerk was curled on his side, like a brightly dressed doll laid down to sleep. Keech was stretched out, his head thrown back, his good eye glaring at the sun. Six other dead men lay in the clearing.
Now, Duro said, we find this gool.
No, Xantee said, we’ll talk with the twins and find out how Hari is. She turned her back on the dead and went to the other side of the fountain. Duro and Danatok followed. She felt Duro’s mind jumping about, fizzing with the excitement of the fight.
Duro, she said, if you want to help you’ll have to calm down.
I want this gool.
After we’ve talked to the twins.
She slipped her mind into Danatok’s and in a moment felt Duro join them. All three together, they called out to Hubert and Blossom. The twins were waiting.
Xantee, what’s happening?
We found the red star and the white. They’re both dead. Was it in time? Is Hari alive?
Yes. He’s breathing. He’s getting more air. The thing around his neck gave a jerk and it rolled over. It cried out. It’s looser now and Hari can breathe. But Xantee, it won’t let go. We’ve tried to cut it and burn it and we’ve all worked together, telling it to release him, but it’s hanging on. We think it’s putting some sort of poison into Hari because he’s starting to sweat and tremble. We don’t know what it means, except Pearl and Tealeaf say the gool’s not dead. You’ve got to find her, Xantee. You’ve got to kill her. And do it quickly or Hari will die.
She’s here on the hill, Xantee said. Stay with Hari. We’ll find her.
The three unravelled their voices. They opened their eyes and looked at each other.
Where? Duro said.
Here, Danatok replied. He looked around helplessly. But she’s hiding and there’s a lot of ground to search.
Xantee shook her head.
We don’t need to, she said. All we’ve got to do is follow her
smell.
FOURTEEN
It led them into Ottmar’s mansion. They went through long bare rooms with their ceilings collapsed and rotting tapestries hunched at the foot of walls. They crept past fallen chandeliers, heaped on the floor like forgotten treasure, and broken tables, and upholstered chairs with their seats ripped open and their stuffing piled like foam. Stairways led to open spaces where spider nests clung to the walls. But the gool was down. Her smell was buried under the floor – and less heavy as they went towards the front of the house.
They turned back through the wide rooms to the rear entrance hall. The smell was thickest there.
It’s down. She’s there, Xantee said, pointing at a narrow stairway turning into the dark. Again she remembered her parents’ story: the stairs led to the servants’ quarters, where Ottmar had stored his poison salt.
Dark, Duro said. He hated the dark and felt for his knife, but it was still embedded in the man called One-eye.
They found dry wood and made three torches. Danatok led the way down the stairs. The torches threw multiple soft shadows and the darkness beyond seemed spongy and wet. They advanced cautiously, not knowing if the gool would be in the open or hidden, not knowing her shape or size, and if she would attack or try to escape. But she was here. They felt her now – her presence, her malevolence and fear.
She’s different, Xantee whispered. She’s different from the ones we saw.
She’s afraid, Danatok said.
And she’s bloody dangerous, Duro said.
The stairs ended. They went through a door hanging crooked on its hinges. Beyond their pocket of light the torches showed a hill of broken tables and chairs. If the gool was as big as her children, as big as the one in the mountain pass, she would fill this room. But she was not here. Xantee could feel her through the wall – concentrated, wrapped in a ball.
She’s small, she whispered. She’s a small thing.
And dangerous, Duro repeated.
She’s in the next room, Danatok said.
