Gullstruck Island (5 page)

The Lace, who understood the volcanoes better than anyone, did everything they could to avoid attracting their attention. They even gave their children names that were imitations of natural sounds, so that when the names were called out the mountains would think that they were hearing bird calls, wind-sighs, water-songs. And they were firmly of the opinion that cutting farms into the King of Fans’ kneecaps was just the sort of thing to wake him up in a bad mood. So the Hollow Beasts had been quietly playing a game of claim-stake chess, moving the markers around until nobody knew where anyone’s plot started or ended.

This was nothing compared to the Arilou secret, however. Hathin just about had the presence of mind to shake her head instead of nodding.

Milady Page gave a small grunt. ‘I be watching you all,’ she said, then gave a half-weary flap of her hand to dismiss Hathin, who obediently fled up the street at a scamper, her heart thudding. What terrified her most about Page’s parting words was not the hint of threat but the fact that they had been spoken in Lace – thick, clumsy Lace, but Lace. Occasionally Page would do this, dropping in stray phrases of their language, but not enough for anyone to guess how much of it she truly understood.

Hathin shuddered, as if she could shake off Page’s unseen gaze like a shawl. Feeling exposed, she headed for the only inn worthy of guests like Inspector Skein and Minchard Prox.

A six-foot-tall tawny elephant bird with scabbed talons had been tethered to the gate. Ribbons of pale flesh showing through the feathers revealed where leather strips had worn away the plumage. A pack bird then. As she edged past it cautiously, staying out of jabbing range of its long, blunt-tipped beak, the bird bent its elongated neck like a bow and from between wheat-coloured lashes watched her sideways with a fierce stupidity.

‘Friendly,’ Hathin called out to two men chatting in the doorway. It was a common Nundestruth greeting.

‘Sell in street,’ one of them said, giving her hardly a glance. ‘No sell in here.’ He used his fingers to flick at the air, as though hoping the gesture would propel Hathin backwards.

‘No sell,’ promised Hathin. She extended her unadorned arms. ‘See, none shell-sellable.’

‘Then why come here no sell? And why come lone?’ Lace from the villages seldom dared the paths to Sweetweather without something to sell, and rarely ventured into the town itself without the security of numbers.

‘You, miss, come feed mountain, yes?’ said one of them. They were smiling for now at least. ‘I see you look thisere friend belong-me – you come take him? Yes, she soontime throw you over shoulder, carry you overhill. Better hide, before she catch you.’ There was a shout of laughter at the idea of the little Lace girl kidnapping the burly towner and taking him away to sacrifice. It was a joke, but centuries of distrust and fear lay behind it.

Soon somebody would say something that was sharper and harder, but it would still be a joke. And then there would be a remark like a punch in the gut, but made as a joke. And then they would detain her if she tried to leave, and nobody would stop them because it was all only a joke . . .

She stared at one face then the other, her smile tensing and widening defensively. She could never get used to the way that towners’ smiles came and went. It made her feel unsafe, as if they might run amok with rage at any moment. Their unornamented teeth looked bare and hungry.

Fortunately, at that moment Hathin saw two more strangers approaching, in shabby Lace garments ruddy with the summer dust. Their shanks were skinny, their feet shoeless, and Hathin wondered how badly Pearlpit and the other Lace villages were faring this season, with no Lady Lost to bring in extra money and food. But they seemed to take in the situation at a glance and hailed Hathin like a little sister. They fell in either side of her reflexively – beleaguered animals always put their young in the middle.

Hathin started by asking after Father Rackan’s relatives. She used Nundestruth, knowing that the Lace were never so distrusted as when they were heard speaking in their own tongue. A little way down the street, however, all three slipped back into the Lace language, like three otters sliding from a riverbank into silver waters.

‘So, little miss, it’s
your
village where the Lady Lost is a Lace?’ was the first question.

‘Yes . . . she is my sister. She has not been tested before, and my mother is fearful that the Inspector might send her mind into a volcano, or out over the sea where she might lose her way. Perhaps you might tell me more of the tests? So that my mother can sleep easy?’

The tallest porter gave her a quick glance to see whether she really wanted more information, that she understood they were walking a dangerous line. Hathin faltered a moment – what if Milady Page was listening in from afar? But she briefly half closed her eyes as a sign that, yes, she needed to know.

‘There are always five tests, one for each sense. Testing the skills they use in the Beacon School.’

It was almost impossible for parents to teach Lost children, particularly those who had not even found their way back to their own bodies yet. But youthful and untrained Lost instinctively followed bright lights so the Lost Council had arranged for a great beacon to be lit every night on one of the mountains to draw in their wandering minds. And so for a couple of hours after dusk every Lost child on the island would ‘attend’ the distant school, receiving lessons from teachers who could not see them and did not know their names.

Once upon a time Hathin had struggled to convince herself that she
did
see some difference in Arilou when the beacon was lit, that perhaps Arilou’s mind
was
at the school with all the other unseen Lost children. But it had been many years since Hathin had really believed it.

The porter started counting off on his fingers, still talking in an easy, older-brother sort of way.

‘Doctor Skein’s first test is always smell. He has somebody bury three little jars somewhere nearby, under different-coloured stones. The Lost has to send their nose underground and tell the Inspector the whiff of each bottle.

‘Then there’s finger-feeling. The Inspector has three boxes, all sealed up and dark, and the Lost has to find, without opening them, what’s inside each one by “touch” alone.

‘Taste. Three corked bottles, two full of yellow wine and one full of honey and water. Your Lady Lost will need to pick out the sweet one.

‘Then comes sight. He gives directions for the Lost to mind-drift along for a mile or so. Then they come across something Mr Prox has left there earlier, and they have to describe it.

‘Last, there’s hearing.’ The porter gave her another look, and Hathin blushed. Lace or no, he was from another village, and by now he must be wondering if a test cheat was on the cards. She could only hope that his loyalty to his fellow Lace was stronger than his loyalty to his employer. ‘He sends somebody – usually Mr Prox – off where he can’t be overheard, and Mr Prox whispers the same word again and again, and the Lost has to mind-drift to him and hear what he is saying.’

‘Not so very terrible then,’ Hathin whispered faintly.

‘No. Nothing for your mother to worry about.’

‘And how many does my sister need to pass?’

‘For full grading? All of them. To qualify for a retest – at least three.’

They were back in front of the inn. Hathin bowed her head to her chest, smiling hard to hide the fact that her eyes were filling with tears of panic.

‘Wait a minute.’ The smaller and slighter of the porters slipped into the inn, and returned a little later with a bundle of cloth. ‘It’s just odds and throwaways, but maybe you’ll find something of use to you in it.’

Hathin scampered back towards her village with the bundle under her arm, her steps winged by worry about Arilou. However free she felt after leaving her sister’s presence, after a short while her conscience became unbearable, as if a string that connected them was tug-tug-tugging at her. Everyone else was so busy – would anyone notice if Arilou needed anything?

Hathin scrambled down the cliff slope and was making her way back to her cave-home when she suddenly noticed a familiar figure seated in the middle of the beach, streamers of her hair fondling her face. Arilou stared blindly out to sea, paying no heed to Hathin’s approach, or to Eiven, who was dragging her canoe up the beach.

‘What’s she doing out here?’ For once Hathin’s voice was almost shrill with outrage.

‘Mother’s busy, and I’ve got boats to mend so I brought her out where we could keep an eye on her. She’s fine.’

‘She’s been sitting here in the high sun?’ Hathin did not dare say more. She manoeuvred one of Arilou’s arms over her shoulder, lifted her gently and supported her into the cave to survey the damage. Sure enough, Arilou had suffered for the touch of fairness in her skin, and there were ruddy bands of sunburn blooming across her forehead and cheeks.

‘I’m so sorry I wasn’t here, Arilou,’ Hathin whispered as she rubbed crushed flowers against the glowing patches. ‘Eiven didn’t mean any harm, she just . . . doesn’t know how to do it.’ Even as she spoke, however, Hathin suddenly realized that she was feeling angry not for Arilou, but for herself. Sunburn would mean sleeplessness for both of them. And ultimately it would be Hathin and not Eiven that everybody would blame.

Hathin dusted the sand out of Arilou’s clothes, settled her down again, brought more water and then hesitated with the bowl in her hands, still feeling a mixture of annoyance and remorse.

‘Arilou –’ she leaned forward on an impulse born of desperation – ‘there’s a bundle in front of me – can you see what’s inside it? Tell me, and you can have a drink of water.’

How could you judge or calculate Arilou? How could you say that you knew her? Now and then Hathin seemed to get a sense of her, like knocking heads with someone in the dark. Perhaps it was Hathin’s frustration, but it seemed to her sometimes that Arilou was not oblivious to her but stubborn, not helpless but sly.

One thing was certain: if Arilou
was
Lost, she never sent away her sense of touch or taste. Every other moment you could count on Arilou to be thirsty, or hungry, or too hot, or too cold. She was a knot of blind and naked need, like a baby bird.

‘What’s in the bundle?’ Hathin withheld the bowl for a few seconds more.

Arilou had turned her head. Perhaps she had heard the water slopping in the bowl. Her lower lip looked a little burnt, and trembled slightly. Hathin’s resolve crumbled, and she lifted the bowl to let Arilou drink, before opening the bundle herself.

As she undid it, a strange mixture of aromas filled the cavern. A cinnamon stick lay beside a fish-head and some white orchid blooms that seemed to have been crushed.

Doctor Skein’s first test is always smell.

Thanks to the kind-hearted porter Hathin could now guess what would be the scents in the three jars. She just needed some miracle to help her work out which would be in which.

A beautiful twilit world was reflected in Arilou’s eyes. A single drop of water sat like a pearl in the corner of her mouth. No miracles were forthcoming.

Who else could she ask for a miracle? Only one name came to Hathin’s mind. It was the name of a person almost as invisible as herself.

3

Farsight Flesh

Hathin could think of only one sure way of cheating the Lost test, and that was the farsight fish. This fish was found nowhere but deep among the reefs along the Coast of the Lace. Beautifully sleek and iridescent as it was, the farsight fish’s true claim to fame was that eating its flesh temporarily let your senses wander, a bit like those of a Lost.

Of course the fish was a very poor substitute for Lost fish-users often spent time throwing up through giddiness, and there was even a story of one fish-addict who had to carry a small rock around in a pouch hung from his neck, because during one fish session his sense of hearing had somehow become inextricably lodged in it.

The farsight fish was notoriously difficult to catch because it was almost impossible to take by surprise. Only the Lace had mastered the art of doing so, and their methods were a closely guarded secret. Many little Lace communities had been saved from starvation by selling the much-prized fish to rich connoisseurs in the inland towns. However, over the last ten years it had become necessary for the Lace to hide another secret – the fact that the farsight fish were becoming increasingly scarce.

Hathin knew of only one man who might have access to farsight-fish flesh, and she had a shrewd suspicion where he hid himself at night. And so, a little after dusk, she went in search of him.

Usually at night Hathin spent an hour busy at the ‘doll game’. Parents of Lost babies would often light lots of candles around their child’s hammock to gain or keep the Lost child’s attention, particularly on moonlit nights, for fear that the little mind would fly up and up towards the moon and never find its way back again. Parents would also perform the ‘doll game’, holding up a wicker doll from which stretched a string that was tied to some bauble or a bright piece of shell. Again and again the parent would pull on the string, hauling the glittering object back to the doll. It was the oldest and surest way of making a young Lost aware of the idea of its body and persuading it to reel itself back into it.