Gullstruck Island (55 page)

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.

‘She says she’s not needed,’ Prox said at last, with the slightly apologetic tone he often used with Therrot and many of the other Lace. The atmosphere between them was still tense, and Prox could not blame the Lace man for disliking him.

‘Not needed?’ Therrot stared at him. ‘I suppose you pointed out that she’s the only person
everybody
trusts now? The Lace, the towners who know what she did in Mistle-man’s Blunder, the Superior of Jealousy, the Sours, not to mention the mountains – how does she think everybody’s going to keep talking to each other if she’s not there?’

‘No. No, I didn’t tell her that. I thought I’d give her five minutes without people
needing
her to do something, even if the idea scares her.’

A slow dawn spread across Therrot’s face, and then he gave a curt nod.

‘She doesn’t know who she is, does she?’ said Prox.

Therrot shook his head, and the two of them sat and watched the Gripping Bird dancing from face to face down below.

Hathin skulked in the Lacery for some time, waiting for Arilou and her retinue to leave the beach. At last the litter moved to the pulley chair, and Arilou was helped into it, her new Sour sister sitting beside her to stop her falling, just as Hathin had once done.

Arilou the Lady Lost, floating upwards with her white robes flickering around her, as if she was a cloud that had visited earth and was returning to her kind.
Goodbye, Arilou, goodbye.
Arilou no longer needed Hathin, and Hathin could not bear to be with her and be unneeded. It was right that Arilou was rising in the world, becoming all that she might, taking her place as the Lost of Gullstruck. And Hathin would not cling to her, would not slow her ascent.

‘Athn,’ said Arilou. She was too far away for the sound to reach Hathin, but the movement of her mouth was unmistakable.

Hathin felt a brief and curious sensation, like cold silk slithering over her skin. The gaze of a Lost - why were their eyes like ice? Was it because there was something lonely in their spirits? Knowing that Arilou was watching her, Hathin raised one hand in a small wave.

Arilou put out a hand, palm forward, and dabbed it at the air, as though patting at an invisible face. And there it was, that oh-so-rare, wise-wicked monkey smile. Then the pulley chair reached the top of the cliff, and Arilou was helped out and vanished with her entourage along the precipice pathway.

Hathin sank back against the rock that hid her. Now at least she had the beach to herself. But no, she could hear two voices murmuring, voices of children younger than herself. She ducked down behind her boulder so that she would not be seen, and listened.

‘. . . heroine of Spearhead,’ one of them was saying. ‘She’s beautiful, isn’t she? But scary.’

‘Yes,’ agreed the second voice. ‘She’s descended from a pirate - you can really see it when you look at her, can’t you?’

Hathin smiled a little despite herself. Poor Arilou, her legend rolling out in front of her like an eternal carpet.

‘. . . hunted her all over the island but she was too clever for them . . .’

‘. . . tricked them into letting her come all the way to the Safe Farm . . .’

‘. . . leading the Reckoning . . .’

‘. . . saved everybody . . .’

And that was how everyone would remember things. People all over the island would be speaking of Arilou like this for centuries. Arilou, who been hunted across Gullstruck, but who had led the Reckoning to victory and saved everybody.
Well, what did I want, recognition? No
, Hathin realized,
I did everything I did because, well, I’m me.

Quietly, so as not to be noticed, she got up and slipped off to the brink of the Lacery, where the shallow water slopped gently at her feet. She glanced down at her reflection, and stopped dead.

A pirate was looking back at her.

The pirate wore a broad-brimmed hat with a sun-bleached crown, good boots and a torn tunic. It wore a green-dyed sash around its middle and carried a sheathed knife at its belt. Two ominous-looking tattoos marked its forearms, a lace-work of tinier scars freckling the knuckles and bare arms. Its face had been burnt gipsy-dark by long days in the sun.

Hathin looked over her shoulder, just in time to see two small heads duck sharply down behind a rock. They were watching her. With the same sense of weightlessness she had felt just before Spearhead erupted, Hathin realized that they had been watching her all along. They had not been talking about Arilou at all. They had been talking about her.

For the first time she wondered if her pirate ancestor had not been beautiful and fine-featured like Arilou. Perhaps he had found himself lying on this beach amid the flinders of his ship, and looked around with wide-apart eyes and a patch of troubled water in the middle of his brow, and thought,
Well, this is the way the world is. Let us make the best of things and set about surviving here, shall we?

The two younger children, awed by their own presumption, were running away up the beach, and Hathin turned back to her reflection.

Who am I? The shell-selling Lace girl, the attendant of Lady Arilou, Mother Govrie’s other daughter, the thing of dust, the victim, the revenger, the diplomat, the crowd-witch, the killer, the rescuer, the pirate?