Gullstruck Island

by Frances Hardinge

  Hurriedly, she gave Arilou a drink of water and left her under Mother Govrie’s watchful eye. Then Hathin slipped on a pair of wicker and leather sandals and set off up the route to the cliff path.

  By the time she reached the top, the eyes of invisible little Hathin had become bright with more than exercise. On the rare occasions she found herself without Arilou, she felt a guilty, giddy sense of lightness.

  Inland from the cliff the land rippled through a series of hills, cave-infested ridges and hidden shafts. Beyond soared the King of Fans.

  Usually when the Hollow Beasts travelled south to Sweet-weather they walked the long, zigzag path that followed the cliff edge. However, if rain made this path treacherous, or the villagers were in a particular hurry, they sometimes took a short cut across the headlands. Not the higher foothills nearest to the King of Fans, of course – they had too much respect for the volcano, and for the sharp eyes and talons of the eagles that surrounded him. But they dared sneak across the lush lower slopes, despite the fact that these had all long since become Ashlands, the domain of the dead.

  Hathin’s father had been carried off by a fever when she was five, and she remembered standing on this very clifftop, watching her mother cast his ashes to the wind so as to free his spirit. His spirit to pass on to the caves of the dead, and everything else to return to the coral and rock from which the great Gripping Bird shaped him. But the Lace was the only tribe that still did this.

  Almost everybody else on the island now followed the Cavalcaste traditions.

  The Cavalcaste had lived in a distant land of grey and yellow plains, where the horizon was a neatly starched fold between land and sky, where nobody ran around without shoes and shirt and where there were no volcanoes to worship. Instead everyone prayed to their ancestors, and kept them happy by dedicating a little plot of land to each of them. Generation by generation the domain of the dead had advanced across the plains of the Cavalcaste’s homeland, pushing back the farmlands of the living.

  So at last the Cavalcaste had sent out ships, loaded to the waterline with little urns containing the ashes of important ancestors, to claim new lands for their ever growing population of dead. And the tribes of Gullstruck one day had seen a fleet of cream-sailed ships swelling on the horizon like a string of pearls, as the Cavalcaste arrived to take over the island, their heads full of unbuilt cities and their ships full of their dead . . .

  Try not to imagine those poor dead, Hathin told herself as she abandoned the cliff path and set off across the headland, thrashing her way through the watery swaying of the grass. Everywhere man-high staves had been driven into the ground, at the top of which were fixed tiny wooden ‘spirit houses’, little homes for the cremation urns of the dead. There were even some mossy stones marking where urns had been buried by the first settlers, two centuries before. Try not to think of all those spirits trapped in little pots, going mad with boredom.

  After an hour’s tramp the path became better trodden and the first buildings appeared, most of them slatted wooden houses with stubby stilts and palm roofs. The eager black heads of goats peered at her through fence palings.

  In Sweetweather she was invisible, but in a different way than in her own village. The families who seemed content to sit in their raised doorways and stare out into the street all day roasted her in the black sun of their gaze. But they did not see her, Hathin, they did not see her face . . . they saw only the traditional Lace salt-and-pepper embroidery of her stiffly woven skirt, the shaven crescent above her forehead to make her face look longer, the little rounded plaques set in her teeth. They saw that she was Lace.

  Here as in most places on the island nearly everybody was mestizo, blood-soup, a mix of the old tribes – the Bitter Fruit who had once lived in the northern jungles, the Amber from the south coast, and many more – and the Cavalcaste. Cavalcaste or tribal ancestry showed through here and there in clothes, in tattoos, sometimes in the shape of the features, but over time the differences had diluted and softened. The Lace were an exception, remaining desperately, stubbornly, painfully distinct. In spite of all the distrust and persecution, the Lace hugged their traditional strangeness, their aloneness, for it was all they had left.

  The voices of the town settled around her like an odd-smelling smoke. They spoke in Nundestruth, a rolling, pragmatic hybrid tongue very different from the softly musical Lace language.

  The town did not so much have a central square as an open space which acted as a playground for everyone’s pigs and children. Across this space the town’s two finest buildings glared at one another.

  The first was the governor’s house, three storeys high because it had been built in the days before the Cavalcaste had seen most of their towers toppled by earthquakes and had learned to build squatter dwellings.

  The second was a strange, hunched building whose low balconies had pregnant-bellied railings in black iron. This house belonged to Milady Page, the Lady Lost of Sweet-weather. Strings of bells hung above the door, a wild, rambling spiceplant had been allowed to run riot over the roof and a set of candlesticks was spiked on to the railings in front of the yard. Milady Page often sent her senses roaming independently of one another, and then brought them back to her body using the bell-chimes, the spice scent and the candlelight to find their way.

  The stone steps before the governor’s front door were clean of all footprints, while the path to Milady Page’s house had been worn into a channel by the stream of people bringing her mangoes, sweetbreads and questions. Everyone respected the governor of course, but his white-painted world had nothing to do with the day-to-day reality of the town, and people had grown accustomed to turning to Milady Page, who had eyes everywhere.

  The poor governor could do nothing without waiting a month for written permission from the capital, faraway Port Suddenwind. Port Suddenwind was a joke. Everybody knew that the government there was a vast, creaking clockwork of laws, laws, laws, most of which even now had everything to do with the snowbound, horse-ridden wastes of the original Cavalcaste plains and nothing to do with sprawling, feverish little Gullstruck. For the Cavalcaste settlers had brought with them a hearty dread of changing or discarding laws, for fear of annoying the ancestors who had invented them. All people could do was carefully pile more laws on top. Port Sudden-wind’s edicts could cope with thieves who stole sledges or furs, but not those who ran off with jade or coconut rum. They could cope with murderers who tricked victims on to thin ice, but not those who boiled jellyfish pulp to make poisons. There were no rules in place to deal with epidemics of weeping fever, no structures for warning other communities to stay away from the outbreak areas.

  In contrast, Milady Page did whatever she wanted when she wanted, and nobody tried to stop her, not even the governor. It was an open secret that he disliked and resented her, but he needed her as much as anyone else did. If Milady Page deferred to anyone, it was to the Lost Council, an organized body comprised of powerful Lost who governed the rest and represented them as a whole to Port Suddenwind.

  And here came the Lady Lost herself, Hathin realized, moving through the crowds with a swaying lurch like a small, stocky galleon on a rolling sea. Milady Page had a broad, seamed face like a cracked leather shield. She walked around with her eyes shut, since she could see quite well without them. To stop her eyelashes crusting, however, from time to time she would open her eyes briefly in a ‘reverse blink’, momentarily dazzling the world with a glassy, hawk-gold stare.

  As usual, there was a gaggle of people trotting alongside her, talking to her all at once. In fact there were rather more than usual, because on the evening of the next day the tidings huts would be renewed.

  Each district had a ‘tidings hut’ up on a hill or high promontory. Once a week a new set of writings or pictograms were hung in the hut. These held the news of all the surrounding towns and villages: births, deaths, personal messages, requests for help, advertisements of wares, information about the stirring of the volcanoes, word on the tem
pests of the sea and so forth. And on that night Lost across the island would send their minds out to visit each tidings hut in turn, before returning with news from all over Gullstruck. On such a sprawling island this system was indispensible, and thus so were the Lost on which it depended.

  For now, Milady Page was sailing through a sea of questions and hastily recited messages. She spoke over them all with a rough loudness like a deaf woman.

  ‘Dayla, I know what you want ask – you right, he do that – steal goatbaby. Hey, Pike! Papayas belong-you ready, go make jam this-week-next-week. Master Strontick – go lookfind hook-scythe by zigzag brook. Ryder, you want merchant-news, ask me two-day-later. Aaaw, you no like wait? Poor Ryder. Ask governor instead.’ Milady Page gave a short derisive cackle.

  Despite her high status, Milady Page usually spoke Nundestruth. It was nobody’s language, everybody’s language, a stew of words taken from the tribes and the Cavalcaste alike. By the time the first settlers’ grandchildren were full-grown, they found that however carefully they taught their own children their ancestral tongue, the children caught the hybrid jabber in the streets and brought it home like mud on their boots. ‘That gibberish may be good for the fields and the beach but Not Under This Roof!’ the parents cried, only succeeding in giving the new language its name. Proper-speak, the old colonial language, earned the nickname ‘Doorsy’, indoors-speak.

  So Doorsy had the parlours, the schools, the university, the doctors’ surgeries, the governors’ palaces, the offices. And Nundestruth bellowed on the beaches, strutted in the streets and catcalled from the cliffs. It seemed quite happy with the bargain.

  ‘You!’

  Hathin flinched to a fraction of her usual size as Milady Page’s ringed finger suddenly stabbed out to point at her. The babble of voices stilled, and Hathin found herself pinned to the spot by a dozen hard, wary gazes.

  ‘You think I no know what you about,’ said Milady Page. Her lids jerked open for a second, showing her golden irises. ‘I know. I know what you Lace about.’

  Hathin felt her smile freeze on to her face as her stomach quietly turned itself inside out. For years the Lace had been locked in a guessing game, trying to work out how much Milady Page knew about their secrets, and many suspected that she was playing cat-and-mouse with them.

  ‘Play stake-go-jump, yes?’ Page’s broad mouth grew broader, as if an amusing dream was passing behind her closed lids.

  With a rush of relief Hathin realized what Page meant. A few sallow summers and hungry winters had driven the townspeople to dare the volcano and cut terraced farms into the sloped lower flanks of the King of Fans. The land was rockier and steeper than the foothills where the Ashlands spread, but there was no other land nearby suitable for farming. The people of Sweetweather, however, were convinced that the Lace were secretly moving around the stakes that they used to mark the edges of these new farms. Of course, they were also convinced that the Lace stole dreams, caused pigs to give birth to rats and could curse you with malaria. But in the case of the claim stakes the townspeople were, in fact, completely right.

  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.