Gullstruck Island

by Frances Hardinge

  Hathin bit her lips together and met his eye. ‘He does not have the name Skein.’ She spoke slowly and with all the diamond-cold resonance she could conjure. And she watched Larsh’s eyes widen and darken as her meaning hit him in the marrow.

  According to the old Lace stories, after you died and went to the Cave of Caves, you had to pay the Old Woman before she would let you pass. In the first cave you had to hand over your name . . .

  The dead had no names.

  ‘How . . . ?’ Larsh trailed off.

  Hathin raised her eyebrows and gave a little shake of her head.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In the Lacery. In the Gripping Bird’s hand.’

  Larsh blinked and blinked, his eyebrows twitching as if to shrug off the rain’s attentions.

  ‘Get your lady sister inside,’ he said at last.

  Even when Hathin had manoeuvred Arilou back into their cave-home, her mind and heart were painfully full of Skein and Eiven and the storm. And so she took particular care as she washed Arilou’s face clean of powder. She used little shell crescents to scrape the dirt out from under Arilou’s nails until the louring of the sky outside made the work too difficult to see, and when Arilou moaned and flinched Hathin realized that she was scratching her.

  The reed curtain flip-flapped and spat a figure inwards. Leaden criss-cross light filtered through the weave and patterned a lean, fierce face, a scar like a bird’s footprint. It was Eiven. She did not respond to Hathin’s incoherent gasp of relief and surprise.

  ‘Leave her with me,’ was all Eiven said. ‘You’re wanted in the Scorpion’s Tail.’

  The cavern where Hathin had found Larsh alone in the mists the previous night was now full of people. It looked as though everybody in the village but Eiven, Arilou and the youngest children was there.

  On a slab of rock lay the Lost Inspector, Skein. Somebody had placed his hands over his stomach as if he had enjoyed a good meal and settled down to sleep it off. This might have been more convincing if the same person had thought to close his eyes, but Hathin guessed that a superstitious frisson had prevented the Lace from doing so.

  . . . and when your dead soul had left your name in the first cave, you passed to a second cave, where you had to hand over your eyes before moving on . . .

  With a shock she realized that Skein had been laid on the altar slab that bore the carving of the sacrifice. She wondered if it had been an accident, or whether there had been the unspoken thought: Well, we need the favour of the divine, and it would be a pity for the body to go to waste . . .

  ‘We can’t talk here.’ Mother Govrie, practical as ever. ‘Our voices will wander to the entrance if we do. We’ll take the Gong Path.’

  Skein was draped with Whish’s canvas cloak, and then the villagers trooped deeper into the cavern to a place where the water pooled into a black mirror.

  There, without a word, everybody took off their outer garments. They all took rapid but measured breaths, stealing as much goodness from the air as they could. Then Whish knelt by the edge of the black pool, drew in one last deep breath and cleaved the water. A few minutes later, her face broke the surface again, with a little whale huff of gasped spray.

  ‘The path is clear,’ she said, once she had her breath. The best diver was always sent ahead to check the Path of the Gongs, and in the absence of Eiven this was Whish. A few more deep breaths and Whish plunged again, her back curling above the surface for an instant like that of a dolphin.

  Next followed Mother Govrie, and then every other member of the village, one by one. Hathin was among the last, and as she stepped up to the pool her face was buzzing and tingling with her hastily drawn breaths. She had only swum the Gong Path a few times. She took her last, deepest breath, and then the cold water received her.

  It was just a matter of holding herself together through the shock of the cold, and then her eyes were open and suddenly she was her underwater self, slippery and unaccountable as an eel.

  Hathin found familiar flint handholds and pulled her way downward to where the underwater tunnel began. She flipped herself face up as she entered the tunnel so that she could push with her hands and feet against the roof. Almost immediately the meagre light abandoned her, and she was reliant on touch and memory.

  There were no voices here. But the water was not silent. No, it whispered of every darkened drop that rang into it along the dark stream’s seeping, secret length. This strange music had given the Path of the Gongs its name.

  And somewhere inside her there was still the land-walking Hathin in her world of worry, clutching herself with fear of fear itself, terrified that she might panic and have nowhere to flee for air. But the underwater Hathin, the mermaid-minded Hathin, knew a strange peace in the blackness, despite the risks.

  Anyone swimming blind would have followed the tunnel to its finish and found themselves at a dead end, but Hathin had been taught where to find the low side passage and twisted her way sideways and down to pass through it. Then she let herself rise, bubbles beading their way out of her mouth as her lungs expanded. She broke the surface, and gasped the world and its worries back into herself. Ready hands pulled her out of the pool to clear the way for the next swimmer.

  This cavern was one of the many secrets of the village. Every child was taught to swim the Path of the Gongs so that if the village was attacked everybody could flee into the Scorpion’s Tail and through the tunnel without fear of pursuit. This cave was linked by a series of tunnels to the great sinkhole near Sweetweather and beyond but here the only light was provided by a galaxy of glow-worms. Then flint clicked, a wick hissed, a tiny flame tugged timorously in unfelt draughts, and Hathin could see that she was standing in a cavern full of teeth.

  . . . and in the third cave of the dead you had to hand over your mouth . . .

  Row upon row of ghostly teeth, many the height of a man, jutting from the floor, tapering from the ceiling. Stalagmites, stalactites. The cave was agape with them, and beyond their bite was nothing but dark throat.

  Around her, the villagers that peopled Hathin’s world were almost unrecognizable. The turbans of the old women, the embroidered aprons of the young wives, the young men’s belts of tools and tricks, everything that let you know them at a glance had been left behind. In the near darkness, their eyes were yellow stars in hollows, their faces swathed in wet hair.

  And yet Hathin knew each of them, even in the darkness. She knew them by their teeth.

  Nearly every Lace with their adult teeth had them ornamented in traditional ways, with tiny plaques of turquoise, mother-of-pearl, greenstone, agate or pink quartz. Now the lantern’s light played over each wide, hard, frightened smile and winked in the little gems.

  ‘Is Hathin here?’ asked a row of lazuli crescents. It was one of the village’s many powerful grandmothers, and the kindness of her voice blunted the edge of Hathin’s fear. ‘Tell us what happened, child.’

  Hesitantly Hathin told the assembled teeth about Skein’s tests, about the disappearance of Arilou . . . she faltered, and then told them only of finding Arilou at the water’s edge, with no mention of Whish’s presence. As she did so, she felt fingers brush gently against her hand, a warm living contact that felt strange in this place of darkness and the dead. She found her voice again, and recounted everything that had occurred until she discovered Skein’s body.

  ‘What are we going to tell the other Inspector?’ asked Hathin finally.

  There was a brief and unpromising silence.

  ‘She does not know,’ came Larsh’s voice. ‘Hathin, the other Inspector is gone. Somebody cut the rope.’

  ‘We don’t know when.’ Lohan’s voice, close beside her. He must have been the one to touch her hand. ‘By the time we noticed, he and the boat were long gone. There was nothing we could do.’ Hathin understood. Even if Prox’s boat was not smashed to pieces by the storm, the current would sweep him helplessly out to sea, to cook to death beneath the sun.

  ‘So . . .’ asked Moth
er Govrie’s mother-of-pearl-studded smile, ‘who was it?’ There was a silence, as everybody adjusted to the brute simplicity of the question. ‘Somebody got scared. They thought our Lady Lost was failing her test, or that the Inspector suspected something. They panicked, they found his empty body, they killed him. We haven’t found a mark on the body yet, but if there’s an urchin-spine puncture or scorpionfish-poison swelling, we will find it. Then they cut the rope so that the other towner could not come back and start asking questions. I understand why it was done, and whether we like it or not it is done, and our only choice is to weather the storm as a village, but who was it?’

  Another pause.

  ‘You can hardly expect her to own up to it.’ Whish’s tone was acrid. ‘After all, she’s not here.’

  For a mad moment, Hathin thought Whish was casting aspersions on Arilou. It gave words and a shape to a faint, smoky idea that had lurked in Hathin’s mind ever since she had discovered Arilou sitting across from the dead Inspector beneath a purple sky and whirligig of gulls . . . but the next instant she understood Whish’s true meaning.

  ‘I wonder,’ Mother Govrie remarked coldly, ‘if you would be throwing accusations around so freely if Eiven was here.’

  ‘She was in the water,’ Whish pointed out. ‘And nobody knows where she was for about an hour.’

  ‘She was swept away by the current!’ Hathin’s outrage jolted her out of reticence. ‘We all saw!’

  ‘For all we know, she managed to swim to the rocks and come ashore through the Lacery,’ answered Whish. ‘Then she could have swum back through the shallows and cut the rope.’

  Hathin took a deep breath, but the unseen hand was back on her wrist with an urgent, restraining pressure.

  ‘Any of us could have done that,’ said Lohan quietly. ‘Dozens of us were in the Lacery looking for Eiven. I was there. You were there.’ The silence bristled and Whish did not answer.

  ‘If only it was one dead Inspector,’ Mother Govrie remarked bluntly, ‘we could do a bit of business with a rock and say he fell. But two . . .’ There was no doubt in anyone’s mind that Prox was dead, or as good as dead. ‘We need to decide whether they left us or never reached us. Their porters are Lace – anybody know their families? Can they be made kindly?’

  ‘Pearlpit Lace,’ murmured one of the old women. ‘I would trust Pearlpitters to help us spin a yarn nine days in ten, but this is a tenth day if ever there was one.’

  ‘So we do not pull them into our story. Now, the porters will know when the Inspectors set off, and that they had plenty of time to get here before the storm struck – they will not believe that the pair of them were caught in the rain and lost in a mudslide. So both the lord Inspectors got into the boat for the sake of the test, and the current carried them out to sea.’

  ‘What about Milady Page?’ asked one of the young men. There was a murmur, for the Lost matriarch of Sweetweather was held in respect and some awe.

  ‘Yes . . . she . . .’ Hathin’s mind flinched at the thought of Page’s quiet threat and appraising golden glare. ‘She said she’d be keeping an eye on us.’

  ‘If her thoughts were on us, then she saw all,’ Mother Govrie said simply. ‘If they were not, she saw nothing. Either way, there is no point in worrying about it.’

  And so Mother Govrie went on, hard and shrewd as a general deploying troops. And even though they all knew that a crack in their account would probably mean hangings, their terror waned because the story was in Mother Govrie’s firm brown hands, and everybody knew what to say. Next to the wall Father Rackan listened with a slow rhythmic nod. He was the priest the village officially did not have, and nobody expected him to say anything.

  ‘So . . .’ one of Lohan’s friends finally asked, ‘what do we do with the nameless Inspector in the cave?’

  Mother Govrie looked over at Father Rackan, and after a hesitation everybody else did the same. That was all the answer that was given. Father Rackan would take care of it.

  The black pool accepted them again, one by one. They swam back down the Path of the Gongs. They climbed out, picked up their carefully folded selves and put them on. Nobody gave the swathed body of Skein as much as a glance as they trouped to the cave entrance and peered out at the pelting sky. Most could be seen smoothing their hair back and readying their expressions as if preparing to step out on to a stage, with the sky and rocks as audience.

  They emerged, in twos and threes, and the performance began. They talked about how the storm was starting to ease, and that soon it would be safe to venture over and repair the ravages to the huts. A couple of the children were sent to the caves to make sure that the Inspectors had found somewhere dry to shelter, and ran back to report that they had found nobody but, Eiven and the youngest children. Then one of the divers ‘noticed’ that Eiven’s boat was still missing, and the whole village expressed consternation as it was suggested that perhaps the Inspectors had been washed away.

  ‘There is nothing we can do about that now,’ said Mother Govrie at last. ‘Not until the storm weakens and the paths can be trusted. Then we’ll send messages to Sweetweather.’

  The King of Fans remembered everything backwards. Now that a death had occurred he could no longer remember why he was wearing his mourning colours. By the next morning the louring cloud had melted away entirely. The thunder of the rain had ceased, leaving only the sound of two dozen pearly-pink waterfalls trickling down the crevices in the cliff-face.

  And little was said, for the whole village was playing a prickly waiting game. They must undoubtedly send word to Milady Page, asking her to spy out for a small boat which had been washed clear of the shore. But how long could they leave it, pleading the treacherousness of the slippery clifftop roads? We must give the Lady Lost a chance to find the Inspector’s boat, they said, and nobody admitted even to themself that each second’s delay was spent in the hope that rescue would be impossible, and that Minchard Prox would never get the chance to contradict their story. Most of the villagers were kindly enough, and this truth was too bitter tasting for them to dwell on it.

  At last Mother Govrie gave the nod, and two young men were sent with a message for Milady Page. And the whole village returned uneasily to repairing the huts that the storm had ravaged, because when the messengers returned everyone would find out how much Milady Page had seen.

  They did not come back until well after noon. When at last they did, there was an uncertain light in their eyes, as if they were deciding whether to run from something or hit it with a rock.

  ‘Milady Page is dead.’

  Milady Page, the Lost matriarch who for forty years had sailed about Sweetweather like a portly galleon, had been found face down in her own yard, her goat nibbling at her shawl. No trace of a mark or bruise, just a serene and knowing smile on her face. Never slow to speak her mind throughout her life, she had gone to the land of mysteries without explanation.

  7

  Teething Trouble

  The village of the Hollow Beasts reared back from the brink of this news. Not knowing which of them had killed Skein had been a fearful mystery to face, but it was homely and comprehensible compared to this. What could it mean?

  Sweetweather was in a state of shock and unsure where to turn. How could they call for reinforcements? Milady Page was their message system, their main link to the rest of the island. They might as well have been told that their chunk of coast had been sawn off and pushed out to sea. How could they find the culprit? Milady Page was their scout, their brigand-finder, their roaming eye. Who could take charge and tell everyone what to do? Milady Page was their wise woman, their crisis-handler.

  Last night all over the island the tidings had been renewed. The town had gone to bed expecting that next morning Milady Page would deliver them news of the whole of Gullstruck. But now Milady Page was no longer a news-bringer, she was herself a piece of news in insufficient detail.

  ‘The towners kept asking, where is Milord Skein? We need him to read the tiding
s for us, we need him to tell us if there are murderers running away from the town . . . So we had to tell them what we’d already told Milady Page’s household – that Skein and his man were gone in the boat.’

  Everyone in the village felt the pang of the lost opportunity. If they had only known of Milady Page’s fate, perhaps they could have spoken honestly of the manner of Skein’s death. Milady Page had left her body only hours after Skein, and in the same peaceable manner. Perhaps his death had been part of the same strange calamity, or could have been made to look as if it was. But it was too late. They had chosen their story and now they would have to stick to it. Besides that would still have left Prox’s disappearance unexplained.

  ‘Then they said, we must put out word and get one of the cities to send us a new Lost, we must tell them that we will give them a house, and a goat from every village in the district. And we said, we already have a Lady Lost, remember? You can give her your house and goats if you have a mind. And then . . . they all looked at us as if we’d walked up out of the sea with shells for eyes.’

  Hathin walked around with her head full of the image of Arilou in a Doorsy house in Sweetweather, her yard musical with goats. A long queue of people snaked from her door. They wanted her to find missing children and runaway husbands and tell her the price of pearls in Smattermast. Hathin’s eye misted and she could not swallow.

  The post-storm coolness lasted barely a morning, and then the coast settled into blithe, shimmering heat. It was bright and beautiful and broken and nothing was right. Sweetweather glared like a great summer-maddened dog looking for someone to bite, and everything was hanging, waiting for its teeth to close.

  The news of Milady Page’s death and the disappearance of Skein and Prox were duly placed in the tidings hut, but nobody expected a quick response. Nearly all Lost sent their mind to check the tidings at the very start of the week when they were renewed, and did not visit them again until the following week.

  And yet a few days later news did come through the mountain passes from the town of Knotted Tail. It came in the form of Jimboly.