Gullstruck Island

by Frances Hardinge

  Heart pounding, Hathin emerged from her hiding place and approached him.

  ‘Father.’

  The old man’s face tensed, and the lines about his mouth wore deeper into his face.

  ‘I no father,’ he said curtly. He got up and slid some worn shoes on without looking at her. Perhaps he had already realized his mistake. He had answered her in Nundestruth, but Hathin had addressed him in Lace, using the word that could mean both ‘father’ or ‘priest’.

  Hathin watched him toss down a coin and walk away, then followed. He turned to confront her two streets later.

  ‘Got nothing for you! Go!’

  She retreated a few steps before his angrily flailing arm, and then continued following. He was waiting for her around the next corner and grabbed her by the shoulder.

  ‘Nothing for Lace here! Wrap goods belong-you, runoff back coast! Go!’

  He strode to a shamble-shack of weather-darkened planks and shut a wicker-mat door behind him. Hathin settled herself on the post outside his hut, and after a few moments he came marching out with a couple of flatcakes and a corked leather bottle.

  ‘Take. Get you far as coast. Fill bottle stream, water fine. Go!’

  ‘Father . . .’ Hathin spoke softly in Lace, ‘I’m looking for the Reckoning.’

  He stared at her in angry hesitation, and then took hold of her hands and turned them over so that the soft part of her forearms was uppermost.

  ‘Well, you won’t find it,’ he muttered in Lace. ‘Only the revengers ever can. If you don’t have a revenge-quest tattoo to show them, they’ll kill you for even entering their jungle.’ He retreated into the shack, shutting his flimsy door with an air of finality.

  Their jungle. Where else? Mistleman’s Chandlery would be a haunted area avoided by the rest of the town. And it was a peculiarly Lace piece of pride and defiance, to set up a headquarters in a place linked with their own ignominy and pain. We shall take everything you do to us and make it into something else. But Hathin needed more directions than ‘the jungle’ or she would never find the Reckoning.

  She looked down at the flatcakes in her arms, and as usual the pang she felt was not for her own hunger. Arilou would be starving, and had been left too long alone.

  A little before dusk the old Lace priest peered through his wicker door again and found not one but two young girls waiting outside.

  ‘You children! You’re like cats! Feed one and there’s hundreds of you mewling underfoot!’ His eye slid over Arilou, taking in her bruised feet and vacant air.

  ‘She’s an imbecile,’ Hathin said quickly.

  ‘Then use her to beg! You’ve already emptied my cupboard of kindness.’

  An hour later when he looked out again, they were still there, the white ash powdering them like sugared fruits. The smaller girl stared steadily at the door, as silent and stubborn as the settling of dust. When at last he held the door open for them they slipped in meekly and mutely, the smaller stooping to guide the taller girl’s faltering feet on the wooden steps.

  He picked the cork out of a crock of fish oil, dipped some strips of flatbread into it, then set them in Hathin’s hands.

  ‘I know your story, you know.’

  Hathin’s heart lurched at his words, but then realized that the old man could know nothing of the sisters’ flight from the law. Their desperate journey across the mountains had saved them three days’ travel. News from Sweetweather would have to tramp the slow route through the passes to reach Mistleman’s Blunder.

  ‘It’s not an uncommon tale,’ went on the old man. ‘Your father or your elder brother goes off on a revenge quest and doesn’t come back – and so you get the idea that you’ll find him and bring him home and everything will be the way it was before.’ He sighed. ‘It never is the way it was before. A revenger always becomes somebody else. When you say goodbye to them you say it forever.’ His voice had the harsh tone kind men often use when they are forcing out cruel truths.

  Hathin broke up the bread and fed it to Arilou in water-soaked chunks, then stroked her throat to encourage her to swallow.

  ‘You’ll have to go home!’

  ‘We can’t.’ Hathin held one of Arilou’s hands in both of hers, kneading it gently as the older girl’s head gradually drooped to rest on Hathin’s shoulder. ‘Father, I haven’t come to you for directions this time. I’ve come to you for the tattoo.’

  ‘What? Don’t be absurd.’

  ‘I have cause.’

  ‘Then you should talk to your local priest, someone who knows the rights of the matter. But he’ll tell you the same thing. Even if there really was a good reason for a revenge quest, it could never be granted to you.’ He sighed. ‘Any such quest can be granted to one person and one alone, you understand? If it was given to you, then the burden of bringing justice and restoring balance would rest on you and you alone. Nobody else would be able to take up the quest. So the wrong would go unrighted, because all the strong young men who might have taken the tattoo have been prevented by a hasty little girl.’

  Hathin stared down at her hands, intertwined with Arilou’s soft one, and said nothing.

  ‘The devil of the thing will be getting you back to your own village,’ the old priest added after a sympathetic pause. ‘Where exactly are you from?’

  Hathin looked up at him, her eyes dark pools above the smile with the nervous ruck.

  ‘My village has no name,’ she said. The old priest opened his mouth to answer and then stopped and blinked slowly three times as her meaning swung over him like a searchlight.

  ‘The whole—’

  ‘Nobody in our village has a name but us. We are the village now. We have no priest, no family, no friends. They didn’t even leave us our enemies.’

  There was a long silence, but for cicadas grinding moonlight into silver dust in the streets outside.

  ‘Daughter, listen to me.’ There was a new, careful seriousness in the old man’s tone now. ‘Think carefully about this. If you take up this quest, you give yourself up to revenge. If you succeed, you become a killer; if you fail, you leave a tear in the world that nobody else can mend. Some day many years from now you might choose to marry. Your husband and children will see your tattoo and know that you have either shed blood or betrayed the world’s trust in you. Choose this path, and it will never leave you.’

  He left her sitting at the moonlit table next to a bundle of blankets, and retired to his bedding mat in the corner. For an hour there was little sound but the creaking of his mat, which seemed to have become uncommonly uncomfortable to him this night. Hathin made no noise, but remained seated at the table. Stubborn as dust.

  Eventually he sat up with a sigh, his hair sketching wild white arcs about his head.

  ‘I suppose you realize that it will hurt?’ he said gruffly.

  The Ashwalker lay on a stretcher by the road in the moonlight, a strange sculpture in red, white and blue, blood and ash marring the uniformity of his indigo clothes and skin. His eyes were wide white rings showing around the dark eyes in the deep blue sockets.

  Prox stared at him, shivering a little in the night air. He had been allowed only two hours of sweet sleep before the excited voices in the street had woken him.

  ‘How did he die?’ he asked at last.

  ‘Er, Mr Prox? I do not believe that he is dead,’ Camber pointed up at the sky. ‘I’m not sure, but I think he might be watching the bats.’

  Prox waved a hand in front of the Ashwalker’s unblinking eyes. But the Ashwalker’s chest did indeed seem to be rising and falling. ‘How long has he been like this?’

  ‘Difficult to say. He was found by the roadside an hour ago. But, as you see, he’s covered in white ash. Our best guess is that he must have dragged himself all the way from Sorrow’s domain.’

  ‘Well, if he’s not dead, he’s had the sense knocked out of him,’ sighed Prox.

  ‘Perhaps – but it is rather hard to tell with Ashwalkers.’

  They both stared at
him for a few moments.

  ‘If he does awaken, he will not be happy if we have removed any of his dye,’ continued Camber, ‘so we cannot clean his skin, clothes or his wounds. And for all I know he might be fasting so we cannot risk feeding him either. The fact is –’ Camber gave a small, rueful smile – ‘I am not at all sure what we can do with him.’

  ‘Oh, for pity’s sake. Well, we can’t just stand here waiting for him to wake up and explain himself.’

  Even as he watched for the shadow-dance of the bats, Brendril was listening to the two voices passing over him. The actual words themselves did not interest him greatly, but the two men did. Both thought that they could use words to make people do what they wanted, and one of them was right. The younger man with the scarred face tried to gust people along with a fussy logic, pelting them with reasons like fistfuls of feathers. The lean, older man with the plausible smile used words to gloss and slope the ground so that people slithered quite naturally in the direction he wished, not even knowing why.

  ‘. . . is the key,’ the younger man was saying. ‘I’ll help this artist of yours make a woodcut of Lady Arilou, and then we can send messengers with pictures of her back to Sweet-weather and beyond so we can find out if anyone’s seen her. She’ll probably be heading north along the coast – she can gather support from the villages as she travels . . .’

  Brendril’s pain had interested him, but now he silently shrugged it off. Human expressions meant less and less to him every year, but he was almost certain that the two men looked startled when he sat up.

  ‘The Lady Lost is not travelling along the coast,’ he said. ‘She is here.’

  The old priest was right. Receiving the tattoo did hurt, a great deal. It was still hurting several hours later as Hathin made her way alone under cover of darkness to Mistleman’s Chandlery. She dared not touch the leaves which now bandaged the place, and through which she could see dark stains soaking. As she blundered up the side of the gorge, she held her left forearm protectively against her chest.

  The idea of taking the tattoo had first occurred to her when she was looking for ways of reaching Therrot, if he was still alive to be reached. If she turned up marked, the Reckoning could scarcely turn her away. But then the thought had worked its arrowhead into her mind so that she could not pull it out. There was too much feeling inside her, too many dead a step behind her. And so in the end she had run to the tattoo, knowing only that she needed it.

  It was a hard hike up the side of the trench of the Wailing Way, but tree roots burst and looped from the soil, offering footholds and handholds. As Hathin reached the top dark and hostile jungle came down to meet her. Tan-coloured vines as thick as her arm trailed across her way, vast spider webs hung like sails and slender shafts of moonlight bored down to glance on the varnished backs of fat mahogany beetles and gaping flesh-coloured orchids.

  There was no path, and only the old priest’s directions allowed her to pick out landmarks to guide her steps – a butterfly-shaped flourish of roots, a long scratch in a tree trunk, a trailing noose-like ribbon tied to a bough.

  A long whistle close by made her jump until she recognized it as a male honeydigger’s lovesong. It was answered by an absolute echo a hundred paces away, and it was a few seconds before she realized why the hairs were rising on the back of her neck. Two male honeydiggers would not have been exchanging such calls. The first should have been answered by a challenge or by a female.

  The denizens of the forest had noticed her.

  ‘I’ve come . . .’ Her voice sounded tiny in a forest that now seemed to be full of restless motions and trilling calls. ‘I’m looking for . . .’

  The tree beside her suddenly spat out a chunk of its moss. Staring, bewildered, Hathin realized that there was a sharp stone embedded in the bark. It must have flown from behind her, narrowly missing her head, with enough force to stick in the tree . . . and now there were whistles all around, and something came towards her with a bobbing sway and two heads of different sizes.

  A moment of paralysis, and then Hathin was urgently snatching the leaves from her left arm, wincing as the tears came. Even in the darkness she could not bear to look at the bloodied lines that the priest’s chisel had cut into her skin. Amber soot dabbed into the wounds sketched one wing of a butterfly. She clenched her eyes shut as she extended her arm, tattoo upwards, so that the moonlit jungle could witness it.

  Something struck her softly on the head. She flinched backwards, eyes open again, and found a slim rope of plaited vines swaying against her flank. There were loops at intervals up its length.

  The two-headed monster drew closer, and the shivering spoonfuls of moonlight showed her a young man astride a muzzled elephant bird. He pointed at the rope and jerked a thumb upwards.

  Hathin patted some of the leaves back on to her wound, then carefully placed her foot in the lowest loop and started to climb.

  15

  For the Wronged a Reckoning

  Climbing loop by loop, Hathin pushed great ferns aside and then watched them swing together below her, cutting out the forest floor. Up through an airy world of gently swaying branches, then into a dense cloud of tapering leaves that slithered over her skin. The moon’s rays arrived piecemeal and cat’s eye green through the foliage.

  At last Hathin’s questing fingers felt her rope end in a knot around a bough. Beside her lay a rough platform of boards, nailed along the top of a branch. Gingerly she stepped out on to it, the drop below pushing tingles of panic through her knees.

  Where the branch met the vast trunk, it was shrouded by a great shadow-clotted tangle the size of a large hut, made up of leaves, staves and trailing creeper. As she approached it along the branch-platform a tall, slight figure stepped forward out of the darkness and took her by the hands.

  It was a young man, not more than twenty, with a face as smooth as quicksand and brows like bands of black velvet. Hathin trembled as he examined her tattoo by the light of a hanging lantern. He nodded briefly, and when he glanced at her face his expression had somehow become less threatening.

  ‘You had this done tonight?’

  Hathin nodded.

  ‘Nice bit of work,’ he said with an odd gentleness. ‘You’ll want some more leaves to put on that though, or it’ll swell up like a coconut by morning. Dance!’

  The last word was much louder than the rest, and for a brief, horrified moment Hathin thought it was a command. But a moment later she realized that his shout had been directed over his shoulder.

  The leaves on the nearest side of the great knot of foliage trembled. Then the creepers were pushed aside like a curtain and a woman emerged. A wealth of glossy black plaits tumbled from beneath her brown velvet skullcap fringed with black feathers. She stood over six feet tall, and managed her broad shoulders and large limbs with a leisurely, mannish grace. From head to foot she was dressed like one of the women of the Bitter Fruit, berry juices used to paint her lower lip to a false fullness and to sketch ‘veins’ across her upper arms in a faint feathering. Her lower arms were hidden in a pair of widow’s arm bindings.

  She did not look or dress like a Lace, but this was the Reckoning and there could be only Lace here. Evidently this was another Lace who had gone to great lengths to hide her lineage.

  The woman came close and looked down at Hathin’s upturned face. She did not look like a ‘Dance’. Perhaps a ‘Quell-With-A-Blow-Or-A-Look’. But not a ‘Dance’.

  ‘Who are you here for?’ the woman asked in Lace, her voice so deep that Hathin could feel it in her foot soles. Bewildered, Hathin nearly gave Therrot’s name, but then understood Dance’s meaning. Who are you here to avenge? Hathin opened a dry mouth to begin the catalogue, and her mind crowded with ghosts.

  ‘Everybody,’ she said at last.

  Dance studied her for a few moments, then nodded very slowly, as if it was an answer she heard every day. She lowered herself to sit on the platform floor.

  ‘Tell me,’ she said. And Hathin did, hear
ing her own voice become a pinched, emotionless rattle of words, counting off unthinkable events. And all the time she watched the woman, trying to see if she was saying too much, looking for the characteristic Lace stiffening or gaze-glitter that meant ‘Be careful – who knows who might be listening?’ but the woman just kept nodding and watching her between slow blinks.

  It was only as Hathin reached the end of her narrative that she started to feel a crushing sense of shame. The old priest was right. What possessed her, tiny and frail as she was, to stand before this giantess and demand the rights of an avenger?

  ‘I . . . I didn’t know what else to do,’ Hathin added after a long pause. ‘There didn’t seem to be any choice.’

  Dance gave a long sigh and slowly shook her head. ‘No. No choice at all, as far as I can see. There may be somebody on this island with a better right to a revenge quest than you, but I haven’t met them.’ As Hathin flushed with surprised relief Dance stood. ‘I had better go and tell Therrot.’

  ‘He . . . He’s alive? He’s here?’

  Dance nodded. ‘There’s no chance that his family survived?’

  Hathin bit her lip. ‘I really don’t think so. His mother is dead – I am sure of that. And his younger brother – he was down on the beach . . . I don’t think anybody escaped the beach.’

  ‘Right. Right.’ Dance sighed again. As Dance turned Hathin found herself thinking of the slow rolling of a whale, muscular and momentous. Dance disappeared back through the creeper curtain, and for a while Hathin sat alone.

  When at long last the curtain parted again, the man peering through seemed for a moment to be a stranger. Hathin had remembered Therrot as a taller, more muscular version of his brother Lohan, his laugh a little fiercer and louder, and with strange bulging tensions that moved in his cheeks when he was angry.

  The young man before her had slender, wasted limbs, traced with a fine webwork of scars. His hair had grown long, and the little movements in his cheeks were now nervous and continual. He stared at her with something that resembled dread. Therrot had not come home, for there had been no Therrot left.