Gullstruck Island

by Frances Hardinge

  ‘Milord . . . Lady Sorrow . . .’ The smell of volcano breath was thick in the air. She felt her voice die inside her, and her stomach plummet in panic. ‘Lady . . .’ She could not form the words.

  Afterwards she could not be sure whether it had been wishful thinking, but she suddenly seemed to feel a coolness against her face, like the touch of silk against fevered skin.

  Eyes like ice. Hathin remembered the old woman from the tidings hut who had spent her life waiting for the chill touch of a certain gaze. Was it possible that a familiar pair of moonstone eyes was resting on her? She clutched the idea and would not let it go.

  If it was so . . . then she was not alone. Arilou was there.

  And so Hathin took heart, swallowed down the panic in her throat and found her words again. She spoke of Lady Sorrow’s emerald-and-sapphire eyes, the satin whisper of her landslides, the chalky perfection of her slopes. She continued speaking, even when the cooling sense of Arilou’s presence slipped away into the cloud.

  The wind rose a little, as if Lord Spearhead had softly sighed.

  ‘What’s wrong with them?’ The officer strode along the ranks of the chained Lace, itching to kick them, just to make them look at him. He was sure he had heard a faintly musical sibilance of whispering among them. Now, however, their heads were bowed, their eyes lowered, watching one slack-jawed girl trailing her fingers through the dust. ‘What’s wrong with them all? What’s wrong with . . . ?’

  What is wrong with the earth, why does it shudder like a fevered animal, what is wrong with the air, why does it fill our lungs with pins? What ancient thing smiles through your smiles, and why can I feel it breathing on the back of my neck?

  The lolling girl spread her hand flat on the dust and gave a slight pat with her palm. She patted it again, a third time, and then let her head loll back to show her eyes, sleepily intent slivers of grey. It was only as she drowsily raised her hand again that the officer noticed a pictogram traced in the dust before her. A clumsy outline of a boat. The symbol for salvation.

  Slap.

  Her hand struck the ground, and dust erupted between her fingers. As one, the massed ranks of the Lace leaped to their feet and sprang upon their captors. Chains were thrown around the guards, pinioning their hands to their sides before they could reach for weapons. Others were borne down by sheer weight of numbers.

  The guards in the guard-towers were not slow to turn their muskets and bows about and aim down into the compound. Before they could fire, however, there came a whirr of slings from the surrounding slopes. Stones rattled through the towers, breaking skulls and lanterns with equal ease. In the darkness an atlatl gave a soft ‘whoomph’, and an officer suddenly thought better of firing his musket into the prisoners and toppled slowly from his tower with a short spear through his sternum.

  After the silence settled, the guards both living and dead were searched. The officer wearing a spear through his middle turned out to have a ring of keys on his belt. Within a minute the keys were off the ring, and manacles were rattling discarded to the ground.

  A deep growl passed through the earth, and all heads turned to look towards Spearhead’s peak, almost lost among the cloud. When the ex-prisoners turned back to their rescuers, their faces held a scared question.

  Whispers, whispers. Gestures towards the great blue flag. Nods. And now the prisoners were shedding jackets, cloaks, coats, and padding them out with straw, leaves, dirt. By the time the clouds started to part, a strange community of fat little figures could be seen crouched by the wall in the compound. Cloth bodies, earth bellies, heads made of buckets, legs made of sticks, feet of stones. If the Lord Spearhead looked closely, he would see that these were not his prisoners, but Lords seldom look closely at those beneath them.

  Meanwhile a large, crouching gaggle of frightened Lace crept down the hill, all trying to remain as close as possible to the great blue flag which those at the heart of the crowd carried spread on their backs. Their only hope was to reach the safety of the plains before Lord Spearhead realized that he had been tricked.

  The clouds were parting again. Looking down into the crater, Hathin could saw a ripple passed across the lake as the volcano softly growled.

  Hathin’s voice was becoming hoarse, and she dared not try the volcano’s patience longer. She could only hope that she had bought enough time for the rescue attempt. Once again she raised the pouch high above her head.

  ‘Lady Sorrow has sent this token, so that you may know she has not forgotten you.’ She hesitated, then flung the little pouch out into the crater. It dropped away and dwindled to a pinpoint splash and ripple.

  As Hathin hesitated, breath held, she became aware that she could see something else, a dusky, rounded growth on the inside of the crater on the far side. There was something about its outline that frightened her, like a bunched fist, or the bulging of a frowning brow. And then she realized that what really frightened her about it was the familiarity of its shape. She had seen it before on Bridle’s murky maps of Spearhead, seen it swell from a speck to a shadow to a bulge. But she had never guessed that it would be so huge. Half of Sweetweather would have fitted on that great buckling of the rock.

  Bridle believes that Lord S will return when the rains end . . .

  And now at long last Hathin knew what Bridle had meant. ‘Lord S’ was not a human being at all; he was Lord Spearhead. And it seemed Bridle had been right. The mountain upon whose shoulder Hathin perched was not murmuring in half-slumber the way the volcanoes always had. The rains were ending, and Spearhead was awake, ready to return, ready for revenge.

  Wetting her dry lips, Hathin cast a glance over her shoulder and almost overbalanced at the sight that met her eyes.

  Now that the clouds had parted, through the gap she could see the downward slope of Spearhead, just beneath the jagged nick in his crater rim, all the way down to the long trench of the Wailing Way.

  She stared at the dizzying vista for several spellbound seconds. An ancient legend somersaulted in her head, and when it landed on its feet it wore a new and terrifying aspect.

  Never build in the Wailing Way, for that is the trench left by Spearhead when he roared away from his fight with the King of Fans. Some day when he is overcome with wrath and the need for revenge he will return along the same route for another battle with the King . . .

  A mountain on the move, grinding its way south-west towards the coast, hauling the skyline behind it. No. That was not what the long-dead storytellers had meant. The story had been a poetry hiding a truth, like those tales with secret directions concealed in them.

  From where she was sitting, Hathin could see that the surface of the secret lake touched the bottom of the nick in the crater rim. And through this nick and below it, centuries of waters had carved a deep twisting groove down Spearhead’s flank, a dozen small rivers and streams threading into it. It was a perfect channel, and anything flowing from the crater would run right down it. Again Hathin seemed to see the miniature mountains she had made for Arilou filling up with rain, the little Spearhead’s crater filling and overflowing down the groove in its side, into the trench waiting at its base . . .

  Never build in the Wailing Way.

  Soon Spearhead would rouse himself from his memory of his lost love. Soon he would think to look for his prisoners. Soon he would wonder what had happened to the little messenger that had brought his gift.

  For the moment that messenger could be found slithering recklessly down the scree amid a deafening hisshhh as the slope slid giddily away beneath her. She had no time to lose.

  36

  Rescue

  Moving down the scree was certainly easier than up, but a lot more frightening. In some respects it was like running in slow motion, but there was nothing slow about Hathin’s descent. Her feet sank helplessly among the pebbles, and she slid down the slope with ever growing momentum, her arms flailing as she tried not to fall forward.

  Thus she sailed down at the heart of her own private lan
dslide, thanking the Superior with every breath for forcing her into boots.

  When the slope at last flattened she celebrated by falling on to her behind and tobogganing to a gentle stop, then dragged herself to her feet and ran until the dead trees rose up to meet her, followed by the living.

  Find Arilou. Find the Reckoning. Tell them to get out of the gorge from the crater. Make them keep out of the valley, stay away from Mistleman’s Blunder.

  For what seemed like hours she struggled down through the jungle with these thoughts alone in her head. She had lost all bearings. Down was the only compass point left to her, so she followed it blindly.

  In the end, Therrot very nearly shot her. He was a little nervous at finding himself in possession of a musket at all, and dealt with this by waving it at everything that alarmed him. The sudden eruption of a small, hooded head amid frenzied undergrowth caused a near-fatal twitch in his trigger finger, and he barely stopped himself in time.

  As soon as he recognized Hathin, he recklessly threw his weapon aside and charged into the undergrowth, scooping her up into a hug. Immediately Hathin felt herself slump with weariness, as if she had finished a long journey and fallen in through her own home doorway.

  ‘Arilou?’ she asked.

  Two of the revengers had made a seat of their crossed hands, and riding upon it was Arilou, leaning against her carriers, her face slack with exhaustion, her eyebrows plaintively raised. Her expression did not change when Hathin threw her arms around her, but Hathin did not care. Arilou was alive, safe. Eyes squeezed shut, she held her limp sister tight.

  She wanted to fuss at the blisters on Arilou’s hands and feet, but Therrot picked Hathin up like a small child and carried her. And it was thus, half lulled despite herself by the rocking of his stride, that Hathin gabbled everything that she had seen and heard.

  She was not the only one being carried. Many adults had small, round-eyed children in their arms, a lot of them weak from hunger and fatigue. Intentionally or no, Spearhead’s tremors had done his fellow revengers a service. When the volcano had first growled, most of those guarding the Lace children in the Ashlands of the foothills and lower slopes had abandoned their posts, and the remainder had fled when they found themselves facing the Reckoning.

  ‘We’ll move through the jungle,’ rumbled Dance. ‘We’ll come out on the mountain’s eastern side. We must be out on to the plains before dawn.’

  ‘Long before dawn,’ remarked Jaze. ‘As soon as the sky lightens the Lord will notice that his prisoners have buckets for heads. And when that happens I for one hope to be a long, long way away.’

  ‘What about . . . ?’ Hathin fought against the numbness of her exhaustion. ‘What about Mistleman’s Blunder?’

  Her own voice sounded small and distant, even to herself, and the slash of machetes through the vines and the crunch of trodden undergrowth became a lullaby. She could not help closing her eyes, and when at last an answer came she barely recognized Dance’s voice. It held the solemnity of prophecy.

  ‘It is too late for them. Perhaps it was too late the first time they laid brick on brick in the Wailing Way. Hatred of the Lace was born in Mistleman’s Blunder, and hatred of the Lace will destroy it. The story has been waiting to end this way for two hundred years.’

  And Hathin thought that she stood in the streets of Mistleman’s Blunder, looking up at Spearhead. The mountain roared with a wide red mouth like that of a jaguar, and from its crooked lip poured a tide of light. As it drew closer she realized that it was not a sheet of fire, but a racing army of flaming figures, each holding a torch from which blazed a quivering blackness. All around them grass fizzed and wilted, timber walls burst into flames, glass windows popped and tinkled. People ran before the army, but it caught them and they flared and were gone in an instant with a sound like paper tearing. Their coins and keys and watch chains fell to the ground and lost their shapes, becoming gleaming puddles like molten butter. Hathin was immune. The flame men ran past on either side, and Hathin felt nothing but a cool breeze as they did so. Not far away she saw a man collide with one of the fiery strangers and fall to his knees, screaming and clutching his own cheeks. Her feet took her closer, and he looked up at her with a pair of familiar brown eyes, letting her see the terrible burns to his face. He reached out trembling, imploring hands towards the great shell of water she held . . .

  ‘Hathin, stop wriggling!’ said Therrot. ‘You’ll make me drop you.’

  ‘I can’t – I have to . . .’ The little patch of troubled water was back in Hathin’s brow as she tried to disentangle herself from Therrot’s arms and her own sentence. ‘His face – I remember what he looks like,’ she chirped hopelessly, and then tailed off and stared desolately down the slope towards Mistleman’s Blunder. ‘There’s . . . There’s a whole town . . . Please understand.’

  Hathin could feel Jaze’s eyes boring into her face, and had a feeling that perhaps he did understand, and did not like what he understood.

  ‘There’s no time to go back,’ he said, his tone decidedly cold. ‘The Lord won’t stop to listen to you a second time. And the towners won’t listen to you at all.’

  ‘Hathin, how many of them do you think would cross the street to help a Lace in trouble?’ asked Dance.

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe none. But maybe one or two. And there only needs to be one. Put me down, Therrot. Please.’ As he set her down, his expression almost broke her heart. He looked as if he had discovered her bleeding to death and could do nothing about it. And Hathin, who seemed to have used up all her words on the volcano, turned from her friends and pushed away through the jungle.

  Something crashed after her, pushing aside the tree ferns she ducked, stepping over the leaning logs she crawled beneath.

  ‘Stop.’ There was such velvet authority in that one deep word that Hathin’s weak legs halted against her will, and she turned to face the speaker.

  ‘Dance,’ she said, ‘I’m going to talk to Mr Minchard Prox.’

  ‘No,’ said Dance, with soft but absolute firmness.

  ‘We set him adrift on a little boat, Dance, and when he came back he was different. I don’t know – I don’t understand – but when I first met him he was kind.’ Hathin thought of his pink face, his bright, bewildered eyes. ‘Kind, but lost. Like a coconut rolling to and fro in the brine, tossed about and not knowing why. I have to hope maybe he’s still like that, still kind underneath, only . . . lost.’

  ‘If anyone can make Minchard Prox listen, I think it would be you. The mountains themselves bend their ears to you. And that is why you will not stir another step towards Mistle-man’s Blunder.’ There was no mistaking the menace in Dance’s tone now. More than ever she reminded Hathin of a volcano, her movements slow and relentless as lava. Until now this inexorable force had been behind Hathin, supporting and protecting her. This was no longer the case.

  ‘I can’t help it,’ whispered Hathin, feeling about as inexorable as straw.

  ‘I will not see you rescue these people. These are the same people that hanged our priests in the Chandlery two hundred years ago, the same who killed your village, the same who have hunted us throughout the island. Different faces, different names, but the same souls. No. They have turned a blind eye to our fate – we shall do the same to theirs. That is justice, Hathin. That is the meaning of our quest.’ The vast woman stooped beneath a balcony of vines and drew closer, ferns throwing shark-tooth shadows down her cheeks. Her eyes were ink.

  ‘It’s not our quest, Dance,’ Hathin said in a very small voice. ‘It’s mine. I can’t be a warrior like you. This is my way of questing. Your quest was over years ago.’

  Even while the words were still in her mouth, Hathin seemed to taste something odd in them. And then when Dance reached for her left-hand widow’s arm binding, Hathin knew suddenly what she would see when it was peeled back.

  The fractured moonlight shone on the unblemished skin of Dance’s left forearm. It bore no second tattoo.

  ‘But
. . . you killed the Ashwalker who killed your husband! And the governor!’

  ‘It was never enough for me. My husband had two hundred assassins. Everybody who refused to speak up for him or hide him. Everybody in Mistleman’s Blunder. Cruel, frightened little people. Well, I have given them lessons in fear. I have given flesh and steel to their nightmares of the deadly Lace that will come for them in the night. And I have waited fifteen years for something like this, Hathin. This is my night, Spearhead’s night. Do not stand in our way.’

  The black bead in Hathin’s stomach seemed to have torn itself apart in the scream that had sent Jimboly to her death. Hathin’s legs would not hold steady, but would not buckle. She could not take a step, could not slump. What was left for her to do but stand?

  ‘So how many deaths do you need, Dance? Will a town be enough? Will that make the pain go away? Or will you still need the Reckoning so you can live through other people’s revenges? There is no “enough”. Nothing finishes with this night. If we let Spearhead eat up the people of Mistleman’s Blunder, then the story doesn’t end, it goes on retelling itself. Their revenge and ours, feeding each other, rolling over and over like fighting cats forever. And my village will die again and so will your husband, over and over and over. Different faces and names, but for all the same reasons.

  ‘No revenge will ever be enough for us. All we can do is try to stop others dying like those we lost. Even if that means taking up arms against the volcano.’

  It was a strange stand-off, like a staring match between a mountain and a sea poppy. The jungle stirred restlessly around them, but neither woman nor girl moved, even when a brown snake slithered hurriedly between the feet of one and then the other.

  Only the jewelled cicadas were witness when one of the two combatants lowered her eyes and bowed her head in consent.