Spindlefish and Stars

by Christiane M. Andrews

  “Rethguaddnarg.” Her voice sounded like a question. Chewing emptily, she held out the basket. “Eht gnidrac,” she said finally. “Eht gninnips.”

  Clo stood, wondering what the old woman wished her to do. Perhaps she wanted payment for her lodging? Clo glanced at the rag-wrapped painting still on the bed.

  “My father…” Removing the wrappings, Clo held out the painting. “This may be meant for you.… My father may have sent this.… He sometimes trades paintings he… finds. He may mean to trade for… board? Room and board? Look.” She raised the painting toward the woman. “It’s valuable. The frame—”

  At the sight of the painted grapes and the gem-encrusted frame, the woman’s nose creased in disgust. “Sselhtrow.” Shaking her head, she pushed the basket of fish toward the girl. “Eht gnidrac.”

  “Just the jewels—” Clo started to protest, but out of the corner of her eye, out the window, she caught sight of a flash of white, a motion in the water.

  She raced to the window, looking into the gray expanse below.

  A boat. A boat! Just there, sailing right below. Clo’s heart leapt; she leaned, straining to follow the vessel’s progress, but it sailed too close to the island cliffs beneath her. She saw its entire body, then just the tip of its white sail, then nothing. She rattled the window latch; it would not open.

  “A boat!” she cried, turning to the old woman. “I saw a boat! My father is coming. I’m sure of it. I should go.… If it’s him, I have to meet him! I have to make sure he finds me.”

  Sighing under the weight of the fish, the old woman shook her head and tried again to put the basket in Clo’s arms.

  “No.” Clo pushed back. “You can have the painting, but I can’t help with these… fish. With the gutting or scaling or cooking or whatever it is you want me to do with them right now. There’s a boat.” Swinging her father’s cloak over her shoulder, grabbing his notebook, she rushed past the old woman.

  “Rethguaddnarg…” Heavily lidded, almost hidden, the woman’s eyes followed Clo out the door.

  The town, its cobblestone streets and little stone huts, was now silent and empty. Gone was the crowd of elderly, crookbacked men and women who had swarmed after Clo with their murmuring. Doors were shut and windows dark; only once Clo thought she saw a flicker of movement behind a pane of glass, but when she turned, all was still.

  Clo retraced the path she had come, following the street to its end, where she clambered up the opening to the cliff path. The descent, with its views of the sheer drop and the open air and the rocks and water below, seemed more treacherous than it had on her ascent, but Clo rushed as quickly as she dared down the stairs. Between the rocks, she caught glimpses of the tidesman and the open sea, yet strain as she might, she could not see the sail of the boat that had passed under her window. Still, she was certain. Her father was coming. Her feet thudded on the rocks, a jubilant noise of boat, boat, boat.

  From time to time, as she hurried down the cliff, she thought she heard another set of footsteps behind her, but whenever she stopped to listen, she heard nothing but the wind moving through the stones. When she scurried on, the noise started after her again.

  “Is someone here?” she finally called.

  Silence. And then, so faint it might have been nothing but a breath of air, a long hissing. “Ssss…”

  “Someone is here?”

  The soft hissing again. “Ssss… Y-yessss.”

  “Who is here?”

  Silence. Stones. Wind.

  Disconcerted, Clo continued to pick her way down the stairs. But now she listened anxiously for whatever might be behind her, above her, on the cliffs.

  Steps. The scraping of stones. Someone was following her.

  Was it one of the rumpled villagers? The parchment-skin man? She thought of the way he had gripped her face in his leathery fingers.

  Alarm growing, Clo hurried as fast as the treacherous path allowed. But the thudding behind her kept pace. At last, seeing a small outcropping, she edged off the stairs and onto the ledge. Backing away as far as she was able, she stood quietly, trying to steady her breath. From here, she could see a wide, boatless expanse of sea. She closed her eyes against the dizzying distance. The steps came more clearly now: hesitant, then quickening.

  Step. Step. Scrape. Step.

  Pressed into the rocks, half holding her breath, Clo waited.

  CHAPTER THE TENTH

  DESCRIBING THE PLIPPING OF STONES

  THE SCRAPING NOISE RUSHED ALONG THE STONES. IT was just above her. Beside her.

  She turned her head carefully.

  She almost laughed.

  It was a boy. A boy no older than she. Portly. Pale. Dark, dampish hair.

  She watched him hurry past. “H-here… I’m er… h-here…,” he murmured, passing without seeing her. He thudded down the stairs, trailing his fingers on the rock walls.

  Clo waited a minute, then stepped carefully back onto the stairs. She resumed her descent, now following in the boy’s wake. But she hadn’t gone more than a few dozen steps when she rounded a corner and found the boy stopped, his arms folded over his soft belly.

  “Yh—… Wh-why are you ff-following me?” the boy stammered. He was breathing heavily, and his face was waxy and damp, an almost bluish hue.

  “I? Following you?” Crossing her arms, Clo scowled at the boy. “You were following me.”

  The boy chewed his lip, considering. “Are you a yo—… are you a b-boy?”

  “Are you?”

  The boy might have blushed if his pallid skin could have held that hue. Instead, his moon-shaped cheeks grew a little moonier, and he dropped his eyes and held out his hand. “I’m yrr—… s-sorry,” he said. “But no b-boys ever come. Or l-lr—… girls. No girls ever come either. T-ts…” He paused. “Just me.”

  Clo glanced at his outstretched palm. “I have to get to the shore.” Pushing past the stammering boy, she started down the stairs again. “I saw a boat. My father may be on it.”

  “A t-ta—… a boat?” The boy followed after her. “Where did you ee—… see it?”

  “From a window. I saw it sailing.”

  “On… N-nno… Your father… is he a nn—… a ff—… fisherman?”

  “No,” Clo huffed. “He’s no fisherman.”

  “Eh—… the boat you saw… it’s the d-d—… island fishing boat. Your father t-tno—… won’t be on it.”

  “How do you know?” Clo whirled toward the boy standing a few steps above her. “Did you see the boat? Do you know my father? He is coming. He will be here.”

  The boy dropped his gaze again. His moony cheeks slumped.

  They continued in silence down the rest of the path, the boy following a few careful measures behind Clo.

  When they reached the narrow beach, the tidesman turned his head briefly before resuming his stiff position on the rocks.

  “Is there a boat arriving?” Clo called to him.

  The tidesman, still and quiet, did not acknowledge her.

  “Has there been a boat?” Clo called more forcefully.

  The tidesman’s arm swept over the sea in a gesture that encompassed all its emptiness.

  Standing on the little beach just out of reach of the water, Clo scanned the horizon, the distant line of crashing waves. The longer she stood, the more despondent she grew. She felt the emptiness filling her. No sail, no boat.

  No Father.

  She sat. Digging her fingers into the beach, she shifted handfuls of pebbles back and forth. This shore was nothing like the harbor where she had first sat unwrapping the cheese, still hoping and believing her father might be nearby. There, the water crashed with force and energy, foaming up the rocks, roaring all around her. Here, it sloshed gently, lifelessly, more like water borne in a bucket than water pulled and rocked by tides. It made no more noise than a pale splashing, a pathetic lapping.

  Clo tossed the small gray and black pebbles one at a time into the water. They plipped brightly, too happily, watery
circles expanding out and out around the splash. Water that is full of salt and has no edge.

  Clo was conscious of the boy standing a little distance behind her. He scuffed his feet in the stones. Clo’s pebbles plipped and plipped. After a long while, she heard the boy sit and shuffle in his clothes, and then a thin melody began to rise. Clo glanced back. The boy was holding a small broken flute to his lips and piping softly, barely audibly, his tune spreading in the air around them like the watery circles from the stones.

  Clo did not think she could bear the emptiness of the sea against the boy’s bright tune. “Stop that, will you?”

  The boy fell silent.

  After a longer while, a hundred or so plips, Clo, keeping her face turned to the unchanging horizon, spoke. “When do the boats come?”

  “The g-g—… fishing boats?”

  “No, the boats with passengers. The boats with passengers to the island.”

  The boy scooted forward in the sand, only a step or two behind Clo now. “I don’t… w-wo—know.”

  “Well, when was the last time a boat with passengers came?”

  “Ss—… y-yours.”

  “Before mine.”

  “Sometimes, I see a ttt—… b-boat pass beyond the w-waves.” In the corner of her eye, Clo saw the boy’s hand gesture to the distance. She pitched another stone into the water, and the boy continued anxiously. “Uu—… Y-you should not throw the sea coal, the k—… b-black stones, they are for the s—f-fires… sea coal…”

  Clo hurled an entire handful of pebbles into the sea. Plipplipplipplipplipplipplippilipplipplipplip. She turned on the boy. “When do they come? When did you last see a boat arrive?”

  “Tttt—Ton… Not, not since I dev—d—.…” The boy’s moons puffed and billowed. He buried his head in his arms.

  Turning back to the ocean, Clo whipped stone after stone into the sea, hurling them farther and farther into the distance until she could hardly hear their splash.

  Behind her, the boy took a deep breath. When he spoke at last, his words were slow and measured. “No boats have come since I arrived here. I’ve never seen a boat come. Or leave. Only sss—y-yours.”

  A clamminess settled at once all over Clo’s skin. She shivered. Surely this was wrong.

  Clo shifted so she was facing the boy. He looked at his hands, then raised his eyes—full of the sea and the gray of the sky—to meet hers. “And when did you come?” Clo asked. “How many days or months or…” Clo felt the heaviness of the word in her mouth. “How many years ago?”

  The boy shifted pebbles beneath his fingers. His mouth opened and closed. “I don’t know how to rre—… answer.”

  “Well.” Clo looked up at the cliffs that towered over them, at the gray sky that was the same gray, the same sunless gray. “How old were you when you arrived?”

  A pucker formed on the boy’s forehead. He considered. “E-ev—… El—… Tw-twelve? Ss—… spa—… Perhaps I was twelve?”

  Clo smiled. A smile that even the boy—with the damp hair and moonish cheeks, who had not seen another boy or girl since he had arrived at the island and who seemed, at best, flustered and confused by every word Clo put to him—recognized as warm. Warmhearted. Full of relief and light.

  “Well, you can’t be much older than twelve now,” she said, still smiling.

  “N-no…” He sounded unsure.

  “So you can’t have been here very long.”

  “I es—… su-suppose,” he said, adding quietly, “It see—seems long.”

  “So another boat must be due again soon.”

  The boy didn’t answer, but his shoulders lifted with all the slow imperceptibility of the water rising and falling along the shoreline.

  Clo turned back to the horizon. For a long while, she stared at its unchanging gray lines. The boy, she felt, was watching her: she was conscious of his eyes on her back, his nervous shifting. Finally, he asked a careful question.

  “Do you have a… a name?” he asked.

  “Clo.”

  “Clo.” The boy pronounced her name slowly, turning it over, Cuh-low.

  She plipped a few pebbles into the water. She heard him say again, softly, “Clo,” and again, “Clo.”

  “And yours?” she thought to ask the still-whispering boy after a few minutes.

  “E—… M-mine?”

  “Your name?”

  “Ye… Th-they call me boy. Just boy.”

  “Well, that’s not a name.”

  “N-no.”

  “What do your parents call you?”

  Clo heard the boy dig into the pebbles behind her; the crunching of stone covered a smaller sound, a little breath like a sigh. She turned.

  “No parents?”

  The boy shook his head.

  “Well, what did they call you? What name did they give you?”

  The boy’s face looked paler and damper than ever. His lip quivered over the word. “Ca-Carus. I k—… th-think. Carus.”

  “That’s not a name either. That just means dear one. Like my father calls me lambkin.”

  Eyes downcast, the boy again busied himself with the pebbles on the beach; his fingers, Clo saw, were prunish with the wet of the shore. She glanced at her own: dry. Why was this boy so thoroughly damp?

  “Lambkin,” the boy at last said quietly, his lip still trembling. “I don’t think my re—… f-father called me anything like that.”

  Clo wished she could stop the boy’s chin from wobbling so. “Perhaps your name is Cary?” she offered hopefully. “That is a name I know.”

  A faint trace of color flashed across the boy’s cheeks. “Y—… Ca-Cary.” He smiled gratefully at Clo. “Yes, Cary. That ts—… must have been it.”

  Clo nodded. In her life in the shadows of villages, she’d had no need—no real need, she’d told herself—of the company of other children. She had known and watched and even silently mocked the ones who had scampered in the streets or hung on their mothers’ skirts or dabbled in the puddles and gutters while she swept the stoop or poked the turnips or waited for her father to return in the dawn. She did not like the way they whispered about her father—vagabond, night soil man, invalid—the way they pointed at him when he walked down the street in the evenings with his buckets and brushes, the way they stared at her even, wide-eyed and openmouthed and runny-nosed, pointing at her while she knelt over her plants in the garden. Even when she had recovered a ball or a knucklebone that had gone tumbling away from one of their games, and she’d brought it to them, holding it out on the flat of her palm, they had shrunk away from her, gawping and whispering, preferring to lose their game piece than take it from her. No, she’d had no need of their company; their raucous laughing, their petty squabbling grated on her ears.

  She did not, she thought, really need this boy Cary either. But he was quiet, and, she had to admit, she liked the way his smile fluttered in a quick line from moony cheek to moony cheek.

  Standing, the boy Cary shook away the pebbles that clung to his clothes and skin. He offered Clo his hand again, but at her doubtful glance, he tucked it behind his back.

  “Y—… Li—.…” He shook his head. “They will be gn—… wa-waiting for me. I’m to help the fi-fishermen unload the boat. I always help da—… u-unload the catch.”

  “I’m not leaving. I want to watch for a boat. I mean to stay until dark.”

  Cary’s eyebrows lifted in surprise, but he nodded and turned to walk toward the cliff.

  When he had just started ascending the stairs, Clo called after him. “Cary!”

  Cary’s voice, when it reached her, came with the echo of the cliff walls. “Se—Yes?”

  “What did your boat look like? The one that carried you here?” She waited for his answer, wondering if he would describe the same gloomy craft on which she had traveled.

  A pause. Cary was now too far in the stairs for Clo to see him. “O—… No boat.”

  “No boat?”

  “They de—… fi-fished me out of the
a—… out of the s-sea.”

  CHAPTER THE ELEVENTH

  IN WHICH A BEGGAR AT THE GATE BECOMES AN APPLE-PICKER

  THEY FISHED ME OUT OF THE SEA.

  Clo turned these words over and over in her mind. She thought of the boy—pale and luminous, soft and fish-ish—floating just beneath the waves.

  She watched the horizon. She ran pebbles through her fingers. She watched the water rise and fall, gentle breaths, along the shore.

  The tidesman kept his silent post.

  The sky held its steady hue.

  They fished me out of the sea.

  Trying to distance herself from the boy’s disquieting words, Clo hugged her father’s cloak tight around her. Surely a boat would come. Surely her father would arrive. I———will find you. The note had said this. He would find her. He would come.

  Pulling out her father’s notebook, Clo frowned, thinking of the sketches she had seen. The he who had drawn those images, who had lived that life, seemed so different than the he she knew. Which version of her father would come? Which version had sent her here? The one who knew of rats and thievery… or this one, the stranger, the one who knew of feasts and finery?

  She flipped once more through the early pages and found herself again astonished by the life and energy of the images. She could almost hear the lute player’s ballad, almost smell the blooms in the lady’s vase.

  The small sketches gave way to more elaborate drawings. The first of these, a full page, showed a woman in misty charcoal outline. She was standing against a wall, vines and blooms clambering up the stones behind her. Beggar at the Gate, her father had written beneath.

  Beggar? thought Clo. She traced the lines of the image with her fingertips. The woman was not beautiful—her portrait, at least, did not obviously exclaim, Ah, here is beauty!—but the way her expression, her eyes, her lips, hovered between joy and sorrow gave her an appearance of wisdom that was beautiful. Her hands were empty; her head was covered. She looked too regal to be a beggar.

  Clo turned another leaf.

  Apple-Pickers, read her father’s note across the next illustration, a sketch covering two full pages of an orchard at harvest. Men and women carried fruit in baskets or tucked up in aprons. The people and the trees had been drawn quickly, with little detail, so as to give an impression of the overall scene, but one woman, perched on a ladder and laughing as she was reaching for the fruit, had been so carefully rendered Clo could almost hear her laughter echoing around her. She peered more closely at the figure. Despite the joyful smile, the woman’s eyes were still shaped with sorrow. She was the beggar at the gate, now no longer a beggar.