Secrets of Carrick: Ghostheart

by Ananda Braxton-Smith

  “The deepest quiet fell in the grove as he tipped the red piggin. The treecreepers stopped and the crickets, even the water boatmen and mayflies. The monk let fall a few drops of holy water onto the sprite’s head. It dribbled down into her hair. It trickled down onto her neck.

  “‘Oh dear,’ Pond-Averick said, patting at her head. ‘Oh dear, oh dear–’

  “She rose shaking her head and laughing a bit. Then she went in a little circle, just like a cat trying to get at biting mites at the back of its neck. She stopped laughing. The holy water made red welts down her long dappled body.

  “‘What is it?’ she asked Brother Collect and the blood flowed from her scalp in tiny streams.

  “‘I don’t know,’ he said, trying to wipe away the smears of holy water and blood. But as he wiped, he spread the welts, and of a sudden the grove was full with the wailing of Pond-Averick.

  “‘It hurts,’ she cried out to him. ‘It hurts …’

  “And then she ran.

  “She ran on her strong legs away from her pool, away from the pain, away from Brother Collect. He followed but couldn’t keep up. All he could do was keep her in sight. She was running senseless, crashing through the trees. Her Otherness, kept soft by her love for the mortal man, burst out and she went screaming in wakes of light down through Midwood, down to the Crossroads – and right down onto the seashore.”

  “No, no. Nooo,” I said, with a bit of a tear coming. “Why would she do that?”

  “She forgot what she was, I suppose,” said Mr Cooley.

  “But how could she forget what she was?” I asked.

  “Her fright made her forget, I expect,” he said, giving me his one slow eye. “She was running wild – and when you run wild, you end up unexpected places. Maybe she’d never heard of seawater. Maybe she thought it would cool the fire. Whatever she was thinking though, she ran too fast for the Brother.

  “She ran onto the salty sand and her bare feet started to shed skin. Soon she was running on raw flesh.”

  I turned my face and wiped my eyes while he took a breath. We watched Lovelypig eat awhile. Her pleasure took the edge off this sad story.

  “When Pond-Averick reached the waterline, the Brother was on the dunes. He waited there with his wind going and his fingers pushed into the pain in his side. And then he saw her. And it was too late.

  “Pond-Averick ran in the water, and stopped.

  “She looked up the sand at him, and she knew.

  “Brother Collect saw and went to her in bounds.

  “But by the time he reached the water it was over. Her dappled body tilted and fell, quiet and fizzing into the sea. Her glassy lights dimmed one-by-one. When Brother Collect reached her, she was nothing but a red stain in the waters. That stain spread into the cove and inlets. Overnight the sea was red right out to the horizon.

  “The next morning it was gone.”

  He stopped and we sat in the story a long time.

  “So there you go,” he said at last. “Thousands of generations snug in Midwoodpool and in the end done in by a little salt and holy water, eh?”

  Mr Cooley stirred the embers with his foot. He felt nothing through the thick hide of his soles. His body parts were just types of tool to him.

  “But how could she die?” I said, somewhat shaken at the turn the story had taken. “I mean, she was one of Them. They can’t die.”

  “Everything that lives can die, Mally Crowal,” said Shenn Cooley, weary in spite of it being only midmorning. “Everything that is, can also be not.”

  He leaned back against the wall and yawned.

  “And everything leaves their leftovers behind,” he added.

  And he closed the one eye the worm had left him and he slept.

  The afternoon came hot then and I sat awhile with Mr Cooley while he was sleeping. I sorrowed for that water-sprite like she was a mortal person. I brooded on that Brother Collect, left behind to live without her. He should never have broken his Rule and should never have expected anything but trouble to come on the back of it when he did – but still my heart upswelled to him. I wondered what happened to him.

  Pond-Averick’s poor leftover.

  Chapter Six

  Webster

  AS SOON AS I GOT HOME from tending Mr Cooley I sat to the loom.

  I am a webster and a good one. Last year it was my cloth that bartered for the bit of meal that saw us through the end of summer. I might have been useless on the shore and in the woods, but my family was thankful enough for my cloth. When I was weaving, they let me be.

  I didn’t have much to work with; my yarns were all leftovers now. The basket was full with motley thread, of various weights and colours and different spin. I hadn’t had anything to trade for good yarn this season so the distaff council had taken up a collection. Those old women had managed two whole baskets between them, all washed and ready to go. I knew each woman’s yarn like the faces of old friends.

  There was Mrs Sorch’s noily grey. And Mrs Meeley’s thick green loops. There was even a small ball of the fine red yarn from Mrs Fell’s spindle.

  It was coming along, this weave, in spite of all the unmatched thread and maybe even because of it. It spread between the rods like a piece of sea-lace. It fell from the heddles in both warm and cool browns, sage and leaf greens, silver-grey, a dab of sky blue; the colours of Midwood in fall. The leftovers were webbing up into something good.

  Something beautiful and particular.

  I sat to the loom. I spread the warp.

  I felt the shuttle smooth in my hand.

  “Hey, Mally!” bawled Flaxney close in my ear. “Look out!”

  My heart just about split me open. The shuttle fell. The thread slipped.

  Something was changed. The sibs had broken into my corner. They were bothering me at the loom.

  “Look out! Look out!” shouted Neven and Sula running in circles round me.

  “Wifeseeeeeker!” screamed Sula, wringing her hands and rolling her eyes back in her head. She fell to the ground and lay in a pretend Palsy.

  I kicked her a bit.

  Then Flaxney took something from behind his back. It was big. It was green. It was glowing in the murk. It was a fish. Dead.

  I sat and studied the weave like he wasn’t there.

  “Give us a kiss,” he said, making a sucking sound with his lips and putting the fish to my cheek.

  Sula and Neven started up with holding their chests and swooning. They made kissing mouths at each other. I shoved Flaxney back until he fell over the threshold. Then I lugged Sula and Neven out, one under each arm.

  “Let me alone,” I told them. Again.

  Sometimes I was homesick for somewhere I hadn’t been.

  If a giant lay down in the lane and looked into our place, he’d see Lovelypig first because she rests in the slanted summer light or in the fire-glow. Then he’d see the one huge dresser with everything on it. Not just the pots and piggins, sieves and seethers but nets, hooks, mallets and trowels too. At last he’d see us all crammed in there, sitting on rope, eating in a shove, sleeping in a tardle.

  Late that night the giant would see me threshing about, sweating in my bed with Tosha, Ally, Coonie, Treen, Sula and Nessa; all trying not to lie close because of the heat. He’d see the mice coming out and finding nothing, and the fleas crawling abroad as the smoke dwindled. Then the dung flies, the midges and biters, and the beetles. He’d have seen me, scratching at the edge of our bed, pretending to be asleep.

  I was fretting on Pond-Averick. Hearing that story had been like meeting a friend and burying them all in one day. I saw her flaying from the salt every time I closed my eyes.

  That Old-one must have been right deep in her pool when the Brothers first came. She must have slept through all the din of the war, and the howling and so forth. There would have been no Midwood then. It would have been thick woods out that way with her pool hid right in the middle. The Others can sleep better than anybody. Long-lasting, almost everlasting,
sleeps.

  But I was most baffled by why she’d come out of her safe waters in the first place. Maybe if she’d known about the war, it wouldn’t have happened. If her people had warned her, it wouldn’t have happened. If she wasn’t so brave, it wouldn’t have happened. But she’d trusted Brother Collect and she’d braved the baptism, and so it did happen.

  And now see.

  She was a scaan. She had to walk the salty Sands forever when it was the salt that killed her. She couldn’t go back to her green pool salted like some herring. She was lost; a freshwater thing stuckfast to the sea. It hurt when I thought on it.

  And none of it had to happen. If somebody had just told her. And, of course, if she had listened.

  Farback as I can remember our parents told us everything. All the things to look out for. And they weren’t just outside the palings. They could be just round the corner.

  At first we were not to leave our yard because of Moony Annie, who lost all her babies and, according to my mother, wanted one of us. Later we were not to leave the lane in case of loose Coils and Foams. If you listened to my mother, half the men in Shipton turned into their own pipe-smoke and grog-wash when they died. A bad-tempered Coil could blind you, and envious Foams were well-known to knock folk down and drown them in shallow ditches.

  “They prefer boys,” she told my brothers.

  “But they aren’t fussy,” she said to us girls as if we knew something and weren’t telling her.

  When we were too old to keep to the yard we started going down on the Sands. Then they told us never go past the mid-waterline; the sea will suck you away. Never swim; you are not a fish.

  Never turn your back on the sea, for obvious reasons.

  Lately, they were all fired up over the matter of Wifeseekers. Particularly Mam.

  “What if,” she asked us girls of a sudden, “you went and got yourselves taken by one of them things?”

  For reasons Mam wouldn’t say Wifeseekers didn’t have any females of their own. They hide in the low-tide pools, but they have family in the under-sand tunnels. They work together to get females. But they can only take you if you leave your hair untied.

  “The one Wifeseeker who wants you,” she said. “Pulls you into the rockpool by your hanging-down hair and the whole mob passes you along the tunnels like some packet. Then he drags you down and ties you by your hair to his other wives all floating there on the seafloor.”

  Treen and Ally pressed their lips tight and then bust out in grins and snorts. Mam slapped the tops of their heads both at the same time, one with each hand. It only made them laugh more.

  “Then there you are,” she went on, giving my sisters the warning eye. “A bunch of sea-gooseberry wives held together by your braids. What would you do then?”

  “Yes, girls. What would you do then?” Da said, and I thought he winked at Treen and Ally.

  I didn’t know what to say.

  I didn’t know what I’d do then.

  “Well, if you were taken,” said Mam to me as the others weren’t listening any more, “you couldn’t say you weren’t told. You’d only have yourself to blame, wouldn’t you?”

  I nodded because that was what Mam wanted, but honest now – I would have blamed the Wifeseeker.

  Mam and Da told us that outside Market-Shipton every dub holds its troll; every cave its salamander and every croft its witch and changeling. In Midwood the scaans hang in the trees like fruit. The far north is all half-breed merrows and the Cronks all heathens. In spite of the first Brothers chasing the Others off, there were plainly plenty left over to harrow the monks and everybody else.

  So in the yard and along the lane, down at the sea and up the greenplots, I kept watchful as cats. I wore my hair up and tight, and I turned my face from hares. I shunned elder trees. I went with pocketfuls of mugwort and my braids full with burdock. I never, never whistled. Not just on the shore but anywhere. When I shut my eyes I saw such things as withered me so I tried not to shut them.

  I had bad dreams.

  When I did sleep it was with noils packed into my ears and nose so that those ways were closed to demons. For a time I even went marked by an ash-cross on my brow – until Mam said to stop before folk saw me and thought me cracked.

  I just twisted one from a briar and wore it inside my shift instead. The thorns pricked me and I bled. The blood made me feel eased somehow.

  Mam reminded us daily you could drown in drags, choke in mires, get stuck in caves and be lured offshore by unnatural singing. There looked to be no end to the death and slavery waiting outside Market-Shipton and I didn’t know how people could leave the palings and paths for anything.

  Not Breesh Dunnal though. She loved all the edgewise places. She loved to think on the outside and faraway. On the lives that might be lived there; on the other lives a person might live. She said that the seashore was not only the edge of the land but also the edge of the water; it was the meeting of the two worlds and both of them ours. I didn’t like to think on there being two worlds; I was having enough trouble with one. But Breesh always said she couldn’t wait to have the ways open to her. To go and see. I loved that Breesh Dunnal when she talked big and brave, but I knew I could never do what she did.

  And this summer there were people in town that frighted me more than monsters. I watched the faces passing our yard and what I saw gave me such doomy feelings. All the faces a person could end up with. All the faces you could end up wearing.

  Those sorrow-fasted and milky eyes.

  That sneery lip and white-tip nose.

  Those two faces lived close by our place. They were my parents’ friends. I wondered how those folk went from somebody like me to somebody like themselves. Did they do something terrible? Or was something terrible done to them?

  Had they left their hair untied? Had they whistled into the wind? Had the gusts set their faces?

  Then there were faces with edges to them, like Dolyn Craig’s. You could cut yourself on his face. His lips were white; his eyes were red; his teeth were yellow. When you looked into his face, he wasn’t in it right. Like there was somebody else in there too. Somebody running in smaller and smaller circles.

  I had bad dreams about that Dolyn Craig.

  Once in a dream he chased me through the back lanes and bit my nose off. Another time one of the rat-babies in our wall had his face. Sometimes he turned up at the sea-cave, but in those dreams Breesh always saw him off.

  The dreams woke me most nights. I never slept long any more. I woke and then I walked, or I wove, or I watched the rest of them sleep and envied them.

  While I was out walking the back lanes these last weeks, I’d nearly run into Dolyn a few times. I didn’t think he’d seen me. I always backed away into the dark until he was gone. Once he went by so close; I could have reached out and touched his sleeve. So close I could hear his breath.

  I’d slowed my breathing. I stopped my thinking. I slipped flat into the wall-shadows.

  His blood-eyes had hunted up-and-down the lane and I thought he’d seen me. His eyes settled on my shadowed corner, and his lips moved.

  I’d held my breath.

  “Lamia,” he’d hissed into the shadows. “Get away from me, witch. Abi dierecte.”

  And he’d crossed himself and bolted.

  There was some slipstitch of thread tucked into the warp of Market-Shipton, holding the secrets fast like floating threads on the wrong side of a weave. One side told one story, and the other side told another. The right side was tidy stuff, flat and neat. But turn it over and the wrong side was all noils and nubs and greasy tails.

  Chapter Seven

  Bloodsibs

  THE WORLD KEEPS CHANGING. One day we go in fogs gathering dabberlocks, the sibs just small quiet shadows at the waterline. Next day we go in dewbow, the sibs lit up on the sand. The day after we’re stung by spindrift and drenched in wind-spray. And the day after that comes still and soft as a mill-pool.

  You can’t trust anything.

&nbs
p; The day after the scaan came and Shenn Cooley told about Pond-Averick, Carrick was shaken by earth-trembles. Somehow I slept through it and was only woken by the deadquiet that comes after. I sat up and looked. Everybody was gone.

  Everything was upturned. Our bed had shifted on the trembles; it had travelled a snaky path from the back wall right to the threshold. It was the sun on my feet that woke me.

  I lay sweat-manky and listened.

  Slow, slow, the regular morning came back. Outside, there were footsteps. Then excitable talking, faraway. Of a sudden the town was shouting, laughing, cursing, eaveswarbling and clucking, lowing and barking. I could hear it all. Wheel-rims creaking over stone, brooms scratching, the wheeze of Smith’s bellows and the clunk of the mill – and behind it the hum of the flies. Inside, our place was quiet. I could hear longtails and bugs, but no breath or bellies or any other sounds of people.

  The St-Sanctan bell was ringing. I was late.

  There was no breakfast left, only the bread Mam had put aside for Shenn Cooley’s Fee. I drank water from the barrel to fill myself. The hunger’s not so bad with a bellyful of water.

  The thought of another hot day stuckfast between the mid-waterline, the Woodward and the palings left me somewhat gutted. Then the thought of the scaaney and its worms left me boned entirely. And Lovelypig was making a terrible noise by my side, like the trembles were still coming and she was all Come on, come On.

  But when I told her to Shush she did.

  Lovely was the only pig left in Market-Shipton. The others were foraging in Midwood as they do every summer, running the paths and woods in a mob. She always stayed with me, to keep me company. She may have been small but she was big-hearted and that was because of her start in the world.

  The year she was born, the whole town suffered a plague of rats and fleas. The longtails bred to teeming and folk shaved their heads from the bone-deep itches. Walls creeped in blood-hungry sheets of midges. At our place, we scratched until we were nothing but a family of welts and smears. One night Flaxney had looked up from tearing at his feet, reached out with his stick and clouted a longtail as it passed. It stopped straightways and was dead.