by Ali Shaw
‘And what,’ he asked himself, ‘did you repay her with?’
Time passed. The afternoon dribbled away. Adrien was still meandering on the beach come the evening. Staring up now and then at the emerging Pole Star, that tiny naked light, and wondering why he’d ever given up his childhood hobby of stargazing. It had been his relief from the bullies, and he had loved the strangely cultish feeling of gathering on a hilltop to stare at the heavens. As a boy, stargazing had made him feel like there was something awe-inspiring about his own insignificance. It had let him be satisfied with smallness, instead of lacking for it. He had used to imagine himself neither as a space captain nor an intergalactic hero but as a comet, a nugget of cold rock whirling long orbits round a brilliant star.
The sea sifted. The trees creaked and shivered. Adrien closed his eyes and tried to pretend what he had not pretended since childhood. Cold to the bone and streaming out a wake of ice. Hurtling unimpeded through the simplicity of nothingness. It brought a fraction of a smile to his otherwise troubled face. Outer space was no more complicated than an elaborate machine. There was nothing up there to eat you, nothing small and creeping to haunt you with its dead wooden stare, nothing to fall in or out of love with. Down on the Earth everything was so much more imperfect, and the most imperfect thing of all was Adrien Thomas.
The two winds kept blowing, back and forth between woods and waves, but after a time it was the water’s wind that quietened, as if its attention had fluttered away on the tide. Adrien was just beginning to think he should head back to the tent, when something moaned in the forest.
It was a sound so forlorn that, for half a second, Adrien assumed it was a noise from inside himself. Then it came again, a drawn-out timber whine, and he realised it had sounded behind him. He looked over his shoulder and saw the whisperers’ tree, the one that poor broken Gweneth had called a throne.
At once he looked left and right for help, but he had wandered far from the town and was all alone on this stretch of beach. It was just him and the great plant, which stood on the near fringe of the forest rearing high above all the other trees. Dark and leafless, it looked like some hardy survivor of the cruellest winter ever to bite the world. Its two lower boughs ended as bluntly as screwed-up fists, but the creaking noise that Adrien had heard had not come from them. It sounded again now, from higher up the trunk where the branches fanned out like the prongs of a crown, and its noise was like a deep hymn sung from the back of the throat. Adrien drew in a long breath of his own and tried to stay calm. He told himself it was only a tree, a plant, a plain vegetable. It could not touch him down here by the water.
With a rustle, a whisperer stood up where the undergrowth met the beach. It was the thinnest Adrien had yet seen, its body as fragile and decorative as a fern. Near it rose another with a doleful face and stumpy legs. Then there was a third, a fourth and fifth, and two conjoined like grafted wood. When Adrien looked back to the throne tree he could see them crawling all over its branches, and up and down the sombre bark of its trunk.
Something twitched in the sand at Adrien’s feet. He looked down to see a crab paused there, mid-shuffle, its stalk eyes trained on the forest’s edge. Over there was another, and here and there lugworms pumping their bodies out of the sand, only to stiffen upon surfacing, their featureless heads pointing at the throne. A cormorant landed with a hurried beating of wings, then stood up just as motionless as the worms, its beak angled in the same direction. Adrien gulped and looked too, but felt like he could see only half of what the animals did. He wondered what it was about the tree that so transfixed them.
There was still some light left in the sky, but the throne tree was almost as dark as a silhouette. Its upper branches creaked as they swayed in the breeze. Then, with a deep and tortured squeal, one of the highest swung against another and scraped bark along bark. For a moment the two looked just like the itching legs of some colossal insect.
Adrien’s throat made a strangled noise. Those were not branches. None of those higher growths were branches.
They were the legs of something sitting on the throne tree.
Now that he had seen it, Adrien felt as if his eyes had come uncrossed. The thing up there was all legs, like some grandmother tarantula flexing her limbs atop her den. The evening was too murky to count all those appendages, but each of them branched at every joint. Elbows split into forearms, forearms into multiple wrists, wrists fanned out into innumerable crooked digits. The creature didn’t even have a body to speak of, only a wooden knot from which all of its protrusions emerged. Even as Adrien watched, three of those legs stretched out and at once retracted. The creature groaned as it tested them, and the noise stuck like a stitch in Adrien’s belly.
This thing, Adrien realised, was the reason for the whisperers’ bustling. They clambered up and down the tree trunk to attend it, or to whisper in its presence. Sometimes the creature moaned as if calling out from a long slumber, and the whisperers would scurry about this way and that, and all of the leaves of the forest would shiver with an echo.
‘What are you?’ mumbled Adrien, but the wide open air between him and the woodfringe stole all the volume from his words.
In a sudden spasm, the thing flung wide its legs and wailed. Adrien staggered backwards even as its exhalation gushed over the sand, a choking rush of earth smells and nectar and the sugar of sap and the excretions of worms, all borne on moist air and a rattling confetti of leaves. Gagging on the sweetness and the rottenness of it, Adrien turned away and shielded his mouth and nose, but even his own breath in that gust seemed too sickly to inhale. His stomach bucked and his vision swirled into brightness and he thought he was passing out. He teetered in some halfway state between fainting and consciousness, and everything turned a dazzling greenish-white, and his vision broke up like light falling through treetops. For a few untethered seconds he thought he heard the beating pinions of a crow and the cantering hooves of a deer. He thought he felt a woodpecker rattling his ear, and a squirrel’s tail whisking over his cheek. Leaves whirled around him. He tripped on his own feet and the sand rushed up to greet him, everything plunging into pitch dark and cold, and he thought he felt wriggling grubs all over his flesh.
He grunted as he hit the ground, but somehow he did not pass out. His delirium faded along with the noise of the creature’s cry, and after a few seconds he was able to prop himself back up and spit out a mouthful of grit. The beach, the woods and the sea all settled back into their rightful places.
The throne tree had vanished from the forest’s edge. So had the thing that had lurked atop it, along with all of its attendant whisperers bar one. That stood as upright as a bulrush and, although Adrien couldn’t even tell if it had eyes, he knew that it was watching him.
The whisperer made a short, hissing noise like a snake’s, then turned and fled into the forest.
Adrien puffed out the breath he had been holding. He wiped his arm across his forehead and tried to make sense of what had just happened. There was a taste like uncooked meat on his tongue and there was a ringing in his ear. His left cheek tingled, and when he touched his fingers to it he half-expected to find strands of squirrel fur stuck to his skin. There was nothing, of course, just as in the forest there were only ordinary trees, stirring innocuously in the wind.
8
Fox
‘I’ve got something for you,’ said Hiroko. ‘To say thank you for the postcards.’
Seb looked at the two strips of leather she was holding up. ‘Belts?’ he asked, confused. ‘But . . . I’ve already got one.’
‘These aren’t belts, stupid. They’re holding straps. To stop luggage sliding around on a boat.’
‘Er, right . . . Thanks, I suppose. But what do we need these for? Strapping down the tent when we cross?’
‘No. Come with me.’
‘Where are we going?’
But Hiroko didn’t explain. Instead, with Yasuo purring on her shoulder, she led him along the coast. North of the town she t
ook him, where the stratas of the cliffs jutted in and out like stacks of different-sized books. Wildflowers grew on some ledges, as well as scrawny trees not much bigger than bonsais.
‘How far are we going?’ asked Seb, when they had been walking for almost half an hour.
‘Further yet,’ said Hiroko, and smiled to herself.
Another half-hour passed before she spotted their destination up ahead. Someone from the beach camps had told her about it the day before, although in her imagination it had been taller. It was a lighthouse, standing at the end of a headland. The trees had taken it apart as easily as a child’s tower of blocks, but they had not cast the pieces down into the frothing waters at the bottom of the cliffs. Instead they had separated them, spacing them between their branches and trunks, so that the pieces became a vertical sequence of tree houses. Broad stripes of blue paint were still visible on some of their crumbling sections, but the topmost parts were invisible among the treetops.
‘Up there,’ said Hiroko, pointing. ‘People say it’s where a pair of them are nesting.’
‘Where what—’ began Seb, but at once a sea eagle took flight from out of the lighthouse, its wings broad and rippling as it swept for the ocean.
‘Come on,’ laughed Hiroko, and started walking again.
It took them another twenty minutes to reach the foot of the lighthouse. Yasuo ran ahead of them all the way, sometimes pausing to turn over a shell with his nose, but he wanted to be picked up again when the beach ended and the path up the cliff began.
The little fox was growing every day and Hiroko sometimes found it hard to carry him in her hood. On the other hand, she was getting stronger and Yasuo was learning to perch his forepaws on her shoulder for support. When he pulled himself upright like that, and she saw him sideways out of the corner of her eye, his figure struck her as almost human, albeit only a foot tall and with ears as big as leaves. She was glad he had stayed with her, despite Hannah’s warnings that he might abandon her at a moment’s notice. She was glad, too, that she had named him after her grandfather. Every time she said Yasuo’s name she thought fondly of her elderly sobo and sofu, and fox stories told to her as a girl, and of her grandfather’s silent vigil in a rocking chair, whittling wood while she walked with her grandmother in the orchard.
She let out an involuntary sigh.
‘What’s up?’ asked Seb, at once picking up on her sadness.
‘It’s nothing,’ said Hiroko, although she knew Seb wouldn’t believe her.
Among the many fox magics her sobo had delighted in describing, the one that had most captured her imagination was the power to alter form. The most eldritch among foxes could turn (or so her grandmother would claim in that musical croak that was her storytelling voice) into human beings. Then they would creep into the lives of lonely and impressionable souls and offer them long-sought affection. ‘They say there have been marriages,’ her grandmother had once told her, ‘and babies born who look human, but are neither truly one thing nor the other.’
‘How would you tell?’ Hiroko had asked her once. ‘How would you know if you were one of those children?’
‘You would seek out your reflection in running water. If you saw yourself red and whiskered, well . . . then you’d know.’
Yasuo barked to regain Hiroko’s attention, and barked again, and she crouched down and lifted him up, holding him under the armpits like a baby. Many times, even in recent years, she had looked for her reflection in running water. Normally it was hard to find, for brooks babbled and streams surged. If she ever managed to see it she was disappointed. It never looked anything like the animal she now helped onto her shoulder. It was just another human girl.
The cliff face here was scored with diagonal crags, as if all of its weight were slumping sideways into the sea. The path up it was nothing more than a series of such ledges, with a scramble sometimes needed to climb from one to the other. Finding handholds in such weathered rocks was not difficult, but Hiroko stopped halfway up the first stretch to offer Seb some assistance. To her surprise, he was right behind her.
‘What?’ he laughed, upon seeing her surprise. ‘Stop looking so shocked. Mum taught me how to climb when I was small.’
‘Good,’ said Hiroko, after a moment. ‘Then let’s go faster.’
A few minutes later, they were up, and the broken lighthouse rose before them.
‘Now what?’ asked Seb.
‘In,’ she said, and led the way.
It was still possible to enter through the lighthouse’s doorway, even though the door itself was gone and the rest of the bricks surrounding its frame had been torn upwards. Patches of the ground floor had survived the arrival of three particularly massive trees, but the levels above had been destroyed. Only intermittent stretches of a staircase remained, connecting the floors of the lighthouse like a contorted spine.
‘What do you think?’ asked Hiroko, looking up. The tiers above were still whirlpools of brick and brown leaf.
‘I think we can get up,’ said Seb, ‘but I can’t tell why you want us to.’
Hiroko grinned and set foot on the first step of the staircase. The wood was damp from rainwater and creaked beneath her boots, but it was firm enough to support her weight. A dozen steps up, the stairs came to their first abrupt end, but there was a low bough she could step on and sidle along until she reached the next run. Seb kept up competently, just as he had on the cliff, and as they climbed higher only Yasuo seemed troubled by vertigo. The further up they got, the more evidence they saw of the sea eagles. Fragments of an old egg lay smashed in one place against bricks streaked white by droppings. Threads of dropped fish meat had hardened to the bricks and soon, when peering upward, Hiroko began to see the nest itself, and above that the grey of the sky. Neither of the birds were currently at home, but the smell of them certainly was. It was brine and blood and something more brisk, like the wind blowing ten thousand feet above the sea.
The final stretch of staircase came to an end and the branches grew too narrow to trust. Hiroko and Seb were as high as they could go, but it was enough. Here were a few square yards of floor intact, and walls on three sides. To the west, the branches opened wide, and there was a spectacular view of the ocean. The sun was coming down and growing fat, and against the backdrop of its light the two eagles circled like the hands of some delicate clockwork.
Hiroko might have stopped and admired them, had not there been something else too distracting, which they could not have seen from below.
It was the lighthouse’s lamp. It had fallen from its original height, but had then been caught in the branches. Once a giant, many-panelled device of lenses and filaments, it had fractured as it fell and cracked in every facet. It was now an orb of frosted glass and splintered prisms, and a handful of its broken surfaces faced the sun directly, and were lit up like the sparkles in quartz.
‘That’s pretty,’ said Seb eventually. ‘Is that what you wanted to show me?’
‘No,’ said Hiroko. ‘I didn’t even know it was still here.’
She crouched and picked something up off the floor. ‘This is what we’re here for.’
She brandished a wing feather, chocolate brown and flecked with white like the sea spray that flecks the beach. When she tickled Seb with it he laughed but clung to the wall.
‘Bloody hell, Hiroko! There are a lot of ways to fall from here!’
‘Crybaby,’ she said. ‘Come on.’
Quickly she began to search the place for more feathers, finding them here and there among the leaves. Seb helped, and when they had gathered a dozen or more, Hiroko said, ‘Figured it out yet?’
‘I’ve figured out nothing. I’m just following your lead.’
She shook her head in disbelief, then untied from around her waist the two leather straps she’d shown him earlier. She unsheathed her knife and took out thread from her pocket, then sat cross-legged to cut holes along the leather. After a moment she paused and looked to Seb again. ‘Understand now?’
‘Maybe,’ he said, sitting beside her. He chose one of the eagle feathers and fed its quill through the first of the holes she’d cut in the strap.
Hiroko secured it in place with the thread. ‘Carter had a friend who was a shaman,’ Hiroko said. ‘He used to stop by to eat jerky with us in the woods. I think they’d been to war together, although neither would say. Anyway, one time this guy told me that to wear part of an animal was to ask its spirit to watch over you.’
Yasuo, in her hood, yawned and closed his eyes against her neck.
They got to work on the other feathers. It was slow and careful work, and the sun moved an inch down the sky and its light shone orange in more and more facets of the shattered lamp. Then, when they’d almost finished the headdresses, one of the eagles returned to its roost. Hiroko and Seb seized each other’s hands as it whooshed in through the open wall and then up, its outstretched wingspan rippling in the air. In its talons was a mighty fish, glittering and thrashing and dripping beads of water.
The eagle touched down in the nest above them with a scream. Hiroko grabbed Seb’s biceps and squeezed. They were doing things like that now, instead of kissing. Just grabbing each other whenever the moment felt right. There was a thrill in such spontaneous intimacy, but to Hiroko’s frustration it never lasted. She’d feel Seb tensing with that same desire she had inside her, that sensation not unlike dread in her stomach. And then they would let go of one another and let their arms drop uselessly to their sides, just as they did now. He would not push for anything since the breaking of his nose. She wanted to push for it but had once again become caught in the snare of her own emotions, so much harder to break free of than a real pit trap or wire noose.
It was too difficult a thing to discuss, so Hiroko could only guess what Seb thought of her. Did he think she was experienced? The truth was that she felt she ought to be. Sex just seemed the kind of thing a girl should have done before she’d killed too many things to keep count of. One boy in Japan had offered it to her, almost as casually as if it were chewing gum, and she’d followed her instincts and issued dire threats about just what she’d do to him with a knife if he ever asked again. Not long after that, though, she’d wished she’d taken him up on the offer. Just to see what it was like. By then, of course, it had been impossible. He had believed her every word and was too terrified to even come near.