Ghostheart

by Ananda Braxton-Smith

  Moo blamed me for leaving him home alone the day of her penance. She blamed Pa for not teaching him to fight.

  Pa blamed Moo for being shamed by him. He blamed me for not being my brother.

  And I blamed everybody. For everything.

  Chapter Ten

  Flight

  IT’S STRANGE HOW YOU CAN MOVE toward something without knowing you are. Some things happen blind, you feel your way. Some things happen pathless, you cut a path. They happen like water, falling drop-by-drop, gathering together in bright lines to run and fall. One day the drops are trembling at the waterline where there’s only one place left to go. One more drop and all the running and falling ends where it was moving all the while. At the sea.

  That’s how it happened to me.

  When Pa and me came down from the upland cut, Gilpin was digging. He’d been at it some time by the look of it. The hole dropped straight into the brown earth by the greenplots like a trap, and at first all we saw was the dirt flying up and out. When we leaned over the rim to look, he was squatted in the sog like a dirty little troll, digging at it with both hands and shovelling the loose earth out with the book of beasts like it was just some useful thing.

  ‘Oy! Sloughworm!’ I said and grabbed the book out of his filthy hands.

  ‘Pa!’ I said. ‘Tell him.’ But Pa just made a face like What can you do? and went to clean and store the tools.

  Gilpin was digging like it was all one to him, and his face was closed to me like the face of a creature; like the face of all creatures, except dogs. You’d have thought he was some lost Old-one trying to dig himself back into the Under-halls. He was slick and stinking like Moo would never have let him before, and he looked overly-aged. Sharp and unnatural.

  He wouldn’t let me take him up out of the hole. In fact, he thumped at me when I tried. ‘I’m digging,’ he told me.

  ‘I see that,’ I said.

  ‘It’ll be my hole.’ His voice was low. ‘I will do it myself.’ His eyes raised to me and his face looked forty. ‘And nobody can come in!’ He threw a clod at me.

  ‘Brout! Why would I want to come in your nasty old ditch?’ I said.

  I opened the book of beasts and it fell to the pages of the merged folk, those that share bits of their bodies or even, use a common head. They’d been our favourite pages. Boson and me could never settle whether the folk whose heads were merged and bodies split, made one person or two. Whether they were one-in-two or two-in-one.

  I brushed at the clods on the pages and they smeared.

  What had been a page all blue and red, fine-wrought like dragonflies’ wings, was spoiled.

  When I tried to turn the pages they came wet and piecemeal.

  The whole thing was wholly rotted.

  I left Gilpin, and went into the cold, lightless house.

  Moo had let the fire burn out. In the corner where she sloped and faded, a spider had anchored its silk to one of her fingertips and was swinging wallward. There was to be no brew, no broth, no fuss or chat. I dropped my wet sheep-bag and muddy bundles right in the doorway where everybody was sure to fall over them. She didn’t even turn.

  In spite of standing right up close, I couldn’t hear her breath. I laid my hand flat on her drooping neck and felt her blood still beating there. She was only pretending to be dead.

  I took our spoiled book and curled up in my bed around it. Everything in me suffered. Head-agues, belly-agues and bone-deep Withers cramped me. I stretched out and tried to sleep.

  I lay wakeful as the hours passed. The winds moaned outside, low to the ground and fast. They howled through the high mud-roots. One sang awhile like a girl alone. Everywhere, it was all slipping airs and humours. The moaney was up and on the move. And that’s not all.

  Outside, the yard was all scuttle and hiss. I thought it must be Pa or Gilpin in a romp; I prayed it was, but it wasn’t. When I went out to see, Gilpin had pulled a plank over his hole and was asleep down there, damp, a hazelnut in each hand, and Pa was nowhere. I thought then there must be some new scuttling, hissing sort of wind about since our troubles started. Everything else was changing, learning to talk in new ways or forgetting they ever knew how. Why not the wind?

  Our yard was lit by a big, clear moon. I sat on the threshold. All about the edge of our yard and into the home-thickets, I saw the Dead Lamps walking. Their little soul-lights were rocking along the paths, glowing through the elders, whispering like in chapel. I’d never heard them so chatty, but then everybody and everything in the whole world seemed to have something to say since my brother died. Even the faraway birds that shared that hiding place with me had started to mutter and make a sort of sense.

  Those Lamps seemed to me warm and cheerful, their lights strong and steady. They glowed along the home-thickets like moonshine, illuminating the bodgeway. They whispered in friendly tones.

  I followed them. Why not? They went in a type of content we didn’t know at home anymore. I wanted what they had. I just wanted to be close to some lifesome thing, something that hadn’t been sapped by death and families and suchlike. Later, I thought it strange that Dead Lamps should have seemed to me livelier than living Quirks.

  I stayed way back from the Lamps and stepped dainty as a boatman, careful as a crane, putting each foot down heel, sole, toes, one in front of the other and in this way I moved forward. I thought every scrape and crackle I made would have the Lamps spitting and flying off, and then I’d be entirely alone in the nightbog.

  But the Lamps were making too much noise themselves to be bothered by me. I’d never thought creatures of the air could be so clod-footed. The Dead Lamps were positively clumping along the bodge. And they were arguing too. I couldn’t hear the words but I could hear the high-toned voices.

  The thicket met over my head like the low, shadowed halls at the monkhouse and the moonrays lit each leaf. The moon floated above as the Dead Lamps floated below; there was just enough light to keep the path.

  Then the Lamps moved out of the trees and turned onto the Saltward.

  I waited at the edge of the home-thicket until they were almost lost in the mist-bands before stepping into the open mire.

  As I stepped out, straight-up, so did that lost crane. It was just by, only a few spans from me. It stood taller than me, taller even than Moo, fledged clean and white as the angels in chapel, and with its red crest and yellow eye lit up by moon-streaks. Me and the crane stopped tomby-still, eyes on each other, feet ready to run, wings ready to fly.

  All I know is the sky hung fixed, and the clouds set still. The winds dropped, the mire hushed. All I know is the crane’s eye and mine met, tardled, and the hours stopped. Nothing was happening. It was all not happening at once. All I know is there was this hum-din in my ears. Whether it was inside or outside my head I couldn’t tell.

  It didn’t matter. I liked it.

  ‘Stop it,’ said the inside-voice.

  I took no notice. I didn’t want to stop. It was a mean old voice, trying to take my little bit of joy away just as I’d found it.

  ‘You’re just wasting time,’ it said. Smarmy.

  ‘Goes to show how much you know,’ I thought at it. ‘He’s that time-angel. Whassisname? Tempus.’

  ‘No, he’s not,’ said the voice. ‘He’s just wild.’

  I started to say as how the inside-voice should look around, to see for itself how the night had stopped but when I looked, it hadn’t. The low winds were slipping around my feet like adders again, and the bog was all rustle and pok. And the lost crane fidgeted and fussed about like it couldn’t keep still to save its life, its eye and crest unremarkable things.

  ‘They’re leaving,’ said the inside-voice, quite bossy of a sudden. ‘Pay attention, Fermion Quirk.’

  The Dead Lamps were disappearing, glowing out along the Saltward over the rise to Redcliff. I followed their night-shapes. I would find where they went, and winkle them out into the open. Now they were talking I would make them talk to me and tell me what they knew of m
y brother, the skybog and our missing things. They were all over the bog all night, every night, and forever. They should have seen plenty. They should know plenty.

  The Lamps should know the dead, and where they fit. If my brother was not with the Lamps, they should have word of him. If he was moving west to that island, they should have seen him passing. They could have the ones that led him out of the skybog and onto his Afterwards path.

  They should know, too, what had stopped my mother’s words. They were the only ones left up the moaney I could talk to, who might talk back. Whatever they had to say, I had to hear it. Ahead, they turned onto the Croftward.

  The idea of Strangers’ Croft by night, its deeps and falls and foreign ghosts, weighed at my feet like a drag-anchor. My body was frighted and it tried to stop my feet moving forward. My skin felt to be just about peeling off, adder-like, at the notion of that descent and my breath turning to blades. But when my feet slowed, my heart fell.

  There was no bright snug behind me, no warm brew or night-tales. There were no fretting parents to look for me. They were gone missing with the other household things; gone with the hoe, gone with the piggins, gone with my brother. There was nothing to go back to. I was stood on a blade-edge. Fear ahead; a different sort of fear behind.

  In this way I moved to the sea. In this way, on slow feet, I came to the stone steps. I stepped down into the slip-mould in the shadow of the mountain overhang.

  In fact, I almost dropped and fell like water because behind me, silent, a cold wet thing pushed itself into my hand.

  I leapt up and stepped back all at the one time, and found myself flailing. I was tipping over the edge of the cliff, my face to the open sea, the free air all about me, empty and horrible. Just before I dropped, though, somebody barked.

  Mungo snapped at me like I was a mayfly, shutting his teeth on air with a wet clop. He caught my shift between his teeth and stood firm. He hauled me backwards, his haunches and his jaws straining, and I did my best to stop flapping my arms. He growled low in his belly and would not let me go. I hung still with the long fall opening under me. Then he lurched and I was falling with a thump into his warm hairiness.

  We sat there panting on the steps, and he licked my whole face with his curling, silk-soft tongue. I’d never been happier to see anybody.

  I did make one stab at sending him home.

  After all, I said to myself, I don’t know what the Dead Lamps are really like, whether they are meat-eaters for instance, and Pa would think it middling-to-high idiocy to put a good hound in danger to no clear purpose and I agreed with him. But when I pointed him homeward, Mungo looked at me put-out and somewhat offended. He rolled his white-eye and I knew what he was thinking.

  He was thinking what I needed for this sort of thing was a companion; somebody who could bear witness, remember paths and scent trouble. He was thinking I needed somebody like a silver-haired hound with flowing ears whose ancestors had hunted the white stag Himself, and who’d think nothing of fighting the Dog-Star if called to it. Somebody like himself.

  Some dogs are like that. They hold to their own. Their people belong to them.

  So down into the Croft we went together. There were no shadow-borne ghosts about tonight. Moving through the crumble-down cobbles and timbers was only hard work, not slowed by fear of corners. We went into the old harbour. The slips were quiet and the breakwater was empty. We must have lost the Lamps.

  Me and Mungo stood somewhat disheartened with the sea-foam hissing in-and-out. We looked out at the night sea. I couldn’t go home. It was impossible.

  Then I heard the whispering, on the lee-side of the breakwater. The voices whinged and snapped, and gave orders. Mungo looked up at me.

  His eyebrows bunched like caterpillars and he waited, hide twitching for me to give him the word. I put my hand to his head, and he settled to waiting. We crept up the slabs of the breakwater until we hung like rock-spiders only a few spans from the top. I stretched up until I was standing only on toes, I crawled my fingertips up the rock, I craned my neck until I thought it would crack, and then I saw.

  In the shelter of the breakwater’s hidden harbour a fleet was pulled up on the ghosty sands. There were five little coracles in a circle, upside-down like so many sea-turtles. The cloud-clad moonshine was enough to make out only dark shapes moving about on the pale sands.

  Mungo whined, many small fretful whines that told me he wanted to get among the intruders, whoever they were. I sank below the breakwater and gripped his muzzle. He shut his gob straight-up.

  Down on the sand were six people. Well, I say people but they were not like any people I’d seen. In the half-light their forms were shifting, their shapes various, but each one alike wore a coat of yellowed thatch and a wide hat of wicker. The woven hats caught moonrays in their faded wattling, and gleamed below us. Two shapes, a tall one and a short, had upturned the bigger coracles and were loading them with sacks and bricks. One tiny shape was chasing two hens about the beach. The shape scuttered up and back, in-and-out the legs of its taller companions, cursing the hen and everybody, and shedding thatch on the sand.

  They pulled the loaded coracles down to the waterline, and then the three smaller ones. A tall and twiggy shape with over-long limbs like a woodpile spider, all joints and shanks, stood hunch-backed in shadow against the sea. His white hair shone against the black horizon. When he turned sidewise his hunch was a terrible thing, mounding up right above his shoulders and moving, churning about up there like it might be the person and the twig-thing underneath only its growth.

  Maybe the twig shape was carrying its young in that swollen spine-paunch, like spiders carry theirs in sacks. Maybe it would split and countless mite-sized twiggers would swarm out and up over the breakwater. I watched the busy hunch, brimful with dread. Mungo rose grumbling disgustfully and his hackles rising. I grabbed him tight and pulled him back. He sank to his belly but he didn’t like it.

  The tiny scuttering shape was now cursing the others as it loaded the flustering hens into a coracle. There was something familiar about the hens’ calls. One made a long, dry drone before letting fly a noise like a crow. Another had a hiccough right in the middle of her call, and a beak-click right after.

  They were our hens. One was our lead-hen, Coddle. And the other was Sops.

  Looking closer, I saw the bricks were turf-spits.

  The sacks were stuffed with them. My gorge rose. These were no creatures of air — they were just thieving dollops.

  Then the twigger took his hunch right off.

  He stood it on a bench in a coracle, where it wriggled and curled like a dying moth. I had to hold my own mouth to stop noises rushing out. With a heave the hunch sat up and then I saw it was its own creature, not a small part of the tall one at all. Part of me was eased by this, though I don’t know why. After all, where there had been just one shape, now there were two. But even two shapes weren’t as horrible as living hunches that could be put on and off like cloaks.

  That hunch sat up in the coracle as straight as you like. It had what looked to be a head and a tiny pair of shoulders, and maybe a middle, but I couldn’t see with the sea stirring in mists. Anyway, it sat there waiting, calm, and then it lifted a face like Gilpin’s when I take him out to say goodnight to the moon, and it started up singing. I forgot all about our stolen things.

  It sang in the voice of a child but the song was full of trouble. I couldn’t hear it well, the words of it I mean, but I felt I knew the song or it knew me. It sang somehow of the skybog and of the terrible night, of distempered boys making nests in the willows and of holy men boring into folks’ heads, of people giving up entirely on talk and sense — and the mournfulness of it all.

  Meanwhile, our turf-spits were stowed and the night-shapes finished loading the last sacks. There was one creature all stuck about with any amount of legs and arms like a windmill. It sidled crabwise into a coracle, using all its limbs at once, and took the oars in two of its arms. Another tiny shape ca
me scrabbling down the cliff in a sputter of gravel and trotted along the shoreline, its arms full of trailing greenery. It splashed into the crab shape’s boat.

  ‘You wasn’t going to wait,’ it said, spitting wetly over the bow.

  ‘Of course I were going to wait,’ said the other one, and you could hear the sigh in the words.

  ‘I knows you,’ said the furious creature. ‘You’d all leave me here if you could.’

  The twigger stepped into the ripples and gave the boat with the squabbling shapes a mighty heave.

  ‘Nobody is being left behind, Ginny,’ it said and its voice sounded bigger than such a whippy body should be able to hold.

  ‘We all go together or not at all,’ said the twigger and reached out its hand to the angry little shape.

  When the fleet had headed seaward, loaded down with our turf and hens, Mungo and I slipped down the breakwater onto the sand. The cloud-piles were breaking up now and a low moon lighting the shore. Soon it would set and the world would disappear before the sun’s rays came shy, then streaky, then blazing into day. Watching the night-shapes strung out like beads on a thread and moving away from Carrick, I was of a sudden wrung-out and wholly desolated.

  I looked up and down the beach, hoping for something to arrive. Maybe Moo, shouting for me. Or Pa, flapping his arms like wings, hopping up and down on the white sand and calling like the peewit. Or was it Boson I hoped for, coming like in the old days, the days before birdangels? Mungo was rummaging about in the shadow of the breakwater.

  ‘Come away,’ I called.

  He kept rummaging and I went to stop him.

  In the shadow of the breakwater was a small sheltered spot and in that spot, rocking on the ripples, was another coracle. It was loaded with our shovel and hoe, our strongest blade, and when I looked closer there was Pa’s best hide bundled under its seat. Mungo sat in it already, circling and grinning and drooling with expectation.