Ghostheart

by Ananda Braxton-Smith

  I got into the little boat. I sat and unbundled Pa’s hide. Some pages of the book of beasts fell in my lap. One was the page with the angel-talkers with their hair on fire. Another was the demon-page. Both the angel-talkers and the demons had eyes that burnt with some Otherwise fire. The only difference between them was the tail on the demon-talkers, coiling right up their backs. And their cruel faces, of course.

  But angels can be cruel also. They’ve never lived in the world and it shows. What did They think would happen to my brother after they gave him his holiness and let him hear Them talking among Themselves? What did they think folk would do with him as he glowed and blazed and blithered around the island? Nobody believed him, not even his own mother. Not even me.

  This was his coracle, the one he was going out to his godling island in.

  He’d said he was expected. He’d been preparing to go. Out there in the sea lay everything my brother had loved and longed toward, everything that called him so loud that he would have got into this little coracle and gone right away.

  Without me.

  Someplace that’s only there sometimes might have been just the place for him. He might have made sense there. Lots of things that are the very type of senseless here might make sense in such a place.

  As I studied our old illuminated pages, the gently fizzing sea and its low winds fell away. Sometimes, there is no lonelier place than a family.

  Faraway I went, further than ever before. I reached right out to a single wing of cloud at the brim of the sea. I streamed to it. It was stretching north and south over the other island, almost folding that place into itself. Faraway and longaway I went. I sat. I waited.

  I gazed down at the world inside the breakwater.

  A tall girl with white lips and freckled skin was in a coracle at the waterline. She was hacking at her long plaits with a blade. They came off easy and fell onto the sand like adders. She kept hacking and when she was bald in the monk’s way, she stood and threw all the rest of her fiery hair into the cool sea.

  She took up the oars.

  The tall girl pushed the little boat off the tidal sands just as the morning crabs rose. She poled free of the shallows, and punted into the minnow hordes. She patted the silver hound lying circled on the floor.

  I saw the coracle move out from the shore with the girl sitting in it, straight and still. I saw that girl drift out beyond the breakwater, beyond the drops, beyond the drags, and follow in the wake of shapes.

  Why not?

  Chapter Eleven

  A Sea-Going Quirk

  ALMOST THE MOMENT ME and Mungo hit the waters I’d changed my mind.

  The pretty shallows soon deepened to black water and there was some sort of drag under the boat, carrying it out into the channel between Carrick and the other island. I wrestled with the oars but couldn’t turn the coracle or fight the sea’s chop and spin. We rushed away from Strangers’ Croft and toward the kelp ring. A cold stone sat in my belly.

  We had no fresh water. No food. I hadn’t eaten since yesterday and Boson hadn’t thought to stow food-stores as well as book pages. Soon the sun would be full-up and me with no hat or cover. I couldn’t swim and the waters brimmed with every possible death. The other island was just a faint shape on the edge of the world. I’d never rowed, nor had I any feeling for such things. The little fleet was just a line of small dark spots in the big silver sea. I wanted to go back.

  Bloody-buggery Neen Marrey and her elf-shot eyes.

  Bloody-buggery Faraway.

  I should have known.

  Behind, Strangers’ Croft was just a tumble of grey in a strip of white behind us. Ahead, the sea spread itself where no Quirk had ever gone. I gripped the sides as the boat was whirried and slapped by the water, and then was sucked out beyond the fishgrounds. We crunched gently into something reeky and stopped.

  It was dawn in the kelp forests. All the wrack was reaching for light and gathering on the surface in a dark, tardled curve. The coracle just kept bumping weakly into its salt-set mounds while any pull-push in the water forked to the right, or the other way, and streamed under the kelp and away.

  Mungo stood. He barked, testing and short. Our little coracle rocked and tipped somewhat, and I gripped both sides and slid into the bottom. The whole matter of the water was fretting me. In the dim light it wallowed and clopped about like a fat child-giant who doesn’t know its own strength. I was frighted of being lost in one of its rolls, and the sea not even noticing. Mungo barked again, louder, stronger.

  I rubbed his neck and he groaned instead. He rested his chin and one huge paw over the edge, and he creaked deep inside himself like old timber. Just on the other side of the kelp mounds, the puffin offspring were leaving. They’d gone in the night just as I knew they would. They’d ganged up and sailed away like a loosed flark.

  Sometimes in the bogwaters thick flarks of waterweed up and float away. Flooded beetles scramble up the rushes to escape, but most of them just drop and sink. Sloughworms slip the flark and slide into the water, but of them most are taken by fish. Some of the stranded creatures are saved though. Ants walk on water back to the bank. Hoppers swim frog-style. There are spiders who climb onto flat leaves and curl the sides up around their bodies. Then they launch themselves and sail the tiny lake breezes back to shore.

  I studied the oars. All I knew was that the narrow end was for holding and the broad end went in the water. I picked them up and tried a few holds and dips but it all seemed bootless to me. But then I looked back at Carrick.

  The homeward waters were all various. Drags and whirries marked the surface and flowed away. All flowed away from the island — none flowed back to Strangers’ Croft. If we waited, the mid-morn breakers might drive us back to shore but those great crushing walls of sea could just as easily break us into crab-food. Soon they would rear like horses and thunder in. I thought I saw the first of them gathering itself just beyond the kelp, all stamp and whinny and furious white mane.

  Out beyond the kelp the waves only rolled.

  They swelled but never broke.

  I needed to be out there.

  The puffins rocked and called just on the other side of the kelp. They had made it through somehow. There must be a way.

  I tried the oars again. Dipping. Pulling. Lifting. Dipping. Pulling. Falling.

  Quick as spit I was flat on my back, my legs still on the seat and my head in a mess of wet rope. Mungo thought it some romp and his head came at me grinning and drooling.

  ‘Right!’ I said, still lying on my back with Mungo over me, laughing out of his open pink throat in my face. It was a pale green morning, one of the best sorts. I couldn’t help noticing.

  ‘Ruff,’ said Mungo.

  I sat up and pushed him back to his end. ‘Stop there,’ I told him and showed him my flat hand. He licked it.

  Now I spat on my hands for grip and flexed my fingers. If I could swing the scraw I could do this thing. The sea was only a bit of wet, I told myself. We had more water up the moaney than in this whole channel, it was just more dabbled and spread-about. I gripped the shafts of the oars and dipped them slowly, paying attention.

  And the sea made way for me. The oars cut like a hot blade through fine leather, with just enough push-back to take pleasure in. The coracle shot forward. It was like flying.

  I lifted the oars like spreading my wings. Bright drops flew away in curves, raining from the swinging oars and making tiny rainbows. I dipped the oar again, pulled, lifted and swung it back. There was a beat, a pulse to it, like any work. It was in my body, like swinging the slane. We skimmed the kelp mounds looking for an opening, a seaward path through to open water where the puffins rocked.

  Now dawn was full-risen and the early light sure all around us, though ahead all was still darkish water and dim shapes. Sea-mists and vapours rising on the other side of the kelp looked just like the moaney fogs and that familiarity calmed me somewhat. A few times I thought I heard the hunch’s song drifting across the water,
or the dipping of other oars.

  The unbroken wall of kelp we’d been rowing along at last thinned out and broke-up. A small passage opened into its walls of black weed, a passage through its knots and bladders. The passage was only a span wider than the coracle on either side but it would do. After some fuss trying to turn about, I nosed the coracle into it. It held us close as I poled through the narrow stream, pushing an oar against the piled-up kelp to move us onward.

  The early breakers started up then, but I didn’t mind now we were beyond their breaking. In the kelp forest waves only lifted us in a sort of weedy lollop and let us down again, gentle. Through the kelp I kept on dipping, lifting, swinging the oars. Sometimes a gull or skua rested on the kelp-bed and gave me an unearthly eye before flying away on wings like sails.

  Once I stopped trying to decide what to do next, it was simple. It was as though some choice had been made for me by the sea itself, with the help of flarking puffins and piling kelp. For the first time in a long time my life made some sort of sense. There was nothing to do but follow the drags. All I had to do was stay afloat and see where I ended up.

  The little coracle reached the end of the kelp and the start of the sea. From just that little bit of rowing my palms were puckering into blisters — something I hadn’t been troubled by since early days in the cut before my hands hardened. Resting the oars, me and Mungo flowed out into the sea-mists. The day came lively. The puffins were rafting fast away now and calling in wholly new voices. They rocked, unified, right over the rollers and through the spray until they disappeared.

  Right into the thick grey-green sea-fog that fell like a curtain between us and the other island.

  I had to lean back to see the fullness of that fog. The sky was hid inside it. Its breadth held the whole channel.

  I sat before the great fog and worried. Good blades, rope, or the pages of books weren’t going to shift that towering wall. Even the calls of the puffins were muffling inside it.

  The sea dropped under us in green fathoms. Looking down into the depths was like standing at the edge of a mountain and seeing the earth fall away. My head swam and my knees felt like they’d never hold me up again. It felt all of a sudden a very small vessel to be trusting to such a very big sea.

  I was frighted to fall.

  I also wanted to jump.

  Fright and wantingness, both at once.

  Then out of the kelp forests, up from the murk, porpoises were rising. They rose dark, all at once, tumbling like wave-wrack. Their shapes turned quick as flights of swifts. First they were a singular swarm underneath us, and then the swarm split and single fish veered off leaving hard lines cutting behind them through the water. All except this one porpoise, this one-eyed porpoise. This one shoved at the coracle with its hard snout. It prodded Mungo right where he sat, at which rudeness he stood and gave one deep bark. I knew what he was thinking.

  What did it want from us?

  He didn’t trust it.

  He wanted to see it off.

  But still this one determined porpoise kept breaching close by. It shot skyward and hung curved there, wet and black in the blue air, before falling back to the sea. In-between breaches, it butted and shoved at us.

  This porpoise let its fellows go and it stayed with us alone. Mungo and the porpoise rolled eye-whites at each other, and Mungo even stuck his own snout into the water to prod back at the beast but had to pull back quicksmart, choking. The porpoise butted at the coracle once, twice more.

  It was shoving us toward that fog.

  Mungo sat all akimbo and watched me sidewise.

  He was thinking I had no choices left. That there was only one road and that was the one that lay ahead.

  He was thinking the only way out was going to be through.

  So I sculled us into the deadquiet of the great fog. It came at us like veils and we were nun-like of a sudden, even Mungo, all silence and wide raised eyes. I rested the oars and we drifted in the mist-bands, unpiloted. I should have been more frighted. I should have been harrowed in that coiling gloom. My skull should have been creeping, my bones freezing, but they weren’t. I was calm.

  It came as something of a surprise.

  I started up with feeling quite brave then; somewhat heroic. I rowed straight and smooth as I could, in spite of the blind-fog. I was all strong blood flowing warm in me and my chest just about busting with mighty breaths. There were full-grown women in Carrick who’d never set foot outside their own holding, and here was I, a girl — and a Quirk — in a coracle in a fog in a broad, wild sea, and joying in it.

  Then, a shape like a small cronk rose to my right. Another, rose to the other side. The fogs parted a moment and I saw the cronks were heads, shedding water in silver sheets, like mountains after storms. They came towering, one after the other, until I lost count; until, in vast compassing movements, they were all around the coracle. They looked to be a whole range of hills fading back into mist.

  Part-hid in the vapours they waited and breathed and their breath was the sound of all the herds at once crammed into the winter lock-ups. It was like the breath of a giant or a god. All my puffery was blown out of me. I sat still and took tiny sips of air.

  Mungo, the big hero, had other ideas though. He let out a volley of his most bossing barks and drew the eye of the monsters right down on us. I shrank into the bottom of the coracle as the whalefish came close in their terrible roughstone flesh. They mobbed in hugely to look at us through their little bloodshot eyes. One fish had warm eyes, like a cow’s, that understood loneliness. Another had eyes filled with smiles. Another, eyes like silver, quick and sharp. Mungo met them like a lord, steady on his four legs and with the face of right upturned to meet them.

  When they didn’t eat him or take him for sport, I sat up.

  One of the whalefish had taken to us. It swam alongside for some time, rising and falling on the mob’s slow waves. Its body hung over us like a bluff. I felt its shade even in the sunless fog. It sang of a whole load of sorrow.

  I knew its voice like it was my own mother’s.

  It was the whale-mam.

  I took up the oars again but I didn’t know which way to row. We were navigating blind as if a town had risen and we were passing through its strange paths. The whalefishes’ bodies were crusted with shells and barnacles, like Shipton boat-hulls, and they were striped all over with what looked to be reeds. If I was a more flighty and Otherwise person I might have thought they were types of land. Living islands, moving reefs.

  Islands under a spell, unable to stop sailing about.

  Islands chanted down, doomed to swim like fish.

  Islands following the whale-road with no purpose.

  I told myself that they were just fish. According to the Brothers, they were the only creature allowed in God’s Heaven. I told myself these things as I rowed about looking for a way out. I told myself again as the whale-mam started up nudging the coracle. It was only a tiny nudge but the coracle rocked edgewise. Sea-water slopped over the sides. Mungo barked a warning but she didn’t listen.

  The whale-mam nudged at us again, and again; eight times altogether. We tipped and slid forward.

  I clung to the coracle’s edge and Mungo clattered, all legs and claws, right under the bench and into the ropes and hide. He lay in a pile and looked up hurt at the whalefish as she sang and sang, filling the fog with her song. Then with some dignity he struggled, he stood and he howled. He was singing too, lifting his head and throat to where the sky would be if we weren’t lost in fogs. Singing like he remembered what it was to be wild. The whalefish stopped then, in some surprise I thought, and let us row some distance away.

  Then she ducked her head and came at us in a tumult of waters.

  We saw her gape, big enough to take our little boat in one gobful.

  She bore down on the coracle. She thumped the water close-by and sank under us into the black.

  Her last wave, that final wall of water, hit us sidewise. Mungo and me rose on it, h
igh as roofs, and waited to be shattered by its breaking. But it didn’t break, it rolled, it carried us forward. Now Mungo was huddled groaning under the bench, and I was the one shrilling and laughing as we rushed blind through the fog. My mouth and eyes streamed water and my heart behaved like the whalefish; plunging, singing, breaking the surface.

  It was like flying. Like how Boson had said flying was.

  The whale-wave carried us out of the fogs. The forward-path showed itself. Curtains of light and mist drew back, soft, one after the other, and the lost morning came back shimmering. We rode that wave right out of the sea-fog.

  If you’d told me I would ever do such a thing I would’ve said you were elf-ridden.

  I looked back as I rowed on and it was like there were two worlds. One world inside the fog and one here, now, where me and Mungo floated in the bright channel. The sea ahead was sprawling green to black, and the white lips of the waves were alive. Calling. Even the sky was split in half; before us all lay skyclad, behind us shredding fogs flowed away. At last all that was left of that great wall were some flighty wisps tumbling back high over Carrick.

  Or, over where Carrick should have been.

  But there were only the wisps.

  Because it was gone.

  Sometimes when something disappears, something you know was right there just a moment ago, you just can’t believe it. You look in senseless places, like the time I looked in the meal-bin for the lost shovel. You look and look in the same places, you get up in the night to see if it is back, you believe it will just turn up. Nothing convinces you it’s really gone.

  I stood up in the coracle and looked again. I squinted and rubbed my eyes until they watered. I checked the sky as if the island might be hanging there, and I turned around and around like if I turned often enough it would come back. I even rowed a bit back toward the last threads of the unravelling fog.

  It was gone, entirely.