I had a bad feeling. Not just the bad feeling of having lost a whole, solid island. As I’d been turning and turning, looking for Carrick, there’d been something else shouting an alarm in the outer palings of my mind, too faint, too far off to hear clearly.
Now, I knew what it had been.
I turned one more time.
The other island was gone too.
Chapter Twelve
Flark
I SAT IN THE CREAKING CORACLE. Time passed. I looked about for something to use for a bail, in case we sprang a leak. I made a small shade from the hide Boson had stowed. Time passed. I used my hands to measure and sight the horizon, in case I’d missed some mark or sign. I didn’t know where I’d started measuring, though, so I didn’t know where to finish. I just turned around and around until I didn’t know whether we were headed for Carrick or the other island, the open waters or the northern rocks. The sea and sky were just two blue half-circles, empty of everything but us.
Time passed.
I cried once, not much.
Then I just sat there.
The sun rolled overhead and started on its downward path. Mungo panted, his dry tongue hanging, his eyes just red slits. He put his head on my lap and whined in a heartening sort of way.
The coracle rocked about on a soft swell. After the puffins, the porpoises and whales, the world was of a sudden too quiet, too still. I’d not noticed before how low the little boat sat in the water, and I hunted all its soft skins for leaks. I started to think I saw tidal breakers rolling toward us, and sharp reefs rising from the seabed — not to mention Pa’s Other things coming at us. Scaly tails flicked at the edge of my sight, and faraway water-pits shimmered in the sun, gaped and slammed shut. When I closed my eyes hungry mouths opened in the middle of headless bellies and smacked their lips. All the monsters of my mind-eye were webfooted, blade-finned and angry at me. I covered my head with the hide.
‘Well, now what?’ said the inside-voice.
Down off the moaney that voice was familiar.
‘Oh, now you talk,’ I said.
‘There’s more than me talking to you,’ it told me.
All I heard was the carrying fuss of sea-birds. They screeched at me and Mungo to bugger off. This was their country.
I did not love the birds.
I couldn’t remember a time when they had not been the bad companions of my brother’s affliction. They were mite-ridden, shit-splattered creatures, thieving our seed, spoiling the plots, stealing Boson’s sense.
I had no bright remembrances of birds.
Of a sudden I wished I remembered more than that.
I wished I remembered my brother when he was well.
But all I could remember was his white body stuck about with black feathers, and his wet blood dripping onto dry rock. All I saw were the ravens’ eyes, all I heard was Pa’s voice breaking over the grave-dirt. All I knew was I should have known.
‘All I hear is birds,’ I said and my lips split and bled as I talked.
‘That’s right,’ said the inside-voice.
I squinted salt-faced into the skyclad distance. Out there a motley of loons tardled on the horizon. I couldn’t face them.
‘Stop it,’ I told the inside-voice, and it was like my words fell down a long funnel.
‘Stop what?’ it said.
The blisters on my palms had risen and busted open. My head thumped and my mouth was dry as dust. If I talked the words would stick to my tongue. It was a world brimming with water but full of thirst. Mungo lay flat on the bottom of the coracle, his legs bent and folded to fit into that small place. Whether he was sleeping or senseless I couldn’t tell.
I sat up, swoony.
I hung over the side.
My inward-parts sank.
In the glass sea I saw myself looking back. My head was small without its hair. My cheeks were sunken and my eyes burning. It was like looking into two fiery tunnels with a glimmer of dark at the end. There was hardly anything left of me in them.
‘Klop,’ said the sea.
The sun was burning down there in the water, as golden as it was burning here above our heads. It was like the small sun of another world, a world of deep green skies and murky, shifting land. Down there, though, it was just a tiny bright thing; while up here it was the biggest part of everything. That sun down in the water wouldn’t broil you like the sun up in our sky.
Hanging over the side, I closed my eyes. I didn’t want to see the sky in the water. It reminded me.
‘You look like him,’ said the inside-voice. ‘Very like.’
I was up to my gills in that voice. It never had anything useful to say. It only ever told me what I already knew. Pa would have said it was a master of the bleeding obvious. I thought a filthy curse at it as loud as I could.
‘Charming,’ it said.
‘What now?’ I asked.
If I was to go my brother’s way and start hearing gods in everything, all right. If I was to turn and finish up living out on the moaney like a fog, all right. Even if I was to live in nothing but a feathered cap, well all right.
But I wasn’t going to talk about it.
Particularly with this voice that came like an unwelcome stranger and talked in questions. Needling, pushing, scolding at me like my mother. Teasing, mocking at me like Boson. Whatever it was, it was no ghost, no angel, and no god.
‘Exactly. What now?’ it said. I swear if that voice came out of a neck I would have wrung it.
In his sleep Mungo made a mouth like he was on the scent and calling about it, and his paws ran a little in the air.
‘Well, in this sort of upshot,’ I told it, ‘the common thing to do is lie down and die.’
There was quiet inside. I thought I’d finally flummoxed it into a more serious and helpful humour. But when it talked again, it was cool and light as water-nymphs.
‘Are you sure?’ it said.
I wasn’t.
Even if I lay down and died right there, how would I find the Deadward that would lead me to Boson? Even if I followed him down into the sky-waters, I didn’t know which Dead-place he’d gone to. The Father said there’d be no welcome for him in God’s snug, not after all that business with the birds. He said all purgatories are private places, and you can’t visit folk there. You can’t save them except by begging God to be kind and He’s not kind, just good.
Boson wouldn’t have been there, anyway. They wouldn’t have let him in.
As for the Dead-isles, nobody knows who belongs to them anymore.
They’re peopled by Old-ones so ancient, nobody remembers.
And they’re irregular; they can’t be trusted to stay the same.
Not only are they countless and occasional, but those islands move around. So, while you’re looking for your Dead-one on the Ants island, they’re making landfall on the island of the Horses, and when you’re hunting the caves on the island of the Horses, they’ve sailed for Turning Beasts. Your Dead-one can be just behind or just ahead of you all the while. And if you do at last manage to settle which isle they’ve taken to, then all the islands can uproot themselves and belly about the seas like whalefish. Likely as weather you’ll never catch up.
And if Boson hadn’t chosen before he died which Afterwards he’d take, there’d be only the homeless Dead Lamps coming for him when he did. He’d be left to haunting folk for company. And I just knew he hadn’t chosen. It wasn’t the sort of thing he’d be pushed into.
It was too late. I’d never find him in any of the Afterwards now.
Mungo woke then, but only his eyes. The rest of him lay like wakefulness and such things had nothing to do with him. He gazed at me steady, and there was no blame in him. I took his silver head, now somewhat rimed and greasy, into my lap. He grinned a bit and licked my hand but he had no spit left and his tongue just rasped at me. His eyes rolled back and they were filled with clouds.
A week ago my brother’s eyes had rolled back and filled with stars.
I shou
ld have listened.
I should have paid attention.
He’d told me straight-up that the shrunken gods came and went through the skybog. He’d seen them do it.
They’d wait for me and Pa to pass through the thickets back from the cut. They’d wait until we were safe away at home. Then they’d come up into our world, falling up through the mud. They came dirty and starving, and in secret. It was his deepest secret. But he told me anyway, because I was his sister and his twin.
‘That’s the other world down in there, Fer,’ he’d said to me, going home through the skybog after the beating. He was holding my hand and he was happy just to think on it. ‘There’s those in there worse off than me! They wear their monsters right on the outside of them. They can’t go about in the light at all.’
He had leaned close to me and his eyes were cheerful in his bruised head. ‘They’ve got two heads, you know. One for now, one for later.’
I should have known what would happen to him if I let it, but I was too busy pretending. We all were.
Pa was busy pretending Boson wasn’t really so distempered. Moo was pretending that he was brimming with angels and then later, when he was plainly not, she pretended it was demons. Old Shambles, Lily Fell and the followers were pretending he was their lost one returned.
I’d been too busy pretending not to know the sort of country we lived in, and the sort of folk living in it. They would drive just about everybody away, one way or the other. My brother was all of the things people thought should be put in a boat and sent away.
He was special.
Two years ago he’d been mobbed by angels in the outlands of his own mind, and wrestled there into some corner. He couldn’t come home then; he’d had to stay there. I don’t know why. Since then I’d had no brother, no twin. Only a face that looked like mine looking back at me with those eyes like the skybog ravens. Eyes busy pretending to be a person.
Two years ago his mind and body split and started walking a twofold path. I could tether him to the bed at night, follow him around the reedswamps, lead him home from the towns, force his meal down his gullet, hold him while he howled to go home, bathe his wounds, but in the end his body and mind were only gathered together again down among the stars. In the mud.
My heart twisted and I wanted to fight somebody.
Where was that inside-voice when you needed it?
Mungo twitched hugely in his Swoon.
I didn’t know what I’d been pretending to let us float out into open water, with not a notion between us of sea-going and its particulars. It was all very well to talk lightly of lying down and dying of things, when Mungo’s big trusting head was snugged and still warm in my lap. He was dying from lack of water, not lack of sense like my brother. Thirst, I could do something about. Ravings, muteness, grog, the trepan and penitent sheets, were all beyond me.
I picked up the oars and spat on my raw hands.
I was just going to have to live.
That’s all there was for it.
I would just start rowing. Those argumentative birds were the only sign of life in the whole flat dish of the sea, and I wanted to be close to them. The coracle skimmed the clear waters and every dip-and-swing flayed at my hands, until there was blood on the oars and red spotting the glass sea behind. We surged forward and the still waters parted, our little wake the only white-caps in eye-shot.
And then slowly, out of the tangle of birds, a shape appeared. Inside their fret and screech, the other island showed itself. I could see its soaring mount at one end, and the needle rocks at the other. I didn’t know which end to head for, how I would make landfall in all the breakers and whirrying water circling those Needles, but still I stood up and yelled.
‘It’s good,’ I shouted at the island, almost tipping the coracle. ‘Good, see!’
I was brimming with fresh, quick humours in spite of the blood and thirst.
‘We’re here,’ I told Mungo and hugged his head to me. ‘Water, old man,’ I said. ‘Water.’ He did stir somewhat and open his eyes.
There was some part in me woken-up and feeling fine. Some squeamish, fear-split part, now careless and out in the sun-bright world.
‘Well, what do you think of that?’ I thought at the inside-voice. ‘So there! Eh? Eh?’
But the inside-voice didn’t answer. It was gone.
It had brought me to this island and left me to it.
We flowed into the drags and chop around its rocky shores and there was no rowing anymore. There was just holding on and praying. The coracle skimmed the water, and took flight for a moment. When we dropped back to the sea, it felt like hard ground. There were shadows in the water; rising Needle rocks for us to be stuck by, drifting sheets of grapple-weed to smother us, and a dark shape slipping about beneath us.
Our porpoise was back.
It herded us dog-like, with little nudges here and strong thumps there. It shouldered us past hidden rocks and gentled us over razor-shell reefs. At last I gripped its fin and we cut white-water alongside its wild black body, until the coracle was taken by a little whirry and of a sudden stopped, spinning among the Needles. The porpoise gave us one more nudge and we were taken by a strong drag, moving sure and quick.
The drag swung us around the farside of the island. There the shore lay sheeted in shell-grit, but curled around itself, snug from storm-waters. There was a perfect passage through the shore-rock into a still, calm harbour. Our porpoise piloted us into this back-cove. We scraped onto the shore.
The sand was all wrigglework.
There was nothing but birds and sandhoppers.
The godling fleet lay there, deserted.
Chapter Thirteen
Faraway
SOMEWHERE IN THE SEA-FOG, notions about the uses of dying had come up at me like weeds. I suppose I’d thought that if I didn’t do anything about carrying on living, I’d just quietly die and that might fix a heap of troubles. Such as the matter of which Dead-road my brother was wandering, for instance, or what a person could do to save her family from silence and grog. Dead-ones can’t work up the cut, or be insulted by townies — all the troubles would be done with.
I suppose I’d thought we could go together.
That me and Mungo could go Deadward together.
I didn’t want to go alone.
Mungo lifted the face of trust to me. His tongue looked set to snap and crumble in his sucked-dry mouth. I stepped on trembling legs onto the shore and called his name. He raised himself, shivering and deadquiet, and his head drooped right down onto his breastbone. He stepped out onto the grit all right but then sank swoony onto his haunches. He just lay down at the waterline like he would stay there forever. I could see his squinted eyes, and hear his too-light breath, and feel his heart limping under my hand.
The shore spread each way in countless bleachy shells. Behind us the beach rose to scree and sky. In the north loomed the bare grey mount. Overhead, loons in the blue-white sky; underfoot all crumbling snakestone and shepherd’s crown. And down the waterline tiny fish crowded the edge of the fizzing sea. Here we were, still alive and nothing for it but find water, if we wanted to stay that way. I started off northward, following the shore toward the mount, hoping for some stream.
Mungo lay where he was.
I didn’t want to leave him.
My whole body ached. Soon the scree grew to rocks and then to boulders and ledges. My legs climbed all aslant, clod-footed and bone-weary, and the ledges became walls of stone and honeycomb caves. The first cave I came to I ducked and went in. It was broad and sandy, and only a few spans taller than me. There was no seep of water — only all along the walls and laid out on its ledges were our missing things.
Our hoe, the good blade and rope, even the old holey pail and dipper were all there. And not just ours, either. In every pock and crease of rock was some bit of Carrick. There was Old Shambles’s cleaver and a whole basket of Baker’s mugs, and there was even a barrel of wine that must have come from the monkhous
e stores. These godlings of my brothers had been running night-raids on us.
I didn’t think it very god-like of them. Gods were supposed to be able to bring honey from stone and apples from deadwood, and here they were pilfering like common sneaking thieves. It wasn’t very monstrous either; monsters were supposed to come loping and tear away whatever they wanted. Not creep about in the craven dark as if they didn’t want to be seen.
I heard them before I saw them. Somewhere outside the store-cave, that shrunken, dwindled female from the breakwater was shouting again. She was making a terrible ruckus, even for a monster or a god. I crawled outside and snuck back along the ledges, down the scree to the shore.
I flattened myself like a speckle-moth, down into the shells, lowering myself behind a dune. I needn’t have bothered because the dwindled one they called Ginny and the other, the male one, had no eyes for anything but each other. They hurtled over the scree in a storm of gravel and the male one had our hens under his arms. He had two arms in the regular way and two legs, and only one head. He had no tail and no wings and he moved like anybody else; no flames or silver clouds or locust-horses; he was just a man. But he was small as Gilpin.
‘Brout! They’re mine!’ said the dwindle Ginny, spluttering in a terrible fit of spleen. ‘Give them back!’
‘Why’s they both yours, then?’ said the other one, somewhat hip-tilted and smarmy. ‘Heishan! I can look to them just as good as you.’
‘I got them and I brang them,’ Ginny said. ‘I held them across the water, and they is mine!’ On this last word she jumped like a salmon and grabbed the hair just above his ears and dragged it back until his face was all muzzle and slit-eye.
‘Oo-ow,’ he said and dropped the hens.
Straight-up Ginny let him go and went after the birds. Loosed on the beach, they ran in starts and circles, all wings and sand and mayhem. I saw them clearly, the lot of them running and screeching.
But that was nothing to what came over the scree after them.
Legs and arms, eyes and hair and mouths, but few in a proper place, the godlings came altogether. Each was nothing like the other and each had its own way of going along. And now I could make out their faces.
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