Ghostheart

by Ananda Braxton-Smith

  ‘Come on then, shrunk,’ I heard myself say, and Dorrin did. He flew at me like a bat.

  I put out my hands to welcome him with blows.

  One of my fists caught him in mid-leap and there was a sound like when Pa slaughtered the fall calf. He sort of slumped in the air. Then he dropped like a little dead bird.

  Straight-up I was panting-cold, all my rightfulness gone.

  I sat up with Ginny still stuck on me, tight and close as my own skin. There was deadquiet, inside and out.

  ‘What has you done to him?’ she whispered, dropping off me like a spider.

  I fetched the torch. We knelt over Dorrin. He was grey-faced and still.

  His body looked small and sad.

  ‘You is some kind of monster!’ Ginny said.

  ‘He was going for me,’ I said. But she was right.

  There was some monster hiding in me. I’d wanted with all my heart to hurt him. I’d wanted to break his bones, and hear the snap. I’d wanted to show him who was special and who wasn’t; to show him who was regular and who wasn’t. Now I couldn’t tell who was what and who wasn’t, and I didn’t care. I just wanted him to sit up and insult me.

  He groaned and I put my hand to him.

  Now I wanted to save him, not thump him anymore.

  ‘Why doesn’t he just go back to that place?’ I said to Ginny. ‘That bettermost place.’

  ‘He can’t,’ she said, kneeling by him and patting his face. ‘The drags aren’t right.’

  Dorrin opened his eyes and blinked and she took his hand. ‘They’re never right for taking us home, are they Dorrie?’

  He shook his head.

  The dark blood smeared across his brow and stuck his eyelids together. All my rages had lifted and now it was like somebody else had done this thing to him. We helped him sit and leaned him against the cool earth of his greenplot banks. He rubbed the blood from his eyes and felt around his chin and ears, careful-like as if they might not be there; then he blew a stream of red and black out of his nose. It fell on the brown earth and glittered there in the new moonlight. They both looked like they’d never seen blood before.

  I’d seen the beating of my brother, however. I knew how much blood could come from one small person.

  Ginny bundled up a pile of herbs and dabbed at his face.

  ‘Why is you here, offlander?’ Dorrin said again, letting her dab and wipe.

  It seemed the only thing he knew how to say to me.

  Now, though, it didn’t seem an unfriendly or unreasonable question. It seemed full of good sense. A person should know why they do things, why they go places, why they stay or leave. The moon rose behind Carrick, and lit on us.

  ‘Well, I suppose I had to see about my brother,’ I told him and I didn’t know why I hadn’t just said it before. ‘I didn’t believe him, see. I thought he was just whittering again. Then I saw you lot in the Croft. There was a coracle right there. The drags did the rest.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said and nodded. ‘The drags. They’ve a lot to answer for,’ and that was that. He was content.

  Me and the dwindles gathered ourselves and made for the upward path. I stopped at the monsters’ ridge and looked once over the sea to Carrick. Across the water, over the bog, through the mist-bands, I felt Pa looking back. I felt his warm, dark eyes on me. I felt them like a pair of quarrying foxes in a dark-moon thicket, looking for me. Hunting me.

  ‘Won’t your people be missing you?’ Ginny asked then.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, and couldn’t say anymore about that. ‘But I had to get out here, see. Before you disappeared again.’

  Ginny and Dorrin swapped sidewise looks.

  ‘You lot just can’t help yourselves, can you?’ sniggered Ginny. ‘You thinks everything is all about you.’

  ‘We doesn’t disappear,’ said Dorrin. ‘You does.’

  Chapter Sixteen

  Song

  AS WE CLIMBED THE UPWARD PATH from Dorrin’s plots I heard the singing. It was the voice I’d heard across the water and through the great sea-fog. A clear, uprising voice cutting the night and filling me with some familiar warm stir. Just for one moment, down inside its nest of gristle and sinew, my heart ruffled. It was like some small bird on the edge, trying out its wings.

  It was like something.

  It was like happiness.

  It was there, and then it was flown.

  Up on the monsters’ ridge, in a half-circle lit about with yellow torches, they sprawled or hugged themselves outside their cavey snugs in the cooling dark. They each sat apart — except for the twins who had no choice in the matter — and their thoughts were all turned inward. Corr was back in the murk with only his shanks stretching out into the dim torchlight like fall’s long shadows. Pedder held the lolling body of his unsteady brother tight, and they swayed, songclad and moony. Cowel dribbled and hummed and watched me with his eyes like the whale.

  It was Onnor that was singing, sat on a stone-seat at the top of the upward path. Her song swooped and circled in the sky, and struck out for other shores. Each of her four hands, and some of her three feet, too, flowed about her. They seemed some part of the singing, catching and shaping its tones and letting it fly again. The rest of her was still as a spider, except for her swaying hair.

  What with all her sighings when she’d had to talk, I confess I’d thought her somewhat bloodless and feeble. And as I came up the path she did fade somewhat. She slipped from the stone-seat and scuttled back into her own shadowed threshold. But she was a changed thing to me now. The voice that’d come out of her hadn’t been bloodless. It’d been a living thing.

  Caly rocked, cosseting Mungo, holding him so close to her that I couldn’t tell where she finished and he started. Just behind her neck and spreading down her shoulder, a terrible wen had risen, pink, wrinkled. She looked like some cat-shaped lump had grown there under her fur, and then been deftly shaved. But it was just a cat, and entirely hairless. It was like seeing something folk aren’t meant to; a naked grandmother, or the insides of a person. I didn’t know where to look. It stared at me in the way of all cats. Smirky. Like you’re nothing to them.

  ‘This is Higgs,’ Caly said. She made mouths at it and cooed into its wrinkled-up face. ‘Aren’t you, my tigerling?’ The cat yawned and turned around with its tail straight-up like a sapling, before settling down again with its back to us. Caly laughed.

  ‘I has told her and told her,’ she said. ‘But Higgs do not believe in manners.’

  Ginny and Dorrin took one of my hands each and dragged me into the middle of the stone ledge, into the yellow wavery light. I looked down and they were both looking up at me like I was the hen on the shore all over again. I tried to pull my hands gently from them but they gripped tighter.

  ‘Fermion’s in with me tonight,’ said Ginny, snugging my arm. ‘We is sleeping in the summerbeds. Aren’t we, Fermion?’

  She shook my hand right up my arm.

  ‘Why you?’ said Dorrin, and he tugged my arm just about out of my socket. ‘She can sleep just as good in with me.’

  Ginny snorted and covered her mouth. ‘What is you saying, you rude man. She are a girl!’

  Dorrin pulled himself up to his full height. ‘What is you saying, bile-sprite,’ he spat. ‘You has got such a nasty brain. How you lives with yourself, with all that Nasty sludging you up in there—’ He was his old high-toned self again.

  ‘I is not a bile-sprite, you great dollop,’ said Ginny in the tones I’d heard just before she went at me, down in the greenplots.

  ‘You sleep in with me, and you is a girl, I spose,’ Dorrin growled.

  ‘Yes, but I is only me,’ said Ginny, as if it that made the whole thing plain.

  They stood there glaring at each other. Dorrin’s face went strange hues of white and red, and Ginny’s started to droop and tremble. Neither would back down, nor would they let me go.

  ‘I think she should sleep in with Cara tonight,’ said Corr, raising himself with cracks that echoed th
e length of his backbones and right around the ledge. ‘She can tell Miss Quirk the story.’

  The dwindles let me go and Dorrin sloped off into the dark of his own snug. Straight-up Ginny followed him, all whimper and Don’t go, don’t go; wait for Me.

  ‘I doesn’t know whether I remember it right,’ said Cara’s voice from somewhere in the rock-wall.

  Corr brought a torch to the stone and there lay Cara in her summerbed.

  The wall was cleft in a little vault, open to the breezes, and she was tucked-up in there like some eaveswarbler. Her body rested on reeds and feathers. She was all paunch and middle, and covered in soft red wool. I wanted to pick her up and cosset her but in spite of her child’s body she had the eyes of a grown woman, and a not very happy one at that.

  I felt somewhat scolded and sheepish, though I’d done nothing but tell her what was true.

  She lay looking out at me, and her face was no longer the untroubled face I’d seen on the shore. I felt sorry I’d brought such a change to her, and I didn’t know what I was going to do about it. I wished she’d just forget what I’d said about her mother, but I had to confess that was about as likely as talking birds had been.

  I looked up the tower of the mount. As far up as I could see, the whole wall was marked with the shadows of the monsters’ summerbeds. Caly was helping Pedder and Cowel step up into theirs, and Onnor had already gone crabwise into her own.

  ‘Climb in then, Miss Quirk,’ Cara said, miserable.

  ‘Just tell it as you remembers it,’ Corr told her, making a hand-step for me. ‘And it will all come right in the end. It always do.’

  I stepped into his clasped hands and scrambled up into the rock. It was cool in there, sweet-smelling from sage and balm. Cara made room by wriggling further back into the cleft and I laid myself down by her. She lay there for a moment staring at the stone above our heads, and her face was the face of Mungo the time Pa clouted him. I saw all her calm and trust baffled.

  She looked like she’d like to fly away from me.

  ‘I’m sorry I fretted you,’ I said. ‘I never meant to.’

  Cara turned, forgiving me straight-up as you could see she always would. You could see it wasn’t in her to hold grudges. But though I hadn’t meant to hurt her so badly, I had and there was no taking it back. There was more going on here than I understood. I could feel it in my waters. The tears prickled my eyes and ached in my throat, but all I could do for her now was shut my gob. So I did that.

  ‘This is the first place of the world,’ Cara started, closing her eyes. ‘Before this place, there was no place. Nothing. Even the places where the places would be, were not. All was as inside a closed fist.’

  Corr and the others had disappeared into their summerbeds, but I could hear them breathing soft in all the reedy holes through the rock.

  ‘Who knew what that fist held; there was nobody to know,’ she went on. ‘Who knew what worlds would fly from that fist once it opened; there was nobody to see. How would the world taste in the mouth; there were no mouths. What would it sound like in the ears; there were no ears. Where in that fist were all the whalefish and dandelions and men and women? Where was place and when was time?’

  Somewhere in the rock Pedder laughed.

  ‘When was time?’ he snorted. ‘I loves that bit.’

  Cowel went up too, in a sort of bray. The monsters plainly knew this story. Cara smiled into the roof.

  ‘At the start there was nothing,’ she went on. ‘Then the nothing filled up with seas. All was storm-waters, white-caps and gushing foams. The first seas split the nothing in two parts. Then the first salty breakers welled between the two nothings. They circled and span until the space between the fists was one great whirlpool.

  ‘And it would have kept turning forever like that, except for one thing, one very small thing that was to be the start of worlds and places. And time. Small things have powers big things cannot grasp.’

  I remembered Dorrin’s greenplots, and stepping down onto their skinny ledges. Anybody else would have fallen trying to fit on them, trying to plant and harrow on their soft narrow shelves. Three of my regular steps and I’d have fallen. But he’d raised a store of herbs and greens there.

  Not to mention my ears and mouth still stinging from Ginny trying to have my face off me.

  Small things.

  ‘A speck of salt was gripped in the heart of the whirlpool,’ said Cara. ‘The speck was held fast in the deepest point of the whirl. All it could do was spin and whirry. Soon other specks were drawn to it and it was compassed in spinning milky waters. And the salt specks drew together, one to the other, gathering until they were no longer specks and motes but packs and balls. And then the packs and balls crashed together and they made thundering worlds that bobbed just under the upper fist of nothingness.

  ‘The worlds settled and calmed into the first morning.

  ‘Some of the worlds had it in them to shine and burn, and they did so. Others had it in them to carry away some of the sea with them, and that’s what they did. The waters flowed away into the worlds.

  ‘And that’s not all.

  ‘The creatures of the whirry, all made of specks and water, all carry their own bit of the first whirl inside. If you lie on the ground in the night and look into the stars, you will feel it. We all feel it.

  ‘That’s why children and such creatures like to spin and whirl and fall.

  ‘Our world was the first formed in that whirl, and our country was the first place of the world. It rose bubbling, bobbing like cork, before all the other places, and with all its trees and birds and caves just-so. Just as you can see them today was how it was at the start.’ Cara stopped and was so long about starting up again that the others had to yawn loudly and clear their throats. The torches were burning down, but there was a sliver-moon and it was enough.

  ‘A grey land to the north rose up,’ said Cara. ‘And it sent streams of ice and frost into the seas, flowing south. Cold as hell were the fishes in their beds under the ice, and the snow falling soft like sleet-rugs over their hoary bones. The day closed in and the night came early. Some plants grew beards to warm themselves, others curled up their blackened toes and died, the animals grew thin, the pools froze; it was winter.

  ‘And a land to the south rose up red-earthed and its streams boiled through the seas spitting embers and ash, steaming north. Then were the fishes cooked right where they hid, in glow-stone hides that seared the white flesh from their softening broth-bones. The plants ran to seed, the animals lay panting, the pools turned to dust; it was summer.

  ‘And there were times in-between, when it was neither one thing nor the other. These were pleasant, changeable times.

  ‘And there were changeable forms too. Folk weren’t hardened into one thing or another yet. If the First- ones needed to be tall, well, then they shot up like spring stalks. If arms were useful, folk sprouted a few. If it was dark-sight they needed, their eyes became lamps. There was more than one way to skin a cat, present company excluded, Higgs.’

  There was laughter from the rockholes but Cara was all worries now. Her own voice sounded like it didn’t believe a word she was saying.

  ‘There was every kind of being, every kind of shape, and nobody knew any better. So the First-ones were just thankful to be, and to let each other be. Now of course we all know better, don’t we?’

  She was losing the high-tones of the story. Doubt lit its particulars, like carrying lit rushes into chapel. Some things are better seen dim, at some distance. Up close they’re somewhat grimy and plainly human-made.

  But she carried on, like saying lessons over.

  ‘The First-ones spread all over the world, by feet, by wing, by coracle. Into the storming water, the scouring salt, they went, without paddles, without maps, without pilot or porpoise — with only the slim shining trail in their hearts to follow. And they increased and filled the world with their various forms and their perfected shapes. But that’s when the speck of salt
at the middle of the world revealed itself.

  ‘It is the speck that stings as well as the speck that quickens.

  ‘It is the first speck caught between the fists of nothing.

  ‘It is the speck deep inside the whirl of every person.

  ‘As the First-ones spread they shaped themselves to new places. Marrying only with others like themselves, their children were born as like to each other as peas. They settled into the one sort of form. They looked about and saw their fellows to be just as they were, and thought this because their own forms were natural and right. All the other forms were laughable to them, then.’

  ‘That’s you, my cosset,’ said Caly, somewhere close in the wall.

  ‘Me?’ I said.

  Cara covered her face for a moment.

  ‘SQu on sem sprou,’ said Onnor’s voice.

  ‘Speak up,’ said Caly, louder than she need.

  ‘I said, Miss Quirk don’t seem so proud,’ Onnor said, and I was glad to hear her at last waxing somewhat bristly.

  ‘Well, that’s just the story, isn’t it?’ said Pedder, like he’d said it too many times. ‘You needs the two things, doesn’t you? You needs the one thing, and also the other thing, to make a story. Elsewise it’s all just agreeing and staying put with nothing going on and nobody saying nothing.’

  Cowel made a hooting, howling kind of rageful sound.

  ‘Don’t be feeble. Because if it was us that was proud and nasty, what fun would that be?’ Pedder said. ‘Now shut up and let’s have the rest.’

  ‘Ssssh,’ said Onnor, and they did.

  ‘And the samey ones settled all over,’ Cara went on in a rush of words like she wanted it to be done. ‘Now they are so busy trying to forget what they were, that even the land they live on is offended. Their countries change themselves, to remind the people what’s really right and natural. Their lands sink and rise, sail about like boats, even turn to cloud, but still those samey ones cling to their pride.

  ‘But,’ she said quietly. ‘There are still those who are as they were made in the first whirl.’