Ghostheart

by Ananda Braxton-Smith

  ‘Uncle-Brother,’ I said, quiet-like. He had a lot of names, but I was sure. Sure of him as I was of myself.

  The Venerable leapt like one of his lice and was lost in a whirry of them. He looked to me and then to Corr, who shrugged like What could I do?

  For a moment Dogsbody looked to be fighting some battle in himself; his face a back-and-forth of feelings. He was plainly telling himself off and then just as plainly, pleading for something.

  He was fighting in himself and then the battle was decided.

  He turned to me with the face of a child who’d expected beatings and been brought honeycakes. It split in a broad grin, an infant’s grin, entirely toothless. His eyes brimmed and he rushed at me and had me in his arms, infesting me altogether. For good manners I did not cover my nose.

  I breathed his filthy old self.

  I felt the crawlers on my arms.

  I didn’t care.

  ‘You too, Fermion Quirk,’ he said, lingering over every bit of my name. ‘I was expecting only your brother. Mister Corr, this is my grand-niece.’

  Corr drooped his wispy neck and nodded his tiny head.

  Behind my uncle’s back he made faces at me, like Careful, careful.

  The old man held me out from him and looked me up and down like would eat me with his eyes.

  ‘Here you are. Here you are. The other one,’ he said, his smeary eyes shooting rays like a beamy day up the lakes. ‘The other one, eh?’

  He stroked my head, covering both of my ears with his hands. ‘Me and your brother have plans, you know.’ His old face disappeared in its grin-wrinkles.

  Corr watched me as I thought on how to tell him what I had to tell him.

  Softly, carefully, his face told me.

  How can you be careful about telling such things? What are the soft words for saying what I had to say?

  There’s no being gently dead, or a little bit killed in a boghole.

  As I stood somewhat gormless my uncle took up the parrot from its perch on the bench.

  ‘Have you met Fancygoods?’ he asked me.

  I put my hand out and the bird walked onto it just as tame as you like. It was softer than Lily Fell’s wool, and lighter than an egg. It was warm and quick, and I could feel its heart beating inside its soft feathers.

  ‘Hell-ooo,’ it said to me again, full of what sounded like love.

  I took my uncle’s hand. It was warm too, and it shook a little. I held it.

  ‘My brother is dead,’ I said.

  It came not careful but soft, and with only regret around it. There was no shutting up like a hinged box, no bile-sprites in my earholes whispering that everybody was prying and stupid and had no business prodding me for my feelings. I felt only sad, and warm, and calm. But poor Dogsbody’s cheeks had shrunk and paled.

  He sat down right where he was, among the cave-dust and empty ink galls. Then he set up weeping there, bereft like it’d been his own brother gone west. I’d never seen so many tears. He couldn’t talk for a while. Corr gave him our pages to look at, the ones from Boson’s coracle, but it only made him worse. He took them and just about ruined them with his dampness and howling.

  I was forever bringing bad news to entirely unsuspecting folk.

  Maybe it was my fate.

  Maybe it was what I was for.

  I sat by him while he mourned, and all the time Fancygoods was dancing on my wrist.

  The parrot stepped and shuffled, and its bright head bobbed. Up-and-down my arm, foot-to-foot and claw-to-claw, that talking bird danced. It scrabbled and scratched up to my shoulder and then it and I were eye-to-eye. Just for a moment we stopped. Tempus was there, in its eye. Holding the hours back.

  Then it shuffled too sharp, its claws tore my skin and I dropped it.

  It fell to earth like a feathered clod and waddled off like an armless man in a too-long cloak. It was plainly not much of a flier. Dogsbody, still weeping on the floor, took the talking bird up onto his shoulder. Then, just like that, it said it.

  And, just like that, I knew.

  It was the word.

  The word my brother waited for his birdangels to bring, the great dollop.

  ‘Oops,’ said Fancygoods the parrot. ‘Downsy-up.’

  Chapter Eighteen

  The Homeward

  AFTER HE’D DONE WITH WEEPING, Dogsbody said he’d take me and Mungo home himself. He said the journey back was always faster than the journey out. The way was easier once you’d travelled it, he said, and anyway he couldn’t settle properly after my news. He wanted to get away from his peak and his galls and feel the sea’s rough on him. He said he’d set his heart on my brother for a companion; one of his own blood, one of his own spirit. A monster like him.

  He knew enough about angels to see how it went with Boson. Enough about mainland folk to see where my brother was headed. Enough to know that to them angels and monsters were the same thing.

  In the beginning Boson carried the monster only in his inward parts. His outside parts looked regular. There was no fault or curse in him, such as a club-foot or hare-lip would have honestly admitted. He was a smooth, sound-limbed child with a straight gaze and beamy smile. He grew in plain sight into a tall, sound-limbed lad. His eye was still straight and his smile still beamed, but soon folk knew he’d been hiding his fault. When at last his monster came out, people felt fooled. It was something they could never forgive.

  Being made fools of is the one thing people cannot overlook.

  ‘I know about that,’ Dogsbody said. ‘People thought my dog’s gruntle was the only deformity I carried. They were used to it. But they were wrong. I also carried hound-parts inside me. They couldn’t stand for that.’

  ‘Hound-parts?’ I said looking down at Mungo, but before he could say, I knew what he meant.

  Dogs are terribly insulted in the world. When folk want to offend somebody else, they call them a dog. It’s one of the worst things you can call somebody. Dirty Dog they say and enjoy the words as they come out, hard. People say dogs are greedy, or savage, or just plain stupid. Those people clearly haven’t met Dolyn Craig.

  And they clearly haven’t met Mungo.

  Mungo is one of the finest folk I know. He’s smart enough to know our bog-path marks and find us out in the mire. He’s full of kindnesses; who else would have sat out all night in the bog saving my brother’s eyes from the ravens? He’s loyal — even when Pa hit him that time he didn’t bite. He eats what we give him and sits quiet by our threshold while we eat. He only savages hares and cats, and what self-respecting dog wouldn’t?

  And Mungo knows what love and beauty is.

  When the mire is sweet with spring and everything busting out in mysteries, he knows it’s worth dancing in the bog-cotton even if you might be drowned at it. When the moon rises full and its great fat face hangs right there so that all you’d need to do is put out your hand to touch it, he knows it’s proper to howl, long and full-throated. When we’re all tucked inside by the fire, and outside the moaney wind’s cutting the willows, he knows it’s time for snugging and soft voices. And at first-light, when the only speck in the sky is the bright, morning star, he’s the most prayerful of hounds.

  ‘Mungo would be a saint if he were a person,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, poor old thing,’ said Dogsbody, scratching under Mungo’s beard. ‘Don’t wish that on him. The trouble with saints, is there has to be sinners for them to mean anything. It only stands to reason. They go together. Like twins. And the trouble with that is who’ll be the saint and who’ll be the sinner?’

  Dogsbody said he should never have taken to coming over, but lately the long years had started to drag on him and he found himself lonesome. He wondered about his family. He couldn’t help it. He watched from his peak as Carrick came and went, just as he’d watched this other island from the shores of Carrick years before. He watched and it set up glamouring inside him. He found himself mooning on lost faces; the faces of his mother and father, his brother, his brother’
s wife and their children, particularly the one called Moirrey who’d shared the deformity of his gruntle even as an infant. Finally he mooned on all the unmet faces of the unknown generations of Perkynses. He found himself dwelling on it, brooding over it, and at last, sorrowing under it.

  It made no difference that he’d left because he’d wanted to, or that he’d had good reason for it. He told himself daily that there was nothing back there for him; nothing but folk that wanted somebody to follow. And other folk that wanted somebody to blame.

  He told himself that if he went home it would all be the same. Nothing would have changed. The Father would once again sermonise on the rules about bodies. He’d sermonise about those who could and couldn’t work the altar. Men who were blind or lame, couldn’t. Men who had a flat nose, or anything extra on their bodies, couldn’t. Or men who were broken-footed or crook-backed, or dwarfs. None of them could. And him with his gruntle, as unchanged as the day he left — if anything even bigger and more curved.

  He said to himself, do you really want to go back among all that rigmarole when you can just stay here and praise god as free and unmolested as a bird?

  But instead of working, he moped. Instead of praying, he sulked. And instead of sleeping the sleep of peace brought on by dreams of the face of god, he dreamed of his mother’s stew.

  So one mournful day a year ago, when the homesickness was in him deep as wells, he went home. He went alone, with only Corr to show him the right sea path, and Fancygoods, who went everywhere with him. At first he went just to see which Perkynses were left; who’d died, who’d married with who, who’d been born and so forth. He thought once he’d seen, once he’d found out, he could come back to his peak and be cheerful again.

  Because he had been cheerful for a very long while. For years and years, he’d felt himself the luckiest of men. He’d been saved from sainthood, freed from the blessing and curse of his remarkable gruntle.

  But his trip home had made him worse. He’d met Boson in the home-thicket and known straight-up who he was. He was his own blood and one made for the other island.

  When Dogsbody first came to the other island, his little cave at the peak had been just the thing. He’d brimmed with blessings at having washed up on this particular shore. He’d settled in to become the man he couldn’t have become, back among the holy Brothers. The man who laughed during mass and couldn’t say why. The one who wept at the puffins for no reason. The man who found spiders beautiful and even loved the lice that sucked his own blood.

  Of course, at first he’d had to settle the revolt of his soul at eating his brothers and sisters, the sea-things and the birds. He lived on eggs and seeds for the longest time. He fasted and prayed on it until he was about perishing.

  At last he thought, who am I to stand apart? This is what God has given. These little brothers and sisters would eat him when his body gave up its ghost, and he would do the same. He wasn’t an impractical man, and he wanted to live. He scoured the shores for the already dead and he ate them. He became a scavenger and fought the gulls for fish.

  And then the monsters came.

  They came years ago.

  Too many years ago to count.

  Their small and marvellous forms had washed ashore like tidal flotsam. Lying wrecked on the shallow needle-rocks, some broken but still breathing, they were lonesome Dogsbody’s own miracles. To him they were as angels, or like his own never-born children. He gathered them like wildflowers and laid them out on the sands.

  How beautiful they were.

  All particular and none the same.

  Each of them perfect.

  One of the little monsters had died in the wreck. The hairy boy Lagman had fallen from his boat and drowned in the tumult around the Needles. Dogsbody buried him deep under sea-washed stones right where he landed, on the sharp side of the island; the side facing Carrick.

  And then it had seemed to him only natural he should find himself afloat on this island with nobody but such strange creatures for company. He fed the remaining little monsters on soft fishes and egg-coddles; his delight drove him to learn to fish and snare and that was the end of scavenging dead food. He wasn’t surprised when they thrived.

  Weren’t they his own, his very own mooncalves, come to keep him company? Come to show him how a dog-nose man, or a boy of bones, or a girl all arms and legs, were parts of a wild god’s creation too, just as he’d always suspected. Just as he’d been praying on all these years. Dear God Teach Us To Love The Strange Ones.

  He knew where they’d come from.

  He knew right from the beginning.

  He knew his country, their habit of putting folk in boats for the least of reasons.

  But he also knew there were purposes at work in the world. Not to mention the means to follow those purposes, and he knew a person could be part of both without knowing it. Plainly there was a purpose at work and he was part of the means. So he fed the monsters, he loved them and so they would never feel unwanted, he told them the story Cara told me.

  He taught them they were the special ones, and Carrick was no home to them.

  He taught them our ears leaked bile, and our hearts were dwindled to black lumps.

  He taught them we would hunt them, skin them and hang them on our walls to mock.

  He taught them to be frighted of us to save them. To keep them safe. That’s what he said.

  But as they grew, the monsters grew just like regular folk. Instead of sensibly shunning the world’s frights, they wanted to go see them. Instead of staying safe and quiet, they took to wondering to themselves. Then to muttering together. At last they took to hoarding quickbeam and twisting cord from vine. They gathered the old skins from their childhood wreck, and they washed and trimmed them. All unknown to Dogsbody, the monstrous children rebuilt a whole coracle down in the sea-caves. It was their secret.

  They built it out of quickbeam stripling and rags. It took months, whole seasons of months. Then one day it was ready.

  Corr and Caly launched it first. They set it afloat in the calm back-cove where the porpoises played. They didn’t know what to expect; they didn’t expect it to sail away. But it did. The coracle was caught in the drag. The same drag they’d watched since they came as children. The same drag the porpoises launch themselves upon. The same drag that pulled me in.

  Corr and Caly went to sea that day without even knowing how they’d managed it. Without a plan, without a notion between them. That’s how things happen sometimes.

  They went to sea accidentally. At the end of the drag, instead of the eastern country full of folk like them, they found the kelp forests. They found the passage through and beyond. They found Strangers’ Croft, deserted and full of useful things. They came home safe and bristling with bodge, bolts, pots and rope.

  After that, there was no stopping them.

  Dogsbody made them promise they’d go only at night, never talk to anybody, and stay away from the towns. They promised him those things but that’s all. They wouldn’t promise to stay away.

  He couldn’t make them.

  He wasn’t their boss, or their father.

  And as he told me, he didn’t know what they were for.

  People don’t come with notes attached telling you what their purpose is, he said. Sometimes they can’t even tell you themselves. Sometimes it becomes clear, sometimes it never does. In the end, you just have to leave them to it.

  All this Dogsbody told me as we dangled in the stone chimney, and slipped down the gravelling paths. He talked all the way back along the narrow ways, over the monsters’ ridge and onto the downward path. It was like he had some sort of talking flux. At their ridge Caly and the others joined us and we went altogether through the stones as they shrank from boulder giants to scree to pebbles on the beach. They mobbed around me as we went and were all Take care Miss Quirk and It’s been a Pleasure and Next time bring the rest of his Book.

  All except for Cara.

  She just drooped in her basket on C
aly’s back and had no words for me. I didn’t know what to say to her, either. Her soft, sad face ached in my mind all the way home.

  Dogsbody, Mungo and I took to the glistering waters of their calm bay. The drag that had brought us here curved inward to the right, upwelling here and there like the rise over some deep-rolling water-serpent. The drag that was to take me home curved the other way, rushing and whirling. I just had time to stand and wave before we were in it.

  The outward drag had more force in it than the inward one. As soon as we felt its pull, Mungo grovelled and lay flat, grumbling. I knew what he was thinking.

  ‘Don’t fret,’ I said. ‘We’re for home.’

  And of a sudden I had the notion I knew what I was for.

  Lately, I’d been all for Faraway. Before that I’d been all for saving my brother. Then I’d been all for following the inside-voice, for following it to where I might find Boson’s Dead-place. For giving him back to my parents.

  I had supposed knowing where his ghost walked would stop my mother from hunting him in her fogs and vapours. I’d thought knowledge of his ghosty particulars would bring my mother’s voice back to her. Then I’d supposed she’d drag Pa out of the jug like she’d always been able, and I’d been all for that. In the end I’d been all for sailing away. Now I was all for getting back among them.

  I was for whatever was needed.

  A person wasn’t for one thing always and forever.

  A person was for all sorts.

  Folk are changeable, like night-shapes or weather. Like drags. One drag brings you in, another takes you away. Sometimes there’s a porpoise to help, sometimes there isn’t. Sometimes a person’s uncommon gruntle is a boon that leads them to meet with angels; sometimes it’s a curse that has them running and hiding. People shift. There’s no rule or regularity to it. There’s only right now and what lies inside.

  Right now, I was all for home and whatever waited there. Like managing sea-fogs, there was one way out and that was going to be straight through. We left the back-cove. We hit the sea. The drag carried us along the coast and threw us into the Needles.