Gullstruck Island (2 page)

There lay the road he would travel over the next few days. He scried it carefully. Even though he had left for the coast quietly and with haste, there was always a chance that news of his arrival had outstripped him, and that enemies lay in wait.

And it was no mean task, spying out ambushes and surprises on this coast of all coasts. Everything about it reeked of trickery and concealment. There were reefs beneath the water of the bay, betrayed only by the foam fringes on the far waves. The cliff-face itself was a labyrinth. Over centuries the creamy limestone had been hollowed and winnowed until it was a maze of tapering spires, peepholes and snub ridges like sleeping lions. So it was all along the west coast of the island, and it was this that had given the Coast of the Lace its name.

The tribe who lived here nowadays was also known as ‘the Lace’, and they too were full of ins and outs and twists and turns and sleeping lions pretending to be rocks. You never knew where you were with the smilers of the Lace. They were all but outcast, distrusted by everyone, scratching out a living in outskirt shanty towns or dusty little fishing villages.

Villages like the one that now came into view, nestled between a cliff and a beach in a rocky, half-hidden cove.

Here it was, Skein’s ultimate destination. The village of the Hollow Beasts.

It was a Lace village. Skein could see it at a glance, even though he was too high to make out the turbans on the grandmothers, the young men’s shark-tooth anklets, the bright stones in everyone’s teeth. He knew it from the furtive location, the small pearl-fishing canoes cluttering the waterline.

He descended until the freckling of two-legged specks on the beach became foreshortened human figures. His sight alighted on two young girls, one supporting the other.

The taller of the girls was dressed in a white tunic, and he guessed instantly who she must be. Arilou.

Arilou was the only Hollow Beast whose name he knew, and it was the only name he needed to know. She was easily the most important person in the village, and arguably the only excuse for its existence. He contemplated her for a few seconds, before soaring again and preparing to return to his body.

As it happened, the girl supporting Arilou had a name too. It was designed to sound like the settling of dust, a name that was meant to go unnoticed. She was as anonymous as dust, and Skein gave her not the slightest thought.

Neither would you. In fact, you have already met her, or somebody very like her, and you cannot remember her at all.

1

Arilou

On the beach, a gull-storm erupted as rocks came bouncing down from the clifftop. Half a step behind the rocks scrambled Eiven, her face flushed from running.

No member of the village would take a shortcut straight down the cliff unless there was a matter of some urgency, not even bold, agile Eiven. Several people dropped their ropes or their nets, but not their smiles, never their smiles, for they were Lace.

‘An Inspector!’ Eiven called to them as she recovered her breath and balance. ‘There is a Lost Inspector coming to see Arilou!’

Looks were exchanged, and the news ran off to this hut, that hut. Meanwhile Eiven sprinted across the beach along to the base of the cliff, her feet scooping ruts in the spongy sand. There she scrambled up a rope ladder and pushed through a curtain of woven reeds into the cave behind it.

According to Lace tradition and tale, the caves were sacred places, perilous mouths leading to the world of the dead, and the gods, and the white-hot, slow-pumping hearts of the mountains, mouths that might snap you up suddenly with stalactite teeth if you were judged unworthy. Eiven’s family was considered worthy to live in the caves, but only because of Arilou.

Moments later within the cave Eiven was in agitated conversation with her mother. It was a council of war, but you would never have known it from their smiles.

‘So what is he planning to do to her?’ Mother Govrie’s eyes had a fierce and urgent brightness, but her mouth continued to beam, the lopsided swell in her lower lip speaking of stubbornness and warmth. ‘How does the Inspector inspect?’

‘They say he wants to grade her for their records. See how well she can control her powers.’ Eiven had a knife-slash smile. Years of pearl-diving had left white coral scars trekking up her forehead like bird-prints. ‘We need to tell the whole village. Everybody will want to know about this.’

Arilou was everybody’s business, the village’s pride and joy, their Lady Lost.

The Lost were born nowhere but Gullstruck, and even on the island they were far from common. They were scarce among the non-Lace, and much revered. Among the Lace, however, they were all but unknown. During the great purges two hundred years before, most of the ‘Lace Lost’ had been killed, and their numbers had never recovered. Before the birth of Arilou, none had been born to the people of the Lace for over fifty years.

Young Lost were notorious for becoming entranced with distant places and forgetting their own discarded bodies, or even failing to notice that their bodies existed. As a consequence, nobody ever lamented when a child seemed slow to learn or unaware of its surroundings, for this was often the sign of a newborn Lost that had not yet learned to reel its mind back to its body.

The birth of a baby girl who showed every sign of being an untrained Lost had transformed the village’s prospects overnight. Suddenly they were not dependent upon their dwindling harvest of pearls or on peddling shell jewellery. The nearest town grudgingly gave them food in winter, for it was accepted that when the town’s own Lady Lost retired, Arilou would have to take her place. Furthermore, the stream of visitors who came to see Arilou paid well for their food and lodging, and for relics to remember their visit to the only Lace Lost. Arilou was a celebrated oddity, like a two-headed calf or a snow-white jaguar. And if any haggard doubts haunted the villagers’ pride in Arilou, an outsider would never have known it from the seamless pleasure the Lace seemed to show in discussing her.

But now Arilou needed to be found and made ready for company. Her best clothes had to be prepared. Her hair had to be combed free of burrs and her face would need to be dusted with stonedust and spices. There was no knowing how much time they had.

In the late afternoon two men stepped gingerly into the pulley-chair and let themselves be winched down the cliff by six young Lace men below.

The taller of the two visitors was unmistakably Lost. Whereas many Lost learned to base themselves in their own body, some discovered their physical form so late that they were never entirely comfortable in it. They found the perspective disorientating, disliking the translucent peripheral view of their own nose, and the fact that they could not see all of their body to guide it. Such Lost often chose a hovering perspective instead, a little behind or to one side of their body, so as to keep themselves in view, monitor and adjust their own body language, and so forth. However, there was always something static about their posture then, and this man was no exception.

He wore his grey hair pushed back into a pigtail, the loose strands across his head pinned in place by his green three-cornered hat. His eyes were hazel, which was not unusual for one of his background. Most islanders were mixed race, for it had been over two centuries since the Cavalcaste settlers arrived on Gullstruck, easily long enough for them to intermingle with the local tribes. However, in the towns there was often more Cavalcaste blood poured into the mix, particularly among the better-heeled, and that was clearly true of this man. What
was
unusual about his eyes was that they were slightly swivelled to the left, and that he did not take the trouble to blink, or adjust the direction of his gaze. This, in short, was obviously the ‘Lost Inspector’.

His shorter and younger companion seemed to be ‘lost’ in an utterly different sense. Compared to the Lost Inspector, he was a-twitch with involuntary movements, clutching at his hat one moment, the handrail the next, shifting his feet or his weight with every swing of the chair. Papers fluttered in the leather wallet he held under one arm. He had a rounded, pouting chin, a touch of Cavalcaste pallor and bright, brown eyes. For the moment these eyes were fixed upon the ground reeling treacherously far below him and the mosaic of upturned faces.

He was smartly dressed and obviously a towner. Like many Gullstruck officials he was both well-heeled and bell-heeled, another result of the Cavalcaste invasion. Centuries before, back on their own homeland plains, respected members of the horse-riding Cavalcaste clans had shown their status through the size of their spurs. But nowadays the powerful were not horseback battle-leaders but lawmakers and bureaucrats. Instead of spurs, even lowly officials had taken to wearing little bells on the backs of their boots, ‘honorary spurs’, which jingled in just the same way but did not catch on carpets and ladies’ hems.

His name was Minchard Prox, and not for the first time he was wondering if it was possible to find a secretarial post that was less prestigious than being aide to a Lost Inspector but less likely to involve trekking mountain paths in goat-drawn carts, being lowered down cliffs in glorified baskets or coming into contact with the Lace, who set his neck-hairs tingling as if at the touch of a knife.

Down there, three dozen faces, all smiling.
Just because they’re smiling, it doesn’t mean they like you
, he reminded himself. Smiles a-glitter, for most Lace had their teeth studded with tiny plaques of shell, metal or bright stone. Would those smiles melt away to leave implacable looks as soon as there were no strangers in the village? Perhaps it was even worse to think of the smiles clinging to every face even after they had no purpose, a whole village sitting and walking and sleeping and smiling and smiling and smiling . . .

In the old days before the settlers, the Lace’s smiles marked them out as a people to respect. The Lace had acted as peacemakers and go-betweens for the other tribes, and had even carried messages to the volcanoes. So it was small wonder that when the Cavalcaste landed the Lace had been the only tribe to approach them with smiles rather than spears.

The helpful Lace had given the settlers lots of advice on how to survive on Gullstruck. Most important of all, they warned them not to build their towns in the Wailing Way, the river valley between the King of Fans and his fellow volcano Spearhead, for the two volcanoes were rivals for the affection of Sorrow, and might some day rush together to continue their fight.

But the land around the river was rich and tempting, so the Cavalcaste had ignored their advice and built a great town in the Wailing Way. Shortly afterwards its citizens started to go missing, one at a time. Only when thirty or so had disappeared without trace did the settlers discover the truth. They were being kidnapped and murdered by the politely smiling Lace themselves.

The Lace had acted as they thought best. After all, the whole township was at risk of being trampled by angry mountains. To the Lace’s minds the only way to keep the volcanoes sleepy and happy, and so prevent this disaster destroying the town altogether, was to quietly waylay solitary settlers, spirit them to the Lace mountain shrines and jungle temples . . . and sacrifice them. But when the truth came out the Lace’s towns were burned by the enraged settlers, their temples destroyed and all of their seers and priests killed. Even the other tribes disowned them. They were pushed out to the westernmost edge of the island – the Lace coast – and left there to forage for survival as best they could.

As the pulley-chair touched the ground at last, the front of the crowd gave a small, impatient shuffle forward.

‘You want stick! You want stick!’ There were about a dozen small children holding sharpened stakes twice their own height. ‘For walking!’

‘Hello, sir!’ called one of the girls further back. ‘You have lady wife? You have daughter? She likes jewellery! Buy jewellery for her!’

Now the tide was upon them, and Prox felt his face growing red as he sidled through a forest of hands proffering earrings made of shell, bead-studded boxes and pictures painted on palm leaves ‘to burn for ancestors’. He was a dapper little man, but the tide of short, slightly built Lace made him feel fat and foolish. Furthermore, behind the jewelled smiles, the singsong calls and the hands slipped into his in greeting, he felt the crackle of desperation like dry weather sparks, and it made him desperate too.

The crowd quickly realized that the strangers were not to be slowed, and simultaneously decided to lead them to the heart of their village instead, to Arilou, their own prized Lost.

‘This way! This way!’ The human wave that had rushed them and nearly bowled them over backwards was now bearing them along with it.

The visitors were ‘guided’ by many companionable shoves in the back towards a cave where stalactites hung in pleats like draggled, dripping linen. Prox followed the Inspector up a rickety rope ladder to the cave entrance. A reed curtain twitched aside and strong arms reached down to pull them into a darkness full of voices and – Prox could feel them – smiles.