Gullstruck Island (21 page)

. . . and suddenly Hathin was recalling a conversation many years before between Eiven and Whish on the day that Whish’s eldest son had left on his revenge quest. Whish’s voice had been sharp as a gull’s.

‘ You persuaded him to go? What, it is not enough for me to lose a daughter, I must lose my son on a revenge quest as well? And where is he more likely to be strung from a tree than in Mistle-man’s Blunder?’

And then Eiven.

‘
He will find friends and help at the Reckoning. You know that.
’

Yes – Whish’s eldest son had left for Mistleman’s Blunder in order to find help from the secretive Reckoning, so that he could avenge the death of his younger sister. He had never returned. It was likely that he had died in the attempt, or been imprisoned for his pains. However, hope started to beat its angry little drum in Hathin’s chest again. Perhaps he was still alive. Perhaps he could be found in Mistleman’s Blunder.

Hathin rose unsteadily and hobbled off to search for one of the bird burrows. The one she found was occupied by its rounded, fuzz-feathered resident and, hungry as she was, she could not bring herself to strike it with a rock as it emerged. Instead she waited for the bird to depart, then dug up the mound with her fingers. She wrapped the eggs in leaves and lowered them into a pool of hot mud until they were cooked. They were still a bit gluey and weepy when she broke the shells, but they took the edge off her hunger. Arilou seemed drugged, perhaps drained by her long journey and her out-burst of the previous night. She did not protest when Hathin poured half-cooked egg into her mouth.

Then Hathin found a stream where the water was not boiling or discoloured, and brought the sleepy, stumbling Arilou to its banks.

‘I’m afraid we’ll have to walk again, Arilou,’ Hathin said as she washed Arilou’s bruised and bloodied feet. She had no reason to believe that Arilou could hear her soothing tone, but it was a matter of habit and Hathin clung to it. ‘But it’s all downhill from here. We’re heading there . . . Mistleman’s Blunder. I’ve got to find Therott, if he’s still alive. I need to go to the Reckoning.’

14

Bloodied Butterfly

After two hours of leading Arilou through the dry tangle of mountain undergrowth, Hathin fell in with some small, companionable streams, all bound for the river at the base of the Wailing Way.

As the ground levelled, the rough ground gave way to paddyfields, carved into squares by ridge paths. King of Fans and Sorrow gradually fell back behind the sisters, and over the next couple of hours the looming shape of Spearhead became more distinct. When they were close enough to the city to make out the white and black specks of grazing sheep and goats on the outskirts Hathin halted and set about making Arilou a nest amid the ferns.

‘I’m going to have to leave you here for a while, Arilou,’ Hathin said as she found some heavy rocks and placed them on Arilou’s hem to stop her standing and straying. ‘I’m nothing to look at, but people will notice you.’ Then she beat the worst of the white dust out of her clothes, kicked the sad tatters of her shoes aside, and set off towards Mistleman’s Blunder, barefoot and alone.

As she grew closer the town resolved into a sprawling mass of hundreds of palm-thatch roofs, clustered as if some enormous and untidy bird had abandoned its nest half made. In the heart a clutch of crimson clay-tile roofs and walls formed neat rounds about a central tower. Hathin saw these grander houses and knew only that they were Doorsy, no place for her. What she did not know was that they were mostly no place for anyone living.

Like many of the older colonial towns on Gullstruck, Mistleman’s Blunder was dying from the inside out. Many centuries before, the Cavalcaste homeland plains had been full of warring, horse-mounted clans fighting each other for land that they could dedicate to their own dead. The Ashlands were commonly placed at the centre of their cities so that they could be protected by the outer ring of the living. The problem was, of course, that once the Ashlands at the centre of town were ‘full’ of the dead, there was nowhere for the dead to go but into the houses of the living. Families found themselves cohabiting with the urns of their ancestors, yielding them first one room and then another, until the living were squashed into a tiny corner of their own home. Finally they would give up and build themselves a new and smaller house even further out on the edge of the city, surrendering their old house to the dead. And so it would go on. There were many great cities, both on Gullstruck and in the original Cavalcaste homeland, that were thriving at their edges but dead at their hearts. Mistleman’s Blunder was just such a city. And so it had grown and grown, swallowing precious farmland, pushing the inhabitants’ paddyfields out and out until they were brought up short by the volcanoes and there was nowhere left to till.

As Hathin reached the ramshackle outskirts she faltered, uncertain. Her only hope of finding Therrot was to make her way to the Reckoning, the legendary revenger meeting house.

The ancient Lace tradition of the revenge quest had been illegal since the Lace purges. However, over time ominous rumours had spread that there were still Lace pursuing such quests, and that the revengers were working together, becoming a formidable and frightening force. The idea of a secret, murderous conspiracy of Lace revengers terrified the non-Lace. And the name of this conspiracy, this nightmare, was the Reckoning.

The governors had taken this new threat very seriously. Ashwalkers at least worked with laws and licences, but Lace revengers operated outside the law and answered to nobody. How could you reason with people like that? What could you do but stamp them out?

For over a century the governors had waged war against the Reckoning. Rewards had been offered for anyone found wearing the revenger’s mark, the butterfly wing that was tattooed on the forearm when a revenge oath was sworn. The Lost Council assisted the forces of law and order, scanning the wild places for the Reckoning’s hideouts until at last they reported that the secret cult of revengers was no more.

Only the Lace knew that the Reckoning was far from dead. The cult still thrived in the shadows.

The location of the Reckoning’s headquarters was never spoken aloud, and Hathin knew only that it was near Mistle-man’s Blunder. She had to hope that the local Lace would point her in the right direction. And surely there would be Lace working and trading in this town. She need only look in the barren, unwanted places and there she would find their stalls . . .

But where were they? Here were the trains of shambling pack-birds bearing loads of obsidian down from the mountainside mines and the shallow streams that had raged into the Wailing Way from the heights of the King and Sorrow. There should have been a dozen Lace girls selling wares to the workers or stirring through the torrent-borne shingle for tiny pieces of obsidian that had been missed.

The main street was flanked by narrow wooden houses whose planks bore the tide-marks of floods, and whose palm roofs were grey and ragged. The labourers who worked up to their waists in the paddyfields had apparently brought a good deal of the mud home with them, walked it all over the streets and through everybody’s expression. But first and foremost, Mistleman’s Blunder was an obsidian town. There was something sharp and brittle in the stances and faces of the pale-faced miners queuing before the merchants to have their packs of obsidian weighed. Hathin trembled under cold, hard, curious gazes. There were no smiles here, so there could be no Lace.

Hathin quietly loosed her cloth belt and tied it about her head to hide her shaven forehead. Suddenly she was grateful for the white dust which she had feared would draw attention to her. Now she realized that it was the only thing that might conceal the unmistakable Lace embroidery of her skirt. She let one of her hands hover in front of her telltale Lace smile, as if waiting to smother a sneeze.

From time to time despite herself she felt her heart leap with hope. A young woman scrubbing a table outside a toolmender’s reminded her for a moment of Mother Govrie in gesture and feature. But the woman looked up and met her eye without a smile or any of the silent signs of camaraderie with which even unacquainted Lace greeted one another. A young man polishing amber pieces with a steel brush had a jagged coral cut along his forearm like many of the young divers in her village, but when Hathin got closer she saw that his lower lip was painted with berry juice, showing him to be from the tribe of the Bitter Fruit.

One shack that stood alone smelt strongly of hot, sick fruit, and outside it men of all ages sat and sipped tiny wooden cups of steaming liquid. A white-haired old man grimaced as he tasted his, and for a second Hathin was sure that she saw a wink of jewelled colour in his teeth. She settled down behind a well-pump to watch him.

A previous life leaves marks on the manners, just as floods leave tidemarks on riverbanks. As he drank from his shallow cup, the old man unthinkingly held up a hand on the windy side, shielding his drink from sand that was not there. And then as she watched he wiped the tip of his little finger around the rim of the cup with care. It was one of the many small unexplained rituals that Father Rackan had always performed in mute serenity.
All is well, Father Rackan is taking care of things, everything he does means something.

Heart pounding, Hathin emerged from her hiding place and approached him.

‘Father.’

The old man’s face tensed, and the lines about his mouth wore deeper into his face.

‘I no father,’ he said curtly. He got up and slid some worn shoes on without looking at her. Perhaps he had already realized his mistake. He had answered her in Nundestruth, but Hathin had addressed him in Lace, using the word that could mean both ‘father’ or ‘priest’.

Hathin watched him toss down a coin and walk away, then followed. He turned to confront her two streets later.

‘Got nothing for you! Go!’

She retreated a few steps before his angrily flailing arm, and then continued following. He was waiting for her around the next corner and grabbed her by the shoulder.

‘Nothing for Lace here! Wrap goods belong-you, runoff back coast! Go!’

He strode to a shamble-shack of weather-darkened planks and shut a wicker-mat door behind him. Hathin settled herself on the post outside his hut, and after a few moments he came marching out with a couple of flatcakes and a corked leather bottle.

‘Take. Get you far as coast. Fill bottle stream, water fine. Go!’

‘Father . . .’ Hathin spoke softly in Lace, ‘I’m looking for the Reckoning.’

He stared at her in angry hesitation, and then took hold of her hands and turned them over so that the soft part of her forearms was uppermost.

‘Well, you won’t find it,’ he muttered in Lace. ‘Only the revengers ever can. If you don’t have a revenge-quest tattoo to show them, they’ll kill you for even entering their jungle.’ He retreated into the shack, shutting his flimsy door with an air of finality.

Their jungle.
Where else? Mistleman’s Chandlery would be a haunted area avoided by the rest of the town. And it was a peculiarly Lace piece of pride and defiance, to set up a headquarters in a place linked with their own ignominy and pain.
We shall take everything you do to us and make it into something else.
But Hathin needed more directions than ‘the jungle’ or she would never find the Reckoning.

She looked down at the flatcakes in her arms, and as usual the pang she felt was not for her own hunger. Arilou would be starving, and had been left too long alone.

A little before dusk the old Lace priest peered through his wicker door again and found not one but two young girls waiting outside.

‘You children! You’re like cats! Feed one and there’s hundreds of you mewling underfoot!’ His eye slid over Arilou, taking in her bruised feet and vacant air.

‘She’s an imbecile,’ Hathin said quickly.

‘Then use her to beg! You’ve already emptied my cupboard of kindness.’

An hour later when he looked out again, they were still there, the white ash powdering them like sugared fruits. The smaller girl stared steadily at the door, as silent and stubborn as the settling of dust. When at last he held the door open for them they slipped in meekly and mutely, the smaller stooping to guide the taller girl’s faltering feet on the wooden steps.

He picked the cork out of a crock of fish oil, dipped some strips of flatbread into it, then set them in Hathin’s hands.

‘I know your story, you know.’

Hathin’s heart lurched at his words, but then realized that the old man could know nothing of the sisters’ flight from the law. Their desperate journey across the mountains had saved them three days’ travel. News from Sweetweather would have to tramp the slow route through the passes to reach Mistleman’s Blunder.

‘It’s not an uncommon tale,’ went on the old man. ‘Your father or your elder brother goes off on a revenge quest and doesn’t come back – and so you get the idea that you’ll find him and bring him home and everything will be the way it was before.’ He sighed. ‘It never
is
the way it was before. A revenger always becomes somebody else. When you say goodbye to them you say it forever.’ His voice had the harsh tone kind men often use when they are forcing out cruel truths.