Gullstruck Island (4 page)

The two women exchanged glances and put down their grinding stones.

‘Well, something to tell the rest of the village, I think,’ said the second woman. ‘Be sure to thank your lady sister, Hathin.’ And the two of them set off quickly to pass on word, often in a whisper that might have seemed strangely intense for a storm warning. But, as it happened, this was not exactly the message they were spreading.

With the Lace, it was not just a matter of understanding the little that was spoken plainly, it was also a matter of reading the hidden meanings. The Lace had always chosen their words carefully, for it was well known that the volcanoes understood their language and could be woken by a careless phrase. And since their fall from grace the Lace had grown ever more wary of being overheard by a hostile world, and so they had grown used to speaking as if somebody was listening in.

For example, a stranger eavesdropping upon Hathin’s little conversation would not have guessed one important thing – that everybody in the village had known about the storm for several hours. There was a streak of tobacco yellow in the sky behind the King of Fans; there was a cold smell on the clifftops; there was the way the herring shoal had changed direction that morning. But after the word had been spread the village would be full of people who would swear blind to the Inspector that they knew of the storm only because the Lady Arilou had warned them.

As Hathin stood alone on the beach, rubbing one sandy foot against the back of her calf and watching her whisper spread through the village, she was summoned by her mother’s voice.

‘Hathin!’ Mother Govrie sat cross-legged with her back to the cliffbase, twisting reed stems into a basket frame. ‘You’re going to town, aren’t you? There’s a message for you to carry. They say the Lost Inspector has been travelling with a couple of porters, and right now they’re making his lodgings ready in Sweetweather. Porters from Pearlpit.’ Pearlpit was another Lace village further up the coast. Mother Govrie gave Hathin only the briefest of keen glances, but she spoke slowly and with meaning. ‘Father Rackan has cousins in Pearlpit – you should go and ask the porters if they have any news of them.’

Hathin understood her mother’s meaning immediately. The Lost Inspector had Lace porters who might be sympathetic enough to answer questions about the forthcoming test.

Despite herself, Hathin hesitated briefly before departing. For a moment she wanted to throw herself down next to her mother and ask,
What do I do? How can I fool a Lost Inspector? Oh, what do I do?
But she said nothing. There were invisible walls around those things that could not be discussed. Sometimes Hathin could almost see these walls, shaped from clay and tears, bearing the handprints of generations of Lace. She was too young, too tired and too worried even to think of climbing them. Her mother, wrestling the reeds with her strong, calloused hands, was unreachable.

Hurriedly, she gave Arilou a drink of water and left her under Mother Govrie’s watchful eye. Then Hathin slipped on a pair of wicker and leather sandals and set off up the route to the cliff path.

By the time she reached the top, the eyes of invisible little Hathin had become bright with more than exercise. On the rare occasions she found herself without Arilou, she felt a guilty, giddy sense of lightness.

Inland from the cliff the land rippled through a series of hills, cave-infested ridges and hidden shafts. Beyond soared the King of Fans.

Usually when the Hollow Beasts travelled south to Sweet-weather they walked the long, zigzag path that followed the cliff edge. However, if rain made this path treacherous, or the villagers were in a particular hurry, they sometimes took a short cut across the headlands. Not the higher foothills nearest to the King of Fans, of course – they had too much respect for the volcano, and for the sharp eyes and talons of the eagles that surrounded him. But they dared sneak across the lush lower slopes, despite the fact that these had all long since become Ashlands, the domain of the dead.

Hathin’s father had been carried off by a fever when she was five, and she remembered standing on this very clifftop, watching her mother cast his ashes to the wind so as to free his spirit.
His spirit to pass on to the caves of the dead, and everything else to return to the coral and rock from which the great Gripping Bird shaped him.
But the Lace was the only tribe that still did this.

Almost everybody else on the island now followed the Cavalcaste traditions.

The Cavalcaste had lived in a distant land of grey and yellow plains, where the horizon was a neatly starched fold between land and sky, where nobody ran around without shoes and shirt and where there were no volcanoes to worship. Instead everyone prayed to their ancestors, and kept them happy by dedicating a little plot of land to each of them. Generation by generation the domain of the dead had advanced across the plains of the Cavalcaste’s homeland, pushing back the farmlands of the living.

So at last the Cavalcaste had sent out ships, loaded to the waterline with little urns containing the ashes of important ancestors, to claim new lands for their ever growing population of dead. And the tribes of Gullstruck one day had seen a fleet of cream-sailed ships swelling on the horizon like a string of pearls, as the Cavalcaste arrived to take over the island, their heads full of unbuilt cities and their ships full of their dead . . .

Try not to imagine those poor dead
, Hathin told herself as she abandoned the cliff path and set off across the headland, thrashing her way through the watery swaying of the grass. Everywhere man-high staves had been driven into the ground, at the top of which were fixed tiny wooden ‘spirit houses’, little homes for the cremation urns of the dead. There were even some mossy stones marking where urns had been buried by the first settlers, two centuries before.
Try not to think of all those spirits trapped in little pots, going mad with boredom.

After an hour’s tramp the path became better trodden and the first buildings appeared, most of them slatted wooden houses with stubby stilts and palm roofs. The eager black heads of goats peered at her through fence palings.

In Sweetweather she was invisible, but in a different way than in her own village. The families who seemed content to sit in their raised doorways and stare out into the street all day roasted her in the black sun of their gaze. But they did not see
her
, Hathin, they did not see her face . . . they saw only the traditional Lace salt-and-pepper embroidery of her stiffly woven skirt, the shaven crescent above her forehead to make her face look longer, the little rounded plaques set in her teeth. They saw that she was Lace.

Here as in most places on the island nearly everybody was mestizo, blood-soup, a mix of the old tribes – the Bitter Fruit who had once lived in the northern jungles, the Amber from the south coast, and many more – and the Cavalcaste. Cavalcaste or tribal ancestry showed through here and there in clothes, in tattoos, sometimes in the shape of the features, but over time the differences had diluted and softened. The Lace were an exception, remaining desperately, stubbornly, painfully distinct. In spite of all the distrust and persecution, the Lace hugged their traditional strangeness, their aloneness, for it was all they had left.

The voices of the town settled around her like an odd-smelling smoke. They spoke in Nundestruth, a rolling, pragmatic hybrid tongue very different from the softly musical Lace language.

The town did not so much have a central square as an open space which acted as a playground for everyone’s pigs and children. Across this space the town’s two finest buildings glared at one another.

The first was the governor’s house, three storeys high because it had been built in the days before the Cavalcaste had seen most of their towers toppled by earthquakes and had learned to build squatter dwellings.

The second was a strange, hunched building whose low balconies had pregnant-bellied railings in black iron. This house belonged to Milady Page, the Lady Lost of Sweet-weather. Strings of bells hung above the door, a wild, rambling spiceplant had been allowed to run riot over the roof and a set of candlesticks was spiked on to the railings in front of the yard. Milady Page often sent her senses roaming independently of one another, and then brought them back to her body using the bell-chimes, the spice scent and the candlelight to find their way.

The stone steps before the governor’s front door were clean of all footprints, while the path to Milady Page’s house had been worn into a channel by the stream of people bringing her mangoes, sweetbreads and questions. Everyone respected the governor of course, but his white-painted world had nothing to do with the day-to-day reality of the town, and people had grown accustomed to turning to Milady Page, who had eyes everywhere.

The poor governor could do nothing without waiting a month for written permission from the capital, faraway Port Suddenwind. Port Suddenwind was a joke. Everybody knew that the government there was a vast, creaking clockwork of laws, laws, laws, most of which even now had everything to do with the snowbound, horse-ridden wastes of the original Cavalcaste plains and nothing to do with sprawling, feverish little Gullstruck. For the Cavalcaste settlers had brought with them a hearty dread of changing or discarding laws, for fear of annoying the ancestors who had invented them. All people could do was carefully pile more laws on top. Port Sudden-wind’s edicts could cope with thieves who stole sledges or furs, but not those who ran off with jade or coconut rum. They could cope with murderers who tricked victims on to thin ice, but not those who boiled jellyfish pulp to make poisons. There were no rules in place to deal with epidemics of weeping fever, no structures for warning other communities to stay away from the outbreak areas.

In contrast, Milady Page did whatever she wanted when she wanted, and nobody tried to stop her, not even the governor. It was an open secret that he disliked and resented her, but he needed her as much as anyone else did. If Milady Page deferred to anyone, it was to the Lost Council, an organized body comprised of powerful Lost who governed the rest and represented them as a whole to Port Suddenwind.

And here came the Lady Lost herself, Hathin realized, moving through the crowds with a swaying lurch like a small, stocky galleon on a rolling sea. Milady Page had a broad, seamed face like a cracked leather shield. She walked around with her eyes shut, since she could see quite well without them. To stop her eyelashes crusting, however, from time to time she would open her eyes briefly in a ‘reverse blink’, momentarily dazzling the world with a glassy, hawk-gold stare.

As usual, there was a gaggle of people trotting alongside her, talking to her all at once. In fact there were rather more than usual, because on the evening of the next day the tidings huts would be renewed.

Each district had a ‘tidings hut’ up on a hill or high promontory. Once a week a new set of writings or pictograms were hung in the hut. These held the news of all the surrounding towns and villages: births, deaths, personal messages, requests for help, advertisements of wares, information about the stirring of the volcanoes, word on the tempests of the sea and so forth. And on that night Lost across the island would send their minds out to visit each tidings hut in turn, before returning with news from all over Gullstruck. On such a sprawling island this system was indispensible, and thus so were the Lost on which it depended.

For now, Milady Page was sailing through a sea of questions and hastily recited messages. She spoke over them all with a rough loudness like a deaf woman.

‘Dayla, I know what you want ask – you right, he do that – steal goatbaby. Hey, Pike! Papayas belong-you ready, go make jam this-week-next-week. Master Strontick – go lookfind hook-scythe by zigzag brook. Ryder, you want merchant-news, ask me two-day-later. Aaaw, you no like wait? Poor Ryder. Ask governor instead.’ Milady Page gave a short derisive cackle.

Despite her high status, Milady Page usually spoke Nundestruth. It was nobody’s language, everybody’s language, a stew of words taken from the tribes and the Cavalcaste alike. By the time the first settlers’ grandchildren were full-grown, they found that however carefully they taught their own children their ancestral tongue, the children caught the hybrid jabber in the streets and brought it home like mud on their boots. ‘That gibberish may be good for the fields and the beach but Not Under This Roof!’ the parents cried, only succeeding in giving the new language its name. Proper-speak, the old colonial language, earned the nickname ‘Doorsy’, indoors-speak.

So Doorsy had the parlours, the schools, the university, the doctors’ surgeries, the governors’ palaces, the offices. And Nundestruth bellowed on the beaches, strutted in the streets and catcalled from the cliffs. It seemed quite happy with the bargain.

‘You!’

Hathin flinched to a fraction of her usual size as Milady Page’s ringed finger suddenly stabbed out to point at her. The babble of voices stilled, and Hathin found herself pinned to the spot by a dozen hard, wary gazes.

‘You think I no know what you about,’ said Milady Page. Her lids jerked open for a second, showing her golden irises. ‘I know. I know what you Lace about.’

Hathin felt her smile freeze on to her face as her stomach quietly turned itself inside out. For years the Lace had been locked in a guessing game, trying to work out how much Milady Page knew about their secrets, and many suspected that she was playing cat-and-mouse with them.

‘Play stake-go-jump, yes?’ Page’s broad mouth grew broader, as if an amusing dream was passing behind her closed lids.

With a rush of relief Hathin realized what Page meant. A few sallow summers and hungry winters had driven the townspeople to dare the volcano and cut terraced farms into the sloped lower flanks of the King of Fans. The land was rockier and steeper than the foothills where the Ashlands spread, but there was no other land nearby suitable for farming. The people of Sweetweather, however, were convinced that the Lace were secretly moving around the stakes that they used to mark the edges of these new farms. Of course, they were also convinced that the Lace stole dreams, caused pigs to give birth to rats and could curse you with malaria. But in the case of the claim stakes the townspeople were, in fact, completely right.