Riverkeep (20 page)

He looked at Wull through his brows, and his voice was toneless.

“What do you mean?” said Wull.

“O' your life. What are your memories?”

“I don't know,” said Wull, keeping his attention on the oars' grips. “Everythin', I suppose. Faces, smells, feelings. Pictures of things that've happened, but still . . . like in a woodcut.”

“That's good, that is. That makes sense. An' does you
have a look at these woodcuts from time to time? Pickin' through 'em, rememberin' your past?”

Pictures flashed through Wull's mind, a gallery of dim-lit moments: the river, black water, Pappa reading Mamma's letters when he thought Wull was asleep, his clothes and wet hair and cut palm, the spectral gathering of empty boots and hats and cloaks hanging in the empty pantry like so much death, awaiting the city's needy. And at the end of the gallery's dark corridor, unseen but sharp and hot in his mind, the brown, wide mouth and the moment Pappa disappeared.

“No,” he said. “No, I don't.”

“Then let me call you a liar, 'cause they was crossin' your face this minute. Miss Cantwell an' Mix an' all—even at the mention o' memories, you goes to them, an' don't ye always remember that the sun was shinin'? In rememb'rin' you's fiddlin' the parts of yoursel's what makes you's human, all the little empathies an' struggles an' triumphs. I's not an old
creature
, Wulliam—older than you, mibbe, but still younger than this face would have you think. This face belonged to someone else, an' these hands an' legs an' the brain that thinks away in my big skull. So I has memories I's made myself, an' I's done some int'restin' things, things would curl the hair on your cocksure little head an' would make for fine tellin' if I thought Miss Cantwell could stand to hear 'em. But my own memories're a fart in the wind next to the mountains
what're buried in the meat an' bones o' this body. This body has thoughts lurkin' in it you'd faint to hear, an' I keeps them locked away as best I can.

“But I can't tend locks in sleep. When I dream I's attacked by the memories of my skin and the bloodied mob o' black thoughts. My parts all came from the leavings o' the gibbet; the hanged lumps o' these scoundrels cut down an' sold off, sliced up an' stitched together, an' here I am. Even now when you speak to me as you are, I feel on the edge o' my temper the curlin' fingers o' my murderer's hands, an' the memory o' neck veins bursting under pressure o' stranglin'. I wake most mornin's with these thick legs feelin' they's bein' chased. All the voices of the blaggards what made this body howl at me like monkeys, an' the only time I gets to talk for myself is in wakin' moments like this. But soon I'll sleep again, and they'll all nudge forward again to remind me I's a nobody.

“So you tell me again, Wulliam, that I don't value what I's been given when I's been given this prison to carry around. I's not a real person, an' why should I try to live as a man when I'm nothin' but a cheap trick? Is it a wonder I live as I does when agony lives on the other side o' every thought? I was jus' gettin' to toleratin' havin' company for the first time since I started walkin', but I's better on my own—I c'n live as I please an' have none o' your judgin'. I
value life, Wulliam, I value it fine. I jus' hasn't got it. An' by the way—neither has your old man.”

“Don't you dare say that!” said Wull, meeting Tillinghast's eyes as the bäta nudged into the bank, knocking them all off-balance.

“I 'in't tellin' you nothin' you doesn't already know! Din't you wonder how he was still livin' when you found him? He'd been down there a long time. Seems there's somethin' else goin' on in there, don't you think?”

Tillinghast heaved a waterlogged foot over the gunwale and onto the grass, toppling under its weight. Mix stepped forward to help him.

“Are you all right, Till?” she whispered.

“I's fine, thank you, little miss,” he said, pulling himself fully onto the bank.

“Good. I'm takin' my seat back now then.”

“Ha! An' you're welcome to it. Oh, that feels good right enough, solid ground.”

Tillinghast tried to take a step, heaving his right foot as though it were a lead weight. Wull, his eyes shining, made to climb from the bäta.

“Don't!” said Tillinghast. “You jus' stay there wi' your pappa an' the ladies. I'll be fine, jus' as I always has been—water'll drain out me in no time. You's not far to go now we's through the city. Shouldn't be more'n—what? Five, six hours
down to Canna Bay? Best get goin' now. But by the way, you's not catchin' more'n a pickerel on that stupid boat, an' there's no way you's gettin' on the crew of a proper whaler, so you might as well turn back.”

Wull opened his mouth, looked at Pappa, sat down again, and kicked the bottom boards.

“Good-bye, Mr. Tillinghast,” said Remedie.

“Cheerio, toots,” said Tillinghast without turning round. “Think o' me sometimes, in your lonely, private moments.”

He moved his left foot, then his right again, pulling his legs with his hands, gradually achieving something that was almost a shuffle.

By the time he turned to look, Wull had pushed off and was already rowing steadily down the Danék's central current, the bäta a tiny piece of black on the dazzling screen of the sunset's golden water.

An hour or so of slow shuffling had passed and the blue light of evening spilled over the sunless sky before Tillinghast felt his limbs lighten, the squash of his insides flushing
the last of the river into the earth and returning to their usual sticky lightness.

He felt his strength fill him again and straightened his back, flexing his muscles as they drained, enjoying the sense of his own weight and power.

The words of a child. Nothing more. Since he'd been able to think he'd known his life was a fragile thing, bound up in borrowed skin, a miracle of delicately balanced herbs and chemistry. When his existence could be taken so easily (and the Bootmunch had been closer to taking it than he'd been prepared to admit—he could still feel the effects of that fennel-less smoke in the deepest parts of him), it made sense that he should live as he had. People rejected him—he drew the wrong kind of attention. People had always rejected him. Except Wull.

He shook his head, walked faster.

The forest had started a few paces from the river's edge and thickened steadily into a tangle of branches, thick with roots and foliage and a pervading soggy darkness, a place designed by nature to be hospitable to plants and hostile to people. The green-bloomed bulk of fallen trunks littered the ground, creating impassable barriers connected by gnarled knots of roots and broken branches, and all was wet and slimy and thick with moisture and moss.

Tillinghast stepped in a deep puddle of loose mud that
rose past his knees. When he came to the pool's edge, he hoisted himself from it with one arm and carried on, his stride unbroken. In the slivers of new moonlight that cut through the canopy his cool blue skin gleamed.

The forest was dark, but Tillinghast saw everything, his trapper's eyes effortlessly picking out the detail in the gloom, his footing sure and steady.

Time passed. As he went deeper into the heart of the woods he was aware of a growing sense of familiarity, not conscious recognition of the trees and pools of gathered water—unending in their sameness after so much walking—but of being able to locate himself in the world, feeling the sense of the place coming through his pores, knowing it with his eyes closed.

It was a feeling he hadn't known he'd known: a long-forgotten extra sense of being in the
right
place. This was the place of his creation: the Deadmoor.

And when he realized where he was going, pushed by some interior drive that worked outside of his thoughts, he shook his head.

“Would've been a lot better bein' dropped off a good bit downriver,” he muttered. “Save me all this walkin'.”

He ambled for hours in a state of happy bewilderment, closing his eyes and taking blind paces with a mouth-open smile, enjoying the forest's spirit, the sighs of its wind-tickled
leaves and boughs, the canopy high and unforeign around him. He passed through clearings of borrow-vines and starflowers and toadstool lanterns that glowed a dull green and spat damp-smelling powder around his feet. He sniffed it, grinning and remembering.

Eventually he broke through the tree line and into a field of untended barley, saw the house, and was so struck by the force of the past's assault, he dropped to a knee as though winded.

“An' there it is,” he said to himself.

The house had been built into the hill, perched over what had once been ornately groomed gardens. The gardens, wild now, he saw, made a gap in the trees through which the big, eyelike windows could peek out at the surrounding woods. Tillinghast felt the attention of the place shifting toward him, as though the chattering of a busy room had fallen silent at his approach. A light flared in a downstairs window.

He approached it in a dream, the winding path slippy with unkept plants and years of neglect, the hedges—once immaculate topiaries of animals and fruits—lurking like muggers in the dark.

He remembered the knocker, too—a heavy brass thing cast as a lapphund that shook the door and sent pealing echoes into the house. The portico's stones were crumbling like broken teeth and were shot through with moss. Through
a buttress on the front wall lanced the thin, white stem of a sapling.

Tillinghast realized as the door began to open that he had knocked before preparing, before thinking, and that he was not ready to see the face he knew was coming.

“Hello?” said Clutterbuck, peering round the door, Mac stuck to his scalp.

“I . . . I mean, I's . . .” stammered Tillinghast. He took a step back into the light from the window, the shadows cutting him into slabs of light and dark.

“Is that . . . It can't be . . .
Tillinghast?
” said Clutterbuck.

“Sir,” said Tillinghast, head down, new-made and shy again.

“Mac! Look who it is!” cried the little scientist, sending the patchwork bird croaking into the air. “Well, come in!” he added, ushering Tillinghast inside, reaching high above his head to clasp his shoulder.

Tillinghast leaned away from Mac's wings, narrowing his eyes. “I saw the house,” he said stupidly. He sniffed, smelling something familiar but out of place—a light fragrance that did not belong.

“I always knew you would be back. Yes, indeed, my boy, I did!” said Clutterbuck, walking into the sooty heat of the kitchen.

Tillinghast looked around the hot, domed space, feeling
heavy with recognition, seeing phantoms of himself in corners, his skin firm and clean, bare feet spread on the cracked flagstones.

“I din't know this was where I was comin'. It's . . . I—”

“And how do you feel now that you're here? After fifteen years, twenty?” said Clutterbuck with a professorial air.

“I dun't know, sir,” said Tillinghast. “Truth is, I's been havin' a strange time in the run up to my arrivin'. I met some folk an' spent time with 'em, an' then I left with bad feelin'. An' I feels wounded by it, quite unexpectedly.”

“It happens,” said Clutterbuck, one-handedly heaving a fat kettle onto the stove.

“Not to me,” said Tillinghast. “I lives by myself an' away from pryin' folk.”

“But life is a strange thing—it wriggles, like an eel! Just when you think you've got it pinned down, it changes on you, shifts, and moves out of reach. And, like an eel, it can be quite delicious, absolutely—if you're careful. Have you been careful, my glorious Tillinghast, since I made you and sent you off into the world?”

Tillinghast looked at Clutterbuck peering over his spectacles, and turned away, unable to meet the inquisition.

“I dun't know, sir,” he said again. “I's taken daft risks. Said hurtful words an' taken things. Many things.”

“Ha! That's a lot of people,” said Clutterbuck, gesturing
for Mac to land on his forearm. He stroked the bird's patchwork plumage, fanning the feathers in affectionate twirls as Mac gabbled in his ear.

Tillinghast stepped back, away from the bird's twitching.

“Oh!” said Clutterbuck, sending the bird to his perch. “I'm so sorry, my boy, I forgot all about your little—”

“It's not little,” said Tillinghast quickly. “That damn bird pecked my eyes out.”

“And I got you fresh ones!” said Clutterbuck brightly. “Even better ones, hmm?”

Tillinghast glowered at Mac, who champed his black beak and shuffled on his perch.

“Well,” said Clutterbuck, taking Tillinghast's shoulder and leading him away from the mostly raven, “there's not many a person could give a straight answer to that question: have I been careful? Am I living as I should? Most of the time we just blunder about—only at rare moments are we granted a snuck glance into ourselves and the nature of our lives. In my case it happens when I stand up too quickly in the bath. A matter of blood pressure, I'm afraid.”

Tillinghast felt himself stepping toward the edge of panic.

“An' what about me?” he said, tugging the silver amulets on his neck. “I 'in't properly got blood to feel pressure! I got goop an' straw, an' you made me like that!”

“Do you think it's a coincidence you found your way back here tonight?” said Clutterbuck. “At the exact
moment you were beginning to connect to other people and finding yourself vulnerable for the first time?”

Tillinghast snorted. “I can't make connections wi' other folk, sir—I's made o' dead men who fed the noose. What is I but a plate of leftover meat what's learned to sit up an' talk?”