Gullstruck Island (17 page)

11

Dread of Dyeing

Brendril had hoped to start the hunt alone. When he was halfway down the Sweetweather shaft, however, he looked up and noticed a number of the townsmen staring down at him from the brink. They had taken one look at his raven-wing blue figure and known him for what he was. They had smelt a kill in the offing, and because the angry blood was still banging in their veins they had decided they wanted a part in it. And so they had followed him, their faces filled with uncertain hostility as though he had already told them to go away. He thought of flies on a fallen fruit and said nothing. Brush them away, and they would come back, perhaps even sting.

The trick to descending the great shaft was to find the edge before it found you, and then descend it in a very gradual spiral, like flotsam drawn down the funnel of a whirlpool in slow motion. Otherwise, you were likely to find yourself treading air and darkness for a second and an eternity. While Brendril was gently manoeuvring his way from invisible ledge to imperceptible handhold, it became clear that a couple of his new followers were a little unclear on this trick. However, there seemed no point in letting the resultant screams distract him, so he continued without looking up or down.

At the bottom, while the towners were fashioning makeshift stretchers for their injured and filling the caves with noise and the smell of their rushlights, Brendril examined the caverns, looking for traces of his quarries and some clue to which of the many passages they had chosen for their retreat. Beside a black pool littered with rock shards he found what he was looking for – and yet, it was not what he had been expecting.

On the pale rock floor were prints from two very different sets of feet. One solitary print was pinkish with dust and showed the outline of a narrow foot with long toes and a tendency to roll. A second set of feet had left wet prints leading from the pool into one of the nearby tunnels. These feet were smaller, shorter and more squarely placed.

What surprised Brendril was the size of the prints. He had not thought to ask the age of the Lady Lost and her retainer. For the first time he realized that he was on the trail of children. It did not so much stir an emotion in him as make him aware of the place where it should have been, like a tongue-tip finding out a narrow hole and remembering the missing tooth.

Wet footprints dry quickly. The young fugitives could not be far ahead of him. Brendril set off in pursuit.

At this moment, the owner of the wet prints was stumbling through the darkening tunnels, lips moving as if in prayer. But Hathin was not praying.

She had never walked these caverns, but nonetheless she knew them. Some of the stories taught to Lace children were nothing but old legends, but others had meanings encoded in them. The version of the Legend of the Rivals that was taught in the village of the Hollow Beasts was also a means of remembering a list of directions. As she took each shivering step, Hathin was allowing Mother Govrie’s soft, storytelling voice to speak in her mind.

For centuries the King of Fans thought of nothing but dancing with the great plumed fans of cloud he used to shield his head. One day when he paused weary, the fans drooped in his hands and for the first time he glimpsed Sorrow. A silver river of tears formed in his eyes as he beheld her beauty. He took her to wife, and was so in love that it was some time before he noticed how strangely and coldly his wife received his tender caresses
. . .

So far, the story had guided her between two rocky outcrops shaped like fans, through a narrow wedge-shaped tunnel where water ran over the walls like tears, then through a hole as round as a wedding ring.

Where now? What came next?

There was a whisper from the walls around her, as if the shadow was trying to answer. The tunnel was widening to either side, and the darkness before and above her was alive with winged movement. Hathin realized she stood at the edge of a vast cavern, in which the shadow spun, slung and snatched fragments of itself. It was flickering and whirling with bats.

. . .
One day as he approached her chamber the King of Fans heard voices and knew that his wife was with his own brother, Spearhead. His heart, which had overflowed with love, became filled with dark rage, and winged imps of jealousy
. . .

The cavern was the largest she had ever seen, an enormous ghost ballroom with stalactite chandeliers. Bats blackened the high ceiling, flitting crazily or clustering suspended, each a neat little dangling triangular package, heads a-twitch. Hundreds, thousands of bats. Their dung was piled waist-high on the floor like dull oatmeal, so that you could barely see where the funnel-shaped floor descended to a great pool in the centre, fed by drips from the ravaged ceiling.

It was important
not
to enter this cave, Hathin suddenly remembered,
not
to walk into the King’s anger. She faltered, again trying to remember the next part of the story, all too aware of the growing sounds of pursuit from the tunnels behind them. Arilou slithered and lurched, nearly losing her footing, and Hathin flinched as the rattle of her shell bracelets was taken up by the echo.

She snatched off her own bracelets and those of Arilou, and stared down at them with a sudden pang. They were treasures, painstakingly built up a shell at a time over years . . . but survival depended on silence.

Hathin covered her face and darted into the cavern. She dropped the fistful of bracelets on to the nearest vast, soft mound of bat dung, kicked droppings over to hide it and withdrew before the fumes of the mounds could start to poison her lungs. She did not need legends to warn her of the dangers of grottoes such as these.

Brendril continued through narrow veins linking little antechambers, all the while painfully aware of the glow of the towners’ torches close behind him. After some time he started to notice the bats, first in ones and twos. And then there were more, a dozen, then dozens, then tens of dozens.

He reached the edge of the great bat domain, and his attention was caught by one of the heaps of dung. There was a slight dint and disturbance, as if it had been stirred by a recent step.

Brendril was about to cross the threshold when by pure chance he saw a pattern of bulges on the opposite wall, and recognized among them a macaw-like beak and beneath it the shape of a cruel human mouth. The old paint was long-faded, but this cave was an ancient Lace temple, guarded by a demon shaped like the Gripping Bird. Brendril felt suddenly breathless.

Another step forward, and he would have placed himself in a sacred domain. His control over the captive spirits in his clothing would no doubt have been broken instantly. Ashwalkers were not priests, and they avoided temples.

He turned and edged back along the tunnel, into confrontation with his now perplexed and angry followers. For once he did allow himself to speak with them, since they clearly needed some reason for the whole queue of them to retreat and let him past. His explanation was passed along the line.

‘He says he can’t cross the cavern,’ he could faintly hear one of the furthermost explaining in weary disgust, ‘or his trousers will stop working.’

They pulled back to let him through, and murmured as he scouted around, staring intensely at the walls. However, when they found him determined to travel up a rocky mousehole tunnel too small for anything but wriggling on one’s belly, murmurs became challenges. The general feeling among those whose trousers had nothing to fear from macaw demons was that they would rather cross the bat ballroom that the fugitives apparently
had
passed through than wedge themselves like corks in a pipe that they almost certainly
hadn’t
.

And so as Brendril wriggled slowly up the ‘mousehole’, taking care not to rip his tunic and feeling little breezes lick at his face from a hidden opening somewhere ahead, he heard the rest of the search party slithering and splashing through the ballroom, calling to each other as they looked for the next cavern, their voices getting fainter as they ventured into further reaches of the bat palace.

Brendril continued up the tunnel even when the tone of the cries from the great cavern changed, became hoarser, wheezier, desperate. He ignored his erstwhile companions crying that they could not clamber from the sloping pool, could not get breath, could not find their strength . . .

He had nearly been outwitted. He had nearly allowed himself to start thinking of the Lady Lost as simply a child. If she could lead a whole village – perhaps even a whole tribe – in a secret and murderous crusade, then whatever her years she was no mere girl. He was certain now that she had simply entered a few paces into the ballroom of the bats to make it look as if she had gone that way, counting on the strange magic of the temple to destroy all pursuers, and then had escaped the same way the bats did, up through this strange little tilted mousehole of a passage.

Brendril continued his crawl upwards, careful but relentless.

. . .
And so at the end of the mighty battle between the brother volcanoes, Spearhead fled roaring, his sides charred and a great piece missing from his rim, rucking and raddling the earth behind him
. . .

Gasping, Hathin gave one last heave, and pushed Arilou out of the tilted tunnel into the pale daylight, then scrambled after her. Arilou had been worse than dead weight, continually waving her arms like weed and making small murmurs of distress.

Hathin flopped exhausted on the earth and became aware that her limbs were shaking uncontrollably. They were on a hillside of thorned pink shrubs and lolling grass over which flickerbirds bobbed and dipped and flexed their tails. They were far nearer to the summit of the King of Fans than she had expected, and his cloud-fans seemed close overhead.

. . . And the King of Fans returned to his wife whom he still loved, and thought for a moment that she had shed a single tear in grief for what had happened. But when he drew close he found it was only a gleaming white stone, for Sorrow is named for what she gives, not what she feels.

Beyond a series of rolling ridges, Hathin glimpsed a vast, mist-wreathed white cone. That was Sorrow. Drawing an imaginary line between herself and the white volcano, she made out a large pale rock at the crest of one of the ridges. Sorrow’s ‘tear’.

‘We have to get up now,’ she whispered. Her voice seemed to make no impression on Arilou, but Hathin was speaking to herself as much as to her sister. ‘Come on, we have to. When we find the others they’ll carry you, I promise.’

The white stone ahead was the last marker in the legend, the destination point. It was somewhere under which people might shelter and wait for stragglers, or at least leave a scratch on the rock to show where they had gone. This was the hardest part of the journey, every ripple of the land fooling Hathin into thinking that they were closer than they were, every upward slope dragging at their muscles. But Hathin knew that if they paused for too long their exhaustion would catch up with them.

At last the marker stone reared on a ridge above them. Limbs aching in anticipation of rest, Hathin staggered up the slope with both arms around Arilou, and the two collapsed beside the white rock. When Hathin could muster the strength to move, she scrambled to her feet and made a circuit of the great stone, leaning one hand against it to steady herself. There was an overhang large enough for three people to shelter beneath, but nothing had gathered there except living flies and a dead lizard. She made another circuit, another, the tears pushing up her throat, and finally climbed up on to the rock in case some mark had been left by one far taller than herself.

The moss had drawn maps, the birds had made offerings, the beetles had left rust-coloured sigils, but there was no scratch of a Lace shell.
We are the first here
, said the cruel, remorseless voice of hope.
We are the last here
, said the gentler voice of despair.
There is only us. We are alone.

They were not alone. Staring across the rippled ridges, Hathin became aware that she could see a single dark figure against the pink and golden slope. The stab of hope lasted for only the barest instant, for this was a figure of midnight blue. Sooner or later fugitives always fled to the slopes of the volcano, hoping that others would be afraid to follow them. But Brendril had the spirit of an old Lace priest bound into one of the patches of his shirt, to make him invisible to the volcano. The cord he used as a belt held the soul of a woman who had burned someone to death, to prevent him being scalded or singed by the temperamental landscape. Even when he had to cross one of the King of Fans’ charred scars, he anointed his feet with ceremonial oil and walked swiftly across, hearing his footsoles hiss painlessly against the smoking black rock.

The distant specks he pursued had become human figures. As their route started to weave he knew that they had seen his ink-blot shape against the pale hill.

Clambering to the crest of yet another ridge, he had his first good look at the pair of them. As he had suspected, neither of them could be more than thirteen. The shorter girl wore the same stiff skirt and embroidered blouse he had seen on a hundred Lace girls. The other wore a long pale tunic embroidered in yellow thread, and he guessed that she must be the Lost.