Gullstruck Island (28 page)

‘The landowner knew that a butterfly’s wing was beating for him. By the time I next tracked him down he’d spent a year, and half his fortune, turning his house into a walled fortress. The garden had its own fruit and vegetables, its own well, its own cows and goats, even its own beehive. Nobody was allowed in unless he was sure of them.

‘One day he hired a gang of men to hack down the creepers and bushes around the walls, for fear of assassins using them to climb over. I still remember the terror on his face when he looked through his barred window and saw me among the workers. I was arrested, and the landowner’s word was enough to put me in jail. And then over the next week he wilted, wasted and finally . . . gave up his name.

‘They wanted to hang me, but they couldn’t prove I’d done anything. They let me cook in a cell for six months, and when I didn’t die of malaria they kicked me out, hoping I’d starve. But the Reckoning looked after me.’

‘Was it poison?’ Hathin glanced sideways at Therrot. ‘How did you get it into his food?’

‘I didn’t.’ Therrot gave a thin, confiding smile in which there was a trace of shy pride. ‘My little helpers did. I knew I’d never make it over the wall, so I took a serpent smile herb with me and planted it on the verge nearby. A few days later the flowers opened, and bees carried the poison nectar back to the landowner’s hive. He always did have a sweet tooth.’

Hathin felt herself go pale.

‘You see,’ Therrot added in what was probably meant to be a comforting tone, ‘revenge doesn’t need to be face to face. Maybe you’re not made for sticking a knife in someone . . . but would you feel the same way about planting a little fistful of leaves and roots?’

Hathin tried to imagine herself using her sickle to dig root-space for a sly, slow killer. It
did
feel different, but she was not at all sure it felt better.

‘It sounds cold-blooded, doesn’t it?’ Therrot answered her wordless look with a rueful big-brother smile, and gave her a gentle biff on the shoulder as if she really was his younger brother. ‘But it won’t feel like that when the time comes. I mean . . . if you’ve got enough anger, then you just go mad. A calm, cool sort of mad. And then it’s all easy.’

Perhaps she would try to go mad for her new big brother. She would turn herself into something white-hot, implacable and relentless. And then she would become . . .

The Ashwalker.

‘What is it?’ asked Therrot as her hand tightened on his.

‘It’s nothing . . . I just thought . . .’ Hathin scanned the low hill, but saw only golden grass waving innocently. It must have been a sun blot on her eye making her seem to see a flash of blue among the trees. ‘I know Sorrow swallowed the Ashwalker, but just then I thought I saw . . .’

She gave Therrot an embarrassed smile and he returned it, but a few paces later he switched sides with her, so that he was walking between her and the low hill. Ahead of them, they could see Arilou waving a weak arm, coughing gasps of sound up towards the sky.

For the rest of the day Hathin could not help her eye stealing to left and right, but there was no sign of the Ashwalker.

After several days’ hard hike, the Obsidian Trail curved to the east, towards the distant piebald peak of Crackgem the Mad. In the old stories, Crackgem had been sent far away from the other volcanoes because of the way he laughed. His fits of laughter shook him so hard that it dragged up his maddened stories and dreams and flung them into the air. And the other volcanoes could not hear them without starting to shake, with rage, with fear, with something else too terrible to be laughter. So Crackgem was sent away from the others to play with his coloured mudpools, but there was always a worry that if his laughter grew loud enough the other mountains would hear it and start to shudder in spite of themselves.

However, it was exactly this position away from the other mountains that had made Crackgem ideal for the Beacon School. A tower like a lighthouse had been built halfway up the mountain, and at night a fire was lit at the top so that it could be seen from nearly everywhere on the island.

The paddyfields had been left behind with the Wailing Way, and the plains were a patchwork of little farms bristling with newly stripped beanstalks and hedged about by stunted banana plants, interspersed with silent, ever-expanding Ashlands. Occasionally the road passed steam-haunted orchid lakes, where green, ginger and golden mud broke the surface in fat bubbles that burst to leave a collage of coloured rings.

As one travelled away from the western coast, Lace villages became rarer and rarer. However there were odd settlements strung out along the road to Crackgem, and Hathin’s group hoped to stop at them for shelter and new information. As they were approaching the first such village, however, something halted them in their tracks.

At first Hathin saw only an armed group of men tramping their way from the village to the road. Then she noticed the huddle of bruised and frightened-looking figures hemmed into the middle of the group. They were Lace, and some bore ropes around their wrists.

‘Nothing we can do here and now,’ murmured Jaze. Hathin noticed that his fingers were biting hard into Therrot’s upper arm. Therrot watched the parade of captive Lace pass, his face spasming like a puddle in the rain, but he did not break stride.

Soon they saw other such gangs of armed men, each with their Lace prisoners. They swiftly learned that these were gangs of thugs or out-of-work labourers turned bounty hunter, tempted by the promise of a fee for every Lace they delivered to a camp near Mistleman’s Blunder. Non-Lace that passed such convoys stopped to peer at the captive Lace with cold-eyed satisfaction.

The few Lace villages the revengers passed now were eerily deserted.

Hathin remembered Minchard Prox frowning at the map and striking out Lace villages with little flicks of his pencil. But these latest villages were too far away to threaten Mistle-man’s Blunder. The madness of Lace hatred that had welled up in Sweetweather was seeping across the whole island faster than she and her friends could walk.

Eventually, even the abandoned Lace villages petered out. The Lace did not tend to settle this far east, so far from their fishing grounds and the comfort of numbers. Those very few who did venture into these lands tended to hide their race. But even here there were the roaming bandit-like groups of bounty hunters, stopping travellers and peering into their faces. One such group had clearly captured a Lace in disguise, a worn-looking young woman dressed in towner garb. As the revenger group passed the other way her eyes fixed on them and widened. She made eye contact with Therrot and tapped meaningfully at her own teeth, before looking away.

Therrot swore when they were out of earshot.

‘If they’ve started checking teeth for Lace decorations, we’re in trouble. From now on, if we see roadblocks we’ll have to duck off the trail and pass them that way.’

It was at this time that they first heard the phrase ‘Time of Nuisance’. Nobody seemed to know what it meant, but the words hissed and buzzed in Hathin’s ears.

Other worrying news reached them from travellers coming the other way. Crackgem’s whims had become more violent of late, and he had taken to flinging up boiling hot geysers under the feet of travellers. The general view was that he should be avoided until his mad fit had passed.

‘What are we going to do if Lord Crackgem is not accepting visitors?’ whispered Hathin. The ‘safe’ route up the mountain to the Beacon School was known to very few, but even that was likely to be dangerous if Crackgem was feeling temperamental.

‘Hide out in Jealousy, at Crackgem’s foot,’ answered Therrot. ‘It would give us a chance to find this Bridle that Skein mentioned in the journal, and ask him about “Lord S”. It’ll be all right though – Crackgem will have calmed down by the time we get there.’

But Crackgem, Lord of Maniacs, did not calm down. By the time the revengers reached Jealousy, they found that a host of little camps had formed near the town. The most popular trail towards the eastern ports led between two fizzing, tutting orchid lakes, and many travellers had decided to camp outside Jealousy until Crackgem was in a better mood. The Lost, who might have spied out safe routes for them, were gone.

‘It’s not so bad,’ Therrot insisted. ‘Lots of people outside the city – we’ll hide ourselves in a big group, get lost in the shuffle.’

Unlike the dour, practical Mistleman’s Blunder, Jealousy had been built to show the benighted tribes of Gullstruck all the glories of the Cavalcaste traditions. The simple natives were meant to marvel at the magnificent stables, the family of mosaic-tiled towers, the regal palace for the governor. And marvel they did, as they might have done if they had seen a snow leopard trying to swim the warm ocean tides. To the credit of the founders, not
all
their plans had fallen into flinders. Crackgem’s earthquakes had left one of the towers erect, and parts of the palace still stood. Most of the street-houses were squat enough to survive too, even while the weather ate away their balustrades.

The city’s complicated Doorsy name meant ‘Reflection upon a Greater Distant Glory’. Blunt, practical Nundestruth had no time for such fancies, and translated this simply as ‘Jealousy’ and, as usual in the battle of the names, Nundestruth had won.

It did not seem wise for the revengers to spend too long in any one camp, in case it gave people time to see through their story, and so each night they joined a different bonfire. Above them glowered Crackgem, but there was no hint of the beacon that should have burned to summon Lost children to their school.

Tomki turned out to be invaluable at helping them blend in. He had a puppy-like way of bouncing up to greet people as if they knew him, and by the time they realized that they didn’t he had slotted into the gathering snug as a peg and was halfway through telling everyone a story. There was a camaraderie of the road, and many travellers gave them food out of pity for Arilou’s apparent ‘condition’.

In the camps, everyone was still talking of how all the Lost had been killed by a secret league headed by the fugitive Lady Arilou. Now, however, it also appeared to be ‘common knowledge’ that the Reckoning was a part of this conspiracy, and that the rest of the Lace were helping and hiding them at every turn.

Listening, Hathin felt sick. Was this her fault? If she and Arilou had not escaped, would any of this have happened? Perhaps the conspiracy that had really killed the Lost was manipulating the governors at every step, whispering tales of murderous Lace into their ears. But what frightened her was how readily the law and the ordinary people of Gullstruck believed such lies.

Rather than risk all four of them venturing into Jealousy, Jaze offered to slip into the city alone. However, he could discover nothing about the mysterious Bridle or Lord S. Meanwhile, the whole group listened out for mention of the Beacon School, or of anyone who might be able to guide them there between the perilous orchid lakes.

‘Nobody seems to know the way,’ Tomki told his companions late on the first night. ‘As far as I can tell, nobody ever went up there and nobody ever came down. The school kept itself completely to itself.’

‘Then I suppose the schoolmasters must have eaten rocks and burned words on their beacon,’ remarked Jaze drily. ‘
Somebody
must have taken them their food and firewood.’

An answer was found to this mystery the very next morning, but it did not help a great deal.

Hathin woke early and noticed that a group of young men had stopped for a rest not far from the road. They were dressed in a ‘Dancing Steam’ style, except that it seemed a weaker indigo dye had been used on the thread of their clothes, so that instead of midnight blue the cloth was patterned in green and eggy yellow. Large packs of kindling lay beside them, waiting to be hoisted on to their backs once again.

Remembering what Jaze had said about firewood, Hathin approached.

‘Friendly,’ she called out.

One of the young men stood, but did not return her Nundestruth greeting. He pointed at a bundle of kindling and gave her a questioning look.

‘You . . . You carry burnwood Beacon School way?’ she asked.

He stared at her, jutting his jaw to one side, then picked up one of the bundles, slapped it and held up five fingers. It took a moment for her to realize that he was suggesting a price. They held gaze in mute frustration for a few seconds, and then the young man gave a rasp of a laugh and turned away. He called over his shoulder to one of his fellows in a language that had no hard edges. Hearing it somehow filled Hathin with a wave of nostalgia for the cove of the Hollow Beasts, reminded her of the downy smell of the clifftop orchids, and the crackle of dry seaweed under her feet. And, yes, this language was liquid like the Lace language, but much less musical and sibilant, so that Hathin could not quite explain the sense of familiarity.

It was not hard to find out more about the green-clad men. They were notorious for being unable to speak Nundestruth. They had arrived in the area at about the time the Beacon School started, and it was thought they had come from the far side of Crackgem, near the coast. Most believed that the Beacon School had deliberately arranged for them to come and ferry their provisions, precisely because they would be unable to tell anyone else the secret route up to the school.

The common local term for them was the Sours. Their green clothing was partly the cause of this, since a ‘sour’ was a slang term for an unripe fruit, but the name was also a reference to their sullen independence.

While other farmers had fled the foothills of Crackgem, the Sours apparently remained in their village on the mountainside, only coming down to sell timber or green cloth.

‘Surely
some
of them must know Nundestruth?’

‘Well, if so, they won’t admit it.’

On the third night, Hathin’s group found themselves in one of the smaller camps, with a big gang of men travelling together. They spoke Nundestruth with a Mistleman’s Blunder accent, and it became clear that they were new arrivals and had already clashed with a gang of bounty hunters from Jealousy. ‘Poach,’ one of them kept saying. ‘Like steal rabbit.’ He seemed to find this very funny. ‘They say if rabbit run on to land belong-them, then rabbit belong-them. Call we penny-pirate, poacher.’