Gullstruck Island (50 page)

‘Athh,’ she murmured. ‘Athn . . . Hatthhn . . .’

‘What?’ A guard walked over. ‘What was that?’

‘Me,’ answered a woman who sat next to the girl who had spoken. ‘No speak. Sneeze.’

The guard looked down at the mosaic of sleepy, stubborn, bruised faces, their wide-apart eyes reflecting the lantern in his hand, and then stooped to wave his hand before the face of the grey-eyed girl.

‘What wrong her?’ he asked in Nundestruth. ‘Clutter-skull?’

‘Sun,’ answered the woman bluntly. She slapped the top of her own head, then rolled up her eyes and lolled her head to mime dizziness. ‘Work too hard.’ She picked up one of the girl’s hands and opened it like a book to show the blisters on the palm.

‘Hey!’ A call from an officer in the guard-tower. ‘What are you doing, socializing with the smilers? Keep your eye to your arrow slit.’ And so the guard returned to his post, watched by all the prisoners. Everybody was jumpy. A scout had sprinted back to the Farm, babbling of a blue creature with no head that ran on a dozen legs and whose back rippled like the sea . . .

All the while the Lace held their tongues. Long before they reached the Safe Farm, the grey-eyed girl’s fellow prisoners had noticed her drifting eye and her stumbling walk, and had seen that they had a Lost among them. There was only one Lace Lost – the much-sought Lady Arilou. Voicelessly the news had spread through the Safe Farm, and the guards never noticed the way that one prisoner was always shielded from their view, always had her pail of rocks lightened by stealthy hands, always had new rags tied around her injured feet.

Lady Arilou had come to the Safe Farm, and that could mean only one thing. She had come to rescue them. And so in silence they watched her, waited for a sign.

Ath
, mouthed Arilou to herself.
Hathin
.

Swallowing, Hathin held up the little pouch of white dust. Some instinct told her that she should not give it immediately, despite the terrible impatience of the gaping crater. After all, she was there to keep the mountain talking.

‘Milord . . . Lady Sorrow . . .’ The smell of volcano breath was thick in the air. She felt her voice die inside her, and her stomach plummet in panic. ‘Lady . . .’ She could not form the words.

Afterwards she could not be sure whether it had been wishful thinking, but she suddenly seemed to feel a coolness against her face, like the touch of silk against fevered skin.

Eyes like ice.
Hathin remembered the old woman from the tidings hut who had spent her life waiting for the chill touch of a certain gaze. Was it possible that a familiar pair of moonstone eyes was resting on her? She clutched the idea and would not let it go.

If it was so . . . then she was not alone. Arilou was there.

And so Hathin took heart, swallowed down the panic in her throat and found her words again. She spoke of Lady Sorrow’s emerald-and-sapphire eyes, the satin whisper of her landslides, the chalky perfection of her slopes. She continued speaking, even when the cooling sense of Arilou’s presence slipped away into the cloud.

The wind rose a little, as if Lord Spearhead had softly sighed.

‘What’s wrong with them?’ The officer strode along the ranks of the chained Lace, itching to kick them, just to make them look at him. He was sure he had heard a faintly musical sibilance of whispering among them. Now, however, their heads were bowed, their eyes lowered, watching one slack-jawed girl trailing her fingers through the dust. ‘What’s wrong with them all? What’s wrong with . . . ?’

What is wrong with the earth, why does it shudder like a fevered animal, what is wrong with the air, why does it fill our lungs with pins? What ancient thing smiles through your smiles, and why can I feel it breathing on the back of my neck?

The lolling girl spread her hand flat on the dust and gave a slight pat with her palm. She patted it again, a third time, and then let her head loll back to show her eyes, sleepily intent slivers of grey. It was only as she drowsily raised her hand again that the officer noticed a pictogram traced in the dust before her. A clumsy outline of a boat. The symbol for salvation.

Slap.

Her hand struck the ground, and dust erupted between her fingers. As one, the massed ranks of the Lace leaped to their feet and sprang upon their captors. Chains were thrown around the guards, pinioning their hands to their sides before they could reach for weapons. Others were borne down by sheer weight of numbers.

The guards in the guard-towers were not slow to turn their muskets and bows about and aim down into the compound. Before they could fire, however, there came a whirr of slings from the surrounding slopes. Stones rattled through the towers, breaking skulls and lanterns with equal ease. In the darkness an atlatl gave a soft ‘whoomph’, and an officer suddenly thought better of firing his musket into the prisoners and toppled slowly from his tower with a short spear through his sternum.

After the silence settled, the guards both living and dead were searched. The officer wearing a spear through his middle turned out to have a ring of keys on his belt. Within a minute the keys were off the ring, and manacles were rattling discarded to the ground.

A deep growl passed through the earth, and all heads turned to look towards Spearhead’s peak, almost lost among the cloud. When the ex-prisoners turned back to their rescuers, their faces held a scared question.

Whispers, whispers. Gestures towards the great blue flag. Nods. And now the prisoners were shedding jackets, cloaks, coats, and padding them out with straw, leaves, dirt. By the time the clouds started to part, a strange community of fat little figures could be seen crouched by the wall in the compound. Cloth bodies, earth bellies, heads made of buckets, legs made of sticks, feet of stones. If the Lord Spearhead looked closely, he would see that these were not his prisoners, but Lords seldom look closely at those beneath them.

Meanwhile a large, crouching gaggle of frightened Lace crept down the hill, all trying to remain as close as possible to the great blue flag which those at the heart of the crowd carried spread on their backs. Their only hope was to reach the safety of the plains before Lord Spearhead realized that he had been tricked.

The clouds were parting again. Looking down into the crater, Hathin could saw a ripple passed across the lake as the volcano softly growled.

Hathin’s voice was becoming hoarse, and she dared not try the volcano’s patience longer. She could only hope that she had bought enough time for the rescue attempt. Once again she raised the pouch high above her head.

‘Lady Sorrow has sent this token, so that you may know she has not forgotten you.’ She hesitated, then flung the little pouch out into the crater. It dropped away and dwindled to a pinpoint splash and ripple.

As Hathin hesitated, breath held, she became aware that she could see something else, a dusky, rounded growth on the inside of the crater on the far side. There was something about its outline that frightened her, like a bunched fist, or the bulging of a frowning brow. And then she realized that what really frightened her about it was the familiarity of its shape. She had seen it before on Bridle’s murky maps of Spearhead, seen it swell from a speck to a shadow to a bulge. But she had never guessed that it would be so huge. Half of Sweetweather would have fitted on that great buckling of the rock.

Bridle believes that Lord S will return when the rains end
. . .

And now at long last Hathin knew what Bridle had meant. ‘Lord S’ was not a human being at all; he was Lord Spearhead. And it seemed Bridle had been right. The mountain upon whose shoulder Hathin perched was not murmuring in half-slumber the way the volcanoes always had. The rains were ending, and Spearhead was awake, ready to return, ready for revenge.

Wetting her dry lips, Hathin cast a glance over her shoulder and almost overbalanced at the sight that met her eyes.

Now that the clouds had parted, through the gap she could see the downward slope of Spearhead, just beneath the jagged nick in his crater rim, all the way down to the long trench of the Wailing Way.

She stared at the dizzying vista for several spellbound seconds. An ancient legend somersaulted in her head, and when it landed on its feet it wore a new and terrifying aspect.

Never build in the Wailing Way, for that is the trench left by Spearhead when he roared away from his fight with the King of Fans. Some day when he is overcome with wrath and the need for revenge he will return along the same route for another battle with the King
. . .

A mountain on the move, grinding its way south-west towards the coast, hauling the skyline behind it. No. That was not what the long-dead storytellers had meant. The story had been a poetry hiding a truth, like those tales with secret directions concealed in them.

From where she was sitting, Hathin could see that the surface of the secret lake touched the bottom of the nick in the crater rim. And through this nick and below it, centuries of waters had carved a deep twisting groove down Spearhead’s flank, a dozen small rivers and streams threading into it. It was a perfect channel, and anything flowing from the crater would run right down it. Again Hathin seemed to see the miniature mountains she had made for Arilou filling up with rain, the little Spearhead’s crater filling and overflowing down the groove in its side, into the trench waiting at its base . . .

Never build in the Wailing Way.

Soon Spearhead would rouse himself from his memory of his lost love. Soon he would think to look for his prisoners. Soon he would wonder what had happened to the little messenger that had brought his gift.

For the moment that messenger could be found slithering recklessly down the scree amid a deafening
hisshhh
as the slope slid giddily away beneath her. She had no time to lose.

36

Rescue

Moving
down
the scree was certainly easier than
up
, but a lot more frightening. In some respects it was like running in slow motion, but there was nothing slow about Hathin’s descent. Her feet sank helplessly among the pebbles, and she slid down the slope with ever growing momentum, her arms flailing as she tried not to fall forward.

Thus she sailed down at the heart of her own private landslide, thanking the Superior with every breath for forcing her into boots.

When the slope at last flattened she celebrated by falling on to her behind and tobogganing to a gentle stop, then dragged herself to her feet and ran until the dead trees rose up to meet her, followed by the living.

Find Arilou. Find the Reckoning. Tell them to get out of the gorge from the crater. Make them keep out of the valley, stay away from Mistleman’s Blunder.

For what seemed like hours she struggled down through the jungle with these thoughts alone in her head. She had lost all bearings.
Down
was the only compass point left to her, so she followed it blindly.

In the end, Therrot very nearly shot her. He was a little nervous at finding himself in possession of a musket at all, and dealt with this by waving it at everything that alarmed him. The sudden eruption of a small, hooded head amid frenzied undergrowth caused a near-fatal twitch in his trigger finger, and he barely stopped himself in time.

As soon as he recognized Hathin, he recklessly threw his weapon aside and charged into the undergrowth, scooping her up into a hug. Immediately Hathin felt herself slump with weariness, as if she had finished a long journey and fallen in through her own home doorway.

‘Arilou?’ she asked.

Two of the revengers had made a seat of their crossed hands, and riding upon it was Arilou, leaning against her carriers, her face slack with exhaustion, her eyebrows plaintively raised. Her expression did not change when Hathin threw her arms around her, but Hathin did not care. Arilou was alive, safe. Eyes squeezed shut, she held her limp sister tight.

She wanted to fuss at the blisters on Arilou’s hands and feet, but Therrot picked Hathin up like a small child and carried her. And it was thus, half lulled despite herself by the rocking of his stride, that Hathin gabbled everything that she had seen and heard.

She was not the only one being carried. Many adults had small, round-eyed children in their arms, a lot of them weak from hunger and fatigue. Intentionally or no, Spearhead’s tremors had done his fellow revengers a service. When the volcano had first growled, most of those guarding the Lace children in the Ashlands of the foothills and lower slopes had abandoned their posts, and the remainder had fled when they found themselves facing the Reckoning.

‘We’ll move through the jungle,’ rumbled Dance. ‘We’ll come out on the mountain’s eastern side. We must be out on to the plains before dawn.’

‘
Long
before dawn,’ remarked Jaze. ‘As soon as the sky lightens the Lord will notice that his prisoners have buckets for heads. And when that happens I for one hope to be a long, long way away.’

‘What about . . . ?’ Hathin fought against the numbness of her exhaustion. ‘What about Mistleman’s Blunder?’