Gullstruck Island (54 page)

‘The timbers won’t hold forever,’ said Prox at last, his voice rough as sawdust with effort. ‘It’s not the rocks, it’s the weight of the ash. It’ll be the ash.’

He might as well have said,
It’ll be the ash that does for us.
There was a pause.

‘Others be well,’ Hathin said quietly in Nundestruth. It didn’t seem like a Doorsy moment. ‘Others reach temple. Hidemhole for night.’

Prox looked up at her, then nodded.

‘We win,’ Hathin said. ‘We save them. We beat mountain.’

There was a pause, and then Prox nodded again and smiled. His seamed face softened and rounded, and his eyes seemed to brighten and become his own again. That small smile was the last thing Hathin saw before the roof caved in on them, smashing the lamp.

39

All Change

Dawn came grudgingly, and several hours late. A dull sun parted the clouds of steam and ash nervously, afraid perhaps of what it might find.

It found Spearhead biting a new and jagged shape out of the sky. The spear in his crater rim had blown itself apart, leaving a crinkled gash. The nick in the rim had become a gaping V shape, through which steam still billowed. He had seared away his fury, and now stared bleakly at what he had done.

What had he expected? Had he thought to see this, a world cloaked in soft, all-smothering grey? No birds circled in his sky any more. The jungles were gone, flattened by winds, burnt by giant falling embers, drowned in ash. The lush patter of leaf on leaf, the hoot and howl of monkeys, the drill and whirr of insects, all choked into a slumberous silence.

Mistleman’s Blunder was gone. The roaring dragon of lake water and boiling mud had swept it away, leaving only here or there a blue-crusted brass bell from a clock tower, an anvil adrift, the broken wall of an old storehouse. The rest was a slick of drying, steaming mud, dotted with black, pockmarked rocks like burnt loaves.

There was a silence, but for a crackling rustle deep within what had been the jungle. Dozens of white-faced people were still struggling out of forgotten stone temples, pushing their way through the curtain of tough, straggling vines that had saved their lives. Now there were no Lace, no towners. The ash that covered their faces made them one race, bleached them into kinship.

And then there was another sound. It was a terrible keening, croaking cry with the true ugliness of pain that does not care how it sounds.

Arilou lay full length on the earth, wailing and thumping the ashen ground with the heels of her hands. The Reckoning stood in a circle around her, and did not know what to say to each other.

They were all certain in their heart of hearts that Arilou was mourning the loss of her sister.

As a matter of fact, Arilou was not doing anything of the sort.

Dip down. Dance like a midge just above the earth, waver with the strain of make-myself-do-it. Charred shards of tree, spiralling white vapour, thick wind-rippled dunes of ash, getting closer closer closer almost touching. Feel roughness of stones. Flinch don’t want to. Want to send down eyes and ears but won’t do. Too dark. Have to feel the way.

Rocks full of tiny foamy holes. Push into the ground, through the rocks, feel each raking through my mind as go into darkness. Want to thrash, want to scream, want to not do it. Deeper. Shard and shingle, splinter and spike, feel them all pass through. Like swallowing coals with mind.

Ash gets in my thoughts, forget which way is up. Panic! Panic and plunge! Somewhere body I cannot feel any more is flailing. Plunging mind onwards, darkness, darkness. A strangling cord nearly cuts mind in two. Tree root. Follow tree root down and down, to mud, hot mud. Hot, hot, hot.

Scramble back to the air, bruising mind on stones. Can’t do it again can’t can’t can’t.

Do it again.

Must find Hathin.

Afterwards, when people talked of the day following the great rage of Spearhead (or Broken Brow as he was afterwards known), Arilou’s name was spoken with reverence. It was she, the last Lady Lost, who searched through the earth with her mind and found many who had taken refuge in cellars or hollow trees and been buried alive. No longer Arilou the treacherous, Arilou the murderous. Now she was Arilou the heroine.

She was tireless, sleepless. Again and again she staggered to her feet like a new calf, and led the way at a lurch to some other buried victim, her mouth hanging loose and forgotten. Every time someone was found alive there was celebration, and yet behind the eyes of every would-be rescuer lurked a question.
Where is Hathin?

By the end of the second day, however, the few bodies that were being dug out no longer held the spark of life, and it seemed probable that the rescuers had saved all who could be saved. None of the Reckoning would say as much out loud, but they shared a fear that Hathin, child of the dust, had quietly slipped back into dust. It was as if she had held centre stage only as long as she needed to, and then had shyly crept back into invisibility, this time forever.

And yet nobody was willing to give up the search. Lace and townspeople alike struggled across the grey plain, calling out, looking for prints, shifting the fallen trees, their footprint trails furrowing the deep ash.

On the second evening, as Arilou rose unsteadily, eyes red from the sting of the ash, Therrot sprang to his feet, only to find his legs unwilling to support him. He was caught by Jaze, who carefully lowered him to the ground.

‘Therrot . . .’ Jaze’s tone would have been gentle if it had come from someone else.

‘I know what you’re going to say. Don’t tell me to prepare myself. I don’t want to be prepared.’

Jaze studed Therrot’s face and then gave a long, deeply saddened sigh.

‘There might be a time when you have to let go. You still haven’t learned how to do that, have you?’

‘No,’ said Therrot bluntly as he staggered to his feet again, cupped a supporting hand under Arilou’s elbow and let her lead him away for the twentieth time along the colourless plain. And Jaze, for all his talk of letting go, followed them, as did Tomki and Jeljech.

Hathin was nowhere. Hathin was everywhere. Everything in the deathly landscape had her secretiveness, her careful blandness, her quietness, her stubborness.
Hathin
, whispered the wind-borne dust as it settled on the slopes.
Hathin
, lisped the ash as it rained upon the plain.

‘You hear that, Arilou?’ Therrot muttered with fevered intensity. ‘Your sister must be still alive. The mountain is still talking to her. All the mountains talk to her.’

Exhausted and stumbling, Arilou led them along the route the fugitives had taken from Mistleman’s Blunder, up the side of the valley. There, quite abruptly, she slumped as if in a faint. Nothing that anyone could do would make her rise from where she lay, resting her chin on a ridge sticking up from the ash. And for a while everyone was too glazed with exhaustion and frustration to realize what the ridge was. It was the angular spine of a half-buried slanting tiled roof.

An instant later, willing hands were scooping away the ash, lifting fractured timbers, picking out tiles. Jaze called down to the plain and soon more figures were struggling up the incline to help. At last a small boot became visible, then another, and everyone picked up the pace until a diminutive figure was uncovered. Hathin was half-curled, as though she had made herself as small as possible so as to be no trouble to anyone.

They almost failed to notice Prox at all. At the instant that half the roof had collapsed he had flung himself across to push his small companion out of the way, and the worst of it had fallen on to him, burying him completely. But by chance Jaze noticed some pale fingers through the rubble at a little distance from Hathin, and they set themselves to clearing the rest of the debris away. And if there were some among the Reckoning who recognized him and suggested that he should be left there under the wrecked hut . . . perhaps it is best if such words lie buried.

Hathin looked for all the world like a child of dust, white and still, as if a careless hand might crumble her. For once she had the serene, angelic strangeness of her sister, the ash powdering her face like the chalk dust Arilou wore for formal occasions. But Therrot rubbed at the ashen face and found pinky brown skin underneath, and poured water over her clamped mouth until it went up her nose and resulted in a far from angelic sneeze. And then Therrot flung himself backwards on the slope and howled at the hills, for true joy like true pain does not care how it looks or sounds.

When someone thought to check a little while later, it turned out that Minchard Prox also had a pulse.

It was not a good time to be Minchard Prox. Half the island wanted to blame him for everything, half of them wanted him to tell them what they should do. Everybody wanted answers from him. And the answers he had to give did not really make anybody happy.

There has been a colossal and terrible mistake, and I have made it. Lady Arilou and the Lace are innocent. Every Lace who has died at our hands was murdered. Those who killed the villagers of the Hollow Beasts and other innocent Lace must be found and put on trial. All the Lace who have been held prisoner in Safe Farms and secret labour camps must be set free. All the Lace villagers who were robbed of their homes must be built new ones. And I, who am the most guilty, will make sure this happens, and then submit myself for trial.

Those who truly murdered the Lost and framed the Lace must be tracked down. They killed the Lost because they did not want them to tell us that the volcanoes are waking up. They were afraid that if we did not build on the mountains we would starve. They were right. We will. Unless we do what we should have done many, many years ago, and start reclaiming the land from the dead.

There was utter uproar. Prox was a blasphemer, a murderer, a defamer, a rabble-rouser. But what could be done about him? After all, who had set up bird-back messenger networks to take the place of the tidings huts? Prox. Who was even now setting up a new carrier-pigeon post and a system for food distribution? Prox. Who had been organizing patrols to round up bandits now the Lost could not look for them? Prox. And who was working with the last Lost left alive? Prox. There was no point in looking to Port Sudden-wind for such things.

So he remained at large, but abhorred by many. He grew used to the sudden jab of a flung stone against his cheek, to the lowering of voices when he entered the room, to hearing his own windows smash. A few attempts were even made on his life, but somehow none of them quite reached him. A man who had been squatting on a roof with a pistol aimed at Prox’s heart somehow managed to fall two storeys on to his own head. Two attackers who broke into his house with hatchets fled again almost immediately with bleeding crowns. Prox thought as he peered out of his bedroom window that he glimpsed a third figure in pursuit of them, a large figure with long loose dreadlocks thumping against her back as she ran, a spiked club in her hand.

Dance had disappeared shortly after the discovery of Hathin and Prox, taking with her Jaze and many of the other revengers who had survived the rescue raids. After a little thought Prox had thought it best to record them as ‘lost during the events of the Spearhead eruption’. It was not quite a lie.

Prox did find support from an unexpected source. The Superior of Jealousy, still exulting in his new freedom, declared that he was quite willing to move his ancestors’ urns and let his people farm the Ashlands. But others were slow to follow suit, and the Superior himself was too busy with wedding preparations to offer Prox any more practical help than this. He had discovered to his delight that he
did
have a housekeeper. And his housekeeper, who had patiently and loyally looked after the irascible little man for decades without him noticing her, had been surprised but pleased by his offer of marriage and had accepted immediately.

The only person who suffered as much as Prox was poor Arilou, everyone’s heroine. No longer could she retreat into her private world to flit her mind where she chose like a butterfly. Everybody had found her out. She was no imbecile, she was the only living Lost, and suddenly all the problems of the island were laid at her feet for her to solve. Someone had to watch for storms, hunt down the rest of Camber’s allies . . .

And there was no Hathin to help her. For Hathin seemed to be capable of nothing but sleep. From time to time she would wake, look up from her bed at whichever room or tent she found herself in, and feel nothing in particular. It was not unpleasant, but her body felt empty, like a kicked-off slipper. And so she would close her eyes and go to sleep again, to wake up on another day.

Then at last one day she woke up and she felt she might get up. She stood, and ducked her way out of the tent, and found herself watching blue silk waves lollop and sparkle, rending themselves softly on the hidden reefs. She did not need to see the dark-stained sand, the tooth-like fragments of coral in the shingle. One taste of the air was enough to tell her that she was on the Coast of the Lace.