Gullstruck Island

  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.

  He had thought to find her leading the way, since navigation would be best left to one who could command an eagle-eye view at will. However, it was the shorter girl who gripped the passively dangling wrist of the Lady Lost and led her, almost dragged her, up the side of the hill. This could only mean one thing. The Lady Lost had left her body to the care of her attendant because she had sent out her mind to keep an eye on him.

  The Lady Lost turned her head blindly in his direction, and then her legs folded oddly and seemed to give beneath her.

  ‘Oh, not now, Arilou, please, not now!’

  Hathin threw herself on her knees and gripped Arilou by the shoulders. Arilou’s face was quivering with an expression Hathin had not seen in her before. She had seen shock, dismay, rage, disquiet, but never this look of deep, soul-shaking panic. Again Arilou was moving her hands about, feelingly, searchingly, grasping at stones, at grass, her head turning with a twitch as though hoping to catch some elusive glimpse.

  Hathin felt a chill pass over her. It was one thing for Arilou to be doing that in the tunnel, bewildered by the dark, but now they were in the light. Arilou’s senses had often seemed confused, perhaps short-sighted, and a lot of the time she seemed to care little what was around her, but she had never seemed so . . . blind. Right now she looked as if she was trying to see something, expected to see something and couldn’t.

  ‘Please, I’m here, we’ve got to, we’ve got to . . .’ Hathin tried to hoist Arilou’s weight, but their legs gave under them and Arilou continued twitching and drawing in audible gasps of fear. ‘I’m here, I’m here . . .’

  But, she suddenly realized, it wasn’t that Arilou didn’t know where Hathin was. It was that Arilou didn’t know where Arilou was. Hypnotized, Hathin watched Arilou’s look of fevered concentration as her fingers fluttered over the surface of the earth as though trying to read it. And then Arilou reached upwards with trembling hands, snatching fistfuls of nothing and dragging it to her, clumsily hauling in an invisible rope hand over hand in a motion that was all too familiar . . .

  ‘Oh, don’t you dare!’ shouted Hathin. ‘Don’t you dare tell me you’re trying to reel yourself in! Don’t you dare tell me you’re trying to play the doll game! That’s it, isn’t it? You left your body in that nice Doorsy house in Sweetweather, and then you went back and you couldn’t find it, is that it? Don’t you dare tell me after everything that’s happened that you’ve been a Lost all the time! You had your chances to be Lost, and now it’s too late, you’re only allowed to be an idiot! Don’t you dare tell me that all along you’ve been Lost and could have saved everyone, because you didn’t, and now they’re dead, they’re dead, they’re all dead . . .’

  Hathin tightened both arms around Arilou and heaved at her dead weight. ‘You’re not going to get me killed as well! Get up! Get up!’

  The younger girl was crouched beside the Lady Lost, trying to lift her, calling something in a high, faint voice that Brendril could hardly hear. The girls flat
tened themselves as the wind rose, and Brendril was tensing to begin the run down the valley when he became aware of a papery pattering further up the slope. Other clouds had come to join the King’s fans, he suddenly realized, and the distant ones were dropping faint misty streamers that meant rain. And suddenly the grass around him was jumping and shocking beetles into dozy, beleaguered flight and there were cold finger-taps on his skull and shoulders and neck.

  The only available shelter was a big black rock with an overhang further along the ridge, and Brendril sprinted for it. Panic made his footsteps slither uncertainly, and he lost his footing three times before reaching the rock. Crawling under it, and tucking his feet up to keep them dry, he fumbled in his pack until his fingers curled around a wooden handle. A moment later the Ashwalker was crouched under a large black parasol, smudgy with the wax he had used to waterproof it.

  The Lady Lost had collapsed in exhaustion; he saw that now. The younger girl had given up trying to lift her and watched him round-eyed across the dip, as incapable of proceeding as he was. They were barely twenty yards from him, and unreachable, and for once no signs appeared to Brendril to dilute his frustration.

  They were exhausted. He was still full of energy.

  They were slow. He was fast.

  The indigo dye, however, was not.

  Hathin stared in incomprehension across the narrow gorgelike valley that divided them from the Ashwalker. She could make out his features quite clearly now. She could see the way indigo dye had run out of the bandanna that swathed his head, trailing dark fingers down his face and neck. She could see the white scars of briar scratches on his blue calves, the fraying garments that he wore in layer upon layer, the new over the old. And he looked back at her with white-ringed, waiting eyes.

  But Hathin was not ready to talk with Death just yet, so she tightened her grip around Arilou once more and, with an effort of more than muscle, lifted both of them to their feet.

  And the King of Fans said, I have been betrayed, but I shall not be betrayed again. From this moment my memory shall run back to front. My past is full of happiness and pain I cannot bear to recall, so I shall not. I shall instead gaze into the book of the future and remember only that, so that I may behold treachery before it happens. From this moment I look only forward.

  12

  Sorrow in Silence

  We have run off the edge of our world, thought Hathin as she stared up through a grey faceful of rain. There are no stories to tell us where to go now. We have passed the point where the stories end.

  She wiped her wet face with a wet hand, tasting the salt of sweat and tears, and stared about her. If they kept running up and down the ridges she knew they would wear themselves out, and the Ashwalker would catch them. Their only hope was to scramble uphill while it was still raining and lose him in the King’s fans.

  Oh, in the cloud they might be invisible to the Ashwalker, but what of the King himself? Would he not notice them immediately?

  So what? thought Hathin suddenly. So what if he steals us away as nursemaids for his children? Even if he chooses to burn us into cinder patterns, so what? At least then we’d go straight to the caves of the dead, instead of spending our ever-after as an Ashwalker’s handkerchief. What have we to lose?

  The grass thinned to clumps as they struggled up the slope, then yielded to a shifting shale made up of blackened pebbles that slithered away under their feet. The wind became stronger as they mounted higher, snatching their breath away. Arilou’s weight in Hathin’s arms was agonizing. Every step was impossible and got them nowhere and yet, somehow, they reached the clouds at last. Instantly the wind became vindictive, bullying and buffeting. Occasionally fragments of pale blue sky skimmed high above their heads. It was cold up here, and Hathin’s sodden clothes chilled her.

  Then, just at the point where the wind was at its cruellest, where they could not stand and could not breathe and could not see for the tiny pebbles that stung their faces and eyes, suddenly there was no more up to climb. And Hathin knew that they had reached the top of the long looping saddle-ridge that linked the King of Fans to his ice-white wife, allowing the two mountains to hold hands.

  The wind lessened, the air grew colder still and the clouds shifted. Jagged rocky pedestals loomed with eerie suddenness so that it seemed they had drawn in to surround the two girls, and Hathin halted, feeling like a captured intruder. But then the vapour thinned some more, and a great blackened slab became visible, resting on two smaller boulders. It was as though a long table had suddenly been made ready for the sisters, lichen tracings like embroidery across its length. Two stump-like rocks awaited them like stools.

  You could not run from a volcano. And you never, never turned down a volcano’s invitation.

  Her legs almost giving under her, Hathin guided the still-whimpering Arilou to one of the ‘seats’, then shakily lowered herself on to the other, fearing all the while that she would see the Ashwalker leap out of the mist. But they had stepped into a dream, and dreams have their own rules.

  The King has decided not to destroy us for now – what does he want with us?

  The very centre of the table was split, and a single flower grew from the crack, a slim and perfect white bloom with a long, downy orange tongue. Notoriously, the King of Fans liked to have young girls and women around him, the fairer the better. Could it be . . . was it even possible that in giving this flower the King of Fans was flirting with them? If so, then the flower could only be meant for Arilou.

  The King of Fans remembered events that had not yet happened. What if he already remembered kidnapping Hathin and Arilou, forcing them to serve him as nursemaids into old age, until each of them gnarled into one of the tiny, twisted trees that dotted his sides? If he remembered it, didn’t that mean it was bound to happen? Hathin tried to twist her exhausted brain back to front.

  A flower . . . a snow-white flower. Perhaps it was not meant for Arilou at all. Suddenly Hathin thought of a future that might have created this present, and a way to bring that future about.

  Gingerly, quietly, Hathin slumped off her chair on to her knees and started scrabbling on the ground for a sharpened stone.

  Brendril trod very carefully amid the cloud fans of the King. His magical protection might render him invisible to the volcano, but that was worth nothing if he drew attention to his presence by setting off rockslides or startling birds into the air. The rain shower had been just long enough for the girls to get out of sight, but their steps had left a slight furrow in the shale, and he followed it closely, hoping that his own footprints would be lost in it.

  At last he reached the top of the ridge and discovered a great stone slab was borne on the backs of two low, turtle-like stones. An altar, clearly. The two girls had unquestionably passed that way, for a plant growing from the slab’s crevice had been snapped off close to the base. Whatever ritual they had come here to perform, however, they must have completed it. The Lady Lost and her companion were nowhere to be seen.

  But stark lines and shapes had been scratched into the overgrown and charred mass covering a rock nearby. It was, he realized, a picture.

  Two figures in the old Lace pictogram style. One had a picture of an eye floating above her head to show that she was a Lost. They were holding hands, and clasped between their combined fingers sprouted something . . . a flower. The pair of figures was drawn again, again, again, to show a progression. They were walking, first on the level and then up the side of a cone with a blunt tip – clearly a volcano. Down the side of the volcano ran a single teardrop.

  Brendril straightened and stared out towards the volcano called Sorrow.

  The hastily scratched picture seemed to have done its work. It had, of course, been a message for the King of Fans, telling him that the two sisters would take a gift from him to Sorrow, a single flower. Words would have done no good at all, for a second after they were spoken they would have belonged to the past, and the King could not remember the past. But a picture would endur
e into the future. This way, as they left his lands, the King would still have the picture before him, so that he might just keep in mind who they were and why they should be allowed to leave.

  But thinking like this made Hathin’s brain ache, and she had enough to worry about. She was approaching the domain of Sorrow.

  The ridge that joined the King and Sorrow was really a long, thin plateau, like a hanging bridge half a mile wide. The edges of the plateau were hidden in cloud, and it was easy to imagine one was trapped on some strange and interminable plain. As Hathin passed on to this weird, raised plateau, the petulant wind abruptly abandoned them, giving way to an eerily soft breath of breeze that rose and fell as gently as a sigh without passion.

  The black shale yielded to grey, and everything was coated with a ghostly, ever-shifting white powder. On either side the plain was dotted with lone rocks, shallow tracks on the wind-lee side of them as if they had been trying to roll from this wide, white waste but had surrendered to despair.

  House-high wraiths of mist and cloud chased across the plain like ladies-in-waiting on an urgent errand. Here there were no birds, no trees, no grass. Legends spoke of those few heroes who had dared to speak with the King of Fans and survived. There were no stories of anyone approaching Sorrow.

  The ground started to decline, and then Hathin became aware of a glimmer of colour amid the deathly landscape. Jewelled hues, startling in their brilliance. The veils of mist yielded and yielded, until Hathin halted and found herself looking into the eyes of Sorrow.

  They were mismatched, the larger lake tear-shaped and peacock green, the smaller peacock blue and oval. The water was motionless and lucid, concentric ripples of sediment staining the bottom with hummingbird hues. Lidless, lashless, pitiless. Beyond the lakes the ground ascended sharply, rising towards the invisible crater.