‘She says she’s not needed,’ Prox said at last, with the slightly apologetic tone he often used with Therrot and many of the other Lace. The atmosphere between them was still tense, and Prox could not blame the Lace man for disliking him.
‘Not needed?’ Therrot stared at him. ‘I suppose you pointed out that she’s the only person everybody trusts now? The Lace, the towners who know what she did in Mistle-man’s Blunder, the Superior of Jealousy, the Sours, not to mention the mountains – how does she think everybody’s going to keep talking to each other if she’s not there?’
‘No. No, I didn’t tell her that. I thought I’d give her five minutes without people needing her to do something, even if the idea scares her.’
A slow dawn spread across Therrot’s face, and then he gave a curt nod.
‘She doesn’t know who she is, does she?’ said Prox.
Therrot shook his head, and the two of them sat and watched the Gripping Bird dancing from face to face down below.
Hathin skulked in the Lacery for some time, waiting for Arilou and her retinue to leave the beach. At last the litter moved to the pulley chair, and Arilou was helped into it, her new Sour sister sitting beside her to stop her falling, just as Hathin had once done.
Arilou the Lady Lost, floating upwards with her white robes flickering around her, as if she was a cloud that had visited earth and was returning to her kind. Goodbye, Arilou, goodbye. Arilou no longer needed Hathin, and Hathin could not bear to be with her and be unneeded. It was right that Arilou was rising in the world, becoming all that she might, taking her place as the Lost of Gullstruck. And Hathin would not cling to her, would not slow her ascent.
‘Athn,’ said Arilou. She was too far away for the sound to reach Hathin, but the movement of her mouth was unmistakable.
Hathin felt a brief and curious sensation, like cold silk slithering over her skin. The gaze of a Lost - why were their eyes like ice? Was it because there was something lonely in their spirits? Knowing that Arilou was watching her, Hathin raised one hand in a small wave.
Arilou put out a hand, palm forward, and dabbed it at the air, as though patting at an invisible face. And there it was, that oh-so-rare, wise-wicked monkey smile. Then the pulley chair reached the top of the cliff, and Arilou was helped out and vanished with her entourage along the precipice pathway.
Hathin sank back against the rock that hid her. Now at least she had the beach to herself. But no, she could hear two voices murmuring, voices of children younger than herself. She ducked down behind her boulder so that she would not be seen, and listened.
‘. . . heroine of Spearhead,’ one of them was saying. ‘She’s beautiful, isn’t she? But scary.’
‘Yes,’ agreed the second voice. ‘She’s descended from a pirate - you can really see it when you look at her, can’t you?’
Hathin smiled a little despite herself. Poor Arilou, her legend rolling out in front of her like an eternal carpet.
‘. . . hunted her all over the island but she was too clever for them . . .’
‘. . . tricked them into letting her come all the way to the Safe Farm . . .’
‘. . . leading the Reckoning . . .’
‘. . . saved everybody . . .’
And that was how everyone would remember things. People all over the island would be speaking of Arilou like this for centuries. Arilou, who been hunted across Gullstruck, but who had led the Reckoning to victory and saved everybody. Well, what did I want, recognition? No, Hathin realized, I did everything I did because, well, I’m me.
Quietly, so as not to be noticed, she got up and slipped off to the brink of the Lacery, where the shallow water slopped gently at her feet. She glanced down at her reflection, and stopped dead.
A pirate was looking back at her.
The pirate wore a broad-brimmed hat with a sun-bleached crown, good boots and a torn tunic. It wore a green-dyed sash around its middle and carried a sheathed knife at its belt. Two ominous-looking tattoos marked its forearms, a lace-work of tinier scars freckling the knuckles and bare arms. Its face had been burnt gipsy-dark by long days in the sun.
Hathin looked over her shoulder, just in time to see two small heads duck sharply down behind a rock. They were watching her. With the same sense of weightlessness she had felt just before Spearhead erupted, Hathin realized that they had been watching her all along. They had not been talking about Arilou at all. They had been talking about her.
For the first time she wondered if her pirate ancestor had not been beautiful and fine-featured like Arilou. Perhaps he had found himself lying on this beach amid the flinders of his ship, and looked around with wide-apart eyes and a patch of troubled water in the middle of his brow, and thought, Well, this is the way the world is. Let us make the best of things and set about surviving here, shall we?
The two younger children, awed by their own presumption, were running away up the beach, and Hathin turned back to her reflection.
Who am I? The shell-selling Lace girl, the attendant of Lady Arilou, Mother Govrie’s other daughter, the thing of dust, the victim, the revenger, the diplomat, the crowd-witch, the killer, the rescuer, the pirate?
I am anything I wish to be. The world cannot choose for me. No, it is for me to choose what the world shall be.
Slowly, watching her reflected smile in the water, Hathin raised her hands and gave them two rapid claps.
‘All change!’ she whispered.
And all around her, with a soft golden roar like a lion waking, the world was changing.
Glossary
Gullstruck
The island of Gullstruck rests in splendid isolation, with no other land for hundreds of miles. Seen from above, its outline looks a lot like a hurrying hunchback figure with uncannily extended fingers and toes and a twisted, gaping bird beak. It is said that Gullstruck was fashioned by the Gripping Bird, a capering bird-man trickster, who shaped the island in his own image.
Much of ‘him’ is inhospitable, his head and shoulders wracked with giddying ravines and choked with cloud forests, his belly and legs barren land. But between these, in the region of his waist, lies a band of verdant land, the playground of the volcanoes.
A long ridge of mountains divides the mad, frilled western coast from the rest of the island, and the tallest and middlemost of these mountains is the King of Fans, cloud-shrouded and momentous. Beside him to the north-east sits his wife, Sorrow, the white volcano. Twenty miles further north of them sulks Spearhead with his barbed summit, standing at a sullen distance from the file of other mountains. Far towards the eastern side of the island steams Crackgem the Mad, amid his wildly coloured lakes. And out amid the hiss of scalding sea off the west coast, vapour twisting like wild hair, crouches Mother Tooth.
The Tribes
The original denizens of Gullstruck. According to legend, the Gripping Bird fashioned the original tribes of the island from anything he had to hand. He used berries for making the Bitter Fruit, who dwelt in the northern jungles; geyser vapour for the Dancing Steam, who lived on the hills and lakes around Crackgem; resin for the Amber, who kept to the barren southlands; and coral for the Lace, who had once been scattered all over the western half of the island but now scratched out a living on the ragged western coast.
The Cavalcaste
Originally from a distant land of plains and snow, the Cavalcaste put to sea to find new lands that they could divide up and dedicate to their sacred ancestors. They soon dominated Gullstruck, and although the majority of people are now of mixed race, most of the governors and men of power have a lot of Cavalcaste blood.
Port Suddenwind
The first landing point of the Cavalcaste fleet, where a ‘sudden wind’ blew their ships into a small bay allowing them to drop anchor. A popular joke has it that nothing sudden has happened there since. Port Suddenwind is now the home of the government of Gullstruck, a grinding, monolithic heap of useless laws that nobody can throw away.
The Lost
The Lost
are born with the ability to move their senses out of their bodies and send them abroad. They are scarce and are highly respected, providing their local communities with news, communication with the rest of the island, warnings of storms and other dangers, and a roaming watch for bandits. Led by the Sightlords of the Lost Council, they are in many respects as powerful as the city governors who follow the orders of Port Suddenwind.
The Volcanoes
The tallest and middlemost mountain in the long western ridge of the island is the King of Fans, his cratered head forever lost in the clouds. Beside him to the north-east sits his wife, Sorrow, softly and perfectly conical, sweet and treacherous as snow. Twenty miles further north of them sulks Spearhead with his barbed summit, standing at a sullen distance from the file of other mountains. An old battle with the King of Fans has nicked his crater rim and left a long gouge in his flank, down which fierce streams rage. At Spearhead’s base these streams become a river which over the millennia have worn a long valley towards cold, beautiful Sorrow, and past her to the south. Far towards the eastern side of the island, isolated by universal consent, steams Crackgem the Mad, piebald in black and green, amid his wildly coloured orchid lakes. And out amid the hiss of scalding sea off the west coast, vapour twisting like wild hair, crouches Mother Tooth.
A Note from the Author
Neither the tribes of Gullstruck nor the Cavalcaste are designed to resemble or comment upon specific real-world races. Here and there I have worked in elements taken from various different cultures because they suited the story, but the world of Gullstruck is basically fantastical.
Acknowledgements
I would like to give my thanks to the following: my editor Ruth, my agent Nancy and my housemate Liz for persuading me that this book should not be dropped into a lava spout and forgotten; Martin for running up and down volcanoes with me; the museums at Rotorua and Te Wairoa for details of the Tarawera eruptions; a New Zealand fantail who followed me down a path pecking at my shadow and the beetles my footsteps had disturbed; the hill tribes of Sapa, where foreheads are shaven, cloths are hung in doorways to keep out evil and the Black Hmong’s faces and hands are stained with indigo from their smoke-scented clothes; Helen Walters for her first-hand account of baking alive on a drifting boat; Profound Decisions and the superlative Maelstrom; the Escuela Sevilla in Antigua, Guatemala; the Maori legend of the rivalry of Taranaki and Tongariro for the beautiful Pihanga; Carol for kindness and hospitality; The Maya by Michael D. Coe; Taranaki, Tarawera, Tongariro, Ruapehu, Whakaari, Ngauruhoe, Baldera, Mount St Helens, Arenal, Fuego, Pacaya and, last but not least, my favourite volcano, Felix Egmont Geiringer.
I should also mention a young girl who appeared quite suddenly in the middle of a jungle temple in Cambodia and followed me around with quiet stubbornness until I noticed her. She had wide-apart eyes, a faint whisper of a voice and a civet-like creature perched on one shoulder. She wanted me to blow up her balloon. This done, she vanished again among the trees. I will never know who she was.
Table of Contents
CONTENTS
Prelude
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2
3
4
5
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Glossary
Frances Hardinge, Gullstruck Island
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