Clouds End

  “I will have to ask you not to sleep with her again.”

  Rope flinched. “Of course. I will never—”

  “I realize I should not be upset. After all, why is sex any different than talking from your heart, or holding hands, or working a fishing boat with someone? You spent days alone with Foam and I was never this jealous. But this hurts me.” (Did you like it? Did she make you feel good? Was she better than me? Of course, of course she was. Brook crushed the questions down. She could not ask, she would never ask them.)

  “I love you,” Rope said, clasping her hand in his.

  Brook flinched at his touch.

  She was still awake when the rain slowed and stopped. Still awake when grey light crept into the room.

  She imagined Jo, lying asleep in her little house. Lying as Brook had seen her lie so often on their way to the Arbor and back. Asleep, the haunt seemed much smaller. Too small to twin an emperor! Too small to hack away the lines that held Brook to the world. Her white wrists were thin and her long fingers not even so strong as Shale’s. Often she lay on her back with her head lolling to one side, and her long white throat seemed as fragile as a girl’s.

  Across the room Brook could see the little oil stove where she did her cooking. Rope’s sword hung above it on the wall, a trophy from their journey. It had come a long way with them, that sword. Taken from Cherry Gall after he’d been killed by Seven the night they fled from Delta.

  Jo so fey on the way back, prowling the camp like a restless animal, smoking and pacing until she dropped with exhaustion. So still, so still, lying beside the fire. So many times Brook thought she had stopped breathing, and her own heart raced. Then at last the haunt’s chest would rise.

  It had come a long way with them, that sword.

  Beside her, the man who had fathered her children, who had walked the marriage knots with her, lay still, pretending to sleep.

  There are two ways to untie a knot, Brook thought. Rope beside her. The sword in its leather sheath hanging on the wall. You can follow it out to its end, past all the bitter twists, past all the loops that wring your heart.

  So still Jo was, so small asleep. Hardly more than a girl.

  Or you can cut it.

  Rope stirred and pillowed his head on his arm, looking up at her. “What are you thinking?”

  “Nothing,” Brook said.

  CHAPTER 25

  THE STORY OF THE SEVENTH WAVE

  SOME WEEKS later, near summer’s end, Rope woke early. In the east the sky was grey as ashes. He thought to get some water from the creek for tea, thought to bustle about the business of breakfast. Then he looked at Brook sleeping beside him and shame froze him.

  Every day now was a journey across a sheet of rotten ice. With a look, a word, the world gave way beneath him and he was plunged in misery. Solid, dependable Rope—and he had betrayed her. He remembered Jo’s warm back curved beneath him as he thrust, and then Brook—her wooden limbs, her broken voice. Guilt gripped his heart, and he did not even have the right to resent it. Worthless, he had thrown away the only worthwhile thing he had.

  He had fallen from Jo’s life. Brook did not allow the haunt to come to their house or talk to the children. Rope did not dare meet Jo’s eyes if they passed in the village. He and Jo had been a Clove-Hitch story: one easily pulled apart.

  He would never be Trader, of course. He would be (he tasted the thought) the Witness’s husband, like genial Moss. Someone to organize picnics and gather gossip for Brook to weave into the ongoing story of Clouds End. Anchored here unless he was willing to sail away without her. He had been left standing on the dock, while Brook sank her roots into the island, and Jo drifted out to sea.

  He felt a tingle around his left wrist. Net poked a sleepy grey frond out into the morning air, shivered and withdrew. A moment later he crept forth again and inched along Rope’s left hand. He reared like a caterpillar, swaying with the faint breeze that crept through the shutter. He was pinking up now. He began to reach out toward Rope’s right hand, cautious as a cat putting paw to water. Farther and farther he leaned, clamping ever more tightly around Rope’s left thumb, so that the tingling intensified, running like warm water along the inside of Rope’s wrist.

  The rising sun’s first dart caught Net a glancing blow, knocking him gold. He flailed wildly for Rope’s right hand, just managing to wrap one frond around his master’s thumb. Now the warmth circled Rope’s chest, running down each arm and jumping across to the opposite hand. The wind came up outside, and Net swayed between his thumbs like a lace of sunshine.

  Clouds End stretched and sighed as if glad of the sun’s warmth. The morning birdsong began in earnest. A pair of squirrels went dashing over the roof. The dawn wind swept down from the morning sky and shook out a few early leaves.

  For the first time in many weeks Rope felt at peace. He was not past his guilt or his shame; soon the day would begin with all its memories. But he had looked out through his shuttered window and glimpsed the sky and remembered, if only for a moment, that the world was a great mystery. He was a husband and a sailor and a father. His home was all around him, and beyond it the sea and the sky and stars. He remembered what Garden had said: that the real world was full of marvels and adventures so big they were easy to overlook.

  And Rope thought then that life too was a series of waves made by the wind, and the wind was the Singer’s voice, and each life was part of a great story. And when he was unhappy and confused, it was good to remember that sea and sky were still there, far greater than his problems, and the story he was in was their story too.

  * * *

  A small rivulet had been diverted from the fat end of Teardrop Pond to water the herb garden. Here the soft air was all about plants. It glowed green, with banks of vivid flowers; it smelled of cilantro and clover; it was full of the sound of growing. Sunlight, which elsewhere dashed spangles off the sea, or fell in pale stripes through wooden shutters, seemed in the garden to well down from the leaf tips, smooth and gold as honey.

  Rope had come here with Feather and Boots and his two best friends. “Go ahead and play,” he said to his children. “I mean to talk a while with Foam and Shale.”

  Feather raced off. Boots went more slowly, trudging by the little stream and frowning into its depths.

  “They’re good kids,” Foam said, stretching out on the grass with his back propped against an old aspen. There was something like longing in his eyes as he watched Boots stump downstream.

  Foam was in his thirties now. He kept a decent braid in back, but the top of his head was bald, tanned and freckled, and when his eyebrows lifted in surprise, wrinkles spread improbably over his pate. The first threads of white were showing in his braid.

  He is getting older, Rope thought. We all are.

  Shale might be getting older too, but it didn’t show as much; with every passing year she just looked more and more like herself. “I like Feather,” she said. “She’s got a spark or two in her.”

  Rope hunkered down beside Foam. He thought of Jo, with her silver eyes burning gold, loneliness searing her inside. Blown apart by the breeze. He prayed Feather would not become one of the people of the air. “Once you have tasted things, tasted the bigger world, one island can seem cramped. Always the same place, the same friends, the same people.”

  “You sound like me!” Shale grinned.

  You could not say he and Jo had been lovers. Love was not what they had shared. Sometimes he thought he had been a terrible person; other times, their lovemaking seemed one tiny knot in a braid too big for him to understand. “We are never really part of the story, are we? I mean, a story is a wave, and we are drops of water. The wave picks us up, and then drops us, and then moves on. All we can do is watch it. But sometimes I want so badly to ride the wave. I want to be part of something important.”

  “If you don’t think having a wife and family is important, you are stupider than you look,” Foam said sharply.

  “I know, I know.”


  Boots was still studying the stream. Farther away, Feather held a conversation with a clump of scarlet valerian.

  “It should mean something to you, Rope. To marry the woman you love and have a family.” Foam put his hand over his heart and sighed at Shale. “I would trade!”

  Shale swatted him on the leg.

  Wind brushed through the aspens, making their trailing leaves rustle like tresses of thick green hair. Foam cocked his head sideways and watched Rope moodily knotting stems of grass. “Isn’t it surprising, the way things work out? I used to go looking for mysteries, but I have come to learn that the most mysterious things of all are happening under my own nose.”

  Shale wrinkled her nose. “Oh, now you sound like Brook. It is all very well to say, ‘Look how wonderful ordinary life is!’ But sometimes ordinary life is dull. If I did not get restless, if I did not want something more, I would be washing poop out of my child’s clothes instead of sailing to the mainland. You and Brook may do fine, staring awestruck at beetles, but there is nothing wrong with wanting something special and different. Where would we be if Seven had been willing to do just what his father did?”

  “And the years go by,” Rope said. He remembered Garden, with his fingers rooting to the ground. “The years go by with all their decisions. And the older you are, the more it seems as if each new choice has already been made by all the other choices you made before.” The first branches grope out as they will; the last fill in where they must.

  Foam sighed. “You sound low, my friend. You sound like a man feeling trapped, a man who feels the rest of his life is already told. I do not believe it! Life is strange, stranger than you can know.”

  “Your life, maybe. You get to go places.”

  “You are sailing into fatherhood. I would trade in all my trips for that one voyage.”

  Rope forced the bitterness from his voice and changed the subject. “Which reminds me, how was your latest journey?”

  Foam’s hands strewed miracles. “Marvelous! We sailed through another blank place on Stone’s charts; Shale loves doing that. And we traded our pearlweirds for enough matches to keep Clouds End supplied for years, and leave plenty left over.”

  “You have become quite the mariners.”

  Foam laughed. “Who would have thought it? But with Brook staying on Clouds End so much, and Shale chasing everywhere but—I tell you, I have seen a good deal more of Fathom’s kingdom than I care to. Of course I know who is still the better sailor.”

  Rope said, “I think we all know who the better sailor is now.”

  * * *

  Boots studied the shallow stream. A small trout held itself against the current, wavering. It slipped backwards and then held, slipped and held, until it found shelter under a chunk of granite. Boots intended to build a dam. He wondered where best to put it.

  Across the stream, Feather chatted with a tall scarlet poppy.

  Boots reached carefully into the stream and pulled out a large grey stone. He wondered if it was happier wet or dry. Wet would be cool, but he thought stones didn’t mind cool so much. On the whole, the rock seemed happiest underwater. There it glistened, smooth to the touch and less heavy.

  “The poppy said I would be a queen!” Feather announced. A fat bumblebee buzzed into the flower, humming a small work song as he tramped through its pollen.

  Boots shifted downstream, beyond the granite. “No she didn’t.”

  “You can be emperor,” Feather allowed. “That’s almost as good.”

  A wide place where the water was slow and shallow, or a narrow place where it was deeper and more swift? He settled on the shallow; in his experience, rocks in rapids shifted from where you placed them. “She didn’t say that either.”

  “Did too!”

  “Did not.”

  “Well, if you’re so smart, what did she say?” Feather demanded, pouting. She was very pretty generally, but pouting made her look like a small blond fish with lips.

  Boots placed his first stone symbolically in the middle; he would work out to the banks from there. “She said that it was good to drink the sun.”

  Feather’s eyes went round. “How did you know?”

  Boots looked up at her, rather puzzled. “Because that’s what she said.”

  “You never said you could hear things!”

  Boots shrugged. “You never lied before.”

  Methodically, he began to search for his next rock. His sister’s astonishment gave way to distraction as the east wind hid some secrets under a lilac bush for her to find. Boots paid no heed. He had more important things on his mind.

  * * *

  Summer gave way to autumn, and a whirl of early snow brought down the last leaves.

  Life was different for Brook now. For seven years she had lived her life in the real-world, letting her magic sleep. But the call that had brought her down to the beach to meet Jo that moonlit night in spring had woken it at last. She had tried to harness her gift, apprenticing to be the Witness of Clouds End, but she was aware now, all the time, of the Mist running beneath the world like blood under skin.

  Shandy’s foretelling had been true. Jo was getting desperate. Now she had struck at Brook’s heart. Was Jo clinging to Rope, clinging to anything that might keep her from fading into the Mist? Or was she also trying to cut Brook loose? Brook tried not to give in to despair or self-hatred, tried not to take out her hurt on Rope or the children, but not since her parents died had she been asked to ride a wave so dark and deep.

  Some days Brook’s fear came back, a sudden cold shadow that fell over her heart as she worked in the herb garden, or watched her children racing around the meadow. How delicate, how fragile the world seemed that year! As if her life were made of Mist, and one strong breeze could blow it all away. Some nights were the darkest of her life; yet when she was happy the joy was nearly unbearable. Walking a knife-edge between the real world and the Mist, she had never been so alive.

  Shandy was talking about sending her on her Witness vigil at midwinter, but Brook had a hard task ahead of her first: making up stories that ought to be told. When the elm above Teardrop had lost almost all its leaves, she was ready to try one on the children.

  “This is the story of the Seventh Wave,” Brook said. “It is a story of the Mist-time, where everything is true and nothing is what it seems.”

  The children she was minding sat on the mossy rocks above Crab-spit. To the east a wall of purple cloud was building. A circle of small faces stared up at her, none more solemn than Feather’s. Boots was frowning at his fingers.

  “This is a Sheet-Bend story. Now, as you know, in a sheet bend the big rope and the little rope are all looped together, so you can’t talk about one without mentioning the other, until you get to the end and pull them both tight.”

  * * *

  Little Rope, Big Rope

  The Mist churns into sea, the sea hardens into stone, then islands, then land. The land leaps into mountains and the mountains fade into clouds and Mist; for change is the way of the world.

  In the beginning there was Mist over all the waters of the world. But at last the sea churned the Mist into Delta, the first island. Of course you’ve all heard lots of stories about the people who lived there then. Well, this is the second or maybe first story there ever was about Tool and Swap and Wit and Kettle, and the only story that tells about Stand.

  Now, Wit wandered around the island asking questions of everything and listening to the answers through her Big Blue Shell, so she was happy. And Tool gathered Mist and sticks and oyster shells to make strange new toys, so he was happy. And Kettle found clams to boil and eels to bake, fish to stew and snakes to fry—

  (“Yuck!” went all the children, happily wrinkling their noses and sticking out their tongues.)

  —so she was happy. And Stand had dolphins to race and squid to wrestle, so he was happy.

  But Swap was bored. He was always wanting to make trades and go new places and see strange things. But since there weren
’t any other islands yet, and he couldn’t have gone to them if there had been, he got very bored. He spent most of the day wandering around the beach and peering out at the sea, hoping something exciting would happen.

  Which is why he was the first to notice the Bump.

  It was a special sort of day—rather like this one—and he felt sure something exciting would happen. Up until now the sea had always been perfectly flat, and the wind completely calm. But now a breeze pulled on his braid like a naughty child, and there was a Bump on the sea’s broad back.

  It wasn’t a big Bump, not yet, and it was far to the east. Still, there had never been a Bump before.

  Well! Swap rushed around the island until he found Wit on her hands and knees, listening to a spider make pretty compliments to the passing flies. “Wit! Wit! There’s a Bump!” he yelled.

  Wit jumped into the air and almost fell down again; with her Big Blue Shell held close to her ear, Swap’s voice was very loud. “Bump!” she snapped. “You’ve had a bump on the head, I think—charging around yelling in people’s ears.”

  “No, really! There is a Bump on the sea!” And he dragged her down to the beach so she could see the Bump for herself. It was there all right, and it was getting bigger and closer and closer and bigger.

  “What do you think it means?” asked Stand, who had noticed the Bump while he was swimming.

  “You’ve been wrestling squids again,” Wit said, frowning. She could see the sucker marks all over his big strong arms and wide brown back.

  “We were just playing.”

  Wit scowled once at him, and twice at the sea. “I would surely like to know what that Bump is all about,” she said.

  Tool was the next to join them on the beach. He had the tummies of four dead jellyfish strapped under each arm and a hat the size of a sail strapped under his chin. “I was sitting at the top of the Tall Tree wondering if I should try my Flying Gear when I saw this Bump. What is it all about?”

  The others shook their heads.