Gullstruck Island Read online

  Frances Hardinge’s first book, Fly By Night, won the Branford Boase Award for outstanding debut novel. Both Fly By Night and her second novel, Verdigris Deep, have been shortlisted for several other awards, including the Guardian Fiction Prize, and are now published in several languages around the world.

  Frances spent her childhood in a huge, isolated old house on a hilltop in Kent that ‘wuthered’ when the wind blew and inspired her to write strange, magical stories from an early age. Now she lives in Oxford and London with her boyfriend.

  Praise for Frances Hardinge’s books

  ‘A wonderful and wondrous novel’ Garth Nix

  ‘Mad, exuberant, hilarious . . . as original and joyous a literary adventure as I’ve encountered in aeons. I wish I’d written it, but even better, I know I couldn’t have’ Meg Rosoff

  ‘Like delving into a box of sweets with a huge array of flavours’ TES

  ‘Spellbindingly gorgeous . . . dramatic . . . Hardinge’s prose shimmers and glints with breathtakingly apt imagery’ Daily Mail

  Also by Frances Hardinge

  FLY BY NIGHT

  Winner of the Branford Boase Award

  VERDIGRIS DEEP

  Longlisted for the Carnegie Medal

  MACMILLAN CHILDREN’S BOOKS

  First published 2009 by Macmillan Children’s Books

  This electronic edition published 2009 by Macmillan Children’s Books

  a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited

  20 New Wharf Rd, London N1 9RR

  Basingstoke and Oxford

  Associated companies throughout the world

  www.panmacmillan.com

  ISBN 978-0-230-73949-9 PDF

  ISBN 978-0-230-73948-2 EPUB

  Text copyright © Frances Hardinge 2009

  Illustrations copyright © Tomislav Tomic 2009

  The right of Frances Hardinge and Tomislav Tomic to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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  To my sister Sophie, a truer traveller than

  I shall ever be, who saved lives when others

  were seeing sights, and who brought back

  tropical diseases and broken bones instead

  of photos and souvenir hats

  CONTENTS

  1 Arilou

  2 Twisted Tongues

  3 Farsight Flesh

  4 Trial and Trickery

  5 Current-caught

  6 Going through the Gongs

  7 Teething Trouble

  8 Heat Haze

  9 No More Names

  10 Amid the Ashes

  11 Dread of Dyeing

  12 Sorrow in Silence

  13 A Slippery Slope

  14 Bloodied Butterfly

  15 For the Wronged a Reckoning

  16 A Glimpse of a Ghost

  17 Killer Kind

  18 Hunters

  19 The Superior’s Soap

  20 The Blue Cloth

  21 Lesson’s End

  22 Dangerous Creatures

  23 A Little Light

  24 Strategems and Surprises

  25 Thief of Threads

  26 The Superior’s Stand

  27 Death Dance

  28 Witch-hunt

  29 A New Sister

  30 The Sound of Waves

  31 A Lost Lost

  32 Soul-steeling

  33 The King of Tricks

  34 A Tooth for a Tooth

  35 Lord Spearhead

  36 Rescue

  37 The Man without a Face

  38 The Wailing Way

  39 All Change

  Glossary

  Acknowledgements

  Prelude

  It was a burnished, cloudless day with a tug-of-war wind, a fine day for flying. And so Raglan Skein left his body neatly laid out on his bed, its breath as slow as sea swell, and took to the sky.

  He took only his sight and hearing with him. There was no point in bringing those senses that would make him feel the chill of the sapphire-bright upper air or the giddiness of his rapid rise.

  Like all Lost, he had been born with his senses loosely tethered to his body, like a hook on a fishing line. He could let them out, then reel them in and remember all the places his mind had visited meanwhile. Most Lost could move their senses independently, like snails’ eyes on stalks. Indeed, a gifted Lost might be feeling the grass under their knees, tasting the peach in your hand, overhearing a conversation in the next village and smelling cooking in the next town, all while watching barracudas dapple and brisk around a shipwreck ten miles out to sea.

  Raglan Skein, however, was doing nothing so whimsical. He had to take his body on a difficult and possibly perilous journey the next day, and he was spying out the land. It was a relief to see the world plummet away from him so that everything became smaller. More manageable. Less dangerous.

  Scattered around the isolated island of Gullstruck dozens of other minds would be adrift. Lost minds, occupied with the business of the island, keeping it functioning. Scrying for bandits in the jungles, tracing missing children on the rises, spotting sharks in the deeps, reading important trade notices and messages long distance. In fact, there might even be other Lost minds floating near him now, indiscernible to him as he was to them.

  He veered towards the mountain ridge that ran along the western coast, seeing the individual peaks emerge from the fleece of clouds. One such peak stood a little proud of the rest, its coloration paler. It was Sorrow, the white volcano, sweet, pure and treacherous as snow. Skein gave her a wide berth and instead veered towards her husband, the King of Fans, the tallest middlemost mountain of the ridge, his cratered head forever lost in clouds. For now the King was docile and hazy with the heat, but he too was a volcano and of uncertain temper. The shimmering air above his slopes was flecked with the circling forms of eagles large enough to carry a child off in each claw. Villages on this coast expected to lose a couple of their number to the eagles each year.

  But these eagles would have no interest in the little towns that sprawled below. As far as the great birds were concerned, the towns were just more animals, too vast and sluggish for them to bother with, scaled with slate and furred with palm thatch. The muddy roads were the veins, and bronze bells in white towers told out their slow, cold heartbeats.

  For a moment Skein wished that he did not know that every town was really a thriving hive of bitter, biting two-legged animals, full of schemes and resentment and hidden treachery. Yet again the fear of betrayal gnawed at his mind.

  We will talk to these people, the Lost Council had announced. We are too powerful for them to ignore us. Everything can be settled peacefully. Skein did not believe it. Three days more, and he would know if his shadowy suspicions had flesh to them.

  There lay the road he would travel over the next few days. He scried it carefully. Even though he had left for the coast quietly and with haste, there was always a chance that news of his arrival had outstripped him, and that enemies lay in wait.

>   And it was no mean task, spying out ambushes and surprises on this coast of all coasts. Everything about it reeked of trickery and concealment. There were reefs beneath the water of the bay, betrayed only by the foam fringes on the far waves. The cliff-face itself was a labyrinth. Over centuries the creamy limestone had been hollowed and winnowed until it was a maze of tapering spires, peepholes and snub ridges like sleeping lions. So it was all along the west coast of the island, and it was this that had given the Coast of the Lace its name.

  The tribe who lived here nowadays was also known as ‘the Lace’, and they too were full of ins and outs and twists and turns and sleeping lions pretending to be rocks. You never knew where you were with the smilers of the Lace. They were all but outcast, distrusted by everyone, scratching out a living in outskirt shanty towns or dusty little fishing villages.

  Villages like the one that now came into view, nestled between a cliff and a beach in a rocky, half-hidden cove.

  Here it was, Skein’s ultimate destination. The village of the Hollow Beasts.

  It was a Lace village. Skein could see it at a glance, even though he was too high to make out the turbans on the grandmothers, the young men’s shark-tooth anklets, the bright stones in everyone’s teeth. He knew it from the furtive location, the small pearl-fishing canoes cluttering the waterline.

  He descended until the freckling of two-legged specks on the beach became foreshortened human figures. His sight alighted on two young girls, one supporting the other.

  The taller of the girls was dressed in a white tunic, and he guessed instantly who she must be. Arilou.

  Arilou was the only Hollow Beast whose name he knew, and it was the only name he needed to know. She was easily the most important person in the village, and arguably the only excuse for its existence. He contemplated her for a few seconds, before soaring again and preparing to return to his body.

  As it happened, the girl supporting Arilou had a name too. It was designed to sound like the settling of dust, a name that was meant to go unnoticed. She was as anonymous as dust, and Skein gave her not the slightest thought.

  Neither would you. In fact, you have already met her, or somebody very like her, and you cannot remember her at all.

  1

  Arilou

  On the beach, a gull-storm erupted as rocks came bouncing down from the clifftop. Half a step behind the rocks scrambled Eiven, her face flushed from running.

  No member of the village would take a shortcut straight down the cliff unless there was a matter of some urgency, not even bold, agile Eiven. Several people dropped their ropes or their nets, but not their smiles, never their smiles, for they were Lace.

  ‘An Inspector!’ Eiven called to them as she recovered her breath and balance. ‘There is a Lost Inspector coming to see Arilou!’

  Looks were exchanged, and the news ran off to this hut, that hut. Meanwhile Eiven sprinted across the beach along to the base of the cliff, her feet scooping ruts in the spongy sand. There she scrambled up a rope ladder and pushed through a curtain of woven reeds into the cave behind it.

  According to Lace tradition and tale, the caves were sacred places, perilous mouths leading to the world of the dead, and the gods, and the white-hot, slow-pumping hearts of the mountains, mouths that might snap you up suddenly with stalactite teeth if you were judged unworthy. Eiven’s family was considered worthy to live in the caves, but only because of Arilou.

  Moments later within the cave Eiven was in agitated conversation with her mother. It was a council of war, but you would never have known it from their smiles.

  ‘So what is he planning to do to her?’ Mother Govrie’s eyes had a fierce and urgent brightness, but her mouth continued to beam, the lopsided swell in her lower lip speaking of stubbornness and warmth. ‘How does the Inspector inspect?’

  ‘They say he wants to grade her for their records. See how well she can control her powers.’ Eiven had a knife-slash smile. Years of pearl-diving had left white coral scars trekking up her forehead like bird-prints. ‘We need to tell the whole village. Everybody will want to know about this.’

  Arilou was everybody’s business, the village’s pride and joy, their Lady Lost.

  The Lost were born nowhere but Gullstruck, and even on the island they were far from common. They were scarce among the non-Lace, and much revered. Among the Lace, however, they were all but unknown. During the great purges two hundred years before, most of the ‘Lace Lost’ had been killed, and their numbers had never recovered. Before the birth of Arilou, none had been born to the people of the Lace for over fifty years.

  Young Lost were notorious for becoming entranced with distant places and forgetting their own discarded bodies, or even failing to notice that their bodies existed. As a consequence, nobody ever lamented when a child seemed slow to learn or unaware of its surroundings, for this was often the sign of a newborn Lost that had not yet learned to reel its mind back to its body.

  The birth of a baby girl who showed every sign of being an untrained Lost had transformed the village’s prospects overnight. Suddenly they were not dependent upon their dwindling harvest of pearls or on peddling shell jewellery. The nearest town grudgingly gave them food in winter, for it was accepted that when the town’s own Lady Lost retired, Arilou would have to take her place. Furthermore, the stream of visitors who came to see Arilou paid well for their food and lodging, and for relics to remember their visit to the only Lace Lost. Arilou was a celebrated oddity, like a two-headed calf or a snow-white jaguar. And if any haggard doubts haunted the villagers’ pride in Arilou, an outsider would never have known it from the seamless pleasure the Lace seemed to show in discussing her.

  But now Arilou needed to be found and made ready for company. Her best clothes had to be prepared. Her hair had to be combed free of burrs and her face would need to be dusted with stonedust and spices. There was no knowing how much time they had.

  In the late afternoon two men stepped gingerly into the pulley-chair and let themselves be winched down the cliff by six young Lace men below.

  The taller of the two visitors was unmistakably Lost. Whereas many Lost learned to base themselves in their own body, some discovered their physical form so late that they were never entirely comfortable in it. They found the perspective disorientating, disliking the translucent peripheral view of their own nose, and the fact that they could not see all of their body to guide it. Such Lost often chose a hovering perspective instead, a little behind or to one side of their body, so as to keep themselves in view, monitor and adjust their own body language, and so forth. However, there was always something static about their posture then, and this man was no exception.

  He wore his grey hair pushed back into a pigtail, the loose strands across his head pinned in place by his green three-cornered hat. His eyes were hazel, which was not unusual for one of his background. Most islanders were mixed race, for it had been over two centuries since the Cavalcaste settlers arrived on Gullstruck, easily long enough for them to intermingle with the local tribes. However, in the towns there was often more Cavalcaste blood poured into the mix, particularly among the better-heeled, and that was clearly true of this man. What was unusual about his eyes was that they were slightly swivelled to the left, and that he did not take the trouble to blink, or adjust the direction of his gaze. This, in short, was obviously the ‘Lost Inspector’.

  His shorter and younger companion seemed to be ‘lost’ in an utterly different sense. Compared to the Lost Inspector, he was a-twitch with involuntary movements, clutching at his hat one moment, the handrail the next, shifting his feet or his weight with every swing of the chair. Papers fluttered in the leather wallet he held under one arm. He had a rounded, pouting chin, a touch of Cavalcaste pallor and bright, brown eyes. For the moment these eyes were fixed upon the ground reeling treacherously far below him and the mosaic of upturned faces.

  He was smartly dressed and obviously a towner. Like many Gullstruck officials he was both well-heeled and bell-heel
ed, another result of the Cavalcaste invasion. Centuries before, back on their own homeland plains, respected members of the horse-riding Cavalcaste clans had shown their status through the size of their spurs. But nowadays the powerful were not horseback battle-leaders but lawmakers and bureaucrats. Instead of spurs, even lowly officials had taken to wearing little bells on the backs of their boots, ‘honorary spurs’, which jingled in just the same way but did not catch on carpets and ladies’ hems.

  His name was Minchard Prox, and not for the first time he was wondering if it was possible to find a secretarial post that was less prestigious than being aide to a Lost Inspector but less likely to involve trekking mountain paths in goat-drawn carts, being lowered down cliffs in glorified baskets or coming into contact with the Lace, who set his neck-hairs tingling as if at the touch of a knife.

  Down there, three dozen faces, all smiling. Just because they’re smiling, it doesn’t mean they like you, he reminded himself. Smiles a-glitter, for most Lace had their teeth studded with tiny plaques of shell, metal or bright stone. Would those smiles melt away to leave implacable looks as soon as there were no strangers in the village? Perhaps it was even worse to think of the smiles clinging to every face even after they had no purpose, a whole village sitting and walking and sleeping and smiling and smiling and smiling . . .

  In the old days before the settlers, the Lace’s smiles marked them out as a people to respect. The Lace had acted as peacemakers and go-betweens for the other tribes, and had even carried messages to the volcanoes. So it was small wonder that when the Cavalcaste landed the Lace had been the only tribe to approach them with smiles rather than spears.

  The helpful Lace had given the settlers lots of advice on how to survive on Gullstruck. Most important of all, they warned them not to build their towns in the Wailing Way, the river valley between the King of Fans and his fellow volcano Spearhead, for the two volcanoes were rivals for the affection of Sorrow, and might some day rush together to continue their fight.