Ghostheart (14 page)

Part-hid in the vapours they waited and breathed and their breath was the sound of all the herds at once crammed into the winter lock-ups. It was like the breath of a giant or a god. All my puffery was blown out of me. I sat still and took tiny sips of air.

Mungo, the big hero, had other ideas though. He let out a volley of his most bossing barks and drew the eye of the monsters right down on us. I shrank into the bottom of the coracle as the whalefish came close in their terrible roughstone flesh. They mobbed in hugely to look at us through their little bloodshot eyes. One fish had warm eyes, like a cow’s, that understood loneliness. Another had eyes filled with smiles. Another, eyes like silver, quick and sharp. Mungo met them like a lord, steady on his four legs and with the face of right upturned to meet them.

When they didn’t eat him or take him for sport, I sat up.

One of the whalefish had taken to us. It swam alongside for some time, rising and falling on the mob’s slow waves. Its body hung over us like a bluff. I felt its shade even in the sunless fog. It sang of a whole load of sorrow.

I knew its voice like it was my own mother’s.

It was the whale-mam.

I took up the oars again but I didn’t know which way to row. We were navigating blind as if a town had risen and we were passing through its strange paths. The whalefishes’ bodies were crusted with shells and barnacles, like Shipton boat-hulls, and they were striped all over with what looked to be reeds. If I was a more flighty and Otherwise person I might have thought they were types of land. Living islands, moving reefs.

Islands under a spell, unable to stop sailing about.

Islands chanted down, doomed to swim like fish.

Islands following the whale-road with no purpose.

I told myself that they were just fish. According to the Brothers, they were the only creature allowed in God’s Heaven. I told myself these things as I rowed about looking for a way out. I told myself again as the whale-mam started up nudging the coracle. It was only a tiny nudge but the coracle rocked edgewise. Sea-water slopped over the sides. Mungo barked a warning but she didn’t listen.

The whale-mam nudged at us again, and again; eight times altogether. We tipped and slid forward.

I clung to the coracle’s edge and Mungo clattered, all legs and claws, right under the bench and into the ropes and hide. He lay in a pile and looked up hurt at the whalefish as she sang and sang, filling the fog with her song. Then with some dignity he struggled, he stood and he howled. He was singing too, lifting his head and throat to where the sky would be if we weren’t lost in fogs. Singing like he remembered what it was to be wild. The whalefish stopped then, in some surprise I thought, and let us row some distance away.

Then she ducked her head and came at us in a tumult of waters.

We saw her gape, big enough to take our little boat in one gobful.

She bore down on the coracle. She thumped the water close-by and sank under us into the black.

Her last wave, that final wall of water, hit us sidewise. Mungo and me rose on it, high as roofs, and waited to be shattered by its breaking. But it didn’t break, it rolled, it carried us forward. Now Mungo was huddled groaning under the bench, and I was the one shrilling and laughing as we rushed blind through the fog. My mouth and eyes streamed water and my heart behaved like the whalefish; plunging, singing, breaking the surface.

It was like flying. Like how Boson had said flying was.

The whale-wave carried us out of the fogs. The forward-path showed itself. Curtains of light and mist drew back, soft, one after the other, and the lost morning came back shimmering. We rode that wave right out of the sea-fog.

If you’d told me I would ever do such a thing I would’ve said you were elf-ridden.

I looked back as I rowed on and it was like there were two worlds. One world inside the fog and one here, now, where me and Mungo floated in the bright channel. The sea ahead was sprawling green to black, and the white lips of the waves were alive. Calling. Even the sky was split in half; before us all lay skyclad, behind us shredding fogs flowed away. At last all that was left of that great wall were some flighty wisps tumbling back high over Carrick.

Or, over where Carrick should have been.

But there were only the wisps.

Because it was gone.

Sometimes when something disappears, something you know was right there just a moment ago, you just can’t believe it. You look in senseless places, like the time I looked in the meal-bin for the lost shovel. You look and look in the same places, you get up in the night to see if it is back, you believe it will just turn up. Nothing convinces you it’s really gone.

I stood up in the coracle and looked again. I squinted and rubbed my eyes until they watered. I checked the sky as if the island might be hanging there, and I turned around and around like if I turned often enough it would come back. I even rowed a bit back toward the last threads of the unravelling fog.

It was gone, entirely.

I had a bad feeling. Not just the bad feeling of having lost a whole, solid island. As I’d been turning and turning, looking for Carrick, there’d been something else shouting an alarm in the outer palings of my mind, too faint, too far off to hear clearly.

Now, I knew what it had been.

I turned one more time.

The other island was gone too.

I SAT IN THE CREAKING CORACLE. Time passed. I looked about for something to use for a bail, in case we sprang a leak. I made a small shade from the hide Boson had stowed. Time passed. I used my hands to measure and sight the horizon, in case I’d missed some mark or sign. I didn’t know where I’d started measuring, though, so I didn’t know where to finish. I just turned around and around until I didn’t know whether we were headed for Carrick or the other island, the open waters or the northern rocks. The sea and sky were just two blue half-circles, empty of everything but us.

Time passed.

I cried once, not much.

Then I just sat there.

The sun rolled overhead and started on its downward path. Mungo panted, his dry tongue hanging, his eyes just red slits. He put his head on my lap and whined in a heartening sort of way.

The coracle rocked about on a soft swell. After the puffins, the porpoises and whales, the world was of a sudden too quiet, too still. I’d not noticed before how low the little boat sat in the water, and I hunted all its soft skins for leaks. I started to think I saw tidal breakers rolling toward us, and sharp reefs rising from the seabed — not to mention Pa’s Other things coming at us. Scaly tails flicked at the edge of my sight, and faraway water-pits shimmered in the sun, gaped and slammed shut. When I closed my eyes hungry mouths opened in the middle of headless bellies and smacked their lips. All the monsters of my mind-eye were webfooted, blade-finned and angry at me. I covered my head with the hide.

‘Well, now what?
’ said the inside-voice.

Down off the moaney that voice was familiar.

‘Oh, now you talk,’ I said.

‘
There’s more than me talking to you,
’ it told me.

All I heard was the carrying fuss of sea-birds. They screeched at me and Mungo to bugger off. This was their country.

I did not love the birds.

I couldn’t remember a time when they had not been the bad companions of my brother’s affliction. They were mite-ridden, shit-splattered creatures, thieving our seed, spoiling the plots, stealing Boson’s sense.

I had no bright remembrances of birds.

Of a sudden I wished I remembered more than that.

I wished I remembered my brother when he was well.

But all I could remember was his white body stuck about with black feathers, and his wet blood dripping onto dry rock. All I saw were the ravens’ eyes, all I heard was Pa’s voice breaking over the grave-dirt. All I knew was I should have known.

‘All I hear is birds,’ I said and my lips split and bled as I talked.

‘
That’s right,
’ said the inside-voice.

I squinted salt-faced into the skyclad distance. Out there a motley of loons tardled on the horizon. I couldn’t face them.

‘Stop it,’ I told the inside-voice, and it was like my words fell down a long funnel.

‘
Stop what?
’ it said.

The blisters on my palms had risen and busted open. My head thumped and my mouth was dry as dust. If I talked the words would stick to my tongue. It was a world brimming with water but full of thirst. Mungo lay flat on the bottom of the coracle, his legs bent and folded to fit into that small place. Whether he was sleeping or senseless I couldn’t tell.

I sat up, swoony.

I hung over the side.

My inward-parts sank.

In the glass sea I saw myself looking back. My head was small without its hair. My cheeks were sunken and my eyes burning. It was like looking into two fiery tunnels with a glimmer of dark at the end. There was hardly anything left of me in them.

‘Klop,’ said the sea.

The sun was burning down there in the water, as golden as it was burning here above our heads. It was like the small sun of another world, a world of deep green skies and murky, shifting land. Down there, though, it was just a tiny bright thing; while up here it was the biggest part of everything. That sun down in the water wouldn’t broil you like the sun up in our sky.

Hanging over the side, I closed my eyes. I didn’t want to see the sky in the water. It reminded me.

‘
You look like him
,’ said the inside-voice. ‘
Very like
.’

I was up to my gills in that voice. It never had anything useful to say. It only ever told me what I already knew. Pa would have said it was a master of the bleeding obvious. I thought a filthy curse at it as loud as I could.

‘
Charming,
’ it said.

‘What now?’ I asked.

If I was to go my brother’s way and start hearing gods in everything, all right. If I was to turn and finish up living out on the moaney like a fog, all right. Even if I was to live in nothing but a feathered cap, well all right.

But I wasn’t going to talk about it.

Particularly with this voice that came like an unwelcome stranger and talked in questions. Needling, pushing, scolding at me like my mother. Teasing, mocking at me like Boson. Whatever it was, it was no ghost, no angel, and no god.

‘
Exactly. What now?
’ it said. I swear if that voice came out of a neck I would have wrung it.

In his sleep Mungo made a mouth like he was on the scent and calling about it, and his paws ran a little in the air.

‘Well, in this sort of upshot,’ I told it, ‘the common thing to do is lie down and die.’

There was quiet inside. I thought I’d finally flummoxed it into a more serious and helpful humour. But when it talked again, it was cool and light as water-nymphs.

‘Are you sure
?’ it said.

I wasn’t.

Even if I lay down and died right there, how would I find the Deadward that would lead me to Boson? Even if I followed him down into the sky-waters, I didn’t know which Dead-place he’d gone to. The Father said there’d be no welcome for him in God’s snug, not after all that business with the birds. He said all purgatories are private places, and you can’t visit folk there. You can’t save them except by begging God to be kind and He’s not kind, just good.

Boson wouldn’t have been there, anyway. They wouldn’t have let him in.

As for the Dead-isles, nobody knows who belongs to them anymore.

They’re peopled by Old-ones so ancient, nobody remembers.

And they’re irregular; they can’t be trusted to stay the same.

Not only are they countless and occasional, but those islands move around. So, while you’re looking for your Dead-one on the Ants island, they’re making landfall on the island of the Horses, and when you’re hunting the caves on the island of the Horses, they’ve sailed for Turning Beasts. Your Dead-one can be just behind or just ahead of you all the while. And if you do at last manage to settle which isle they’ve taken to, then all the islands can uproot themselves and belly about the seas like whalefish. Likely as weather you’ll never catch up.

And if Boson hadn’t chosen before he died which Afterwards he’d take, there’d be only the homeless Dead Lamps coming for him when he did. He’d be left to haunting folk for company. And I just knew he hadn’t chosen. It wasn’t the sort of thing he’d be pushed into.

It was too late. I’d never find him in any of the Afterwards now.

Mungo woke then, but only his eyes. The rest of him lay like wakefulness and such things had nothing to do with him. He gazed at me steady, and there was no blame in him. I took his silver head, now somewhat rimed and greasy, into my lap. He grinned a bit and licked my hand but he had no spit left and his tongue just rasped at me. His eyes rolled back and they were filled with clouds.

A week ago my brother’s eyes had rolled back and filled with stars.

I should have listened.

I should have paid attention.

He’d told me straight-up that the shrunken gods came and went through the skybog. He’d seen them do it.