‘Because you’re close. You’re over the fire. But if you stepped back and went down to the beach there’d be only silence. I’m nothing now. An old Dweller who buzzes and croaks.’
Hana swallowed. ‘How long have you been like that?’
‘I don’t count. Three years. Four.’
‘How did it happen?’
He did not speak with his voice or inside her head, but watching his face she knew the answer.
‘The Limping Man.’
‘Yes. Him.’
‘What did he do?’
‘You’ve felt him, Hana. You’ve felt how he sucks people in.’
‘I got away.’
‘Not if you’d been closer. Not if he’d seen you.’
‘Is that what happened? He saw you?’
‘I’d be dead now if the sea hadn’t helped.’
He told Hana his story: how he had lived in a house raised on piles in the harbour of the ruined city of Belong for many years after Xantee killed the gool. The humans in the city went on much as before – fought and starved, made little armies, murderous gangs, in the place known as Ceebeedee and in the burrows, and some grew rich for a while, then they starved while others prospered. ‘Nothing changed,’ Danatok said. He had grown sick and weary watching them, so he left the city and travelled to Stone Creek to live with his own people, the Dwellers, or by himself in the forests by the Inland Sea. There, one day, close by the sea, he heard Tealeaf’s voice calling him back. There was a new ruler in the city. He had rolled Ceebeedee and old Belong into one. Dwellers who ventured there to find out more never returned. Go and find out who he is, Tealeaf said. So Danatok took a dinghy and sailed down the coast and into the harbour at Port, where he found his pile house unchanged. Belong looked the same, the burrows looked the same, a city of ruins.
Danatok scouted in the streets. When he questioned people, some could only say, ‘The Limping Man.’ There seemed to be nothing else in their minds. They worshipped him, they wore his sign tattooed on their foreheads. Others were afraid. ‘Leave us,’ they said. ‘He will hear.’
‘He built a palace on the hill where Xantee killed the mother gool,’ Danatok said. ‘I knew a way there through the drains so I went to have a look at this Limping Man.’
The palace was smaller than the mansions that had stood on the hill in Company’s time. The skills for building were lost, along with all the other skills that had flourished then.
The Limping Man’s palace was like an upturned box. It had yellow walls painted with red flames. There were no windows, no way for Danatok to see the Limping Man. He circled the building, keeping clear of the guards, not probing with his mind. By now he knew that the Limping Man ruled by a combination of awe and mental compulsion, and the latter, the compulsion, made Danatok cautious. He did not want to fight mind battles with the Limping Man until he knew more about him.
Danatok retreated to the trees. There was activity in the palace: an open door, guards moving about, and in a moment a huge man came out, dressed in black, with a horn of shining metal in his hand.
‘At first I thought he was the Limping Man – but he didn’t limp.’
‘No,’ Hana said. ‘He’s the crier, who talks for him. I saw him in People’s Square.’
‘Then two little men as thin as sticks –’ ‘His servants. I’ve seen them too.’
The crier blew his horn. Four men carried a litter from a nearby shed. The Limping Man appeared, moving with the help of a stick. He sat in the litter and the bearers carried it along a path in the trees to a small square building beyond the place where a marble hand stood, pointing out to sea.
Company had made it in earlier times. Danatok hid in the trees. He had felt no power emanating from the Limping Man, he felt nothing at all. Perhaps in the building there was some ritual he performed or secret food he ate . . .
The crier opened a door. The Limping Man went inside. The door closed.
Danatok knelt in the trees, trying to work things out. Was there something inside that the Limping Man drew his powers from, some flame or magical spring or creature like the gool? There was a small window beside the door but guards were close. Danatok was afraid to control them in case the Limping Man became aware. But Dwellers, with their long fingers, could climb where humans could not, so he lowered himself down the cliff, then moved sideways like a crab and climbed again until the back of the building stood over him, rising from the edge of the cliff. A second window, small and round and open to the air, was set in the wall. Danatok climbed silently. He looked inside and saw the Limping Man.
‘He’s small. He’s no bigger than a child. His cheeks are soft. His mouth is red, with teeth that slant backwards when he smiles.’
‘I’ve seen him,’ Hana said. ‘What was he doing?’
‘He wore a brown cap and yellow robes. His hair is grey and hangs down to his waist . . .’
‘What was he doing?’
Danatok sighed. ‘He was feeding his toads. That’s why he smiled.’
The room was lit by lanterns hanging from the ceiling. A wide trough ran along one wall, with rocks like islands in the green water and swamp ferns growing at the edge. Toads rested on the rocks or lay half hidden in the ferns. On the other side were cages of insects and tanks of tadpoles and small frogs. The Limping Man opened a cage and caught a fly in his hand. He held it by the wings and offered it to a toad – ‘Big toads, as big as my hand,’ Danatok said – who shot out his sticky tongue and gulped it down. Danatok clung to the window ledge and watched. He felt the Limping Man’s enjoyment as he plunged his arm into the tanks and came up with frogs and tadpoles and fed them to the toads, whose sticky tongues, shooting out, were longer than their bodies. Last came burrow mice, kept in a cage by the door. The Limping Man held them by their tails and jerked them away each time a tongue shot out.
‘He was playing a game,’ Danatok said. ‘The toads got the mice in the end.’
‘Mam fried mice in a pan. They’re good,’ Hana said. ‘Why didn’t you grab him with your mind? You had the chance.’
‘I was afraid.’
He could sense no place where he might take a grip on the Limping Man. ‘His mind was like a handful of mud. It slid through my fingers. And while I was trying to find a way, he saw me.’
The two of them, Danatok the Dweller, clinging with his fingers to the window ledge, and the Limping Man, holding a struggling mouse by the tail, stared at each other. Then the Limping Man dropped the mouse and screamed like a squirrel caught by a tree cat. He turned to find the door, but fell without his stick and rolled on the puddled floor. The door burst open and the crier ran in. He scooped up the Limping Man in his arms and ran out, yelling orders as he went. Danatok tried to stop him but the crier too had a mind that could not be held. It was like a slippery stone. So Danatok scrambled down the cliff as fast as a jungle monkey and started north along the rocks at the base. Whatever it was that gave the Limping Man his enormous strength must be in the palace and the crier was carrying him there. Danatok knew he must get as far away as he could. He leaped among the boulders, while guards with torches kept pace on the clifftop and threw down spears that struck sparks from the rocks.
Then the blow came.
‘It was like a roof falling on my head,’ Danatok said. ‘I heard it rumbling as it came near. He meant to kill me, not just hold me.’
It knocked Danatok into the sea, where currents, running north, carried him out of danger. He had enough of his mind left to keep himself afloat. In the dawn half-light he crawled up a beach and into the trees and kept on moving north as well as he could, away from the Limping Man and out of the range of his crushing strength.
‘No one followed me. He must have thought I was dead.’
After five days Danatok stopped running. He built his shelter and had lived there ever since. Sometimes fugitives from the city passed, but none who had seen the Limping Man as close as Hana had. They were the lucky ones who had kept outside the circle of his influence.
Hana did not want to talk about him. She had listened intently to Danatok’s story but now that it was over she drooped. All she wanted was to sleep. Danatok offered his bed in the shelter but she preferred the warmth of the fire. She curled up beside it and fell asleep. After watching her for a while, and pitying her, Danatok covered her with a rug from his bed. He went inside the shelter and slept himself.
Hana stayed with Danatok through summer and winter and into spring. He never tried to ‘speak’ with her again but helped her build a shelter beside his. He taught her how to forage in the hills for edible plants, and in the forest for fern roots and fungi. He helped her weave a net from scraped flax and showed her how to cast it in the shallows for fish. He showed her where to find flints to make a fire, which berries to squeeze for juice to drive biting insects away, how to use sponges from rock pools to suck poison from a wound, and many more things. How to pound bark into cloth and sew it with flax fibre, using a fishbone needle. How to make moccasins out of rabbit skins and knives from stone. So Hana learned the ways of Country and Sea.
At the end of winter, Danatok took his sharpest knife and cut her matted hair to shoulder length. He trimmed it from around her face. Hana looked at herself in a forest pond. She had seen her features only dimly before, in buckets of water, in half-lit pools under ruined buildings. She looked like Mam, but Mam’s skin had been blacker and her eyes darker. Hana’s eyes were green flecked with gold, her skin had the colour of the rust that ate the iron bridges in the wasted parks of Belong. She had never known her father. A red man perhaps, or reddish-white, one of those who visited Bawdhouse Burrow for their pleasure. Mam did not know which of many men he might be. She had only known how to stay alive – until she changed into a ‘witch’. Hana snarled at her face in the water. She broke it with her hand and never looked again.
In the spring Danatok climbed a headland for seabirds’ eggs. Hana would not join him. ‘I like birds,’ she said.
‘Do you “speak” with them?’
‘Birds can’t speak.’
‘Everything can. I’ve seen you with the forest birds. You listen and you hear.’
‘I know what they’re going to do next. But that’s not speaking. All I do is see what they see. I did it with the crows in the burrows.’
‘And the gulls?’ Danatok waved at the screaming pack circling his head.
‘They hate you. You’re taking their children. They’re sad too.’
‘You feel it?’
‘Yes, I feel. But they’ll forget. Do you want me to tell them to go away?’
‘Can you do that?’
‘I think so.’
Go away, birds, she said. Lay some new eggs. And thank you for these.
The gulls screamed and flapped away.
Danatok watched her closely after that. She became aware of him probing in her mind and told him to stop. But she knew he kept examining her because, a few days later, he said, ‘You’re leaving soon, Hana. Where will you go?’
‘How do you know I’m leaving?’
‘It’s time, isn’t it? You’ve learned what you can from me.
How to survive.’
She knew she could do that, but had no idea where she would go. Not back to the burrows. Never back there.
‘Go to Stone Creek, Hana. Carry a message for me.’
‘What message?’
‘Say to them that the Limping Man is ready.’
‘Ready for what?’
‘To kill everyone who threatens him.’
‘Do Dwellers threaten?’
‘They do just by being what they are. They’re speakers, Hana. But more than that, those with the strongest minds hear what others think. They can control them and make them forget. There are humans who can do it too. Hari and Pearl and their children, and many more, living in villages by the Inland Sea. If Blossom or Hubert told you to jump off a cliff you would do it.’
‘I would not.’
Danatok smiled. ‘It’s lucky that in humans speaking seems to improve them.’
‘Except the Limping Man.’
‘Yes, him. He wants to be the only one. He burns the women he calls witches because he’s afraid they’ll learn to “speak”.’
‘Will they? Would Mam really have been able to?’
‘I don’t know. But you could if you wanted. You speak with birds.’
‘No, I like them, that’s all. How will he kill the Dwellers and the people at the Inland Sea?’
‘Did you see men from the south at the burnings?’
Hana remembered them – men of every colour, in every kind of ceremonial dress. Chieftains, envoys from the tribes, seated on either side of the Limping Man’s throne.
‘He invites them, then captures them with his mind,’ Danatok said. ‘They become his slaves without knowing it. He sends them back to their people, where they raise armies. The tribes are assembling on the plains outside Belong. Soon they’ll march north and scour the forests and kill every Dweller and human they find. Then the Limping Man will be safe.’
Far overhead, a hawk dipped in its flight, sending out a mournful cry. The gulls screamed. They felt Hana’s fear and distress.
‘Do they know? Do the Dwellers know?’
‘I’ve sent messages and warnings. But the people who carry them are fugitives and perhaps they forget when they feel safe.’
‘I’ll go. I’ll tell them.’
‘Say they must leave their homes. They must hide and never come out until he dies.’
‘What will you do?’
‘I’ll hide too. I know how,’ Danatok said.
Hana left next morning. She wore a shirt and trousers and moccasins and carried a small pack containing a water bottle and food and a blanket and her rolled-up fishing net and flints for a fire. Danatok gave her his best knife. She wore it belted at her waist.
They said goodbye formally, concealing their fondness. Hana promised to seek him out one day. She refused to believe she was losing this friend, who in a small way had replaced Mam.
She travelled fast. She knew how to survive now in Country and Sea. She swam like an otter and climbed as though her hands were Dweller hands. On her fourth day three hills reared up in the distance, the middle one wearing a glassy scar on its face. Danatok had warned her against this place. Ottmar had mined his poison salt in the scarred hill. There was a town on the coast nearby. People had drifted back there to live. Avoid it, he told her. They kill strangers. Go around.