Cahle gave her a little smile and went over to Mrs. Gurgle, who was squatting by the fire. Baskets of dried… things had been brought down from their hanging place in one of the huts, and Daphne knew the rule: the nastier and more dangerous, the higher. These had practically been on the roof.
When Cahle spoke to her, acting like a pupil talking to a respected teacher, the old woman stopped sniffing at a handful of what looked like dusty bean pods and looked across at Daphne. There was no smile or wave. This was Mrs. Gurgle at work. She said something out of the corner of her mouth and threw all the pods into the little three-legged cauldron in front of her.
Cahle came back. “She says safe is not sure. Sure not safe. There is just do, or do not do.”
I was drowning, and he saved me, thought Daphne. Why did I ask that stupid question?
“Make it sure,” she said. “Really sure.” On the other side of the room, Mrs. Gurgle grinned. “Can I ask another question? When I’m… you know, there, what should I do? Is there anything I should say?”
The reply came back: “Do what is best. Say what is right.” And that was it. Mrs. Gurgle did not go in for long explanations.
When the old woman hobbled across with half an oyster shell, Cahle said: “You must lick up what is on the shell and lie back. When the drop of water hits your face you… will wake up.”
Mrs. Gurgle gently put the shell in Daphne’s hand and made a very short speech.
“She says you will come back because you have very good teeth,” Cahle volunteered.
Daphne looked at the half shell. It was a dull white, and empty except for two little greeny-yellow blobs. It didn’t seem much for all that effort. She held it close to her mouth and looked up at Cahle. The woman had put her hand in a gourd of water, and now she held it high over Daphne’s mat. She looked down with a drop of water glistening on the end of her finger.
“Now,” she said.
Daphne licked the shell (it tasted of nothing) and let herself fall back.
And then there was the moment of horror. Even as her head hit the mat, the drop of water was falling toward it.
She tried to shout, “That’s not enough ti — ”
And then there was darkness, and the boom of the waves overhead.
Mau ran onward, but the voice of Locaha still sounded very close.
Are you tiring, Mau? Do your legs ache for rest?
“No!” said Mau. “But… these rules. What are they?”
Oh, Mau… I only agreed there must be rules. That doesn’t mean I have to tell you what they are.
“But you must catch me, yes?”
You are correct in your surmise, said Locaha.
“What does that mean?”
You guessed right. Are you sure you are not tiring?
“Yes!”
In fact strength flowed into Mau’s legs. He had never felt so alive. The pillars were going past faster now. He was overtaking the fish, which panicked away, leaving silvery trails. And there was light on the dark horizon. It looked like buildings, like white buildings as big as the ones Pilu had told him about in Port Mercia. What were buildings doing down here?
Something white flashed past under his feet. He glanced down and almost stumbled. He was running over white blocks. They were blurred by his speed, and he didn’t dare to slow down, but they looked exactly the right size to be god anchors.
This is wonderful, wonderful, said Locaha. Mau, did you bother to wonder if you are running the wrong way?
Two voices had said those words and now arms grabbed him.
“This way!” screamed Daphne, right in his ear as she tugged him back the way he had come. “Why didn’t you hear me?”
“But — ” Mau began, straining to look back at the white buildings. There was something like a twist of smoke coming out of them… or perhaps it was a clump of weeds, flapping in the current… or a ray, skimming toward them.
“I said this way! Do you want to die forever? Run! Run!”
But where was the speed in his legs? It was like running through water now, real water. He looked at Daphne, who was half towing him.
“How did you get here?”
“Apparently I’m dead — will you try to keep up! And whatever you do, don’t look back!”
“Why not?”
“Because I just did! Run faster!”
“Are you really dead?”
“Yes, but I’m due to get well soon. Come on, Mrs. Gurgle! The drop was falling!”
Silence fell like a hammer made of feathers. It left holes in the shape of the sound of the sea.
They stopped running, not because they intended to, but because they had to. Mau’s feet hung uselessly above the ground. The air turned gray.
“We are in the steps of Locaha,” he said. “He has spread his wings over us.”
Words seized Daphne’s tongue. It was only a few weeks since she’d heard them before, at the funeral of Cabin Boy Scatterling, who had been killed in the mutiny. He’d had red hair and pimples and she hadn’t liked him much, but she’d cried when the sailcloth-wrapped body had disappeared under the waves. Captain Roberts was a member of the Conducive Brethren, who accepted a version of the Gospel of St. Mary Magdalene as, well, gospel.[!Daphne was quite sure that there had been a female disciple because, as she explained to a surprised Captain Roberts, “Our Lord is always shown wearing white, and someone must have seen to it that he always had a clean robe.”!] She’d never heard this piece read down at Holy Trinity, but she had tucked it into her memory and now it came out, screamed like a battle cry:
“And those that perish in the sea, the sea shall not hold them!
Tho’ they be broken and scattered, they will be made whole!
They will rise again on that morning, clad in new raiment!
In ships of the firmament they will climb among stars!”
“Mrs. Gur —!”
CHAPTER 9
Rolling the Stone
WATER SPLASHED ON DAPHNE’S face. She opened her eyes, and her mouth said: “ — gle!”
Cahle and the old woman looked down on her, smiling. As she blinked in the light, she felt Mrs. Gurgle gently pulling something out of her hair. But something else was happening. Memory was flowing out of her mind in a tide. The face of death… the great pillars of the world… the white slabs… they sped into the past like silver fish, fading as they went.
She turned to the mat beside her. Mau lay still and snored.
No reason to get excited, she thought, feeling a little lightheaded. He had been so cold, and she’d brought him up here to keep him warm. There had been… something that happened. The shape of it was still in her head, but she couldn’t fill it in. Except… “There was a silver fish?” she wondered aloud.
Mrs. Gurgle looked very surprised and said something to Cahle, who smiled and nodded.
“She says you are indeed a woman of power,” Cahle said. “You pulled him out of a dark dream.”
“I did? I can’t remember. But there was a fish in it.”
The hole in her memory was still there when Cahle had gone, and there was still a fish in it. Something big and important had happened and she had been there, and all she could remember was that there had been a fish in it?
Mrs. Gurgle had curled up in her corner, and it looked as if she was asleep. Daphne was certain that she wasn’t. She’d be peeking through eyelids that were almost closed and listening so hard that her ears would try to flap. All the women took far too much interest in her and Mau. It was like the maids back home gossiping. It was silly and quite unnecessary, it really was!
Mau looked quite small on the mat. The twitching had stopped, but he had curled up in a ball. It was a shock, now, to see him so still.
“Ermintrude,” said her voice in the air.
“Yes,” she said, and added, “You are me, aren’t you?”
“When he is asleep, he still dreams of dark waters. Touch him. Hold him. Warm him. Let him know he is not alone.”
It sounded like her own voice, and it made her blush. She could feel the hot pinkness rising up her neck. “That wouldn’t be seemly,” she hissed, before she could stop herself. Then she wanted to shout: “That wasn’t me! That was some old woman’s stupid granddaughter!”
“So who are you?” said the voice in the air. “Some creature who knows how to feel but not how to touch? Here? In this place? Mau is alone. He thinks he has no soul, so he is building himself one. Help him. Save him. Tell him the stupid old men are wrong.”
“The stupid old — ” Daphne began, and felt a memory uncoil. “The Grandfathers?”
“Yes! Help him roll away the stone! He is a woman’s child and he is crying!”
“Who are you?” she asked the air.
The voice came back like an echo: “Who are you?” Then the voice went, leaving not even a shape in the silence.
I’ve got to think about this, Daphne thought. Or perhaps not. Not now, in this place, because maybe there’s such a thing as too much thinking. Because however much of a Daphne you yearn to be, there is always your Ermintrude looking over your shoulder. Anyway, her thoughts added, Mrs. Gurgle is here, so she counts as a chaperone, and a better one than poor Captain Roberts, since she’s nothing like as dead.
She knelt by Mau’s mat. The voice had been right: There was a trickle of tears down his face, even though he seemed fast asleep. She kissed the tears because this felt like the right thing to do, and then tried to get an arm under him, which was really hard to manage and in any case her arm went to sleep and then got pins and needles, and she had to pull it out. So much for romance, she decided. She dragged her own mat over to his and lay down on it, which meant that an arm could go over him without too much difficulty but also that she had to rest rather awkwardly with her head on her other arm. But after a while his hand came up and grasped hers, gently, at which point, and despite the extreme discomfort, she fell asleep.
Mrs. Gurgle waited until she was sure that Daphne was sleeping, and then she uncurled her hand and looked at the little silver fish she had picked out of the girl’s hair. It coiled backward and forward in her palm.
She swallowed it. It was only a dream fish, but such things are good for the soul.
Daphne woke up just as the first light of dawn was painting the sky pink. She was stiff in muscles she’d never known she possessed. How did married couples manage? It was a mystery.
Mau was snoring gently and didn’t stir at all.
How could you help a boy like that? He wanted to be everywhere and do everything. And so he’d probably try to do more than he should and end up in trouble again and she would have to sort it out again. She sighed a sigh that was older than she was. Her father had been the same, of course. He’d spend all night working on dispatch boxes for the Foreign Office, with a footman on duty at all times to bring him coffee and roast duck sandwiches. It was quite usual for the maids to find him still at his desk in the morning, fast asleep with his head on a map of Lower Sidonia.
Her grandmother used to make sniffy remarks like: “I suppose His Majesty doesn’t have any other ministers?” But now Daphne understood. He’d been like Mau, trying to fill the hole inside with work so that it didn’t overflow with memories.
Right now she was glad she was alone. Apart from the snoring of Mau and Mrs. Gurgle there was no sound but the wind and the boom of the waves on the reef. On the island, that was what counted as silence.
“Show us yer drawers!” floated in through the doorway.
Oh, yes, and the wretched parrot. It really was very annoying. You often didn’t see it for days, because it had picked up a deep, cheerful hatred of the pantaloon birds and took a huge delight in annoying them at every opportunity. And then, just when you had a moment that was quiet and a bit, well, spiritual, it was suddenly all over the place shouting, “Show us your… underthings!”
She sighed. Sometimes the world ought to be better organized. Then she listened for a while and heard the bird fly off up the mountain.
Right, she thought, first things first. So, first, she went out to the fireplace and set some salt-pickled beef to simmering in a pot. She added some roots that Cahle had said were okay, and one half of a very small red pepper. It had to be just one half because they were so hot a whole one burned her mouth, although Mrs. Gurgle ate them raw.
Anyway, she owed the old woman a lot of chewed beef.
And now for the big test. Things shouldn’t be allowed to just happen. If she was going to be a woman of power, she had to take charge. She couldn’t always be the ghost girl, pushed around by events.
Right. Should she kneel? People didn’t seem to kneel here, but she didn’t want to be impolite, even if she was talking to herself.
Hands together. Eyes closed? It was so easy to get things wrong —
The message came right away.
“You did not put a spear into Twinkle’s hand,” said her own voice in her own head, even before she’d had time to think how to begin. She thought: Oh dear, whoever it is, they know that I still think of the baby as Twinkle.
“Are you a heathen god of some sort?” she asked. “I’ve been thinking about this, and well, gods do talk to people, and I understand there are quite a lot of gods here. I just want to know if there is going to be any thunder and lightning, because I really don’t like that. Or if I’ve gone mad and I’m hearing voices. However, I have dismissed this hypothesis because I don’t believe that people who have really gone mad think they have gone mad, so wondering if you have gone mad means that you haven’t. I just want to know who I’m talking to, if you don’t mind.”
She waited.
“Er, I apologize for calling you heathen,” she added.
There was still no reply. She didn’t know whether to be relieved or not and decided instead to be a bit hurt.
She coughed. “All right. Very well,” she said, standing up. “At least I tried. I’m sorry to have trespassed on your time.” She turned to leave the hut.
“We would take the newborn child and make his little hand grasp a spear, so that he would grow up to be a great warrior and kill the children of other women,” said the voice. “We did it. The clan said so, the priests said so, the gods said so. And now you come, and what do you know of the custom?” the voice went on. “And so the first thing the baby touches is the warmth of his mother, and you sing him a song about stars!”
Was she in trouble? “Look, I’m really sorry about the twinkle song — ” she began.
“It was a good song for a child,” said the voice. “It began with a question.”
This was getting very strange. “Have I done something wrong or not?”
“How is it that you hear us? We are blown about by the wind, and our voices are weak, but you, a trouserman, heard our struggling silence! How?”
Had she been listening? Daphne wondered. Perhaps she’d never stopped after all those days in the church after her mother died, saying every prayer she knew, waiting for even a whisper in reply. She hadn’t been looking for an apology. She wasn’t asking for time to run backward. She just wanted an explanation that was better than “It’s the will of God,” which was grown-up speak for “because.”
It had seemed to her, thinking about it in her chilly bedroom, that what had happened was very much like a miracle. After all, it had been a terrible storm, and if the doctor had managed to get there without his horse being struck by lightning, that would have been a miracle, wouldn’t it? That’s what people would have said. Well, in that big, dark, rainy, roaring night, the lightning had managed to hit quite a small horse among all those big thrashing trees. Didn’t that look like a miracle, too? It was almost exactly the same shape, wasn’t it? In any case, besides, didn’t they call something like this an “act of God”?