CHAPTER THE TWENTY-THIRD
WHEREIN THE MOON-CHEEKED BOY DOES NOT OPEN HIS DOOR
ON JELLYISH LEGS, CLO RAN. PUSHING PAST THE OLD woman, she heard a cross Granddaughter! and she heard the piggish cat hiss and felt its claws catch her arm, but still she ran on her trembling legs out of the chamber and past the fire and out the front door into the empty street. The long white smock she had been dressed in twisted around her ankles and sent her sprawling across the cobblestones; the skin of her hands and knees burned on the rocks, but clambering up, she ran on, wishing she could feel the bones in her legs—wishing for anything but the cooked and quivering bilberries that had taken their place.
Down the street, the smock catching with every footfall, she hurried. The windows of the little huts winked darkly at her and echoed back to her the slap of her bare feet on the stones. Hee, they coughed at her. Hee.
As she neared the last of the huts before the cliff stairs, suddenly a man—the parchment-skin man—stepped out of a door and into her path. Clo tried to weave around him, but on her jam-filled legs, she could not keep her balance.
“Girl.” He put down the basket he was carrying.
Clo glanced behind her—the old woman was not following—then looked up. In the gray light, the man’s skin seemed all the more translucent, so that even the cliffs above formed shadows in the flaps of his nostrils and ears.
“You have recovered.” Placing a finger under her chin, he turned her head first one way, then the other. “Good. Your grandmother was filled with worry.”
Clo tried to pull herself from his grasp, but the man continued. “Yes. Your work—how important it is for you to take this up. And drowning… you are fortunate, child. The net boy, you must know, saved you. You might have been lost in the grotto.”
Clo thought of how the cold and dark had rushed into her lungs, how she had sunk airless and heavy into the void. How the stars had been swept and scattered by the nets and the oars above her. How the bosun had knocked her away. How she had once sat in his dinghy with the little boy in the delicate gown. How she had felt where the little boy’s thread in the tapestry simply ended.
The realization came to her all at once.
Her thread. How had she not thought of this? Thought to look for it? Her thread under the hands of the old woman.
The bitterness of it nearly took her breath away. Had it been the cat’s claws that had raked her into the grotto? Had the old woman stroked its fur while Clo sank beneath the water? Tossed it another fish while she struggled to breathe? Or had the old woman herself placed the thread that caused her drowning?
“I expect the old woman could have saved me herself, if she was all that worried,” Clo responded sharply.
The man’s skin rattled with surprise. “N-no…” He seemed taken aback.
“No?” She crossed her arms. The bilberry jam did not feel so jammish now. Boniness was returning to her legs.
“No, she could—”
“Where’s Cary?”
The parchment brow crumpled in confusion.
“The net boy. Where’s the net boy? I’d like to…” Clo paused. She tried to make her voice sweeter. “… to thank him. For saving me. As you said.” She forced a small smile.
The old man nodded, mollified. “Yes. Certainly.”
“Where?”
Again the parchment folded in bewilderment.
“Where is he?”
“I do not know. He has completed his net repairs.”
“Well…” Clo felt at once her own shortcomings. Why had she never thought to ask this? To ask Cary himself? Wasn’t he her friend? Her cheeks grew hot with shame. “Where does he live?”
The man shrugged, and his shoulders made a brittle crinkling sound.
“You fished him out of the sea,” Clo said, all the sham sweetness now gone from her voice. “One of you, one of the fishermen. So when you rescued him, when he came here, where did he live? Which of these houses”—she gestured sharply up the street—“is his?”
“The houses are for the fishermen. And the weaver.”
“But he’s a net boy. He’s a fisherman.”
“But he was not when he came here.”
“But he is now. And he is only a boy. Who cares for him? Who lives with him?”
“Care?” The man picked up his basket. “No one has to care for him.”
Clo gaped at the man, the bilberry jam suddenly overtopping her in a sickening wave. She thought of Cary fished out of the sea, fished out of the sea and left alone among the fishermen and sea-coal-pickers and barrow-fixers going about their chores, their tasks, as though he did not exist. She thought of the nightgowned boy who had coughed—hee—alone in his room, about his mother, who would have risen to comfort him had she been able. She thought of how Cary himself had guided her through the village when she was too weak to walk alone. How he had carried her hidden in his nets past the guard and the vellum-skin man to the boat because she had asked for his help. How he had fished her out of the sea of stars and fish and lifted her onto the boat and brought her to life and sat by her side all throughout her long recovery. “Of course someone has to care—” she began hotly, but the man was already moving away from her. “Someone has to care!” she shouted at his back. “Someone must care!”
Partway up the street, he paused, considering. “Try that door.” He nodded at the smallest of the structures that lined the street. Squat and crooked and windowless, it was little more than a door between two contorted huts. “That is where the fishermen brought him to recover. But it is not a house.”
The man was right, it was not a house. Standing before the door, knocking, Clo could see it was not a house, nor a hut, nor a shack, even, of any real sort. It was a crooked door and a bit of wall.
No one answered.
She made her fist heavier.
In the windows of the neighboring houses, faces appeared and disappeared.
“Cary!” she called into the wood. “Cary!”
Clo pressed her ear against the door. Silence. She placed her hand on the latch and pushed. The door swung open.
Was this where Cary lived?
It was a long corridor of darkness, nothing more. On the far end, a tiny window let in a pale square of light, just enough for Clo to see a white shape, a misshapen heap, on the floor occupying the center of the hallway. Fishbones were scattered here and there along the walls. The air was stale—dusty and damp in her lungs all at once.
She shut the door behind her.
The white thing in the middle of the corridor—she could see at once it was meant to be a bed. Someone slept here.
“Cary?” Her voice bounced along the narrow walls.
She walked toward the heap. It stirred, somehow, shifting at her approach, and when she reached it, kneeling beside it, she realized why.
Feathers. Thousands upon thousands of feathers piled on the floor. Nothing contained them—they were simply loose, and though Clo could see the imprint of a body in the center of the pile where someone had slept, she could also see how the feathers must spread and disperse, how they could not possibly cushion the cold stones below.
“Oh, Cary…” Her hands hovered over the pile. How could he have been left to live like this? A few feathers rose at her agitation.
Farther down the hall, she found a bucket tucked against the wall, half filled with water, silver fish scales floating on the surface, and then, farther still, another bucket stashed in a dark gap in the stones.
As she reached the window at the end of the corridor, Clo was surprised to find that the passage continued, cutting sharply around a corner so tight she had to turn sideways to pass. The floor here rose rapidly—a tunnel that disappeared up into the darkness.
“Cary?”
Only the echo of her voice answered.
Half crouching, half tripping on the wide fabric of her hem, Clo climbed into the blackness, groping along the floor and walls with her hands. Breathing heavily, she felt the jammishness returning to her legs: she had lain too long in bed, her lungs had held too much water, the path was steep. The passage narrowed further: she knocked her head against the ceiling once, twice, and she nearly stopped in frustration. She did not feel like Clo, wall-jumper, forest-trekker, window-breaker. She felt like Clo, smock-wearer, air-gasper, jelly-leg-walker. Insubstantial as thread. Frayed thread.
Gritting her teeth, she tore at the hem of her smock, ripping away the wide circle of fabric below her knees. She sighed—her legs were free—and climbed on.
Slowly, the darkness became grayer. She could see an end to the passage—a blot of light. And then, under the tpp-tpp of her footsteps, she heard, faintly, piping. Cary-like piping.
Crouched so low she was nearly crawling, she rushed toward the blot of light.
The tunnel ended, and she found herself, abruptly, in open air—gray sky all around her. She had reached the very top of the cliff. She stood, shakily. A few steps forward would land her in the crevasse where the village was tucked—she could see the roofs of the houses far below. A few steps to the side would send her tumbling into the sea. The wind tugged at her smock.
“Clo?”
She turned. Behind her, sitting in the middle of a pile of nets and tucked under a white, sail-like thing, as far as possible from the edges of cliff and crevasse, was Cary. Moons bright with surprise, he put down his flute.
“Be careful…” He held out a steadying hand as she approached. Lifting the white thing, he made room for her beside him.
Clo sat beside him in the pile of nets. He lowered the white thing over their laps like a blanket.
“Cary,” Clo said. She had not caught her breath.
The two sat in silence. In the distance, Clo could see the line of waves the bosun had rowed her through. She watched the line shimmer against the otherwise monochrome expanse.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t see anything but the gray,” Cary said at last. “But I believe you.”
Clo nodded. “Do you…” She hesitated, lifting a handful of the nets on which they were sitting. They were old and salt-encrusted, full of holes. “Do you sleep here?”
“Sometimes here,” Cary murmured. “Sometimes…” He jutted his chin in the direction of the tunnel. “Down there… but I don’t like the dark.”
Clo watched Cary. Seemingly embarrassed, he was running his hands over and smoothing the white blanket-thing covering them. It was warm, Clo realized, but not really a blanket. It was too solid, too stiff. Though it flexed, it kept its dome shape over their laps.
She looked more closely and ran her own fingers over its edge.
When she realized what it was made of, what it was, she nearly gasped. She wanted to lift the thing, to see its shape all at once to be sure, but she knew. She knew from the pale feathers in the middle of the dark corridor below. She knew from the way this blanket-thing flexed but held its shape. She knew from the self-conscious way Cary smoothed its surface over and over. And she thought at last she understood what he had never been able to tell her.
“Cary, how did you come to be in the sea?”
His hands grew still.
“Before they fished you out… how did you come to be in the sea?” Clo pressed gently. “You told me you fell. Where did you fall from?”
Cary’s lip trembled. He could not look at her.
“I fell from the sky,” he said at last.
“And how did you come to be in the sky?”
His hands fluttered nervously over the blanket-thing.
Clo looked again into the gray expanse. She imagined the terror of tumbling through the air and into the sea, the water rushing up to meet the falling boy, the slap of the wet surface turned solid by distance and speed.
“My father…”
Clo waited. Cary dug his fingers into the whiteness of the blanket-thing.
His voice shook.
“My father… he tied…”
He tore away a handful of feathers. They slipped out of his palm and into the wind, carried off the cliff and into the air, delicate white specks vanishing into the gray sky and gray water.
“… he tied wings to me.”