A Daughter of No Nation (37 page)

That left Sophie free to film the forest and observe the ecosystem.

The trees and flowers were generally familiar: sword, liquorice, and maidenhair fern; salmonberry; wild rose; cattails and fireweed; and enough stinging nettle to keep everyone on their toes. The only birds seemed to be crows and a dusky variant of a Steller's jay, sharp-billed, with only a hint of blue about it.

This part of the world was lousy with bald eagles, at least at home, but there were none to be seen here.

Maybe they're scavenging on the shore, she thought. She saw a salamander, a garter snake. Parrish paused once on the trail and pointed out an opossum. His expression was hopeful.

She shook her head. “Seen it.”

With a cheerful shrug, he returned to his confab with Verena.

The trail broke out into a marshy plain, fed from above by a stream, wet enough that someone had laid a road with stones the size of small cars above the level of the water. It led across to a continuation of the dirt path, eighty meters or so to the east.

Sophie gasped, catching Bram by the hand. There were primates wading in the murk.

For just a moment she thought she was seeing the goat transforms of Low Bann all over again, or something like them, but these were the real deal. They were gaunt and long of limb, with fur shaded in dull grays that would fade well into the hues of the forest, perfect camouflage. A white, papery pattern on their cheeks resembled lichens. Their faces had a roundness that reminded her of orangutans.

There were five individuals: a male, three females, and an adolescent, all perched on the edge of one of the boulders, munching on a massive growth of shelf fungus and slimy spike caps. Their eyes were big, black as glass and fringed with huge white lashes. The adolescent was eating with his feet, revealing long, flexible toes.

“We call them wood children,” she heard Parrish say.

Sophie felt a shiver of recognition—they looked a little like the mezmers who'd been sent to kill Gale on Erinth. Had one of these creatures been used in a spell to transform a slave, just as Montaro had been transformed, with a vulture egg, into a boy harpy?

The alpha male gave a resigned-sounding hoot—
Oh, great, people,
it seemed to be saying—and heaved himself off the rock, goosing one of the females to send her up a nurse tree with their haul of mushrooms. The females went willingly—the juvenile had to be pinched hard.

Sophie caught it all on camera.
They're tailless. Another similarity to orangutans.

Something—a ripple of water—sent the primates shooting up to the canopy.

Bram looked nervous. “Any idea what that was?”

“Bear, I hope.” The donkey handler was philosophical. “Try not to worry, Kir.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“Look at it this way,” Tonio said, “The whole island's essentially a cemetery. If something gets us, we're already buried.”

He said it deadpan, and Sophie tried out a dutiful laugh. Bram turned back to his equipment with a grunt.

She felt that pang again. The two of them—what if they vanished? Would Parrish—or Verena, or someone—even go tell their parents they'd died?

Verena's here, too.

The primates began shrieking then, letting out a chorus of shrill
gah-gah-GAH!
sounds that ripped at the nerves. The donkeys moaned and picked up their pace. They had crossed the stone walk and were back on the trail by now, nearly to the next turn upward onto dry land and higher elevations.

A cat rose out of the water, maybe a foot from where the primates had been.

It was smaller than a mountain lion, which should have been reassuring. Dripping wet, too, which might have made it comical. It had that funny, reduced, wet-cat look, the fur plastered against its body and making it small.

Instead of making it cute or pathetic, though, the soaking emphasized the leanness of its lines, the alley-cat dangerousness of it. Its fur was dove gray and it had huge paws, the low-slung proportions of a puma, and elongated canines that came to points well below its upper lip. Its eyes were the color of flame.

“Stop recording.” Parrish was, suddenly, beside her. He had four of the javelins in his hand. Sophie let the camera fall to its position at her side and accepted one of the double-pointed spears.

“Send the donkeys up first,” he said, urging the handler to the fore of the party, so that the five of them—Parrish, Tonio, her and Bram and Verena—were arrayed on the trail facing the cat. Verena had her sword out; Tonio had produced a wicked-looking stiletto from somewhere.

“I thought you said cats weren't allowed on dry land!”

“It's native to the island.” Parrish spoke loudly. He was flapping his coat, making himself look big. Sophie squeezed Bram between them and flapped, too.

“Go on,” Parrish said to the beast. “Go!”

It rippled a lip at him, sneering feline contempt, but by now they were all flapping and stomping. It eased out of its hunting pose all at once, sitting on the wide, flat rock and washing a paw.

“Up the trail,” Parrish said. “Go, Bram. Then Sophie.”

They backed up until they were out of sight of the thing, then rushed to catch up to the drover, who'd waited half a kilometer up. “It'll be stalking us now,” he said dolefully.

“We're a big party,” Parrish said. “It knows we'll fight. And we're nearly to Ossuary.”

Sophie felt calm descend as they continued to climb. She was listening to the sound of the wood, waiting for the crows to go silent, listening for footfalls—but the specter would be silent, she supposed.

She stayed close to Bram. Nothing's getting you, she thought.

He was thinking the same thing, probably: they were so eager to play protective sibling that twice they almost tripped over each other.

“Jeez,” Bram whispered. “This was almost my postal code.”

They were both a little strung out, as if after a caffeine binge, by the time they reached the monastery walls.

The walls were unexpectedly colorful—red and gold lacquered bamboo tiles, from the look of them, had been laid over the stone wall. They were carefully polished, but where tiles had fallen out, here and there, they had not been replaced. A relic of luxurious old days when the people of Issle Morta stole from others rather than serving the dead?

Despite its adornments, the wall was a substantial fortification, forming a stockade around a small village. The gate was wide open and unguarded.

“What's to keep kitty out?” Bram asked.

“Them,” Parrish said, pointing. Another family of the primates, twenty strong, was lounging on the wall, jumping to and from an old guard tower. The wood children hooted as the party crossed the threshold, tossing down pine cones. Parrish caught one before it could bean a donkey. He got pelted for his trouble. A pine cone stuck in his hair.

The village at sea level, Lamentation, had been drab but ordinary enough. The villagers, though they'd mostly been fifty or older, had come in an even mix of genders. Here, Sophie and Verena were the only women.

“This is your hometown?”

Parrish looked around at the hovels and statues, and shrugged.

Ossuary was also, in fact, a cemetery. Stone monuments and crypts alternated with huts people were obviously living in; a monk emerged with a freshly laundered cloak and draped it on a line strung from a monument to his roof. Another was using a gravestone as a backrest as he … napped?

“There are a few empty shelters over there,” the drover said.

“These two?” Parrish walked toward a pair of small cedar A-frames, peering in. “Hello?” he said in Fleet, and then,
“Seggin fra?”

No reply. “We can sleep here.”

The drover had already looped the donkeys' leads around a crudely carved representation of a robed man. He began unpacking the provisions, laying out the baskets of food they'd brought onto a crypt in the midst of the stockade. One monk promptly came and chose an orange from the pack; he took a second and threw it to the primates.

“What happens now?” Bram said. “We sit around until someone takes notice of us?”

Parrish shook his head. “We'll spend the night. The scripped dead are kept in a cave within the mountain, and we'll need permission tonight to revive Highfelling tomorrow. Most of the monks won't speak Fleet, I'm afraid. Many won't speak at all.”

Bram was turning a slow circle. “Using the monuments of the dead for clotheslines doesn't seem very respectful.”

“Those interred here inside the wall are the monks themselves. They … it's part of the practice. Their own deaths are as nothing to the suffering they—our people—caused in the past. So their remains don't deserve reverence. Some don't even opt for burial. They ask to be thrown outside the gates to rot.”

Sophie scanned the mix of hovels and graves. It was a decent-size town; she'd have to get up above it to see it all. “Where's Tonio?”

“Pursuing his business,” said the drover, sharply. “One dinna ask what the living might wish with the dead.”

“We don't ask a lot of things here,” she said. “Whether you have business with the dead, whether a nation's free or bonded—”

“Whether Spook Island is filled with big, man-eating cats,” Bram muttered.

“What are ye, spies?”

Parrish looked at the bunch of them rolling out the bedrolls and blankets in the cabin. “Bram, Verena—would you mind setting up camp? The village is safe enough. The wood children will shout if there's a specter coming.”

“And me?” Sophie said.

Verena flinched.

“There's something I want to show you,” Parrish said.

Her half-sister turned away, clearly furious.

“Coming?”

“Where?”

“It's on the trail to Hell.”

“Excuse me?”

“The capitol, but we're not going that far.”

Sophie followed. “Your capitol is called Hell. Of course it is.”

The two of them proceeded to what she thought of as the back wall of the monastery and she saw the gateway into the caves. It was covered by a double door, red in color, that reminded her of a barn. Parrish ignored this, leading her instead to a rickety-looking staircase that climbed to another trail, switchbacks rising high up the mountain.

It was a steep climb, one that, conveniently, left no breath for casual conversation. In time, it took them up to a cliff's edge so sharp and square and level it might have been cut by a diamond saw. She could see all the way to the village, the harbor far below.

Planted at three-meter intervals along the cliff's edge were poplar trees, straight of trunk and perhaps seventy-five feet tall. Their trunks were carved or otherwise shaped to form figures, humans, all with their bare feet planted squarely on the lip of the cliff. White roots dangled over the edge from their toes, bone-white and hairy as rats' tails. The woody arms exploded upward in bursts that might, in abstract art, have been hands, long thin branches like fingers reaching skyward.

The poplars were covered in leaves that, at first glance, reminded Sophie of peacock feathers—they had that false eye that many species used to deter predators.

She looked at the trees carefully, then turned to Garland. “More oddities?”

“Yes.” He led her to the second-last in the line, a woman, whose wooden face gazed serenely out to sea. “People held here under the hostage concession sometimes opt to be altered in this fashion. They can look out at the world they've left behind … well, it's reckoned to be less painful than permanent homesickness. Or even constant boredom.”

“I can see that, I guess,” she said dubiously.

“This,” he said, delicately, and then he cleared his throat and started again. “Sophie, this individual is my mother, Stronia Bel-Parrish.”

Her jaw dropped a little. “Buhhh … you've brought me to meet your mom?”

He nodded.

What is going on with you today?

But the answer to that was obvious: he was essentially visiting a grave and yet the woman wasn't dead. No wonder he hated coming home. “Can she hear me? Do I say hi?”

“Stronia never learned to speak Fleet.”

“So how do you say hello in Issle Morta?”

“Actually, it sounds about the same.”

“Parrish.”

“The most appropriate greeting would be
Vaspe denneh me maney.
”

“That sounds Russian.”

He shrugged. “I don't know Russian.”

She repeated the phrase and then looked at him:
What now?
He added a few phrases of his own, starting with “Zophie Hansa” and going on for a second longer. The accent definitely had a Russian sound. Gale's name figured in his monologue, too.

“Are you telling her Gale died?”

He gave her an odd half smile and seemed unable to speak. The tree's not-carved face did not move, but its branches shuddered in the wind, and the eyes on the leaves all seemed, suddenly, to be looking at her.

“Know what? I'm gonna give you guys a minute.” She gestured at a thread of trail heading upward.

“Take a javelin,” he said, and she did.

His mom's a tree. A dryad? Naiad?
She wasn't up on her fairy tales.
I should've played more Dungeons and Dragons in college instead of volunteering to go shoot wildlife for every ethologist with a research grant and a boat.

Once the transformed trees were out of sight, the trail she had chosen might have been any little strip of land in the Pacific Northwest. It led upward to another little shelf of rock, another viewpoint. This one had a tumbled plate of stone, much like those that led across the marsh, lying like a table on the land. She hitched herself up on it, as if it were an oversize bench, and set herself to watching the landscape.

From up here, the harbor, encircled as it was by land on one side and the skull planters with their redwood trees, looked like a lake. Shifting clouds of crows moved in the trees, giving the perimeter of the foliage a black, mobile border.