The Limping Man Read online

  his time. Then he released a breath of air – a signal to his hunters that he was heading where they expected. They would watch for him where the bottom shelved into drowned reeds a quarter way across. Ben turned and headed back for the island, angling to avoid men surging out chest deep. Spearmen, he guessed. They would probe for him. The water stirred along his side as one went past. Ben kept swimming softly – his good arm, his stump, his legs in unison. He reached a patch of reeds beyond the mud-hump where he had landed and lay on his back, with only his face showing. He breathed deep and quiet, then sank again. For the next hour he worked his way round the island. Once, shielded by reeds on every side, he watched soldiers struggling through the water. A bowman lost his footing and went under. He came up, went under again and no one tried to save him. His last cry was, ‘Praise the Man.’ The next time Ben looked boats were rowing in the deep parts of the swamp and men stabbed the water with spears. Others had landed in the forest but Ben was confident Hana was away. They would not catch her in the trees.

  A small man dressed in black and thin as a stick shrilled orders from the largest boat. Ben could not make out his words but saw him point: he wanted the reeds round the island searched. There was no hope now of slipping through the bushes to Queenie’s shack. Ben cut the pigeons free from his neck and wedged them in roots under the surface. He worked his way further round the island until he felt the gritty rise of the causeway. Nowhere to go. He changed direction, heading deeper into the fringe of reeds. An eel writhed away under his chest. He scraped along the bottom until his breath gave out. Something – a log? – stopped him from surfacing. He felt a hand clamp his head, and fought his terror – not a hand, a piece of heavy cloth. He tore it away, raised his face in the water, and looked into Queenie’s dead eyes.

  Blood had drawn eels like perfume. They twisted round the body, wrapping Queenie in their arms. Ben drew deep breaths, calming himself. He felt for a wound and found three crossbow bolts embedded in her chest. It meant she had not been killed trying to run. They had made her talk and she had told about a boy and girl and their questions . . .

  The sound of oars closed in. There was no hiding place. Ben held his knife tight. What would Hari do? What would his father? It was Lo’s voice he seemed to hear: Use what is there. But there was nothing: reeds, mud, water. There was only his knife. Use what is there. Eels, a body. His mind made a kick. It was as though he had become Lo.

  Ben slid under Queenie’s body, pushing eels out of the way. He surfaced in the gap between her and the reeds. The shouting of men, the sound of oars, came closer. He chose a reed, cut it below the water and snapped off its top. He blew through the hollow stem, making sure it was clear. Then he slid under Queenie, his head beneath hers where it butted into the reeds. He thrust the reed upwards through her hair, blew it free of water and started to breathe. It was hard. For a moment he thought he would not get enough air. He changed to shallow breaths, using the top of his lungs. He could last that way if the boats were quick. He felt one bump Queenie’s body. Her hair drifted, circling his throat. Eels thrashed away. Ben imagined he heard shouts and wondered if he was blacking out. He held on. There was enough air. Lo, he thought, I believe in you.

  An oar scraped his side as the boat backed out of the reeds. Ben waited. One minute. Two. They were still close. He felt water shift as spearmen trod in the rushes by the shore. Then the movements stopped. Only the eels moved. He felt them nibbling the wound in his thigh.

  Slowly he let his face rise through Queenie’s hair. Blue sky, a reed wall, half her face, one eye. He drew a proper breath and sank again. The next time he lifted his head high enough to listen. The shouts and the treading had moved towards the back of the island. One boat was still close. He heard the swish of a spear plunged into water. They were not giving up. He heard the little man shriek orders – a voice like a girl’s, a voice like Hana’s, who had saved him.

  Ben sank again. He stabbed at the nibbling eels with his knife – and all afternoon he kept it up, rising, breathing, sinking, repulsing the eels. Queenie’s body wanted to float away. He took a handful of her hair and pulled it back each time. The sun edged down the western sky – taking its time. When night came he would move, swim silently down the length of the swamp to the place where it drained into the sea. Until then he must lie alongside his companion.

  ‘What’s the secret, Queenie?’ he whispered.

  He wondered if the Limping Man had ordered his mother’s death.

  Feet tramped on the causeway and died away. After a while frogs began to croak. Toads boomed. The sun sank slowly. Lazy bloody sun, Ben thought. He waited an hour after it was dark. There was no sound on the island – no twig snapping, no shuffle or step round Queenie’s shack.

  Ben whispered goodbye to the old woman. Quietly he made his way out into the swamp.

  EIGHT

  A trickle of water ran through beds of yellow grass. Hana waited where it broke out on the beach, hugging the packs to stay warm. After screaming her warning she had run. Ben was alive, she was sure of it. He was so quick, so confident, so easily a part of every place he found himself in that she believed he would simply sink into the swamp and vanish like a frog.

  She waited while the sun went down, hearing waves rustle on the sand. Stars came out and she named them, as Danatok had taught her. But always she was listening, listening for Ben. She kept her mind open for him the way she had for Hawk. Speaking, she thought. Maybe we should speak. Several times in the last few days she had caught whispers from him. Perhaps he heard her too. Perhaps it was natural between them. If she said his name now alongside her own, made a link between them, he might find his way to her as if she were a light for him to see. But she hesitated. She did not like people in her mind and nor did he. He spoke with Lo, and she, in some strange way, had spoken with Hawk. It was enough. Speaking with Ben would be like letting him put his hand on her. She was not ready for that.

  She wrapped herself in her blanket. She counted stars – and opened her mind for him when she remembered, without speaking his name. She would be a place for him to find but not a voice calling.

  The wind rose and waves beat louder on the beach. Where was he? It must be midnight. She began to imagine him pierced with crossbow bolts, floating dead in the rushes with eels like black banners hanging from his chest and belly.

  Ben, she said at last, where are you?

  Another hour passed. She counted time by the movement of the earth, the way Danatok had taught her. The swamp was moving too, with night creatures, bubbling gas, and its own stillness, which was like an explosion clamped down by a lid of mud and water.

  ‘Ben,’ she whispered. The waves answered. The wind answered. A night bird, on the wing, answered with a distant cry.

  Ben, she thought.

  He replied. It was like a hand touching and falling away. Hana, he said, and nothing more. She held on to the sound. She imagined a thread running through the dark and she slid her hand along it, followed it. The way led up the creek trickling in the sand, then into the swamp grass and towards the forest.

  Ben, she said again, and he replied, stronger now: Hana.

  She followed the shred of warmth that came from him, and found him where the reeds began. He was no more than a shine of eyes in the starlight; then a shine of teeth – he was trying to grin.

  ‘Wondered when you’d get here,’ he said in a voice she scarcely heard.

  ‘Ben, are you hurt?’

  ‘In my leg. Flies, mosquitoes, bloody eels. Bloody toads.

  Everything’s biting me. I’m the best dinner they’ve ever had.’

  She felt his exhaustion. ‘Don’t talk.’

  Stumbling, sinking, she helped him along the swamp-edge, through the rank grass, down to the beach. She wrapped his blanket round him but would not let him lie down.

  ‘We’ve got to move, Ben. They’ll be hunting us in the morning.’

  ‘Send them the wrong way,’ he whispered.

  She ha
d already thought of it. She left him by the stream and walked along the beach, leaving footprints where the high tide would not wash them away. Then she angled down to the sea, still heading north, went into the water up to her knees and turned back to the stream. She walked up until she found Ben. He was sleeping. She woke him, helped him stand and shuffle to the stream; left him swaying there while she scuffed out his marks in the sand, hoping she had them all. She meant the searchers to think Ben had died in the swamp.

  Together, Hana supporting Ben, they waded down the stream into the sea.

  ‘Where are we going?’ he mumbled.

  ‘I know a place.’

  The sea water seemed to revive him. He took his pack from her and stuffed his blanket in, then drank water from his bottle. ‘I’m full of mud,’ he said; and was at once sick into the sea. He drank again.

  ‘Come on, Ben. We’ve only got a couple of hours,’ she said.

  ‘One good thing, the salt water gets rid of the leeches.’

  Knee-deep, sometimes shoulder-deep in the waves, she led him to the tumbled rocks at the foot of the cliffs. Up there, the Limping Man was sleeping in his palace. And over the hill lay the ruins of the city that had been Belong. I’m going back to the burrows, Hana thought. It almost made her sick like Ben. She was sick with fear.

  They found the cave she had hidden in on her flight from the burrows. The sun came up, lighting its mouth as they went inside. She led Ben round two curves into the dark and found a place for them to lie on a fan of sand. They slept all day, refilled their bottles from the water trickling down the wall, and crept out as night swept down like a black fog. Ben found seaweed and bound it with strips of blanket to the cut in his thigh. Hana heard him grunting with pain but dared not show sympathy. They had to keep moving.

  Halfway through the night they took to the sea. Hana had no knowledge of the sea wall, just a memory of Danatok’s tale of his house on stilts. She found the gap into the harbour and they peered through. Fires were burning on the road running behind the wharves. Men moved back and forth loading ships. This was the fleet Foss had boasted of: four single-masted vessels with oars along their sides and bows like beak-fish. It was hard to tell in the night, but they seemed to have the limping symbol painted on their sides.

  Ben and Hana swam silently, keeping clear of the firelight on the water. The stilt house made a shadow and they moved along it like a road. A wall had fallen outwards, giving shelter as they drew close.

  ‘Ben,’ Hana whispered.

  ‘Yeah,’ he replied. He freed his pack, pushed it at her, sank without a sound. I seem to spend half my life under water, he thought. He came up beside a pile crusted with shellfish and sent his mind into the room above, probing in corners and feeling along walls. He beckoned Hana.

  The fallen wall made a stairway hiding them from the shore. They climbed and found an open room, grey in the dawnlight. The built-in bunks and iron stove were torn from their places and made a rubble heap on the floor, where rotten planks gave glimpses of the water below. No one would use the pile house again. No one would come.

  They drank from their bottles but had no food left. Ben made a sack of his shirt. He climbed down the sloping wall and filled it with mussels from the piles. They opened them with their knives and ate them raw. Then they slept uncomfortably, disturbed by the shouts of men and the rumble of carts from the wharves.

  The sun was high when they woke. A wind was blowing from the east, rattling loose timbers on Danatok’s house. ` Hana and Ben were trapped until dark. Even then they had no idea where they would go. She helped him untie the bandage on his thigh. The wound was clean, but although he was stoical she saw how it hurt him. The leech bites and insect bites troubled him with their itching. He needed to head back to the forest for cool leaves and healing berry juice. Hana counted the days they had spent: four days gone, two to go before the burnings in People’s Square. The army would march the day after that. And these four deadly ships were almost ready to sail. She felt helpless. What could they do, two of them against the Limping Man? And where were Blossom and Hubert? Where was Lo? She sat with her back to a wall and let Ben watch the shore through a crack between two twisted planks. He did not seem to have these questions. Every now and then he drew his stone out of his pocket and worked on the edge of his knife.

  She was dozing when she felt his hand on her shoulder. At once she knew something had changed. The wind still rattled the house but a hush lay under it. His hand took her shirt and hauled her up. She put her eye to the crack. The workers stood still, the carts had stopped. Even the horses watched as two people, side by side, walked along the empty road towards the wharf where the ships were moored. They did not hurry, they looked as if they were strolling on a path: Blossom and Hubert.

  ‘Don’t,’ Hana said as she felt Ben’s mind crouch and prepare to spring. ‘They don’t need us. If they know we’re here we’ll get in the way.’

  She saw their concentration and unity. Each was held in the other’s hand – Hana felt it the way she had felt Hawk.

  They moved as easily as he flew yet she felt the strength hidden by their ease, like tree roots anchored on stone.

  ‘I want to help them,’ Ben said.

  ‘You can’t.’

  A squad of bowmen ran along the wharf. The line in front knelt to shoot, the line behind stood ready.

  Blossom and Hubert ‘spoke’ a command. Hana felt it ripple across her mind: heard a sound like the small hiss of a wave at its furthest reach on the sand. The bowmen laid down their weapons and made no other move as Blossom and Hubert passed through their lines. The workers and their overseers stepped back as though an unseen hand was pushing them. Their arms fell slack at their sides. Blossom and Hubert turned to the ships. Another command. The men on board trooped off and stood with the others.

  ‘The Limping Man must know. He must feel it by now,’ Ben said.

  Hana feared this too. But his palace was miles away on the hill. She wondered why Blossom and Hubert had not gone there to challenge him. Then she understood. Piles of hay lay on the wharf to feed the cart-horses. Men began to carry armfuls up the gangplanks and drop them in the holds of the ships. Blossom and Hubert waited. Hana felt the strength of their concentration: more than a hundred men in control. If one broke out all would follow. They would fall on Blossom and Hubert and tear them to pieces like a dog pack with a pair of trapped hares.

  Four men bound hay to lengths of wood. Another with a flint and stone struck sparks on the hay. Four torches flamed. The men walked one to each ship. They mounted the gangplanks and stood by the open holds. Again Hana felt the ripple of Blossom and Hubert’s command. The men threw their torches, which plunged red and eager into the bellies of the ships, each with a tail of smoke behind it.

  It took only a moment. White smoke first, swaying and curling. Then puffs of flame, tongues of flame, leaping tigers of flame. Red fire climbed out of the holds and ran on the decks. It climbed the masts and ate the furled sails. It bent over the sides of the ships, caressing them and hissing on the water.

  The men on the wharf took no notice, although the nearest ones beat out sparks eating their clothes. Blossom and Hubert stood as though unaware of the roaring furnaces by the wharf. They disappeared and reappeared behind walls of flame. They stood as though waiting and – Hana was uncertain in the haze of heat and the slanting flames – now each had an arm around the other’s waist.

  ‘Why aren’t they getting away?’ she said.

  The fires lost their anger, they settled down to burn steadily. Soon they would eat through the hulls. Then the ships would go down one by one. Ben’s throat was swelling, his eyes were burning with joy and anticipation.

  ‘They’re waiting for Vosper,’ he said. ‘They’ll burn him up the way they’re burning the ships.’

  Distantly, above the noise of the fire, they heard a trumpet cry.

  ‘He’s on his way. I’m going to help them.’ He stepped away from the crack.

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sp; ‘No, Ben. You’ll get in the way. Can’t you feel’ – she could not describe it – ‘feel the way they’re aimed like a spear. They’ll break if they have to think about anyone else.’ It was true, she felt it – their strength, so concentrated, was also delicate. She wanted to see their faces. Their faces would glow.

  At a new command the workers and bowmen turned like sleepwalkers and shuffled into the streets leading from the wharves. They vanished among the buildings, leaving the carts and horses, leaving their weapons strewn on the ground. The ships continued to burn, flaring, subsiding, crackling with small explosions as timbers parted in the flames. A mast fell hissing into the sea, and as it fell the trumpet blared again.

  ‘The Limping Man,’ Hana whispered.

  ‘Vosper,’ Ben said. He dug his knife into the wall.

  Blossom and Hubert were tiny on the wharf. Suddenly they looked frail. Hana wished for Hawk’s eyes to see them better. Danatok had told her about the great voice gifted speakers heard – Pearl and Hari had heard it saying their names, joining them to the spirit animating the world. Xantee had heard it. Blossom and Hubert too. They heard it now, making them ready. Hana was sure of it, although until now she had believed it was nonsense. She seemed to hear a whisper, an edge of sound. Taste it too. It tasted like honey.

  Ben said, awestruck: ‘They’re hearing something, aren’t they?’

  ‘The voice,’ Hana whispered.

  Then he shivered. And Hana, her eyes drawn away from the twins, shivered too. At the far end of the wharf, where it began its run along the waterfront, a man dressed in black appeared from one of the dark streets. He carried a naked sword that lit up in the sun and a trumpet slung around his neck. Behind him came four bearers, stolid and in step, carrying a litter enclosed in walls of cloth that rippled like fire. Yellow flames within the red darted and licked. Two small men, black-clad like the trumpeter and as thin as wire, walked with prancing steps beside the litter. That was all. There were none of the guards and constables Hana had seen in People’s Square. The Limping Man needed no one but himself.