Riverkeep Read online

  “That’s good, that is. That makes sense. An’ does you have a look at these woodcuts from time to time? Pickin’ through ’em, rememberin’ your past?”

  Pictures flashed through Wull’s mind, a gallery of dim-lit moments: the river, black water, Pappa reading Mamma’s letters when he thought Wull was asleep, his clothes and wet hair and cut palm, the spectral gathering of empty boots and hats and cloaks hanging in the empty pantry like so much death, awaiting the city’s needy. And at the end of the gallery’s dark corridor, unseen but sharp and hot in his mind, the brown, wide mouth and the moment Pappa disappeared.

  “No,” he said. “No, I don’t.”

  “Then let me call you a liar, ’cause they was crossin’ your face this minute. Miss Cantwell an’ Mix an’ all—even at the mention o’ memories, you goes to them, an’ don’t ye always remember that the sun was shinin’? In rememb’rin’ you’s fiddlin’ the parts of yoursel’s what makes you’s human, all the little empathies an’ struggles an’ triumphs. I’s not an old creature, Wulliam—older than you, mibbe, but still younger than this face would have you think. This face belonged to someone else, an’ these hands an’ legs an’ the brain that thinks away in my big skull. So I has memories I’s made myself, an’ I’s done some int’restin’ things, things would curl the hair on your cocksure little head an’ would make for fine tellin’ if I thought Miss Cantwell could stand to hear ’em. But my own memories’re a fart in the wind next to the mountains what’re buried in the meat an’ bones o’ this body. This body has thoughts lurkin’ in it you’d faint to hear, an’ I keeps them locked away as best I can.

  “But I can’t tend locks in sleep. When I dream I’s attacked by the memories of my skin and the bloodied mob o’ black thoughts. My parts all came from the leavings o’ the gibbet; the hanged lumps o’ these scoundrels cut down an’ sold off, sliced up an’ stitched together, an’ here I am. Even now when you speak to me as you are, I feel on the edge o’ my temper the curlin’ fingers o’ my murderer’s hands, an’ the memory o’ neck veins bursting under pressure o’ stranglin’. I wake most mornin’s with these thick legs feelin’ they’s bein’ chased. All the voices of the blaggards what made this body howl at me like monkeys, an’ the only time I gets to talk for myself is in wakin’ moments like this. But soon I’ll sleep again, and they’ll all nudge forward again to remind me I’s a nobody.

  “So you tell me again, Wulliam, that I don’t value what I’s been given when I’s been given this prison to carry around. I’s not a real person, an’ why should I try to live as a man when I’m nothin’ but a cheap trick? Is it a wonder I live as I does when agony lives on the other side o’ every thought? I was jus’ gettin’ to toleratin’ havin’ company for the first time since I started walkin’, but I’s better on my own—I c’n live as I please an’ have none o’ your judgin’. I value life, Wulliam, I value it fine. I jus’ hasn’t got it. An’ by the way—neither has your old man.”

  “Don’t you dare say that!” said Wull, meeting Tillinghast’s eyes as the bäta nudged into the bank, knocking them all off-balance.

  “I ’in’t tellin’ you nothin’ you doesn’t already know! Din’t you wonder how he was still livin’ when you found him? He’d been down there a long time. Seems there’s somethin’ else goin’ on in there, don’t you think?”

  Tillinghast heaved a waterlogged foot over the gunwale and onto the grass, toppling under its weight. Mix stepped forward to help him.

  “Are you all right, Till?” she whispered.

  “I’s fine, thank you, little miss,” he said, pulling himself fully onto the bank.

  “Good. I’m takin’ my seat back now then.”

  “Ha! An’ you’re welcome to it. Oh, that feels good right enough, solid ground.”

  Tillinghast tried to take a step, heaving his right foot as though it were a lead weight. Wull, his eyes shining, made to climb from the bäta.

  “Don’t!” said Tillinghast. “You jus’ stay there wi’ your pappa an’ the ladies. I’ll be fine, jus’ as I always has been—water’ll drain out me in no time. You’s not far to go now we’s through the city. Shouldn’t be more’n—what? Five, six hours down to Canna Bay? Best get goin’ now. But by the way, you’s not catchin’ more’n a pickerel on that stupid boat, an’ there’s no way you’s gettin’ on the crew of a proper whaler, so you might as well turn back.”

  Wull opened his mouth, looked at Pappa, sat down again, and kicked the bottom boards.

  “Good-bye, Mr. Tillinghast,” said Remedie.

  “Cheerio, toots,” said Tillinghast without turning round. “Think o’ me sometimes, in your lonely, private moments.”

  He moved his left foot, then his right again, pulling his legs with his hands, gradually achieving something that was almost a shuffle.

  By the time he turned to look, Wull had pushed off and was already rowing steadily down the Danék’s central current, the bäta a tiny piece of black on the dazzling screen of the sunset’s golden water.

  The Deadmoor

  An hour or so of slow shuffling had passed and the blue light of evening spilled over the sunless sky before Tillinghast felt his limbs lighten, the squash of his insides flushing the last of the river into the earth and returning to their usual sticky lightness.

  He felt his strength fill him again and straightened his back, flexing his muscles as they drained, enjoying the sense of his own weight and power.

  The words of a child. Nothing more. Since he’d been able to think he’d known his life was a fragile thing, bound up in borrowed skin, a miracle of delicately balanced herbs and chemistry. When his existence could be taken so easily (and the Bootmunch had been closer to taking it than he’d been prepared to admit—he could still feel the effects of that fennel-less smoke in the deepest parts of him), it made sense that he should live as he had. People rejected him—he drew the wrong kind of attention. People had always rejected him. Except Wull.

  He shook his head, walked faster.

  The forest had started a few paces from the river’s edge and thickened steadily into a tangle of branches, thick with roots and foliage and a pervading soggy darkness, a place designed by nature to be hospitable to plants and hostile to people. The green-bloomed bulk of fallen trunks littered the ground, creating impassable barriers connected by gnarled knots of roots and broken branches, and all was wet and slimy and thick with moisture and moss.

  Tillinghast stepped in a deep puddle of loose mud that rose past his knees. When he came to the pool’s edge, he hoisted himself from it with one arm and carried on, his stride unbroken. In the slivers of new moonlight that cut through the canopy his cool blue skin gleamed.

  The forest was dark, but Tillinghast saw everything, his trapper’s eyes effortlessly picking out the detail in the gloom, his footing sure and steady.

  Time passed. As he went deeper into the heart of the woods he was aware of a growing sense of familiarity, not conscious recognition of the trees and pools of gathered water—unending in their sameness after so much walking—but of being able to locate himself in the world, feeling the sense of the place coming through his pores, knowing it with his eyes closed.

  It was a feeling he hadn’t known he’d known: a long-forgotten extra sense of being in the right place. This was the place of his creation: the Deadmoor.

  And when he realized where he was going, pushed by some interior drive that worked outside of his thoughts, he shook his head.

  “Would’ve been a lot better bein’ dropped off a good bit downriver,” he muttered. “Save me all this walkin’.”

  He ambled for hours in a state of happy bewilderment, closing his eyes and taking blind paces with a mouth-open smile, enjoying the forest’s spirit, the sighs of its wind-tickled leaves and boughs, the canopy high and unforeign around him. He passed through clearings of borrow-vines and starflowers and toadstool lanterns that glowed a dull green a
nd spat damp-smelling powder around his feet. He sniffed it, grinning and remembering.

  Eventually he broke through the tree line and into a field of untended barley, saw the house, and was so struck by the force of the past’s assault, he dropped to a knee as though winded.

  “An’ there it is,” he said to himself.

  The house had been built into the hill, perched over what had once been ornately groomed gardens. The gardens, wild now, he saw, made a gap in the trees through which the big, eyelike windows could peek out at the surrounding woods. Tillinghast felt the attention of the place shifting toward him, as though the chattering of a busy room had fallen silent at his approach. A light flared in a downstairs window.

  He approached it in a dream, the winding path slippy with unkept plants and years of neglect, the hedges—once immaculate topiaries of animals and fruits—lurking like muggers in the dark.

  He remembered the knocker, too—a heavy brass thing cast as a lapphund that shook the door and sent pealing echoes into the house. The portico’s stones were crumbling like broken teeth and were shot through with moss. Through a buttress on the front wall lanced the thin, white stem of a sapling.

  Tillinghast realized as the door began to open that he had knocked before preparing, before thinking, and that he was not ready to see the face he knew was coming.

  “Hello?” said Clutterbuck, peering round the door, Mac stuck to his scalp.

  “I . . . I mean, I’s . . .” stammered Tillinghast. He took a step back into the light from the window, the shadows cutting him into slabs of light and dark.

  “Is that . . . It can’t be . . . Tillinghast?” said Clutterbuck.

  “Sir,” said Tillinghast, head down, new-made and shy again.

  “Mac! Look who it is!” cried the little scientist, sending the patchwork bird croaking into the air. “Well, come in!” he added, ushering Tillinghast inside, reaching high above his head to clasp his shoulder.

  Tillinghast leaned away from Mac’s wings, narrowing his eyes. “I saw the house,” he said stupidly. He sniffed, smelling something familiar but out of place—a light fragrance that did not belong.

  “I always knew you would be back. Yes, indeed, my boy, I did!” said Clutterbuck, walking into the sooty heat of the kitchen.

  Tillinghast looked around the hot, domed space, feeling heavy with recognition, seeing phantoms of himself in corners, his skin firm and clean, bare feet spread on the cracked flagstones.

  “I din’t know this was where I was comin’. It’s . . . I—”

  “And how do you feel now that you’re here? After fifteen years, twenty?” said Clutterbuck with a professorial air.

  “I dun’t know, sir,” said Tillinghast. “Truth is, I’s been havin’ a strange time in the run up to my arrivin’. I met some folk an’ spent time with ’em, an’ then I left with bad feelin’. An’ I feels wounded by it, quite unexpectedly.”

  “It happens,” said Clutterbuck, one-handedly heaving a fat kettle onto the stove.

  “Not to me,” said Tillinghast. “I lives by myself an’ away from pryin’ folk.”

  “But life is a strange thing—it wriggles, like an eel! Just when you think you’ve got it pinned down, it changes on you, shifts, and moves out of reach. And, like an eel, it can be quite delicious, absolutely—if you’re careful. Have you been careful, my glorious Tillinghast, since I made you and sent you off into the world?”

  Tillinghast looked at Clutterbuck peering over his spectacles, and turned away, unable to meet the inquisition.

  “I dun’t know, sir,” he said again. “I’s taken daft risks. Said hurtful words an’ taken things. Many things.”

  “Ha! That’s a lot of people,” said Clutterbuck, gesturing for Mac to land on his forearm. He stroked the bird’s patchwork plumage, fanning the feathers in affectionate twirls as Mac gabbled in his ear.

  Tillinghast stepped back, away from the bird’s twitching.

  “Oh!” said Clutterbuck, sending the bird to his perch. “I’m so sorry, my boy, I forgot all about your little—”

  “It’s not little,” said Tillinghast quickly. “That damn bird pecked my eyes out.”

  “And I got you fresh ones!” said Clutterbuck brightly. “Even better ones, hmm?”

  Tillinghast glowered at Mac, who champed his black beak and shuffled on his perch.

  “Well,” said Clutterbuck, taking Tillinghast’s shoulder and leading him away from the mostly raven, “there’s not many a person could give a straight answer to that question: have I been careful? Am I living as I should? Most of the time we just blunder about—only at rare moments are we granted a snuck glance into ourselves and the nature of our lives. In my case it happens when I stand up too quickly in the bath. A matter of blood pressure, I’m afraid.”

  Tillinghast felt himself stepping toward the edge of panic.

  “An’ what about me?” he said, tugging the silver amulets on his neck. “I ’in’t properly got blood to feel pressure! I got goop an’ straw, an’ you made me like that!”

  “Do you think it’s a coincidence you found your way back here tonight?” said Clutterbuck. “At the exact moment you were beginning to connect to other people and finding yourself vulnerable for the first time?”

  Tillinghast snorted. “I can’t make connections wi’ other folk, sir—I’s made o’ dead men who fed the noose. What is I but a plate of leftover meat what’s learned to sit up an’ talk?”

  “But you did bond with these people; otherwise, the bad feeling wouldn’t have wounded you so! And a plate of leftovers? My boy—you’re a work of art!” said Clutterbuck, grabbing Tillinghast’s thick arms. “Look at you! I’ve never managed such beauty before or since. You are unique, my boy, just like the rest of us! But unlike those of us made by the unknowable mess of seed and egg, you are art! Given to yourself the first time you opened your eyes. You don’t belong to me any more or less than any son belongs to his father.”

  “Father?” said Tillinghast. His head spun.

  “I created you,” said Clutterbuck, smiling. “What else would that make me?”

  “But I’s made of dead meat! What use am I when—”

  “And what am I made from?” said Clutterbuck. “It’s true that I could split your seams and make a pile of body parts, all dead and cold. . . .”

  “Right,” said Tillinghast. “I’s not a man, an’ I don’t know what you even made me for.”

  “And if you were to take this and split my seams?” Clutterbuck lifted a short knife from the kitchen table and cut his forearm, vivid blood springing up around the blade. “What would you be left with then?”

  “I dun’t—”

  “A pile of dead lumps!” said Clutterbuck. “We are all of us just skeletons wrapped in meat, dear, sweet boy—all dead tissue that lives by the grace of the gods. The voice that speaks in your head is yours, and it never belonged to anyone else. We are all of us miracles, each with a swirling universe inside his own head. And so it is with you.”

  Tillinghast took the knife from Clutterbuck, sliced it carefully across his own palm, watched the dark viscosity of his interior bead up around the blade.

  Clutterbuck took Tillinghast’s hand and clasped it to his own bleeding skin.

  “Where do you think this little white hand of yours came from?” he said, raising the stump of his wrist to Tillinghast’s face. “Oh, I didn’t cut it off! I’d lost it to some bad engineering years ago—a clumsy prototype, youthful foolishness—kept it in a jar, then realized I could give it to you. So you’re not simply made of bad men—there’s quite a few vials of my blood in you too,” he said, eyes twinkling. “You are as much mine as any son could have been.”

  Tillinghast lifted his small hand free and looked at the redness of Clutterbuck’s blood on his skin.

  “You made me to be like you?” he said.

 
“I made you to be like you!” said Clutterbuck.

  “I’s myself, an’ totally myself?” said Tillinghast.

  “Quite so. You are as much your own as I am mine or any other who lives! For you live, my boy, yes, indeed!”

  Tillinghast’s head spun. “So my life’s worth livin’?”

  Clutterbuck looked horrified. “Of course it is!” he said. “Life is always worth living. Always.”

  “What’s my name mean?” said Tillinghast. “What’s it determined about me?”

  “Your name? It means ‘strong one.’ And you always were. Think of yourself standing in this room the day you left—full of your own sense of adventure, all that desire to go away from here and see the world!”

  Tillinghast saw the moment—saw the sun lancing in through the dirty glass, the tears forming in Clutterbuck’s eyes.

  “I’m sorry. . . .” he said.

  “No! I was delighted! I’ve never seen anything outside the Deadmoor! I didn’t put that wanderlust in you—it’s yours! Yours, yours, yours! How wonderful to find parts of your nature that have grown contrary to the expectations of parent or breeding! How simply wonderful!”

  “I does like to wander,” said Tillinghast, laughing as Clutterbuck hopped around the boiling kettle.

  “Splendid!” said the little scientist. “Think, my boy, think of these people with whom you connected. We all want to help one another, yes? Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other’s happiness—not by each other’s misery. We don’t want to hate and despise one another. The way of life can be free and beautiful, Tillinghast, and you have the love of humanity in your heart. Don’t turn your back on other people, my son. Only the unloved hate; you have always been loved in this house and you have found love now for yourself in the world. It is the rarest of treasures, that moment when people, strangers, reach out to one another—and worth fighting for. Stay tonight, won’t you, and then be gone again, living your life and finding love!”