On and up she went, smelling the rank cheese, feeling now fully warm, almost hot, under the wool of her father’s cloak, its hem dragging behind her. From time to time, she thought she heard above her the clattering of stones, the noise another’s step might make. Now and then, she even thought she heard a faint melody, a gentle piping. But each time she stopped to listen, there were only silence and the sound of her own labored breaths. Where was she going? She could see nothing but the cliffs, rising ever higher, and the stairs winding through them.
Finally, though, perhaps halfway to the top, she began to hear what she was sure were voices—a murmuring through the stones. She strained to make out what they were saying, but it was just a mumbling, almost as though the stones themselves were talking.
Mrmrmrm. The voices grew louder the higher she climbed. Mrmrmrm. Mrmrmrm.
Clo climbed on, her chest tight with apprehension and the effort of the ascent.
Mrmrmrm. Mrmrmrm. Mrmrmrm. The voices now were loud enough to bounce off the cliff walls. Mrmrmrm. Mrmrmrm. Mrmrmrm, they echoed.
And then the stairs ended. Clo, eyes on her feet, saw suddenly space instead of stone—an opening nearly as wide and tall as a door. She halted. The cliffs stretched up and up and up; she was still far from the top. But the steps ended at this crevice. Kneeling, half holding her breath, Clo peered into the gap. It was not deep. She could see the bottom a few feet below. And the floor—it was not stone. Not just stone. Cobblestone.
Clo hesitated, then dropped carefully into the fissure. She passed through an arch of stone. The space around her grew larger and brighter. She glanced up. The cliff walls rose straight above her, but now she was on the other side of them, inside them, in some hollowed-out area—almost as though the top half of the core of the island had been scooped out and lifted away. The murmurings grew louder.
Here was a town. A narrow street. Little stone huts.
Clo gripped her wheel of cheese, the sack of turnips, the notebook, the painting.
Mrmrmrm. Here were people, gray-faced and jabbering. Old, old men and women, aged and bent and prattling over baskets and carts. For a moment, on first glimpsing them, Clo saw in their crooked forms her father’s own hunched shape—but no. These people were not like him. Their agedness was such that they seemed more like damp wadded rags or crumpled scraps of paper that had been fashioned into people, and yet, unlike her father, they moved with vigor and ease.
Seeing her, their chattering grew hushed. They stared and stepped aside as she walked down their narrow street. Mrmrmrm.
The cliff walls rose straight over the diminutive town and framed a gray circle of sky. The light that reached the street was pale and dim.
Mrmrmrm. The people pointed and nodded and whispered to one another in tones too low for Clo to hear.
Walking steadily, Clo cast her eyes desperately over the crowd of ancient people, the baskets, the carts, the huts, the doors. What should she do? Where could she go? She followed the narrow street up its gentle slope, trying and failing to make herself small. Clo, who had lived her whole life in the shadows, found here no shadows in which to hide. There was only the single street hemmed in on all sides by the little shacks, themselves crammed in a motley jumble of doors and walls and windows against one another.
Her heart pulsed through her feet. Her legs. Her arms. Her head. Her eyes.
What was she doing here?
The people followed, pointing, whispering. In the windows of the huts, she saw faces flash and disappear. She clutched the cheese more tightly.
Mrmrmrm! Mrmrmrm! The whispering grew more urgent. Mrmrmrm!
Clo felt a hand touch her elbow. She whirled around.
The eyes that met hers were watery and gentle, but Clo drew back all the same. Touching her elbow again, the figure pointed to a hut at the end of the street and opened wide her palm at the path leading to its door.
“Here?” Clo asked, the word dry in her mouth.
All the crowd nodded. More hands pointed. Mrmrmrm, they whispered.
Apprehensively, Clo approached the little door. She raised her hand to knock. Behind her, she heard the murmurings rise in excitement.
Mrmrmrmrmrmrmrmrmrmrmrmrmrmrmrm.
Clo closed her eyes. She held her breath. She rapped once, twice, three times.
The door swung open.
An old woman, her face shriveled and shapeless as a dried apple, her eyes nearly lost in the rumpled cheeks and brows, her mouth chewing and chewing and chewing, peered up at her.
Something like a smile half lifted the blousy cheeks. She raised her hands to Clo’s shoulders.
“Emoclew, rethguaddnarg,” she said.
CHAPTER THE EIGHTH
IN WHICH SOME FISH SLIP FROM A BASKET
HEART GUTTERING IN THE HOLLOW OF HER CHEST, Clo felt herself guided into the little hut.
“Emoclew, emoclew,” the old woman murmured as she pulled Clo forward. In the dim rooms, it took Clo—bewildered, trembling—a moment to make out the sparse furnishings: a narrow table, three chairs, a small fireplace with a handful of glowing coals.
“Emoclew.”
“I’m… I don’t…” Clo, who had spent all her years journeying from village to village, who had on her tongue and in her ears the rudiments of a half dozen languages—dobrý den, namaskar, ghoeie middagh, habari ya mchana—could make nothing of this speech. She struggled to find her own voice.
“Emoclew.” The apple face crinkled and sighed. “Ah…” She reached and pulled Clo nearer to her and touched her shorn lamb’s hair. “Rethguaddnarg, emoclew.”
Clo, feeling the woman’s hands move gently over her head, recoiled. “I don’t…,” she said again as the woman placed her palm against Clo’s cheek. “I don’t know if I’m supposed to be here. There was a boat, a half passage.… I’m supposed to meet my father, I think.… Do you know… have you seen a man… he looks like me, a little.…”
The crinkles fell away, and the woman’s mouth gave over to its empty chewing again. The beads of her eyes, deep in the creases of brow and cheek, flickered over Clo. “Emoc, rethguaddnarg. Ew evah neeb gnitiaw.” She pulled Clo, not ungently, across the room and through another doorway.
“Ruoy moordeb, ruoy rebmahc top.” She gestured around the chamber. Here were a low bed, a small table, a jug, a bowl, a window cut into the stone of the wall. The woman spread open her hands and held them, palm up and empty, at Clo. “Rethguaddnarg, emoclew.” Chew, chew, went her lips and cheeks.
“Is my father—” Clo tried again, feeling she must make this strange woman understand, but the old woman gestured impatiently.
“Uoy tsum tser retfa gnol slevart.” Nodding, she stepped out of the room and closed the door behind her.
For a few moments after the woman left, Clo stood quietly, not moving, not exactly thinking. She sat on the bed and placed her cheese and things beside her.
Her mind buzzed uncomfortably. Was this to be her room? Did her father know this woman? Would her father come for her here?
In the past, when she and her father had traveled from village to village, the finding of a home had always been the last of their tasks. There would be the arrival, the inquiry, the securing of service. Often they would sleep at the edge of town, on pine boughs in the woods or hayricks in the fields, until her father had found a little hut that had been abandoned or that he arranged as payment for his work. And it would be left to Clo, after the hut was theirs, to gather straw and leaves and to stuff and shape their mattresses.