Francesca Haig - The Map of Bones

‘See out there?’ Piper pointed to the farthest reaches of the broken coast, where the spits of land gave way to the water, a series of loosely linked islands barely keeping above the encroaching sea. ‘Right out there, on some of the bleaker spits, it’s too salty to farm and too swampy for good fishing, and paths are there one minute and gone in the next tide. You couldn’t pay Alphas to live out there. Nobody goes there. Sally’s been hiding out there for decades.’

‘It’s not just the landscape that keeps people away,’ Zoe said. ‘Look.’

She pointed out, further still. Beyond the scrappy spits of land, something in the water was glinting, reflecting the dawn back at itself. I narrowed my eyes and peered out. At first I thought it was some kind of fleet, masts massed in the sea. But they ignored the sea’s shifting and stayed perfectly motionless. Another glint of light. Glass.

It was a sunken city. Spires impaled the sea, the highest of them reaching thirty yards above the water. Others were barely glimpsed – just shapes at the surface with angles too precise to be rocks. The city went on and on, some spires standing alone, others clustered near to one another. Some seemed still to have glass in windows; most were just metal structures, cages of water and sky.

‘I took Sally’s boat out there once, years ago,’ Piper said. ‘It goes on for miles – the biggest of the Before cities that I’ve seen. Hard to imagine how many people must have lived there.’

I didn’t need to imagine. I could feel it, now that I was staring at the glass-sharpened sea. I could hear a submerged roar of presence, and absence. Did they die by fire, or water? Which came first?

We slept for the day on a promontory looking over the patchy welter of land and ocean. I dreamed of the blast, and when I woke I didn’t know where I was, or when. When Zoe came to rouse me for the last lookout shift before nightfall, I was already awake, sitting up with my blanket wrapped around me and my hands clutched together to quell their shaking. I was aware of her watching me as I walked to the lookout post. My movements felt jerky, and my ears still rang with the roar of the ravenous flames.

It was high tide, the sea had engulfed most of the furthest spits, leaving a network of tiny hillocks and rocks jutting out, so that the water was curdled by specks of land. The sunken city had disappeared altogether. Then, as the darkness advanced, I watched the tide retreat again. Lamps were lit in the Alpha villages on the slopes below us.

It wasn’t the underwater city that I was thinking of, as I watched the tide go out, the sea slinking away like a fox from a henhouse. I was thinking of Leonard’s passing comment that The Confessor had come from the Sunken Shore. Somewhere, only a few miles down the sloping coastline, was the place where she and Kip had grown up. She would have been sent away when they were split, but Kip had probably stayed on. This strange landscape would have been his home. As a child, he would have roamed these same hills. Perhaps he’d climbed up to this very viewpoint, and seen the tide go out, as I saw it now, more and more of the land being exposed to the moon’s gaze.

When it was full dark I woke Zoe and Piper.

‘Get up,’ I said.

Zoe gave a low groan as she stretched. Piper hadn’t even moved. I bent and yanked the blanket off him, throwing it down at his feet as I headed back to the lookout point.

We couldn’t risk a fire, within sight of the villages below, so we ate cold stew in the darkness. While Piper and Zoe packed up their things, I stood with my arms crossed, kicking at a tree root. Finally we moved off down the hill, towards the rich green slopes that edged the deepest inlets. We walked in silence. When, after a few hours, Piper offered me the water flask, I grabbed it without speaking.

‘What’s got you in such a foul mood?’ said Zoe.

‘I’m not,’ I said.

‘At least you’re making Zoe seem like a ray of sunshine in comparison,’ Piper said. ‘It’s a nice change.’

I didn’t say anything. I’d been gritting my teeth ever since we’d come within sight of the sea.

I remembered the day that Kip and I had first seen the ocean. We’d sat together, on the long grass overlooking the cliffs, and stared as the sea lapped at the edges of the world. And if he’d seen it before, he didn’t remember – it had been new to both of us.

Now I knew that the sea would have been a daily sight for him. He would have been used to it – probably didn’t even glance at it as he went about his daily business. The sea, which we’d sat and marvelled at together, would have been as familiar to him as the thatched roofs of his village.

It wasn’t only Kip that I had lost. Even the memories of what we had shared were being snatched from me, rendered false by what I’d learned about him.

Safest not to remember, I told myself, walking faster. Safest not to disturb the drowned city of my memories.

*

We had to navigate carefully through the unforgiving landscape. We weren’t only avoiding the Alpha villages, but also the inlets and fissures that penetrated even into the high slopes. Several times the route in front of us opened up into dark water, the gash of a crevasse. We walked all night, with only a brief rest at dawn. It was past noon when we left Alpha country and reached the edge of the straggling flatlands and the sea-mired spits. I stopped and looked back, one last time, at the Alpha villages behind us.

‘I heard it too,’ Zoe said, ‘when Leonard mentioned that The Confessor came from here.’

Piper was walking ahead of us, out of earshot. Zoe, one foot up on a rock, was waiting for me.

‘I figured you’d be curious, when we got here,’ she said.

‘It’s not just that,’ I said. I remembered her face at the campsite, when I’d caught her swaying with the music. I kept my eyes on the ground as we walked together. And for the first time, I ventured to say out loud what The Confessor had told me about Kip’s past. I needed to speak it. And I offered my secret to her like an apology, because I had intruded on her secret dreams.

I told her everything The Confessor had told me: how Kip had been cruel, and had delighted in having her branded and driven away. How, later, when he could afford it, he’d tracked her down and tried to arrange to have her locked in the Keeping Rooms for his own protection.

I told Zoe how Kip’s past had tangled everything that I felt. When I looked at the Sunken Shore and tried to imagine his childhood, I couldn’t recognise him at all. Instead of recognising Kip, I was recognising Zach. Zach and Kip had shared the same resentment and anger at having a twin who was a seer and refused to be split. I’d been fleeing from Zach, but the more I thought of Kip’s past, the more I saw Zach in him. And The Confessor – I had feared her most of all, but when I’d heard about her childhood, I recognised my own story. She’d been branded and exiled, just like me.

Everything was backwards. Everything was doubled, a mirror facing a mirror so that the picture regressed infinitely, and no end was possible.

When I’d emptied myself of words, Zoe stopped walking, turning again to face me, blocking my way.

‘What did you hope I was going to say to you, when you told me this?’ she said.

I had no answer.

‘Did you think I was going to let you cry on my shoulder,’ she went on, ‘and tell you it was all OK?’

She grabbed me, shook me slightly.

‘What difference does it make?’ she said. ‘What does it matter what he was like? Or The Confessor? There isn’t time for you to indulge in all of this soul-searching. We’re trying to keep you alive, and not get killed ourselves. We can’t do it with you moping around. You’re slipping further into the visions, too. We’ve both seen it – how they get to you. How you scream and shake, when you see the blast.’ She shook her head. ‘I’ve seen it happen before. You need to fight it. And you can’t do that if you’re obsessing over Kip. You’re still alive. He’s dead. And it sounds like he wasn’t such a great loss after all.’