Skyborn Page 5

Bastjan took his place in line as the circus band kicked off a familiar melody, the one which alerted him and the other young tumblers to get ready to enter the ring. They each had their faces painted green, and their costumes were a matching shade with gold trim running up and down the arms and legs. Nobody really knew any more what they were supposed to be – the spirits of spring, some said. Peas in a pod, said others. But mostly their act went by the name of—

  “The Runner Beans!” announced a strange voice, and the spotlight swung to the curtain behind which Bastjan and the others were standing. Bastjan frowned as they began to run into the ring.

  “Where’s Quinn?” he whispered to the girl next to him. She shrugged and kept moving, her broad smile as plastered on to her face as the thick layer of paint. The children took their places, settling into the routine that they’d known by heart for as long as many of them could remember, and Bastjan tried to look around.

  One of the rousties – the one with the loudest voice, it seemed – was dressed as the ringmaster this evening. He was a tall dark-skinned man without a trace of beard, and he looked exceedingly strange in Quinn’s circus outfit, mostly because it didn’t fit him anywhere. But where’s the ringmaster gone? Quinn never trusted the evening show to an understudy; something important was keeping him away from the tent.

  “Oi!” hissed one of the other tumblers into Bastjan’s ear. “Get your head in the ring!”

  Bastjan turned to find he was out of position. He took a leap, reaching up to be ready to catch the smallest of the troupe as she came spinning through the air. He and four of the other Beans, the eldest of the group, then took their run-ups to the springboards and launched skywards, tucking and rolling with ease and landing like cats on the far side of the ring. The audience responded with a ripple of short-lived applause.

  Bastjan ran through the rest of the act as though he were an automaton, barely thinking about the movements of his body, and then it was over. He and the others jogged through the curtain to backstage, where Gustav and Lily, the knife throwers, were preparing to go on.

  “Lily,” said Bastjan breathlessly. The woman glanced down at him, her eyes focused on the routine inside her head. She blinked and looked at him properly, her blue eyes shining as she smiled.

  “All right, little bean,” she replied.

  “Where’s Quinn?” Bastjan coughed, wiping his sweaty forehead on his sleeve. The green paint smeared, but he didn’t care.

  Lily shrugged. “Search me, sweetheart. Off into Oxford on business, I heard.” Behind the curtain the music surged and Lily looked towards the ring. Her husband, Gustav, gave her a nod and reached out his hand for hers. “Wish us luck, then,” Lily said.

  “Luck,” Bastjan replied, and the woman ruffled his hair. Then they were gone.

  Bastjan perched on the nearest haybale. He hadn’t seen the ringmaster since his terrible rehearsal that morning. Maybe he’s gone lookin’ fer an orphanage to stick me in, he thought, and his chest clenched again.

  He looked around the performers’ space, the secret domain behind the curtain that nobody but his circus family could see. It was haphazard – full of scenery and equipment, sandbags and props, coils of rope and lengths of chain and old coal sacks – but it was home. Bastjan’s heart gave a painful lurch. This wasn’t much, but it was his. And he didn’t want Cyrus Quinn, or anyone, taking it away. ’Specially not now I’ve gone up on the wire, he thought. Despite his failure during rehearsal, all he could think about was going up again. When he closed his eyes, he could see the flash of sparkling light, the hand reaching towards him, and he longed to see it one more time.

  “There y’are,” came a voice he knew, and Crake’s shadow fell over him. The strongman was scarlet-cheeked and sweaty, his mighty beard looking a little frayed. Bastjan budged over as the strongman sat beside him. On one of Crake’s biceps there was a tattoo Bastjan had always loved to look at – blue sea surrounding a scattering of green islands and a three-coloured flag waving at the top. This was Hibernia, Crake’s homeland – but he only spoke of it when he’d had one too many whiskies.

  “D’you ever miss it?” Bastjan asked, looking away from the tattoo and meeting Crake’s eye. “Home, I mean.”

  “The ache never leaves me,” Crake replied. “But most of it is below water now.” Bastjan frowned questioningly and Crake explained. “The sea’s a hungry beast, these days. Past few years, it’s been gettin’ greedier and greedier, risin’ higher and higher and takin’ more of the land into itself. Hibernia was one island, once, and now it’s many; only the highest hills remain above water. That’s why most of her people have had to leave, an’ find other places to settle.”

  Bastjan blinked. “Why? I mean, why’s the sea doin’ that?”

  The strongman shrugged. “Nobody really knows. Somethin’ to do with glaciers, or icebergs, meltin’ or somesuch. I read about it in a newspaper a few years back.”

  Bastjan shook away his curiosity and focused on his other question. “Where’s the ringmaster, Crake?”

  The strongman sucked at his top lip. “Gone into the city,” he replied. “Probably to pick up his post, that sort of thing. Pay a few bills, if there’s anythin’ to pay ’em with. Why d’you want to know?”

  “Never mind,” Bastjan said, closing his eyes. Suddenly, he felt exhausted – but then, like a far-off spark of light in a dark night sky, he remembered his mother’s box, still lying beneath his pillow, and it was like someone had prodded him with a sharp stick. He looked up at Crake.

  “Been a long day for you, eh,” Crake said gently. “I’m off to rustle up a drop of hot water. D’you want to head back to the wagon and I’ll bring you some?”

  Bastjan shook his head. “I jus’ need a lie-down, I think,” he said, stretching. “I’ll wash later.”

  “Right you are,” Crake said. But as Bastjan got to his feet, the strongman gripped his arm. He spoke to the boy in a low voice. “If you feel the need to do any embroidery, or anythin’ like that, remember there’ll be pins in my mendin’ kit. Y’know where that is?”

  Bastjan looked at his wagon-mate with a guileless expression. “Sounds easy to find.”

  “Good lad,” Crake said, straightening up.

  Bastjan grinned up at his friend and they went their separate ways. Hurrying out through the performers’ exit, he kept his eyes peeled for rousties. There were a few standing around the campfire and he kept going as quickly as he dared, hoping he didn’t look like he was in a suspicious rush to get back to his wagon.

  He pulled the door closed behind him and, taking a leaf out of Crake’s book, he flipped the latch closed, feeling quite daring as he did so. He lifted the glass on the oil lamp and lit the wick, and then got to his knees beside his bed. His hand crept beneath his pillow, and his fingers felt for the box. For one breath-stopping second, he couldn’t find it – then there it was, its dark wooden case cool and smooth to the touch. He pulled it out into the light. The enamelled fish danced, its jewel-like eye blinking greenly as he tilted the box this way and that.

  Bastjan tucked the box into the crook of one arm and sat on the floor, his legs crossed. Facing his bed was the low, narrow cupboard where Crake kept almost everything he owned.

  It didn’t take him long to find the mending kit – a length of canvas with a multitude of small pockets, each of them a perfect size for a pair of scissors or a crochet hook or a spool of thread. In one there was a small pincushion bristling with silver pinheads. Bastjan carefully took one out and, settling himself cross-legged on the floor with the box in his lap, he set to work. The pin jiggled around inside the lock to no effect, slipping between his sweaty fingers, until finally it felt as though he’d found an edge, deep inside the lock – an edge that moved.

  Then the pin snapped, jabbing Bastjan in the thumb. He hissed a word Crake would have cuffed him round the ear for and stuck his wounded thumb in his mouth. Once it had stopped bleeding he pulled out another pin and tried again – but exactly the same thing happ
ened. He shoved Crake’s pincushion back into his mending kit, kicked the cupboard door shut and flopped on to his bunk with the locked box clutched to his chest.

  I ain’t goin’ to break it open. But I got to see what’s inside.

  His thoughts turned to his mother’s trunk, which still sat in the ringmaster’s wagon. Bastjan knew there was no chance he’d be able to get to it until Quinn decided he could have it – which, he thought with a sigh, will prob’ly never happen. He wondered whether the key would even be in there – if it were him, he knew he would have found somewhere better to hide it. Somewhere private, somewhere only he knew about.

  Somewhere in my wagon, Bastjan realized, his eyes slowly widening.

  Bastjan scurried between the wagons, bolting from one to the next as soon as he was sure the coast was clear. Besides the occasional roustie and the noises from the animals, all was quiet, and Bastjan soon found himself in front of Ana and Carmen’s wagon without – he hoped – having been spotted by anyone.

  He hopped up the steps, pausing to take one last glance around. Then he opened the door and made his way in, slipping off his muddy plimsolls at the threshold. Placing his still-glowing oil lamp on the floor, Bastjan closed the door.

  The wagon was slightly larger than the one he shared with Crake, with a pair of beds side by side, a narrow gap between them. Beneath the window at the far end Ana and Carmen had a window box, which they’d made into a seat, and their curtains were thin but cheerful. Over each bed were three shelves crammed with all manner of knickknacks, from books to perfume bottles to mysterious pots which looked to be filled with gloop of some sort or other. After glancing into one, which was sitting open, Bastjan quickly left the others alone.

  Just inside the door, on the left-hand wall, was a small stove with narrow shelves built over it, shaped to accommodate the wagon’s curved roof. They were packed with cups and plates and cooking pots – and, Bastjan discovered with a small smile, a glass jar of caramels. Facing the stove, tucked on the other side of the wagon door, was a washstand with an age-spotted oval mirror over it.

  Bastjan took a deep breath. He was no stranger to this wagon – usually, his visits were unofficial ones, as Ana and Carmen always managed to have a stash of the best sweets in the circus – but he found himself looking at everything differently now. He thought about how strange it was that this had been his first home. His mother had checked her make-up in that mirror and she’d slept in one of those bunks. Here, his mother had fed and changed and nursed him, soothed him to sleep, played with him… An’ then brought me out to fling me around on the trapeze. The thought was sudden and darting, painful and poisonous, and Bastjan flinched away from it.

  “Weren’t her fault,” he whispered to himself. Dust motes danced in the air, disturbed by his breath. “He would’ve made ’er do it. I know it.”

  He looked around one more time. He didn’t have long before the show came to an end. Ana and Carmen probably wouldn’t mind him being here, but he wanted to find the key before they found him. They’d only distract him with stories and tickles, and he’d never find the key then.

  The key. He chewed on the inside of his lip. Where are you hidin’?

  Bastjan lowered himself on to the right-hand bunk. The mattress sagged beneath his weight and something about the squeaking springs made a memory bloom in his mind. This was my bed, he thought, the knowledge settling inside him. The memory acted like a magnet, drawing others to it, and he let them come. An’ the sound of the springs used to make Mum laugh. We made up a song to go with it, didn’t we?

  He closed his eyes again and saw her singing to him in a low voice, her eyes bright in the light of a lantern and her smile wide. Then his memory shifted a little. Bastjan saw his mother sitting at the washstand with a pen and a pot of ink, writing. She looked up and saw him, raising one ink-stained finger to her lips as though to shush him back to sleep, and then the memory faded.

  Bastjan opened his eyes and headed over to the washstand. He pulled out the stool tucked beneath and sat on it. He wasn’t quite tall enough to see his reflection in the speckled mirror so he got to his knees and stretched – and there he was. Brown eyes, dark shock of hair, thoughtful expression.

  He looked at the mirror, imagining his mother’s face in it instead of his own. His gaze hopped along the clasps holding the glass in place and he ran his fingers across them, one by one.

  Then he noticed one of the metal clasps seemed slightly smoother than the others, as though worn by someone’s touch. It was barely noticeable, not unless you were really looking. The moment Bastjan put his finger to it, the clasp began to move – and along with it, so did all the other clasps, like they were connected by some unseen mechanism.

  In his mind’s eye he could see his mother, one evening after she thought he’d gone to sleep, perhaps the same evening he’d seen her writing. He’d been tucked up in bed, drowsily watching as she sat by the mirror brushing her hair and quietly humming him a lullaby. Then she’d put down her brush. She’d kept humming, but she’d glanced behind her as though to check there was nobody watching, and then she’d turned back to the mirror and pushed at this secret clasp, just as he was doing now.

  The clasps slipped off the edge of the mirror and the glass oval popped forwards a fraction, inviting him to pull it open. Bastjan chewed his lip so hard he tasted blood – but he wiggled his fingers around behind the glass.

  The mirror pivoted on a secret hinge, opening up to reveal a shallow hidden compartment behind the glass, cut into the wood. The hollow was about the length of his hand, and barely deep enough to be there at all. But it was there, and inside it was an old sheet of paper folded up tightly into a neat, narrow rectangle.

  Bastjan took it out with shaking fingers and pulled the paper open. It was covered with drawings and diagrams, and none of it made any sense, but that hardly mattered. Bastjan barely noticed the fading loops and curls of his mother’s long-ago handwriting – he couldn’t have read it, anyway. He’d never learned to read, nor had anyone ever taken the time to teach him.

  Sitting in the middle of the paper, in one of the folds, lay a tiny silver key. Embedded in its shaft was a miniature fish, enamelled like the lid of the box it surely opened.

  Bastjan didn’t know how long he spent sitting before the mirror with his mother’s secrets spread out on the washstand table. His eyes skipped from one to the other – the tiny key and the paper covered in stick-figure drawings and dense scribbles – and his chest felt as though someone had scraped it out with a knife. He was as raw inside as a peeled apple.

  Through the window, his eye was caught by the crowd leaving the circus tent. Lanterns bobbed in the growing dusk and even from here the sound of the band could be heard. The performance was over – which meant he had to get out. Ana and Carmen could be back any moment.

  He popped the mirror into place again and gathered his mother’s things together as quickly and carefully as he could. Then, slipping them into his pocket, he picked up his lamp and hurried out of the wagon, pausing barely long enough to stick his feet into his plimsolls.

  He fell into his own wagon, strangely out of breath. He felt like he’d been running for miles, even though all he’d done was cross the campground. Dropping to his knees, he placed the lantern beside his bed and pulled the box from underneath the pillow. Then he took his hand out of his pocket and carefully unwrapped the paper. The neat folds his mother had made were less sharp now, but all that mattered to him was the key. He picked it up between two fingertips and fitted it into the tiny lock. It turned. With a barely perceptible click, the enamelled box popped open and Bastjan lifted the lid with unsteady fingers.

  The box was lined in black velvet. Curled inside was something that looked like a bracelet; Bastjan frowned as he pulled it out gently, watching it unspool. It was woven out of hair, he saw, and the clasps were made from something white. Bone, he thought with a shudder. Or teeth. Something about the object made his skin crawl and his head begin to
pound. He quickly dropped it on to his bedspread and kept digging through the contents of the box.

  There were pebbles – some with holes in them, others without – and shells, and an old feather that was, by now, mostly skeletal. There were some coins, large and flat and brown, which Bastjan didn’t recognize. He saw an old key, far bigger than the one which fitted into the lock of the box. It looked like the key to a house, but Bastjan had no idea whose. And at the very bottom of the box, tucked neatly away, was a notebook, its pages thin and yellowing.

  Bastjan pulled out the book, wishing he could read it. He frowned, concentrating, determined to learn what he could from the book anyway. He opened it, the spine crackling through lack of use, and turned the first page.

  He saw a picture drawn in slightly faded blue ink; it reminded him of Crake’s tattoo. There were several irregular shapes, like islands, and the spaces between the shapes were mostly filled with closely drawn lines going up and down like waves. These lines were occasionally broken to accommodate a sketch of some sort of sea creature. One of the sea creatures looked like a monstrous fish; another had a multitude of legs and one huge, round eye. The largest shape – or island – looked vaguely like a teardrop, with a wiggly bay at one end like a tail. A group of smaller islands speckled the sea around it, like babies following a parent. A circular shape at the top of the page was crisscrossed with four arrows, pointing in opposite directions. A compass, Bastjan guessed.

  He continued flicking through the notebook. It was packed with words, so many that it made Bastjan’s head spin, but every few pages there was a drawing. A stick-figure sketch of a woman with dark hair and a man wearing a black suit came first, each with names printed beneath. Then, a few pages later, a house. And then a page that made him pause.

  Bastjan flattened out the notebook on his knees to have a closer look. Etched into the page with frantic scratches of the pen was a terrifying sketch – a creature, like a child but also unlike one. The arms and legs were too long, the face too narrow, the teeth too sharp… And then he spotted the narrow band wrapped around the creature’s arm – a narrow band that had the same unusual clasp as the one in his mother’s box.