The Scorpio Races

CHAPTER SEVEN

I didn’t reckon that it would be awful.

But the whole island is crammed onto the beach, it feels like. Finn convinced us to take the Morris, which promptly broke down, so we arrived after just about everybody else. In front of us, there are two seas: one far-off ocean of deep blue and one seething mass of horses and men. All of them are men, not a girl among them unless you count Tommy Falk because his lips are so pretty. The men are a thousand times louder than the ocean. I don’t see how they can train or move or breathe. They’re all shouting at the horses and at each other. It’s like a big argument, but I can’t tell who’s mad at who.

Finn and I both hesitate on the long sloped path down to the beach. The ground beneath our feet is uneven with divots from horses that have been led down already. Finn frowns as he looks at the collection of people and animals. But my eye is caught instead by a horse galloping at the faraway edge of the sucked-out tide. It is bright red, like fresh blood, with a small, dark figure crouched low on its back. Every few strides, the horse’s hooves hit the very edge of the surf and water sprays up.

The sight of the horse galloping, stretched out, breathlessly fast, is so beautiful that my eyes prickle.

“That one looks like two horses stuck together,” Finn says.

His observation pulls my gaze away from the red horse and closer to the cliffs.

“That’s a piebald,” I tell him. The mare he’s gesturing to is snowy white splashed with big patches of black. Near her withers she has a small black spot that looks like a bleeding heart. A tiny little gnome of a man in a bowler hat is leading her away from the others.

“‘That’s a piebald,’” mimics Finn. I smack him and look back to where the red horse and rider were, but they’re gone.

I feel strangely put out. “I guess we should go down,” I say.

“Is everybody down there today?” Finn asks.

“Sure looks like it.”

“How are you going to get a horse?”

Because I don’t exactly have an answer, the question annoys me. I’m annoyed even more when I notice we’re both standing in exactly the same position, so either I was standing like my brother or he was standing like me. I take my hands out of my pockets and snap, “Is this riddle day? Are you going to ask me questions all day?”

Finn makes his mouth and his eyebrows into parallel lines. He’s very good at this face, although I don’t know exactly what it means. When he was little, Mum called him a frog because of this face. Now that he sometimes has to shave, it doesn’t look so much like an amphibian.

Anyway, he makes the frog face and sidles off into the commotion. For a moment, I think about going after him, but I’m suddenly pasted to the ground by a shrill wail.

It’s the piebald mare. She’s separated from the others, looking back either toward them or toward the sea. Her head’s thrown back, but she’s not whinnying. She’s screaming.

The keening cuts through the wind, the sound of the surf, the bustle of activity. It’s the wail of an ancient predator. It’s one thousand miles away from any sound that a natural horse would make.

And it’s horrible.

All I can think is: Is this the last thing my parents heard?

I am going to lose my nerve if I don’t get onto the beach right now. I know it. I can feel it. My limbs feel like seaweed. I’m so wobbly that I almost turn my ankle on one of the divots left by the hooves. I’m relieved when the piebald mare stops her crying, but I still can’t ignore that the capaill uisce don’t even smell like proper horses as I get closer to them. Dove smells soft, all hay and grass and molasses. The capaill uisce smell like salt and meat and waste and fish.

I try to breathe through my mouth and not think about it. There are dogs careening around my legs and nobody is looking where he’s going. Horses are clawing at the air and men are hawking insurance and protection to the riders. They’re more riled up than terriers in a butcher shop. I’m glad that Finn’s stormed off because the idea of him seeing me totally bewildered seems unbearable.

The truth is, I have a very rough idea of how to go about securing a horse for the race without money up front, but it’s mostly based on things that we used to talk about in school, when the boys would all boast that they were going to ride in the races when they grew up. They never really did; mostly they just moved away to the mainland or became farmers, but their big plans were a good source of information. Especially since my family was one of the few that didn’t follow the races.

“Girl!” snarls a man holding a roan horse that is pawing and charging, galloping without moving an inch. “Mind your damned feet!”

I stare down at my feet, and it takes me a second too long to realize that there was a circle drawn in the sand, and my boots have scuffed a line through it. I jump out of the circle.

“Don’t bother,” shouts the man as I try to retrace the line of the circle. The roan tugs toward the break in the line. I back up and get shouted at again for my trouble – two men are carrying an older boy away between them. He’s bleeding from his head and he swears at me. I whirl away and almost trip over a scruffy dog with sand in its fur.

“Curse you!” I snap at the dog, just because it won’t say anything back.

“Puck Connolly!” It’s Tommy Falk with his pretty lips. “What are you doing down here?” At least, that’s what I think he says. It’s so loud that other people’s conversations drown out most of his words and the wind robs the rest.

“I’m looking for bowler hats,” I say. Black bowler hats are supposed to mean dealers – on the rest of the island, someone wearing one is called a monger, after the horsemongers, and it’s not the nicest of names. Sometimes the boys wear them if they want to be seen as rebels. Mostly it just means they’re pissers.

Tommy shouts, “I didn’t hear you right.”

But I know he did. He just doesn’t believe what he heard. Dad once said people’s brains are hard of hearing. It doesn’t matter if Tommy’s stone-cold deaf on a plate, though, because I catch a glimpse of a bowler hat, on the head of the little gnome-man who had the piebald mare earlier.

“Thanks,” I tell Tommy, though he hasn’t really helped. I leave him behind and wind through the crowd toward the gnome. Up close, the man does not look quite so short, but he does look like his face has been hit solidly a few times with a brick, twice to really squish it and once more for good measure.

He is arguing with someone.

“Sean Kendrick,” spits the monger, which is a name that sounds familiar for some reason, especially said in that disdainful note. The bowler-hatted gnome doesn’t have a gnome-like voice at all. His voice is lined with cigarette smoke and he puts gritty h’s at the beginning of his words. “Heh. His head’s half full of salt water. What’s he saying about my horses, now?”

“I don’t like to repeat it,” replies the other figure politely. It’s Dr. Halsal, with his shiny black hair parted neatly on the side. I like Dr. Halsal. He’s very levelheaded and he’s a very compact, tidy sort of person, who reminds me of a drawing of a person instead of an actual person. I wanted to marry him when I was six.

“He’s crazy as the ocean,” says the bowler-hatted monger. “Come now, if you back her, you’ll want her.”

“All the same,” Dr. Halsal says, “I’m afraid I’m going to have to pass.”

“She’s fast as the devil,” the gnome says, but the doctor is already retreating, and his back doesn’t listen.

“Excuse me,” I say, and my voice sounds very high to me. The gnome turns. His mismatched face is fearsome when matched with an irritable expression. I try to organize my thoughts into a respectable-sounding question. “Do you do fifths?”

Fifths is another thing I learned about from the daydreaming boys. It’s gambling, more or less. Sometimes a monger will let you have a horse for nothing on the condition that whatever you win in the race, they get four-fifths of it. That’s not really anything, unless you come in first. Then you could buy the whole island, if you wanted. Well, at least most of Skarmouth, except for what Benjamin Malvern owns.

The gnome looks at me.

“No,” he says. But I can tell what he really means is Not for you.

I feel a little shaky inside, because it hadn’t occurred to me that they would say no – were there that many people who would ride capaill uisce that the mongers could be choosy? I hear myself say, “Okay. Could you point me toward someone else who might?” I add, hurriedly, “Sir,” because Dad once said that saying “sir” makes gentlemen out of ruffians.

The gnome says, “Bowler hats. Ask ’em.”

Some ruffians stay ruffians. When I was younger, I would have spit on his shoes, but Mum had broken me of the habit with the help of a small blue stool and a lot of soap.

So I just leave without saying thanks – he was even less help than pretty Tommy Falk – and I wind my way through the crowd looking for the next bowler hat, only to get the same results. All of them say no to the ginger-haired girl. They don’t even consider it. One frowns and one laughs and one doesn’t even let me finish my sentence.

By now it’s lunchtime and my stomach is snarling at me. There are people hawking food to the riders, but it’s expensive and everything smells like blood and bad fish. There’s no sign of Finn. The tide is starting to creep in and some of the less brave souls have already left the beach. I retreat a bit and press my back against the chalk cliff, my hands spread out on the cold surface. Several feet above my head, the chalk is lighter, marking where the water will rise in a few hours. I imagine standing here until it does, salt water slowly swallowing me.

Tears of frustration burn behind my eyes. The worst of it is that I’m sort of glad they all said no. These terrifying monsters are not at all like Dove, and I can’t even start to imagine myself trying one out, much less taking it home and training it to eat expensive, bloody meat instead of me. In the summer, children sometimes catch dragonflies and tie strings round them, just behind their eyes, and lead them like they are pets. Those dragonflies are what these grown men look like with the capaill uisce. The horses drag them around like they have no weight whatsoever. What would they do to me?

I look out across the sea. Close to the shore, the water is turquoise in places where white rocks have fallen from the cliffs into the water, and black where dark brown kelp covers the boulders. Somewhere across all these buckets of water are the cities we’ll lose Gabe to. I know we’ll never see him again. It won’t matter that he’s still alive somewhere; it will be just as bad as Mum and Dad.

Mum liked to say that some things happen for a reason, that sometimes obstacles were there to stop you from doing something stupid. She said this to me a lot. But when she said it to Gabe, Dad told him that sometimes it just means you need to try harder.

I take a deep breath and head back toward the only bowler hat who doesn’t avoid my eye. The gnome. He has only one horse in his hands now: the piebald mare that screamed earlier.

“Heh, you!” He says this as if I’m about to pass him by.

“I think we need to talk,” I tell him. I feel unfriendly and messy. Any charm I had when I started this is back at home with the makings of a sandwich.

“I was thinkin’ the same thing. I’m about to be off. I’d rather not be back tomorrow and you’d rather have a capall. What will you give me for her?”

My first reaction is to think, Well, how much do I have? and then I come to my senses and remember his unhelpfulness from earlier. “Nothing up front,” I say. I have to be firm on this. If Gabe really does leave us to fend for ourselves, we’ll have nothing at the end, either. “I’m just looking for a fifth.”

“This mare is amazing,” the gnome says. “Fastest thing on land at the moment.” He stands back so I can see her, restless on the end of the lead, a chain wrapped over her nose and fed through her halter. She is drop-dead gorgeous and absolutely giant. I feel I could stack Dove on top of Dove and only then be able to look the piebald in her wild eye. She stinks like a corpse washed up after a storm. She eyes one of the loose dogs that darts around the beach. Something about her gaze is deeply unsettling.

“Then you wouldn’t mind taking a gamble on her,” I say. I feel petulant but I try to sound businesslike. It’s not the easiest thing in the world trying to be treated like an adult during a negotiation when the idea of driving a successful bargain is making you a little sick to your stomach.

“I’m not in the mood to come back and collect,” the monger says.

I cross my arms. I pretend I’m Gabe. He has a way of looking both unimpressed and disinterested when he’s really both of these things. I sound as bored as possible. “Either she’s everything you say, or she isn’t. If she’s the fastest thing on four legs, don’t you trust her to win more than you could sell her for?”

The gnome eyes me. “It’s not her I don’t trust.”

I glower at him. “I was just thinking the same thing.”

He grins suddenly.

“Get up on her, then,” the monger says. “Let’s see what you got.” He jerks his head toward his saddle, tipped up on its pommel on the sand.

I take a deep breath and try not to remember her scream from earlier. I try not to think about how my parents died. I need to think about Gabe and his face when he said that he was leaving. I feel like my hands are fluttering, but they’re quite still at my sides.

I can do this.