Abarat by Clive Barker, Clive Barker (Illustrator)

From Barnes & Noble

The Barnes & Noble Review
Clive Barker, the sultan of fantastic horror, has ventured out with another project aimed at younger audiences, this time a weighty and spellbinding first book in a series dubbed The Books of the Abarat.

Candy Quackenbush is a troubled yet good-natured Minnesotan girl, but when she ventures into an empty field one day and meets John Mischief, a creature with seven extra talking heads on his antlers, she's rendered awestruck and knows she's bound for a heap of adventure. Soon the two are narrowly escaping a dark hunter sent by the evil Lord Carrion and diving into the Sea of Izabella, a vast ocean containing 25 islands that stand for each hour of the day, plus a mystical Twenty-Fifth Hour. As Candy embarks on her adventure throughout this mind-bending archipelago, she visits the average citizens of Yebba Dim Day, joins a clan of tarrie-cats and slothlike Malingo to battle the dastardly Kaspar Wolfswinkel, and even gets a horrific taste of the Twenty-Fifth Hour itself.

Barker's first installment will send you excitedly jumping headfirst into the unknown, and you'll be itching to read more. An introduction to a fantastic world, Abarat introduces readers to an abundance of characters who play both major and secondary roles, but all seem to have a reason for being included -- not necessarily revealed here -- which makes the plot that much more suspenseful and thrilling. Candy is also a likable heroine, and her gutsy yet modest demeanor is an interesting fit with Abarat's quirky and surprising creatures. Complete with more than 100 pieces of color artwork by Barker himself, this is the start of an adventurous new series sure to win over Barker fans. Matt Warner

From the Publisher

It begins in the most boring place in the world: Chickentown, U.S.A. There lives Candy Quackenbush, her heart bursting for some clue as to what her future might hold.

When the answer comes, it's not one she expects.

Welcome to the Abarat.

Publishers Weekly

Candy Quackenbush travels from Chickentown, Minn., to a fantastic otherworld of unbelievable characters, including the Lord of Midnight, Christopher Carrion. "The author's imagination runs wild as he conjures some striking imagery." (Barker's surreal illustrations are not included in this paperback.) Ages 10-up. (Sept.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kathleen Karr - Children's Literature

What can one say about the paper reprint of a proven best-seller? For starters, it is a handsome paperback. Instead of the usual pulp paper relegated to reprints this one retains its thick, glossy, heavyweight pages—the better to showcase Clive Barker's hundred-plus full color paintings scattered through the text. It's still the same story, though: a fantasy about the teenage Candy Quackenbush from Chickentown, U.S.A., and her adventures in the mythical world of Abarat. Therein lies the problem. Writer and film director Barker has apparently studied the genre, made a list of every conceivable situation, every conceivable grotesque character, and cobbled them all together—not particularly well, either (although to be fair, John Mischief and his brothers hold a certain charm.) Unless, of course, the book was meant as a tongue-in-cheek caricature from page one. Since the story dead ends in the middle of nowhere with the promise of a second book to follow, this scenario is unlikely. While awaiting the second coming, aficionados of true fantasy might prefer returning to the masters: Tolkien, Mervyn Peake, Philip Pullman. 2003 (orig. 2002), Joanna Cotler/HarperCollins, Ages 12 up.

Michele Winship - KLIATT

To quote from the review of the hardcover in KLIATT, November 2002: The first in a four-part series, Abarat takes readers into Clive Barker's imagination... Teenager Candy Quakenbush of Chickentown, Minnesota, stumbles upon a skeletal lighthouse in a field along with John Mischief, a "man" with the seven heads of his brothers growing from the antlers on his head. With Mischief, she crosses the border between her reality and that which lies beyond, finding herself in Abarat, a parallel world of 25 islands, each representing a different hour of the day, as well as the mysterious 25th hour. Candy takes possession of a key, and in doing so becomes the target of the evil Lord Carrion and his minions. As Candy travels through the islands, she encounters fantastic creatures, places, and adventures. Barker's world is complex, as is his writing, making Abarat more suitable for advanced readers of fantasy who can piece together multiple plots and tease out the underlying logic of an unfamiliar world... The appendix at the end of the book describes each of the islands and their characteristics, and might be a good place to begin reading. (An ALA Best Book for YAs and Top 10 Fantasy Book for Youth.) (Book One). KLIATT Codes: SA*—Exceptional book, recommended for senior high school students, advanced students, and adults. 2002, HarperCollins, 431p., Ages 15 to adult.

School Library Journal

Candy Quackenbush is tired of her humdrum existence in boring Chickentown, MN. After skipping out on a particularly frustrating day of school, she wanders into an empty field at the edge of town, and suddenly her life takes a remarkable turn. Through a series of most unusual events, she finds herself transported to the Abarat, a magical realm composed of 25 islands, each representing one hour of the day, with the mysterious Twenty-Fifth designated for Time Outside of Time. As she travels around the islands, Candy becomes involved in a power struggle between two ruthless and bitter rivals, Rojo Pixler of Commexo City and Christopher Carrion, the Lord of Midnight. Each man seeks to control the island chain, and Candy may be the deciding factor in its survival or destruction. Barker is obviously more comfortable in the Abarat than he is in our more mundane world; the chapters that take place in Chickentown don't seem fully developed. Once Candy is safely in the fantastical realm, however, the story takes off. The rendering of the Abarat's locales, cultures, and mythology, combined with the author's own full-color illustrations and well-realized characters, allows readers to become quickly immersed in this beautiful and frightening world. In spite of a less-than-credible, almost preternatural calm in the face of the bizarre, Candy makes a fine protagonist, displaying strength, vulnerability, and a lack of the forced spunkiness displayed by some adventurous heroines. This first book in a series of four sets the stage nicely for what is sure to be a rollicking, epic ride.-Alison Ching, North Garland High School, Garland, TX Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A new series revives the almost-extinct genre of the fantasy travelogue. Candy Quackenbush is fed up with her life of "boredom, violence, and tears" in unbearably ordinary Chickentown, Minnesota. After a typically brutal school day, she runs away to the prairie, only to fall into a most extraordinary adventure. Helping the improbable John Mischief (whose seven brothers all grow from horns on his head) escape creepy Mendelson Shape, Candy magically summons the Sea of Izabella, which links our world to the archipelago of Abarat, where the chief islands are each governed by a single Hour of the day. Candy easily finds friends and guides among its fantastical inhabitants, including Samuel Klepp (publisher of the indispensable Almenak) and the downtrodden slave Malingo; but she also accumulates powerful enemies in the dastardly wizard Wolfswinkel, the ambitious tycoon Pixler, and Shape's terrifying master Christopher Carrion, the Lord of Midnight. Eventually Candy realizes that her journey is no accident, but part of a mysterious destiny. Abarat is an intriguing creation, deserving of comparison to Oz. Filmmaker and adult-novelist Barker (Coldheart Canyon, 2001, etc.) pours out an utter phantasmagoria, ruled by the logic of dreams. Yet there is a peculiar lifelessness to all this imaginative fecundity; fascinating in its minutiae, the world fails to cohere about a compelling narrative or charismatic central character. Like the dozens of illustrations by the author, it dazzles with color and detail, but on closer inspection proves curiously flat, all surface and no depth. Still, with three promised sequels on the way, many readers will, like Candy, want to "trust to Mama Izabella" to take them somewhere worth the trip.

Product Details

• Table of Contents
• Interviews & Essays
• Read a Sample Chapter

Table of Contents

Interviews & Essays

Barnes & Noble.com: The Abarat islands -- each being an hour of the day (plus the Twenty-Fifth Hour) and having its own identity -- is such a developed and intricate world. Where did you come up with the idea for The Books of Abarat? How long did the first book take you to write?

Clive Barker: There are things created in medieval times called books of hours: They are essentially books of meditation and prayer designed so that the nobleman who owned them could go to a specific hour and see what the meditations were for that particular hour. There's one particular version of the book of hours which I love -- for the Duc de Berry, a French nobleman who had two brothers create a book of hours for him. And I had a facsimile edition I've owned since I was 18 or 19. When I bought it, it was the most expensive book I ever bought, but I loved it so much. What I loved about it was the scheme of it: The idea that you could go to a particular hour, and there would be not just things about the hour but things about seasons, the moon, prayer, and meditations. And I had the idea in the back of my head for years -- probably since I bought that book, which is now 30 years ago -- that it would be lovely to create something that had that kind of pattern to it. I have also, since my childhood, loved books of invented worlds. They would include all the classics: Narnia, Oz, obviously Middle-earth, but also worlds that are lesser known. Like the short stories of Lord Dunsany, who wrote short fictions of invented worlds. What I've always loved about them was the idea that you stepped through a literary door, and you were in another place, and over a period of many books you would return to that place (in the case of Oz, very many books, and in the case of Narnia, seven books). And, about 12 years ago, I said to Joanna Cotler, my editor on this project, that I wanted to write a book set in a fantastic world. For a number of reasons I could never get HarperCollins to commit to doing it.

But what happened was this world started to seep out of my imagination in the form of paintings; about six years ago I started to paint canvases that were utterly unlike anything I had done before. And I began to realize that my world was escaping through my fingertips onto the canvas. Now we put all these points together, and what we end up with is a lot of paintings, which described a world, which I began to realize was the world I'd been planning all along. I thought, Ya know, I'm gonna make this world an archipelago, and each island will be a different hour and it will have the intensity of -- it's three o'clock in the afternoon in California right now, and it could not be any other hour. If I were to lead you out, having woken from sleep, and lead you out into the afternoon right now and say, "What hour is it?" you would get it right within 45 minutes, I'd bet. Because we all know how time feels and we associate with certain times of the day feelings -- romantic feelings, scary feelings, feelings of hunger, feelings of expectation. The curtain for theater really should rise at eight o'clock, it shouldn't rise at ten, shouldn't rise at six. I'm always disappointed by matinees. I don't want to go to matinees because theater is an evening experience. Some of this is obviously expectation, but some of it also has to do with how our minds work, and if we're going to be in the fantasticated world of a theatrical production we want to do it when we're moving towards sleep. It's not something we want to do at nine a.m. In other words, there are lots and lots of things that happen in our day that are about our bodies, our minds, our culture -- that are intricately tied to the process of the hours -- and I thought it would be a wonderful structure for a world.

B&N.com: You've said that you're "just an imaginer," and that you "think the heart of what [you] do lives in the shamanistic instinct to be a walker between worlds." What are some of the worlds you bridge? Do you think Abarat's main character, Candy Quackenbush, would think of herself in a similar way?

CB: Candy will come to understand herself as a walker between worlds before the quartet of Abarat is over. But I think of the world that I bridge as being primarily worlds of darkness and of light. I want to move between good and evil, I want to move between extremes. I think of myself as somebody who is reporting from a world of dreams.

B&N.com: Of all the characters that appear in Abarat, which are your favorites and why?

CB: I love Candy because she is a very tough, strong character in a very strange world. I also have a real fondness for Malingo, who turns out to be her sidekick in subsequent novels. And I have a real fondness for the villains, so I would have to say Christopher Carrion ranks highly in there too. Carrion will turn out to be a villain with a lot of sympathetic elements to him, and I've always felt the best villains are those you can comprehend.

B&N.com: The first book puts us on the edge of our seats with its conclusion! Can you give some hints about what we can expect in future Abarat books?

CB: Well, there is a huge story, which runs through the four books, which is about the ongoing battle between night and day. It is going to resolve itself in the space of this quartet. And it also has to do with why Candy feels she's been in this place before. So Candy's sense of herself is one of the things we're going to understand more. The intricate relationships between Mater Motley and Christopher Carrion, Carrion and Candy, and Candy and a bunch of other characters, will be explained in further books, too. But I don't want to give too much away.

B&N.com: You painted 130 very impressive color illustrations for the book. Do you foresee all of the books having as many? Did the idea for the book's paintings come first, or did you begin writing and then think about the illustrations? Where do you find inspiration for your paintings?

CB: We have about 380 paintings already made. So yes, I do see all the books as having as many illustrations. Though I don't really see them as "illustrations" because they preceded the text, and for them to truthfully be illustrations, the text needs to come first. So in most of these cases, the text, curiously, is the illustration; in the book the text is illustrating in words what the paintings first discovered.

B&N.com: On your web site, it states that you were "looking for a partner to take this world into every other medium," and Disney recently bought some hefty rights to The Books of Abarat. Can you talk a little about their hopes for the books? Why did you feel this series in particular had such potential?

CB: I feel any world that can be explained in many different ways has potential for a film, because film actually revisits worlds very successfully. For example, if we're going to get a bunch of Harry Potter books, we're gonna get a bunch of Harry Potter movies. I, in my work as a filmmaker, have revisited characters and by extension, the worlds that contain them.

I feel as though this partnership with Disney is potentially tremendous; certain parts of Disney's work have been very influential to me. When the Abarat books were first being prepared, I said there were three major points of influence: the Narnia books, Cirque du Soleil, which was visually important, and the first Fantasia picture, which is a huge influence upon me, and which for many years I have been listing as one of my top three movies of all time.

B&N.com: It seems like you have so much going on -- how do you find time for all of it? Is there such a thing as "spare time" in your life?

CB: No, I have no spare time, and sometimes it's quite difficult. For instance, it's Friday, and I feel like I don't have an ounce of spare energy left, and soon I'm going on tour for the book, but we're also having an exhibition for the paintings at the Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood, and we also have a movie coming out on the Sci Fi Channel titled Saint Sinner, and it's all happening in the same month. And I'm finishing up Book Two of Abarat, and it all collides. That's just the nature of things, and there is nothing I can do about it but celebrate the fact that I have the chance to do it all in the first place.

B&N.com: Along with The Books of Abarat, you've written another children's book, The Thief of Always. Why do you like writing for younger audiences? What were you like as a child?

CB: As a child, I was a reader, a passionate reader, and that's one of the reasons why I'm really writing for children again. There is something wonderful about getting up in the morning and writing for an audience that has perhaps a more open mind than an adult audience. I mean there are things that I am able to do in the Abarat books which I am simply not able to do in books for adults. Now, that isn't to say that there aren't adult readers whose minds are every bit as open as children's minds are -- and obviously I'm hoping that hundreds of thousands of those adults will come to Abarat. I know there are readers in the millions worldwide who are ready to say, "Yes -- bring on the magic."

B&N.com: Can you name a few of your favorite children's books?

CB: Oh, that is a long list. Well, I mentioned the Narnia books, but there's also Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, and the Babar books because they're so surreal and strange. Treasure Island is also a huge favorite of mine. Graham Greene said that you could learn everything you needed to learn by reading Stevenson. The Wind in the Willows, The Wizard of Oz, of course. The Hobbit, Oscar Wilde's short stories. Grimm's collection of fairy tales. Winnie-the-Pooh. I could go on and on and on! And what's interesting is that the phenomenon of literature for children is very recent -- but children's literature is 200 years old, if that, really. And yet in that 200 years there has been an incredible intensity of imagining. It's fascinating to behold what happens when adults give themselves the freedom to imagine the children they were.

Read a Sample Chapter

Candy had always prided herself upon having a vivid imagination. When, for instance, she privately compared her dreams with those her brothers described over the breakfast table, or her friends at school exchanged at break, she always discovered her own night visions were a lot wilder and weirder than anybody else's. But there was nothing she could remember dreaming -- by day or night -- that came close to the sight that greeted her in The Great Head of the Yebba Dim Day.

It was a city, a city built from the litter of the sea. The street beneath her feet was made from timbers that had clearly been in the water for a long time, and the walls were lined with barnacle-encrusted stone. There were three columns supporting the roof, made of coral fragments cemented together. They were buzzing hives of life unto themselves; their elaborately constructed walls pierced with dozens of windows, from which light poured.

There were three main streets that wound up and around these coral hives, and they were all lined with habitations and thronged with the Yebba Dim Day's citizens.

As far as Candy could see there were plenty of people who resembled folks she might have expected to see on the streets of Chickentown, give or take a sartorial detail: a hat, a coat, a wooden snout. But for every one person that looked perfectly human, there were two who looked perfectly other than human. The children of a thousand marriages between humankind and the great bestiary of the Abarat were abroad on the streets of the city.

Among those who passed her as she ventured up the street were creatures which seemedrelated to fish, to birds, to cats and dogs and lions and toads. And those were just the species she recognized. There were many more she did not; forms of face that her dream-life had never come near to showing her.

Though she was cold, she didn't care. Though she was weary to her marrow, and lost -- oh so very lost -- she didn't care. This was a New World rising before her, and it was filled with every kind of diversity.

A beautiful woman walked by wearing a hat like an aquarium. In it was a large fish whose poignant expression bore an uncanny resemblance to the woman on whose head it was balanced. A man half Candy's size ran by with a second man half the first fellow's size sitting in the hood of his robe, throwing nuts into the air. A creature with red ladders for legs was stalking its way through the crowd farther up the street, its enormous coxcomb bright orange. A cloud of blue smoke blew by, and as it passed a foggy face appeared in the cloud and smiled at Candy before the wind dispersed it.

Everywhere she looked there was something to amaze. Besides the citizens there were countless animals in the city, wild and domesticated. White-faced monkeys, like troupes of clowns, were on the roofs baring their scarlet bottoms to passersby. Beasts the size of chinchillas but resembling golden lions ran back and forth along the power cables looped between the houses, while a snake, pure white but for its turquoise eyes, wove cunningly between the feet of the crowd, chattering like an excited parrot. To her left a thing that might have had a lobster for a mother and Picasso for a father was clinging to a wall, drawing a flattering self-portrait on the white plaster with a stick of charcoal. To her right a man with a firebrand was trying to persuade a cow with an infestation of yellow grasshoppers leaping over its body to get out of his house.

The grasshoppers weren't the only insects in the city. Far from it. The air was filled with buzzing life. High overhead birds dined on clouds of mites that blazed like pinpricks of fire. Butterflies the size of Candy’s hand moved just above the heads of the crowd, and now and then alighted on a favored head, as though it were a flower. Some were transparent, their veins running with brilliant blue blood. Others were fleshy and fat; these the preferred food of a creature that was a decadently designed as a peacock, its body vestigial, its tail vast, painted with colors for which Candy had no name.

And on all sides -- among these astonishments -- were things that were absurdly recognizable. Televisions were on in many of the houses, their screens visible through undraped windows. A cartoon boy was tap-dancing on one screen, singing some sentimental song on another, and on a third a number of wrestlers fought: humans matched with enormous striped insects that looked thoroughly bored with the proceedings. There was much else that Candy recognized. The smell of burned meat and spilled beer. The sound of boys fighting. Laughter, like any other laughter. Tears, like any other tears.

To her amazement, she heard English spoken everywhere, though there were dozens of dialects. And of course the mouth parts that delivered the words also went some way to shape the nature of the English that was being spoken: some of it was high and nasal, a singsong variation that almost seemed about to become music. From other directions came a guttural version that descended at times into growls and yappings.

All this, and she had advanced perhaps fifty yards in the Yebba Dim Day.

The houses at the lower end of The Great Head, where she was presently walking, were all red, their fronts bowed. She quickly grasped why. They were made of boats, or the remains of boats. To judge by the nets that were hung as makeshift doors, the occupants of these houses were the families of fishermen who'd settled here. They'd dragged their vessels out of the cool evening air, and taken a hammer and crowbar to the cabins and the deck and hold, peeling apart the boards, so as to make some kind of habitation on land. There was no order to any of this; people just seemed to take whatever space was available. How else to explain the chaotic arrangement of vessels, one on top of the other?

As for power, it seemed to be nakedly stolen from those higher up in the city (and therefore, presumably, more wealthy). Cables ran down the walls, entering houses and exiting again, to provide service for the next house.

It was not a foolproof system by any means. At any one moment, looking up at the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of heaped-up houses, somebody's lights were flickering, or there was an argument going on about the cables. No doubt the presence of monkeys and birds, pecking at the cables, or simply swinging from them, did not improve matters.

It was a wonder, Candy thought, that this outlandish collection of people, animals and habitations worked at all. She could not imagine the people of Chickentown putting up with such chaotic diversity. What would they think of the ladder-legged creature or the smoke creature, or the baby beast throwing nuts in the air?

I need to remember as many details as I can, so when I get back home I can tell everybody what it was like, down to the last brick, the last butterfly. I wonder, she thought to herself, if they make cameras here? If they have televisions, she reasoned, then surely they have cameras.

Of course she'd first have to find out if the few soaked and screwed-up dollars she had in the bottom of her pocket were worth anything here. If they were, and she could find somewhere to purchase a camera, then she could make a proper record of what she was seeing. They she'd have proof, absolute proof that this place, with all its wonders, existed.

"Are you cold?"

The woman who had addressed her looked as though she might have some Sea-Skipper in her heritage. Vestigial gills ran from the lower half of her cheek into her neck, and there was a faintly mottled quality to her skin. Her eyes had a subtle cast of silver about them.

"Actually I am a little," Candy said.

"Come with me. I'm Izarith."

"I'm Candy Quackenbush. I'm new here."

"Yes, I could tell," Izarith said. "It's cold today; the water gets up through the stones. One day this place is just going to rot and collapse on itself."

"That would be a pity," Candy said.

"You don't live here," Izarith said, with a trace of bitterness.

She led Candy to one of the houses made from fishing boats. As she followed the woman to the threshold, Candy felt just a little pang of doubt. Why was she being invited into Izarith's house so quickly, without any real reason, beyond that of a stranger's generosity?

Izarith seemed to sense her unease. "Don't come in if you don't want to," she said. "I just thought you looked in need of a fire to warm you through."

Before Candy could reply there was a series of crashes from outside the Head, accompanied by a din of yells and screams.

"The dock!" Candy said, looking back toward the door.

Obviously the jetty had finally given out beneath the weight of the crowd. There was a great rush of people out to see the calamity, which was of course only going to make matters worse out there. Izarith showed no desire to go and see what had happened. She just said: "Are you coming?"

"Yes," said Candy, offering the woman a smile of thanks and following her inside.

Just as Izarith had promised there was a fire in the little hearth, which the woman fuelled with a handful of what looked like dried seaweed. The kindling was consumed quickly and brightly. A soothing wave of warmth hit Candy. "Oh, that's nice," she said, warming her hands.

On the floor in front of the fire was a child of perhaps two, her features one generation further removed from the sea-dwelling origins of her grandparents, or perhaps her great-great-grandparents.

"This is Maiza. Maiza, this is Candy. Say hello."

"Hell. O," said Maiza.

With her duty to courtesy done, Maiza returned to playing with her toys, which were little more than painted blocks of wood. One of them was a boat, painted red; a crude copy, perhaps, of the vessel whose boards had built these walls.

Izarith went to check on the other child in the room; a baby, asleep in a cot.

"That's Nazré," she said. "He's been sick since we came here. He was born at sea, and I believe he wants to go back there."

She bent low, talking softly to the baby.

"That's what you want, isn't it, dearling? You want to be out away from here."

"You want that too?" Candy said.

"With all my heart. I hate this place."

"Can't you leave?"

Izarith shook her head. "My husband, Ruthus, had a boat, and we used to fish around the Outer Islands, where the shoals are still good. But the boat was getting old. So we came here to trade it in for a new one. We had some money from the season's fishing and we thought we'd be able to get a good boat. But there were no new boats to be had. Nobody’s building anymore. And now we're almost out of money. So my husband's working putting in toilets for the folks in the towers, and I'm stuck down here with the children."

As she told her tale, she pulled back a makeshift curtain which divided the little room in two and, sorting through a box of garments, she selected a simple dress, which she gave to Candy.

"Here," she said. "Put this on. If you wear those wet clothes much longer you'll get phlegmatic."

Gratefully, Candy put it on, feeling secretly ashamed of her initial suspicion. Izarith obviously had a good heart. She had very little to share, but what she had, she was offering.

"It suits you," Izarith said, as Candy tied a simple rope belt around her waist. The fabric of the dress was brown, but it had a subtle iridescence to it; a hint of blue and silver in its weave.

"What's the currency here?" Candy asked.

Plainly Izarith was surprised by the question; understandably so. But she answered anyway. "It's a zem," she said. "Or a paterzem, which is a hundred zem note."

"Oh."

"Why do you ask this question?"

Candy dug in the pocket of her jeans. "It's just that I have some dollars," she said.

"You have dollars?" Izarith replied, her mouth wide in astonishment.

"Yes. A few."

Candy pulled the sodden notes out and carefully spread them on the hearth, where they steamed in front of the fire.

Izarith's eyes didn't leave the bills from the moment they appeared. It was almost as though she was witnessing a miracle.

"Where did you get those …?" she said, her voice breathless with astonishment. Finally she tore her gaze from the hearth and looked up at Candy.

"Wait," she said. "Is it possible?"

"Is what possible?"

"Do you … come from the Hereafter?"

Candy nodded. "Actually I come from a place called America."

"America." Izarith spoke the word like a prayer. "You have dollars, and you come from America." She shook her head in disbelief.

Candy went down on her haunches before the fire and peeled the now almost dried dollars off the hearth. "Here," she said, offering them to Izarith. "You have them."

Izarith shook her head, her expression one of religious awe.

"No, no I couldn't. Not dollars. Angels use dollars, not Skizmut like me."

"Take it from me," Candy said. "I'm not an angel. Very far from it. And what's a Skizmut?"

"My people are Skizmut. Or they were, generations ago. The bloodline's been diluted, over the years. You have to go back to my great-grandfather for a pure Skizmut."

She looked melancholy; an expression which suited the form of her face better than any other.

"Why so sad?"

"I just wish I could go back into the deeps and make my home there, away from all this …"

Izarith cast her sad eyes toward the window, which was without frames or panes. The crowd outside moved like a relentless parade. Candy could see how hard it would be to exist in this tiny hovel, with the twilight throng moving up and down the street outside, all the hours that God sent.

"When you say the deeps," Candy replied, "do you mean the sea?"

"Yes. Mama Izabella. The Skizmut had cities down there. Deep in the ocean. Beautiful cities made of white stone."

"Have you ever seen them?"

"No, of course not. After two generations, you lose the way of the fish. I would drown, like you."

"So what can you do?"

"Live on a boat, as close as we can to the deeps. Live with the rhythm of Mother Izabella beneath us."

"Well, perhaps the dollars will help you and Ruthus buy a boat," Candy said.

Candy handed Izarith a ten and one single, keeping six for herself.

Izarith laughed out loud, the music in her laughter so infectious that her daughter, Maiza, started laughing too.

"Eleven dollars? Eleven. It would buy two boats! Three boats! It's like eleven paterzem! More, I think!" She looked up, suddenly anxious. "And this is really for me?" she said, as though she was afraid the gift would be reclaimed.

"It's all yours," Candy said, feeling a little odd about sounding too magnanimous. After all, it was only eleven bucks.

"I'm going to spend a little piece of this one," Izarith said, selecting a single, and pocketing the rest. "I'm going to buy some food. The children haven't eaten this day. I think you haven't either." Her eyes were shining; their joy increased by the silvery luster that was the gift of her Skizmut breeding. "Will you stay with them, while I go out?" she said.

"Of course," Candy said. She suddenly realized she was starving.

"And Maiza?"

"Yes, Muma?"

"Will you be kind to the lady from the Hereafter, while I fetch bread and milk?"

"Grish fritters!" said Maiza.

"Is that what you want? Grish fritters with noga seeds?"

"Grish fritter with noga seeds! Grish fritter with noga seeds!"

"I won't be long," Izarith said.

"We'll be fine," Candy said, sitting down beside the child in front of the fire. "Won't we, Maiza?"

The child smiled again, her tiny teeth semitranslucent, carrying a hint of blue. "Grish fritters with noga seeds!" she said. "All for me!"