He stops and hawks, spits something dark into the dark about us.
‘Garn will not take up the task, and sets a face against his duty. Says he’s not a cunning-man and makes work as a metal-monger, which he thinks a craft more fitted to our time. He says he does not care to know the old and secret ways. We cannot talk save that we quarrel, so we do not talk at all.
‘Why, even when he knows the sickness is upon me and my living all but done, he does not bend, nor put aside his hammer-stones and moulds. There’s none but you to take my learnings ‘fore my breath is gone, girl. None but you.’
His eyes are pitiful, cast up at me as with an ailing beast. When men are weak, my heart’s made harder yet, but there is only care within my voice, hushed so as not to wake the sleepers in the reed-topped mounds about.
‘What is your illness, father? Is it in your wind, that you have not the breath to speak?’
His bed bumps heavy, dragged across a sudden hollow in the dirt. He grunts, discomfited, and then he sighs.
‘This willage is too much a part of me. Its sicknesses are mine. If there are beetles in the grain down at the southfields, then it gnaws my vitals here.’ His hand, a brittle crab, moves low across his belly.
‘And if the old rounds up on Beasthill fall to ruin and neglect, then in my back the bones grow weak as yellow stone and crumble where one scrapes upon the other.’
Now he lifts his fingers, gestures to the useless clotted eye, like curdled milk. ‘This happens when the dye-well in the meadows west of here runs dry. Or else a tunnel in the under-willage floods, a cave subsides and leaves me pissing blood from one moon to the next. They burn the trees from off the great east ridge to level it atop, and now my will no longer stands. The hairs fall out and make it like a babe’s.’
Ahead, set some way off from all the other huts, a pile of shadow hunches in our path, to where the woman Hurna trudges, drags the old man in her wake who drags me like-ways with his words.
‘The people are the worst of it. When Jebba Broken-Tooth takes mad and kills his woman and their child, then is there seeping from my ear. Or, if the brothers Manyhorse are feuding my teeth have a cold burn. And now all the doers of wrong that we get here, the cut-bags and the cheats, the tap-and-takes all living in stilt-settles by the drownings. They give me the lice.’
He grins, and shows his lonely teeth, that ache with all the angry words that pass between the brothers Manyhorse, whoever they may be.
‘One time, it pleases me to pick a fat one out and split it with my thumb. The next day, word is come of how some bucket-belly fenland cheater gets caught in amongst his stilt logs when they fall, so that they crush him near to one piece and another.’
Here he laughs again, the creaking of a dead bird’s wing, and here we reach a halt, the woman ceasing in her haul before the heaped up dark that is the old man’s hut. She shoves aside the stop-woods on their swing of rope, wherefrom a dull red light pours out, as from a torture hole, and as she drags the old man in he’s laughing still and makes a pinching motion at me, thumb and finger. Black nails bite together.
There in Little Midden once a girl not much more than a babby tells me how she may not find her mother in the market crowd, as if it’s given up to me to do her mother’s minding for her. From a black man in a robe whose colour is outside my power to name, she fetches me a bright new dagger and a silver piece in trade.
Upon Shank Sister Hill a millman gives me a half a pig for near as many bags of dirt as there are fingers on one hand, with but a finger’s depth of grain spread out atop each bag to mask the soil beneath.
In Dullard’s Way they curse me still for trading dried out dog-stool wrapped in bark as proof against the pox.
An elder man of Reekditch gives me half a skin of mash to have me in the mouth, then falls asleep to wake with treasure bag and gizzard cut the both.
In Fat Arse Fields, the opened mound by night, my shoulders racked by all the shovelling, a rag held to my nose. The rotted fingers swell beneath the rings, which must be twisted off. The softened flesh rucks up about the joint, sloughs off completely as the ring’s pulled clear.
In Sickly that big fat girl and her half a loaf
of bread . . .
The old man clicks his beetle-coloured nails and mums the splitting of a tick.
Inside, the great bellhut’s a lung stitched out of rush and hide on ribs of wood, filled with the breath of souring piss and damp that marks the old, though spiced with rarer scents. Big, yet made small by all the clutter stacked within, fantastic cliffs of dog-skin masks and god-faced shields, of rattles, feathered bones and claybaked men-in-kind. Strange birds, dead yet unrotten, stiff and staring, caged in woven wood. A snarl of pickled rats all knotted at the tail and nailed to bark. A cured and varnished heart. Rocks finger-marked by monsters, cooking bowls and spools of stitching gut and more and more in hazard-footed screehills to the roof’s dark underhang.
There are but shoulder-narrow passages left clear between the listing scarps of muddled tool and fetish-stick, between the dust-dry garlands and the eelskin robes. Is this like something seen before, in a forgotten baby dream of mine?
A fist of amber with a horrid little sea-fright caught inside, its body flat with tufts of bloodworms growing from the back of it, raised up on many pin-stiff legs, and from one end a bulb where is a face that makes me jerk away. A bowl that may be seen through, and an unborn baby girl, curled up, her blind head chalked to white then painted brightly, like a whore.
Somewhere towards the centre of this queer-mazed round an ember pit throws up a sulking light. Like beads of melted ore it prickles red upon the rubbled ornaments; is caught in painted sailsheets, shadowbacked; cut into smoking slats of pink and greening dark upon the sharpness of their edge. Slabbed black falls on the passageways amongst the useless things, slashed here and there by shafts of bloody forge-light spilling from the heaped-up side-paths of those corners where one channel forks into another.
Saving when they drag through such a chimney-shaft of sudden warfire brightness, nothing may be seen of Olun on his bed of sticks. Following them with ears alone: the pallet’s rasp across the scored black dirt, the woman’s foot-thud muffled, drumming through it, tickling beneath the bareness of my heel. Now losing them about a bend and hurrying to catch them up, come round the turn in time to see the old man’s needle-harrowed face bleed sudden red and bright from out the dark as it drags through a stripe of light. The stripe grows wide. We are stepping out into the ember-lighted round of open space there centring this puzzle-track of piling casks, dream tumbles, rary bits.
Her flat face gleamed with sweat, the woman, Hurna, sets the old man and his pallet down to rest beside the sunken fire, then lumbers off without a word for wood to bring it back to the flame. Lost in a moment, great bear footfalls stumbling off into the maze of relic toys.
The old man’s tired, so sends me off to sleep in one far corner hung with hides and set apart. He tells me not to pay it mind if he and Hurna set and talk about the embers for a time. It’s plain he does not wish me to keep company with them, and so my bed is made from furs, the fireside’s light shut out about me by the hangings.
Soon, there’s the sound of Hurna coming back with wood, the clatter as she throws it down. They talk then, low, the first time that she speaks within my hearing. Why, she sounds more flat and stupid than she looks, which is a thing to say.