‘It seems to me she dies the day that you arrive.’ These words are spoken by the brother on the left. His voice is slow and drawling, filled with strange amusement, though he does not smile or crease his eyes as he squats there regarding me across the slaughtered woman.
‘From the north. Arrive here from the north, the same as her.’
This is the other brother speaking, though in voice and manner they are both alike as in their looks. What do they wish for me to say?
The left-most brother speaks again. ‘Do you hear anything of robbers in the passes while you are upon the track?’
Half-drowning in my fright of what they may suspect, this notion is a welcome raft to clutch at.
‘Robbers? Why, you may be sure of it! The travellers that meet with me these last few days upon the track all talk of nothing else. A great fierce band of men, they say, though speaking for myself it seems the cut-bags do not show themselves to me. My way here is without event.’
Both brothers purse their lips at once and then nod thoughtfully.
‘A band of robbers?’ says the one upon the right. ‘It may be so. Such things are known to us. You’re lucky that you do not meet with them yourself.’
‘Aye,’ adds the brother on the left, ‘considering that you must be not much more than a league or so away when she is murdered. Very lucky.’
All of us nod gravely here, acknowledging my fortune, and let Olun carry on with his investigation.
Still with nothing but his blind eye visible the old man shifts his hand back down the woman’s drift-meat belly to explore the curl-ferned mount there at her fork. His knowing fingers sort amongs the coils and ringlets, moving them aside to better see the cold white hillock whence this overgrowth is sprung.
‘There are no bruises.’ Here, the old man clucks his tongue in disappointment and a sudden chill falls over me: he does not move aside the hair to look before he shuts his sighted eye. How may he know a bruise is there or not by touch alone? The hand moves further down now. Fingers struggling like blind-worms crowd in, eager for admission to her rigor-narrowed aperture, and yet without avail. The frail and painted hand withdraws. The witch-man speaks.
‘Her gill-caul is unbroken.’
Here the rough-boys both look up at Olun with the same frown drawing tight their shaven brows.
‘She is not shanked by force, then?’ Buri says, or Bern.
‘There’s queer now,’ Bern comes back, or Buri. ‘She’s a comely girl and if she’s to be robbed and killed then why not shank her first?’
He does not need to add ‘That’s what we’d do,’ for it is in his eyes. Instead, his frown grows deep and, after thinking for a little while, he ventures now his next remark. ‘Does she have pox?’
The old man shakes his head so that the stars designed thereon swoop wildly from their course.
‘No pox. No mark of plague. She’s safe to bury.’ Here he turns his face to me, and shows me all the pain and fatal weakness graven in its lines. The old man’s nearer to his death than is my guess before today, and he does not yet tell me of his tunnels or his treasure holes.
‘Usin?’ he says now. ‘We are finished here. You may as well go take your feast with Hurna while we ready this poor child for burial.’
Though Hurna is not any favoured company of mine, it does not grieve me much to do as Olun says, so great is my relief to be away from these same-seeming brothers and the corpse they peck about so thoroughly. It’s bittering scent is all about me, walking from the hut to where the dour, god-muddled woman crouches by her fire and shapes the fish-meal into flat grey cakes.
She passes one to me that’s like a half-formed animal, so horrible it is squashed flat beneath a rock at birth. We do not speak, still thoughtful of the words that pass between us this last night. The dead girl’s smell is everywhere about my hair and clothing, and my appetite is poor. Each mouthful of the fish-meal cake takes me that long to chew it is not in me for to finish more than half of it.
Shifting my gaze from Hurna to the group before the hut. It seems the bully brothers are employed in rolling up the corpse within a drab, soil-coloured sail of cloth, the old man looking on as he rests there beside them on his bier. About to wind the shroud about her head, one of the rough-boys points towards the stripe of bright stump-water green that’s ringed below her open throat. He mutters something to his brother, then to the old man, who nods and makes reply, too far away for me to hear a word. The brothers shrug, and now continue in their dressing of the dead.
Beside me, Hurna gives a sudden snort as if to mark contempt. ‘He need not hope for me to drag him to his filthy rite. That’s up to you, girl. It may serve you well: you’re sure to pay more heed of how the dead are put to rest if you must make the long walk to their grave yourself.’
She laughs and makes her tits shake. Overhead a single crow looks down in passing and calls once, as if alerting us to the approach of something that may not be seen save from that soaring vantage. Clouds mass on the west horizon. In the willage, children chase a painted pig between the huts, now cheering, now complaining as the frightened creature veers this way and that, a gaudy smear of colour streaked amongst the barns and horse-yards, squeaking. What hope may there be for anything so shrill and bright? No hope. No hope at all.
There is a fearfulness that gathers weight and form within my belly day by day, grown restless and uneasy as a cold grey baby turning in my womb. You must be gone from here, part of me tells myself, before another dawn is come to find a dead girl placed before your door. Leave with the wolf light when there’s nothing save the birds awake; steal off between the snoring huts and never more return. It is not safe here. There are shadows that loom big behind each happenstance, each chance remark, and more is meant than what is said. Move on. Take up the track again and put these whispering huddles at your back.
And now another part of me replies: You cannot leave, it says, and throw away the only chance for ease and wealth that you may ever happen on, not when the stink of it’s so close. Think of the tunnels that may snake, gold flooded, here beneath you as you sit; the wells of treasure deep enough to draw from all your days. Are you a child, to start at dreams born of bad curds you eat before your bed? To mewl when there are creakings in the dark? These night fears must not cheat you of the old man’s leavings, that are yours by right. Stay. Stay and bide your time, and come at last to wear a coloured gown and dine on fat.
But what of her, the dead girl? If they find you out . . .
Don’t pay that any heed. There’s not a thing to forge a link in twixt of you and she. Why, even now the rough-boys, like as berries on a missel-sprig, prepare a bier on which she may be hauled to burial. She is not long above the ground, and when the soil is fallen on her face, then you may put her from your thoughts.
But if his dead eye truly looks upon a world we may not see . . .
All that is nothing save for mummery. Put it aside and think instead of Olun’s gold.
But . . .
Oh, be silent, both of you. There is a fishbone lodged between my teeth, and over by his hut the old man calls for me to drag him to the grave fields. Coming, father. Coming.
For a change, the journey is not far. We walk south from the settlement, with Bern and Buri carrying the cold and naked bride upon her hasty bed, while me and Olun scrape along behind. Above us, dead leaves rustle in great muttering crowds upon each yearning bough.
The grave site sets upon a weed-cleared rise that’s higher than the puddled boglands soaking all about. The women from the willage are already gathered there as we arrive. They glance up, silent, narrow-eyed, kneeling so to surround a place where all the turf is skinned away, the earthmeat there below scooped out and heaped up to one side as if with taint, a man-deep wound revealed. They crouch about the grave and braid a ring of flower-heads between their many hands.
The women part to let the shaven brothers and their lifeless burden move between them, making high
steps, queer and delicate so as not to disturb the floral braid. Once by the graveside, Bern and Buri set the bier upon the grass, one of them clambering down into the pit to take the body from the other who now lifts it up, his fingers clenching in the curls beneath her arms. She’s lowered thus into the gravemouth, eyes still open, staring at us ‘til she sinks from sight in awkward jerks, each lurch and start accompanied by grunts from Bern and Buri. Settling her upon the gravebed now the bully boy climbs up to join his brother by its edge. Crows wheel above, charred flakes of noise that scatter and re-form against an empty sky.
The ceremony is a dull thing with no rise or fall of feeling, no relief, made flatter yet by this wan, uneventful morning light: the gravewords called in Olun’s failing snake-skin rasp, each phrase cast up but briefly on the shores of speech then dragged back by the undertow of straining and collapsing breath; the women, chanting their response learned long and hard above the holes of mothers, husbands, sons, now lavished on a stranger; Bern and Buri, taking up an earth-axe, one apiece, before the chanting’s over, standing shift-foot with impatience to refill the hole and be away back to their queen, their suckling place.
The call and echo of the bone-chant dies away, replaced by other rhythms. Bern and Buri, each in turn, now stamp an earth-axe deep within the hill of soil discarded by the gravemouth, scooping up the dirt upon their blades to shower in the dead girl’s eyes. The grit-edged chop and bite, the rattling lift and fling, again and yet again. Her body lies unmoving in this sharp, dry rain like some abandoned settlement back in the highland north from which all life is fled, silent and still beneath the steady fall of ash and mud that covers now her wrinkled tracks and bristling gorse, her sinks and outcrops all erased. The breasts and face alone remain. Now nothing but her jaw; her chin. She’s gone.
The grave is filled. The women chant again, and Olun scatters dog teeth on the damp, untrodden mound. The petals of the braided flowers begin to curl and darken. Everyone goes home, with Bern and Buri striding off in step across the fields, the women trailing after them all in one long unravelling knot. We bump and judder in their wake, but soon they are too far away to hail, leaving me and Olun to our own company.
‘Why do you scatter dog teeth on her grave?’
My question is put forward more to break the dismal silence of the marshes than from any great desire to know its answer, yet the old man answers anyway.
‘That spirit-dogs may keep her safe, and guide her through the underpaths into the willage of the dead.’ He seems about to venture more, but now a dreadful coughing falls upon him and he may not speak.
‘There’s none save you and dead men, then, as know these underpaths?’ This is my next inquiry, offered once his hawking dies away.
‘That’s true enough. It seems you must have one or both feet planted in the underworld to know its windings.’ Here he laughs, a brittle noise that’s thick with mucous, very like the crushing of a snail. ‘Except old Tunny. He knows every turning of the path, but all the knowing’s in his fingers. None of it is in his head. He . . .’
Here the cunning-man breaks off, as if he thinks it better not to tell me more. At least, that’s how it seems to me. A moment passes, then another. There is still no voice come from behind my shoulder where the old man drags, there at my rear. Turning about, the reason for his quiet is plain: his eyes start out like painted eggs. Beneath the crazing net of signs that mark his flesh the skin is turned a slow and ghostly blue.
Not now! Not now before he’s told me everything! Dropping the bier to run, my screams alert the settlement before my feet can bear me halfway there. Out from their huts they waddle, slow at first then faster as they see who calls and understand what must be happening. They hurry in a line towards me through the long grey meadow-grass, wiping their hands upon their coats or hitching up their leggings as they run.
He’s still alive when we get back to him, some of the blueness faded now, his bird-breast settled back into a lurching rise and fall. He tries to speak as one great oxen-shouldered man scoops Olun from the pallet up into his arms to carry like a babe. His lips move, crinkling their coloured scars, but no words come. Across the field he’s borne amidst the buzz and whisper of the willagers that crowd about him in a wavering swarm, towards the far hives of the settlement, already humming and alive with rumour and lament.
Beneath the soil she lies, her yawn packed full with earth, a dry and bitter lace of root-hair snagged between her teeth. She comes here for her father’s leavings, closer to them now than all my cleverness brings me, with secret paths of gold coiled all about her while she sleeps and stinks and falls apart. Jewelled gravel lodging in between her toes, and chewed by silver worms there in the wasted treasure houses of the dead; the dead, alone of all the world in that they have no greeds to satisfy, no fears to salve or needs they must placate. Their sockets brim with wealth more splendid than their living eyes may ever know, and it concerns them not at all. My body, warm and anxious, moves to cruder drums.
Outside, beyond the cluttering strangeness of the old man’s hut, noon comes and goes, marked by the squeals of panic drowned in children’s laughter as the painted pig is killed, off near the roundhouse by the sound of it.
Olun is dying. Sprawled there facing me across the burned-out ember pit he does not seem to breathe at all, but only sigh from while to while, his blinkless eyes fixed on me, blind and sighted both. He sinks into his death and grows remote, unanswering for all my urgent query and demand.
‘Please, Father. There’s so little time and you must give me all your learnings. Teach me. Tell me how to be a cunning one like you before death draws a curtain in between us.’
Olun smiles, a dreadful splitting of the picture-bark that is his face, and tries to speak.
‘The curtain . . .’ Here he coughs, breaks off, recovers, starts again. ‘The curtain’s torn. There is a way we may speak with the dead and have their learnings. Patience, daughter. Patience.’
Patience? What is all my toiling; dragging; all my listening to his dull mumbles if not patience?
‘How, then? How then may your learnings come to me if you are dead? Please, Father. Why not tell me now, while there is time?’
Again the smile, the decorated bark peeled back. ‘A test. A final test. If you’re to be the cunning one then you must learn to hear the voice of those that bear the name before you. Come now, daughter, do not look afraid. It’s not so hard to know the teachings of the dead, for those whose wits are quick and have the eyes to see.’
My mouth falls open here to make complaint, yet Olun lifts one trembling hand to still my protest ere it’s born.
‘Let’s talk no more of this, for there’s another matter: something you must give to me while there’s yet breath within my mouth. Something of yours, to be my comfort in the tomb.’
What’s this? He makes no hurry passing on my leavings, yet he asks a gift of me? My tongue grows tart, as if with bile. ‘You say that we may talk when you are dead. What need is there for comfort more than this?’
He shakes his constellation-spattered head. ‘No. Though my voice may hail you from beyond the grave, it does not work the other way about. You may not speak with me, though there’s a way for me to speak with you. My need is for some token, some possession of my daughter’s for to hold beside me in the dark and make me less alone. It is our custom here. What of those beads about your throat?’
My best chance seems to lie in pleasing this old fool, so that he may relent and tell me all he knows. Making no answer save a shrug, my hands reach up behind my neck to fumble with the knot of copper wire that holds the threaded beads in place. My fingers wage a brief, blind struggle and the hoop of hard blue sparks lifts free, held out towards the old man on his bier.
He does not take the beads, nor look at them. Instead, his gaze still rests with me, seems fixed upon my chin or shoulders just as if the loop of fancy-beads still dangles there. At last, his eyes fall to the gift that’s held out in
my hand. Reaching, he takes it from me, holds it to his face and then begins to weep.
‘My daughter. Oh, my daughter . . .’ More tears fall, his words slurred to a moan, an idiot snuffling. It fills me with unease to see this softness in his manner, he who holds a frightened willage in his thrall. To think it brings such grief upon him, just to part with me. How does this world endure, if all its sages are so weak?
He lifts his head and stares once more into my eyes and there is something fierce within his look. Perhaps he feels an anger with himself, to bawl thus like a babe before his child. He speaks to me, his voice grown flat and cold. ‘Send Hurna to me now. It is my wish to speak to her alone.’
There’s nothing for it but to do his bidding. Picking over hurdles made from gaudy wands and caps adorned with fishbone, my way’s made from in the hut to where the dough-faced woman sits and tends her cooking fires outside. She seems surprised at being summoned thus and, after gawping for a while in disbelief, she hurries through the wood-stopped door to be by Olun’s side.
Sat tired and disappointed in the dust with back against the bare-stripped wooden walls my vision lights upon the view between the willage huts. Off by the roundhouse men with knives of copper flay the face from off the carcass of a coloured pig. My eyes close, shutting out a world that swiftly moves beyond my understanding. Lurid shapes transmogrify and melt against a scab-thick dark.
The rounded woods still press into my back, the hard-stamped earth against my spine. Off in the mottled dark behind my eyelids there are distant calls and coughs and creakings, willage sounds that penetrate my doze, serve as reminders that the world is yet about me. Half-dreams come. Thoughts blossom into pictures, then dissolve.
Garn hammers bees upon his anvil until black and yellow pulp drools down its side. He stands knee deep in ash that rises slowly in a warm grey flow-tide, covering his thighs, his belly, everything except his head, which has the features of a pig, and now the women of the settlement are come across the risen powder-flats to knot a ring of bright blue flowers about its throat. Their stems leave stains of vivid green against the swells of fat and now an understanding comes upon me that Garn’s body is no longer underneath the ash: the head is severed, and the flesh torso hangs nearby, transfixed upon a spar of wood. The bulging skin is painted everywhere with images of birds.