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.
It is my hope that they may talk of shanking, or of something good to listen on, but no. She drears about a god that swallows us, which does not sound the god for me. She says once we are swallowed up then we may be born new amongst the gods. As what? A turd that bobs there in their golden midden-hole? Things may be born then swallowed, though it may not be the other way about, not in my reckoning.
Once in a while the old man’s voice breaks in and crackles something sharp with scorn, withdraws again to let the woman’s answer drag away and on and on into the night. She pulls their talk along, a pallet weighed with blunt and heavy words.
Below my fur and naked save my fancy-beads, my eyes are shut but not my ears. Her words float through me. Essence. Spirit-ore. The hobbles of the flesh. Change. Be transformed, refigured in the passion, passion, passion ash . . .
The ashfields. Me a little girl. This snow is dry, warm grey, its smoothed and rounded flanks just right for stepping in, a powder finer than the stone-ground corn, as cool and slippery as water on my foot that now sinks in, and in, expecting ground, and deeper, there’s no firmness underneath the ash to stop me falling . . .
Start awake. The furs piled up about my neck. The hangings, pink lit on the other side and still the woman’s voice beyond them. Sweat all up my back and silky wet between the breasts. These furs make me too hot. Take out my arms and shoulders from beneath. That’s better. Cooler. Turn and roll upon my other side. The beaded hoop of wire now digs into my shoulder that it must be pushed away. There. Now the all of me feels good, so slack and tired that it escapes my thoughts just where my leg rests, or my hand. All one soft piece, that does not know the different bits of me.
The woman’s words, smooth of all meaning now, are only sounds, grey pebbles sleek and wet that tumble slow through nothing, here inside my eyelids: Beasthill. Heartring. Urned with queens. The cheated worm. Bones milled and raked. And when you. And when all of us. When we. When we are sparkborn . . .
In my dark, the colour flukes play blue, no, red, and run to make a ring. It cobwebs out, it cobwebs out and at the centre comes a melt, deep winter green and, glimmering, breaks apart, the ripples, river, river’s edge, and here she comes, the girl, her throat all open but she does not pay it mind, and she is smiling, pleased to meet with me.
‘Come up the river bank a little way,’ she’s saying now. ‘There is a big black dog up there who says he knows of you.’
She turns and walks, leading ahead. Where is the river gone to? There are bushes at each side and piles of clutter stood amongst them, heaping mounts of queer and clever things that are well known to me, although their names are not now in my thoughts. The girl is calling up ahead, along the passageway.
Trying to catch up next to her but something’s tangling my feet and makes me slow. Her voice goes further off from me. She’s talking now to someone, yet her words are flat and have no spirit in. That must be how it is, the talk between the dead. Push on. Push deeper after her. It’s darker now. Is that her calling me? It’s darker now . . .
Light. Morning light. What place is this to find myself awake?
Olun. The old man’s hut. The father of the girl. The girl beside the river’s edge.
Ah yes.
Yet half asleep, still furry in my thoughts and muttering to myself while pulling on her clothes, my clothes, then crawling out into the centre round of Olun’s hut. Deserted. Fire pit cold and dead. The greying, liver-coloured ranks of oddment that surround me robbed of all their midnight glamour by a sun that’s strained in dusted spindles through the chinked rush roof above.
They have a stillness and an old hush in them now, these chines of bauble and remain. The narrow paths ravining through them are less mazed as seen by pearl of morning, making it a simple thing to find my way out, stumbling and mumbling to day. Squinting against this bright; the world smears in my lashes.
‘Usin? Usin!’
He says it yet again before it comes upon me that this is my name. Turn about. The old man lies before me on his raft of twigs, wrapped not in feathers now but in a robe of many dog-pelts, whole, so that black snouts show here and there above the slashed vent of a mouth, below the lidded fastening holes.
Beside him food is spread in bowls of polished bronze. A hot fish, gaping. Clouded with alarm and great unhappiness its steamed eyes fix upon me. Near to this a dish not bigger than a thumb-cup, filled with bitter cherry mash. Crust-hided haunches of grey bread to dip. A skin of goatwarm milk to wash it down.
‘Hurna and myself, we eat at dawn. She’s off to worship with her people now and is not coming back this side of noon. Now you may eat.’
He signifies towards the food, a spasm of his patterned hand.
He watches me crouch cross-kneed, take the dagger from my pouch and score his fish along its back, about its tail, the gill-line of its throat, grey vapour bleeding up from where the black skin splits, peels back beneath my edge. Thumb out the spine. Ease up the hairbone prongs of rib from smoking whitemeat slots. Now lift the brittle centipede of backbone out with face and arsefins all, to set aside. Prick out a slat of flesh, raised smouldering and pushed between my lips on daggerpoint, which gives me cause to think of how that point is last employed.
My chewing takes some whiles, my swallow hardly less. Out from beneath a dishrim, flaring bronze, the fern-tailed skeleton is staring, girl-eyed, there beside my plate. Chew, swallow, take some more, but this time with my fingers. Olun watches me, and when he sees my mouth’s too full to make an interruption without choking me, he speaks.
‘While Hurna is not here we may walk up the river path a way, as may be to the bridge and back. If you’re to have my leavings, it’s as well you have a cunning of the land and all its lie.’
It comes to me that he says ‘We may walk’, when it is only me who’s fit to do as much. He means for me to drag him, in that ox-legged woman’s stead, and me so little built! The flakes of creature in my mouth and mention of his leavings: these are all that stop me calling him the lazy, crafty gill clot that he is.
He does not speak again throughout the fish, the bread or sweet, dirt-gritted milk, and yet from while to while he opens up his mouth as if to do so, though he makes not any sound at all. It’s only now it comes to me that these are gasps he makes to take his breath.
The cherry stew’s too sharp for me, left barely tasted. Afterwards, upon my bending low to wrap his dog-coat tighter in before his pallet’s taken up and dragged, he lifts one hand and gently wipes away the goatmilk beaded on my underlip, a taste of stale and smoke-cured finger-end. He smiles, eyes creasing in the web-skinned sockets. Three small fish-marks drawn bright red upon one lid are lost within the sudden fissured deeps.
No sire or dam of mine has need to make me drag them all this way. The father lowered bee-stung to his grave up in the hollows of the Great North Woods, he does not ask for me to drag him, stinking, all about the land. Nor is my mother carried when she sickens, whoring in the mine camps east of here, the both of us together now that father’s dead, and when her cough starts putting off my customers there’s nothing more to do than leave her. ‘You rest here. It does not take me long to find some firewoo
ds and come back. Rest, Mother. Rest and wait for me,’ and morning finds me in another place, down track, alone.
The both of them are dead and gone now, neither are they carried there.
My grip is sore about the litter’s poles, hands wealed and callusing, and we are barely out the willage, barely out the skein of knotted dust tracks where the children laugh and fight between the bustling huts, their thin brown shapes that tumble in and out of view like spirits through the pot-haze, stew clouds watery and dismal to the nose, a fever fog that damps the cheek.
Though he is dragged behind upon his pallet in my wake it feels as if the old man’s pushing me, goading me on beyond the hut-rings to the settlement’s north gate. We cross paths with the birth-marked boy who plays the guard on my arrival. Walking with a short, soft-fatted girl whose speckled shoulders pale to milk beneath her blood-gold hair, he does not look at me.
The watch-hut by the gate is empty as we scrape between the shored up brackens to the field beyond. The empty watch-hut troubles me, but once we’re through the gate its reason’s plain: the withered man with dye-blacked hands is stood outside, turned face towards the barrier of thorn, a corded will limp in his rattling hands. On watch alone he steps outside the gate to make a piss, but from the look of it he stands and nothing comes.
As we pass by him, me in front, the old man dredging there behind, he glances up, sees Olun, and calls out.
‘You have a daughter, then. That’s new.’
‘Aye,’ Olun croaks, replying. ‘Aye, that’s new.’ Thus we pass on and take the path beside the river, yellow dirt trod bald between the scrubs of grass. Bronzed leaves pile against trees that stand like widows, shoulders bare and bent with grief, heads hung and grey hair catching in the riverskin where currents braid to silver, split on twig ends. Looking up from frozen, trudging feet and back across my shoulder, see the soot-gloved gateman leaning, still with face towards the thorn and waiting for the dam to break.
We scrape and clatter on beside the river, counter to its flow. The twig-bed crackles, drawn along the hard-worn path behind me, like a brushfire at my back from which a voice comes now, the old man’s, crackling also.
‘If you’re . . .’ A breath. ‘To follow me . . .’ Another. By these constant, desperate suckings-down of air his talk is broken, sudden eddies in its flow.
‘If you’re to follow me, then you must know my path. If you’re to be the cunning one when I am gone, why, then you have my leavings, but it must be that you have my learnings also.’
Listening to him speak, it comes to me that though he may be old he has his wits about him. You can hear it in the way he fits his words one to another, clear despite the interrupting breath. My mother, younger far than he, says only ‘Cack’ and ‘Wet’ and ‘Where’s he gone?’ those last few moons. This Olun is no fool, and so he has my ear.
The fire voice sputters on, above the litter’s cracklings. ‘My way of learning is my path, still trodden in my thoughts, although my walks in this world are no more.’
He does not need tell that to me, me with my palms all blistered and my shoulders sore from dragging him.
He draws his frantic, drowning breath and then goes on. ‘This track of knowing’s beaten through wild overgrowths of thought by long moons of repeating, yet means nothing if it has no counter in this world, the world wherein we walk and die.’
He leaves the walking up to me and, in return, the dying’s left to him.
‘My path of thoughts is therefore drawn from all the paths about me in the truth of life. These territories that we span are as like spanned within, where there are monuments of notion, chasms, peaks and streams for night-thoughts there to spawn. If you would know my path and follow in its way, then know the land about, both track and willage, in its bridge and in its drownings. Know the outcast rat-shacks, relic stones and gill-halls. Mark each path above and know the underpath below, its secret way from vault to treasure hole.’
My peace is held, all the long while he talks. This word of treasure, though, must not slip by, and bids me to break in.
‘What underpath is this, and how is it for me to walk, if all its ways be secret?’
He is sniffy, waving me away with his reply.
‘We have our Urken-tracks beneath the soil. Only the Hob or Hob-wife know their ways, that pass from hand to cunning hand across the ages. Many treasures of our craft are there, but this is yours to know when you are ready, filled with knowings of the plainer tracks above that are an equal to your calling. On that day, it may well be that you go down and walk the candled leagues yourself, where these old feet of mine once tread the wormslopes and the chilly rock, that only tread there in my dog-dreams now. Before that day you must tread all the paths above, and know the stories set along their way.’
This troubles me. It seems the old man has it in his thoughts for me to drag him all through up and down along these paths he talks about, which does not please me, not at all. As for the stories set along their way, the ones that hang there in the torso garden are already known to me, and it’s not my desire to hear of any more. It strikes me, since we do not pass in sight of those staked carrion, my path of last night gone must lie some way east of this river-walk, which pleases me right well. Trudge on, the leaves all kicking up about my feet.
Now Olun calls for me to stop a while, and bids me look away now from the river to the east, where rises up a hill with white smoke twisting out in ribbons from its top. It is the hill by which my way is made down to the bog-struck valley floor upon my coming here, its crest-fires burning still by day. Far off, across the fields, the little people stood about the blazes on that peak may yet be seen. Their chanting, faint and distant, comes to us with each new shift of wind, one voice of note more strident than the rest, that carries further.
‘That is Hurna,’ says the old man, cackling the while and spraying spit across his pup-faced wrap. He offers up no further word, but bids me heft the poles and carry on. Our shadows shrivel up beneath the climbing sun. The whiles pass by.
Ahead and to my right a meadow swamp of rushes fans away, a hollow of blanched spears that has a crop of solid land knobbed up from out its middle like an island in a lake of reed, and there upon it stands a mound of wood, as for a fire. There are some children playing near it, boys who crouch about another of their kind, who lies upon his back. They jab, and fondle him, and make loud cries.
As we tread nearer, passing them, it comes to me that this is not a child that lies between them but a boy-in-kind, whose empty rags they stuff and poke with straw to lend him form.
‘They’re readying the pig-boy in the Hobfield, then,’ says Olun, but it’s better that my breath is put to hauling him, and not to asking him the where of every mad-head thing that he may say. Trudge on. The leaves burst up like birds, and on, and on, and only now, my back nigh broke and fingers fit to fall away, is there a sighting of the bridge, there at the far end of this river track, all passage-walled with peeling birch trees, ashen silver in the light. Almost. We’re almost there.
The old man tells me all his secrets just before he dies, and lets me journey down into the tunnelways beneath the settlement, where there are silver bowls and wristlets made of gold. By still of night, this hoard is carried off down track a way, to where my new home waits for me. My new wealth’s traded in for land, for oxen and fine wraps and pretty slaves, that all those passing by my hut may see its grandness and its herded grounds and say, ‘How fine a woman must live there.’
My food is nothing save the rarest fish and the most tender pieces cut from infant beasts. Tall, painted warriors are set to guard my days; the strongest service me by night, and every moon my willeins offer up their thanks and bags of grain to me. Their children dance between the rose-twined pillars of my stilted chair.
This is their bridge, then. Big black logs that smooth together down across the ages make the curve of it, that rises gently up away from us towards its hump, above the foams and churnin
g deeps below. For all my care in hauling him and litter both across the bump-topped woods, the old man grunts and clicks his tongue and makes complaint to me each time his bones are jarred.
Here, on its near-end slope, the blackened span has chinks between the timbers. It seems there is a little pit dug underneath this south side of the bridge. My eyes squint, peering, but whatever once may be to see inside the hole is long since gone. There’s only pale flecked dirt, lit bright where sunlight’s wrung between the roof logs over which we make our way now, passing on.
‘Stop here,’ says Olun as we reach the middle of the bridge, and bids me set him down and sit beside his litter on the wetworn logs, the waters roaring under us. The cold strikes up my arse. We do not talk of much. He makes remark upon my fancy-beads, blue sparks hung on their copper strand about my throat, and asks me how they’re made.
It startles me, the ease with which this stolen tale comes tumbling from my lips: the sand fires, seaweed banked, seen through the shore fogs, burning. Men with puckered, flame-scarred hands who tip the ore and curse if it should splash, the reek of singeing beard, a scorching in the lungs and, afterwards, the glazed sands all about the furnace hole made hard, shot through with bitter juice of kelp and bladderwrack and coppered blue. My words pour, effortless, and conjure tangle-headed beachgirls, skirts damped dark about the hem by surf, that pick for skybeads in the fire-struck dunes, as if these sights are ever known to me.