‘Jesus, son—’
‘But the river stays silent. The people can’t hear it. They refuse to believe it doesn’t care about them. To it, we’re not giants, and maybe one man can become bigger. Maybe one man can come to mean more than he ever realised, but it’s only so in the heads of others. We’re smaller than we think, smaller than we’d dare admit—’
‘What the hell have you been reading?’
‘It doesn’t matter. We’re on the river, that’s all we need to know. There’s docks now. Wood. Grey. And parts of the bank are clear, grass lawns. There’s porches and houses, and sheds, and boats pulled up on the clay, or tied to docks. There’s a road, and two cars, one behind the other. The river feels wrong under us. It knows where it’s heading. People have thrown a wall across it, and it’s about to roar.’
‘In anger?’
‘Oh no. Just talking for the world. We never listen. We never really listen.’
‘Can you see the locks?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Throttle up and swing us around. I’ll drop the anchor and we can have lunch.’
‘Is the game over?’
‘Is it?’
‘I’m not sure.’
Gribbs shrugged. ‘Me neither.’
‘I realised something,’ Owen said.
‘What?’
‘You’re going blind, aren’t you?’
Gribbs smiled.
‘And that’s why I’m here.’
‘Oh, more than just that, my friend. After lunch, it’s my turn.’
‘I didn’t think I’d get scared playing that game.’
‘Same here.’
III
‘The taste of smoked salmon is exactly the same as its colour,’ I said.
‘Never thought of it that way,’ Walter said around a mouthful. ‘You might be right.’
We didn’t say anything for a few minutes, too busy eating. Smoked salmon, cream cheese, bagels, French bread, Stilton cheese, prosciutto ham and watered red Portuguese wine. I’d never tasted any of it before, and it made me realise just how boring my family’s own fare was. Taste should be a surprise, Walter had explained. Each bite should cut across the palate, go in a different direction. Texture’s highly underrated in this country’s cuisine. The wine was so heavily watered I barely felt it, but it swept everything clean between each bite of food. My head swam with the newness of it all.
‘You know,’ I said after a while, ‘I don’t know if I really see the world that way.’
‘Oh?’
‘I mean, I was painting you a picture, right? Just one kind of picture. I could’ve painted others.’
Walter nodded. ‘I believe you. Even so, it pulled you in, didn’t it? Hell, it pulled me in, that’s for sure.’
‘Summer’s almost over. I can’t believe how fast it went. The way my friends talked about it before school ended, I sort of pictured … something different, I guess. A wildness, as if the world was going to go back in time, as if the forests were going to fill with old, cold-eyed gods. And the ground under us moving ever so slightly, because the dwarves and demons were restless. Ever read Beowulf?’
‘What?’
‘It’s a poem.’
‘I know. You want to hear some of it? In Anglo-Saxon?’
I nodded, then said, ‘Yes.’
‘I’ve only heard it, mind you. Spoken. There was a man, once, a sea dog with his head full of old North Sea shanties and a whole lot more besides. Every time we ended up working alongside each other, he’d start. Reeling off lines, whole poems. Sometimes in Old French, or in High German, or Gaelic. Sometimes I didn’t recognise the language at all. It took me a long time to realise he was handing them down to me, passing them on, the same way someone had done to him when he was young. The man couldn’t read, couldn’t write, but he was an artist. In the old way.’
‘A bard.’
Walter grinned, then he cleared his throat and said,
I couldn’t understand a word, of course, but the language was the clash of steel, the guttural clacking of oars in rowlocks, the heavy thundering flap of sail cloth and savage north winds. The words pulled me away. They pulled me too far. I found myself in a darker place, a place that heated my blood as if my body were being shaped on a forge; the hammer of my heart felt like iron, its taste biting my tongue. I took another mouthful of wine, savouring its bitterness.
Slowly, my eyes opened. Walter sat facing me.
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Words spoken aloud can call you out. We each hold in us our own language, Owen. It can be brutal, like the language of Beowulf. Or rounded, humming with romance, like The Song of Roland. When you hear yours spoken for the first time … everything changes, doesn’t it?’
‘Yes. What’s happening?’
‘You’ve drunk too much wine, my boy, even though it’s barely coloured water. You started guzzling it when you listened to your language.’
‘Blood and iron,’ I said. ‘Wine tastes like blood and iron. Those words, what did they mean?’
‘I don’t know,’ Walter said.
‘What?’
‘How could I? That’s how I learned them, word for word, the sea dog thumping his scarred fist on the table in the ship’s galley. Thumping in time, like swords beating on shields, I guess. He drove that poem right into my bones, his eyes on fire and a quick clout if I got it wrong.’
‘So you’ve done the same to someone else? You passed it on like you were supposed to do?’
Walter looked away, squinting against the sunlight coming in through the front window. ‘Here and there. I spread it out, you see. Maybe that was a mistake, but it seemed the safer thing to do. That one, Beowulf, well, I ain’t passed that one on yet.’
‘I’m going to learn it,’ I said. ‘In Anglo-Saxon and in English. I found an old book. Most of the pages are gone, eaten by rats, but it’s about European folklore, and in the table of contents it starts with Beowulf. I plan on finding copies of all the stories. I plan on learning them.’
‘That’s quite a task you’ve set for yourself there, my friend. Your parents must be proud of you.’
I shrugged, picking at the ham. ‘They don’t do much. My dad fixes cars. My mom reads spy novels. She’d like to get a job somewhere but it never seems to happen. She used to know lots. She was at university. My dad wanted to be an engineer. But then Mom got pregnant so she quit school and Dad couldn’t afford the night school any more and so he got a job at a garage. That was years ago. They don’t do much these days. We moved around lots. Things happened, I guess. But then Dad got the loan and bought the Gulf station on the highway and they used that to get the mortgage, so now we got land and that’s good. It’s an investment, and that’s good.’
‘How’s his business coming along?’
‘Great. He’s making tons. I don’t think we’ll have to move any more.’
Walter began packing away what little food we’d left uneaten, his expression thoughtful. ‘Let’s talk about land,’ he said.
I nodded. ‘Okay. It’s your turn, after all.’
‘So it is. Well. Land’s not something we just live on. We’re all from someplace else, if you go back far enough. We carry with us the stories of where we came from, what we left behind. Those stories put words and meaning to how we lived on the old land, the first lands. When we took to the seas – the first times – it wasn’t a simple, easy journey. No vacations back then. No. When people moved, it was because they had to. Driven from their homes and hearths on winds of smoke and blood. For some of them, they heard voices pulling them onward. Refugees, all of us, and pilgrims, some of us – pilgrims looking for an old holiness in a new place.
‘We moved from one dark land to the next dark land, and the sea that carried us – it was the darkest road of them all. What lived in its deep wasn’t for human eyes to see, so madness was always close by, a spectre ever ready to show us what we didn’t understand, what we couldn’t understand. A spectre of unreason – after all, it’s sensel
essness that frightens us the most.’
He paused for a long moment. Under us, Mistress Flight swung on her anchor line, an easy rhythm that matched the swaying of his words. I heard gulls screaming.
‘That old sea dog I told you about. When he was done, when he’d emptied himself into me, he made landfall back in his homeland. Denmark. Then he left all his life’s possessions – a single leather sack – on a roadside and he walked into the bog and was never seen again. When I heard what he’d done, it left me cold. Scared. You know why?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘He made himself into his last story. The last one to give to you. And you knew your future, then.’
‘Clear and bright like a full-moon night.’ Walter’s eyes reflected something intense, almost wary. ‘What’s made you so old, Owen?’
I closed my eyes. I made a promise, didn’t I? ‘I’ve found a giant,’ I said. ‘He’s my world, now. I think I live inside him. Lost, deep inside him. I need to climb out, up, through the top of his skull. But I don’t know how, and it might be too late. I just don’t know.’
Walter was silent a moment longer, then he climbed to his feet. ‘Let’s get a move on. Heading back’s gonna be harder.’
Ten minutes later the Sea Horse worked us steadily forward, our path slicing the river in half, the screws under the stern churning the water into brown foam in our wake. I held the wheel, Walter standing beside me.
‘Your picture,’ he finally said. ‘It painted a world where people are like ants, crawling on the surface, remixing the thinnest layer of earth. It was a true picture, for this place. This land’s still raw. Human history is barely skin-deep here, like bird tracks on clay. It’s what you were born to, it’s what your eyes have seen all your young life. But there’s other lands. Places where human history runs deep, almost down to the land’s bones, and the land’s muscle is of our own making. Life on life on life, generation on generation, century after century.’
‘Europe,’ I said, nodding. ‘And Africa and Asia.’
‘Visit those places, son. They’ll open you out. People in this country are lonely. Some of them spend their time trying to talk to the land, trying to connect to it and find a spirit there. They’re missing the point. They’re jumping the gun. Put yourself on a hilltop in the Old World, and make yourself understand that the hill’s man-made. It’s tombs, barrows, hill-forts, villages, towns, even cities, right there under you. Look around and realise that the pretty view is a gift from a hundred thousand hands, building their lives brick by brick, stone by stone. Then you won’t feel lonely any more. And you’ll find a new perspective on things. What’s come will go, and will come again, and go again, and so on. That’s a comfort, a comfort deep in your soul, and it keeps you from desperate acts, desperate thoughts. Don’t bother looking to identify with your land before you learn to identify with your species. Sorry if I’m sounding like a teacher, Owen.’
I shook my head. ‘No. I know that what you’re saying will stay with me. It’ll all come back someday, when I need it to.’
Walter turned away. He left my side, walking around the small cabin, his hand tracking the teak trimming, the brass fixtures.
‘Something wrong?’ I asked.
He shook his head, keeping his back to me, then cleared his throat and said, ‘I met an old woman in Istanbul, which used to be called Constantinople, after the first Christian Emperor of Rome.’
‘Constantine.’
‘She had gypsy blood, this old woman. I went to her to hear stories. I was young and still making my world. She lived in the old Greek quarter, her small house leaning against the city’s inside wall, always in shadows at the end of an alley that showed cobbles under the garbage and dirt.
‘A young boy led me to her door, and I saw that the door was a kite shield – you know, a warrior’s shield, from long ago. It was hinged on one side, with spaces above and below it. The paint had mostly chipped off, but some flakes remained, showing white and red. A red cross on a white field.
‘The boy wouldn’t go inside,’ Walter continued, completing his circle and coming around to my side again. He had his eyes closed as he spoke. ‘The boy wouldn’t go inside, and I admit I didn’t blame him. The foulest smoke was pouring out from under and over the shield. I had to tie a cloth over my mouth before I went into that dark gloom.
‘That old woman – she might have been the sea dog’s sister, or mother. Not by how she looked, but by what I read there in her eyes. She was nearing her own end, rotting with leprosy, and she sat in front of a fire, a hearth there on the earth floor, ringed in ancient bricks. The walls were white with ash, and the ceiling was black – black as a starless night.
‘Inside, the smell was fierce. You see, she had her hands in the fire. A leper with dead nerves, she was burning herself away. Nudge the throttle up a tad, we’re losing headway.
‘She was naked, and she opened her mouth and showed me the stub of her tongue. I asked myself: How will this poor creature tell me her stories? But she beckoned me closer, and I tell you, Owen, it wasn’t an easy task to do her bidding, but somehow I managed. She laughed. Without sound. And when I got close enough I saw that, in the hidden places – places normally covered by clothes and modesty – her skin was tattooed. Dots, bar shapes, squiggles. And that’s when I understood. Some stories are older than words, some stories live on in the oldest language of all, the language that is our own bodies.’
‘Did you copy down the tattoos? Did you get them done on yourself? Did you decipher them? What did they say?’
Walter’s smile looked sad. ‘I was too late. So much had rotted away. So much had burned away. The woman wasn’t laughing. She was crying.
‘Compared to the mountains and forests, compared to this river, we’re not very old. Even so, Owen, we’re older than we ourselves can comprehend. So much has already been lost. For her, I have only the story of her last days, and in my mind the memories. When her legs and arms were gone, she wriggled like a snake on to the fire. The boy brought me more wood, and it was me who piled it around her, making sure the flames caught and held, but at the same time keeping the house from burning down – keeping the fire wardens from finding out. So I had to stay till the end. The only thing I could give her was what my eyes saw. Sometimes, the price is too high. Some things you should never have to see, but it happens anyway, and you come away from it changed inside. A little colder, a little sadder. Maybe wiser, maybe a little madder. Beware that kind of madness, Owen. It’ll take you like demon teeth from the deep, fast and when you’re not looking.’
I was trembling, sensing the old man beside me with senses I couldn’t even identify. ‘Is that it?’ I asked in a whisper. ‘Is that your darkest corner?’
‘Soon,’ he said, ‘I’ll tell you about the Ship of Nails.’
I hesitated, then said, ‘Could you tell me Beowulf again? What you can remember?’
Walter sighed, rubbing at his face as if his story had burned tattoos there. ‘Let me rest a while.’
‘Sure.’ I scanned the river in front of us, squinted at the thick banks ceaselessly rustling past. Crows played in the sky above the trees, black like tatters of night. Up ahead the oil refinery loomed into view. Our journey was nearing its end.
The beaver lodge passed by on my right. Unchanged, its woven cloak of normalcy complete – I could see nothing of what I knew was still there. The sunlight showed only the surface. Walter’s words had sunk into me, crowding the giant’s bones. Rotting flesh rose around me like quicksand. I wanted to struggle, to scream, but I knew it was hopeless. I’d seen something I shouldn’t have had to see, making me colder, sadder. I’d already heard the maddening call, but I’d rejected it. I wondered if it had claimed one of the others, and I felt fear.
The river spread out from under us. It churned, the secrets tossing and boiling beneath the surface. I felt cursed to follow its path, both of us silent, birds speaking what we didn’t dare say. What ends is what was begun. We begin again. It begins with the r
iver, and so shall it end.
Walter cleared his throat, the first words rolling out, and somewhere a crows’ chorus sounded as if in answer.
PART THREE
The Sacred Crib
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I
The drought had burned the land into a pathetic state. Dust muted all the colours, covering the windshield in grit. Joanne Rhide held the steering wheel in both hands. Ten to two, the positioning a perfect match with the illustration in the driver’s manual. She scanned all the mirrors. The tank was full, the oil checked and the tyre pressure exact.
It wasn’t a long drive to the school, but she’d never liked highways. And even though the start of classes was still a week away, and not a single leaf had turned from its uniform green, she dreaded the thought of the coming winter.
She’d done what she’d set out to do. She’d become what she’d set out to be. She had a right to be proud of her accomplishments. At twenty-three she’d be West St John’s youngest teacher, one of the Education Department’s finest graduates, honed by a year of practical training in the inner city. And unlike most of the other teachers at West St John’s, she knew the new programme intimately. The open-room philosophy lay at the heart of her education, its spirit fed by all that she had learned in her undergraduate years in sociology. There was no room for doubt, no reason for a crisis of confidence.
The car’s air vents did little to cool the interior, but she wouldn’t open the windows. The wind had a way of pulling her hair loose from the barrettes. Makes you look like a haystack, her mother always said.
Today was the first staff meeting. Joanne knew that she’d receive a lot of attention. Primed in the new methods as she was, they’d have questions. Some of them, she knew, would feel threatened. She was ready for that. She’d only offer an opinion if asked, she wouldn’t be critical, she’d keep her enthusiasm and hope that it would prove infectious.