Pellisson helps the bishop take the bride-book from its box. They place it on its stand, and the bishop unlocks and opens it. He moves aside the gilded bookmark, and there’s Agnes Stork’s flourish that she practised for two years, and Felicity Doe’s loopy tangle of a name, with the two hearts dotting the i’s. When the quill is readied and handed to me, Mattild Weir, I write plainly, so that anyone who looks will know that I was here, became a Bride, this day. Thereunder signs my witness: Pellisson, descended all the way from the court painters of the Straitened days.
The way to thank the bishop is with money, in a white purse a bride unties from her waist. He opens a chest and the bride-purses are piled in there like sleeping mice. A few are trimmed end to end with lace, one or two monogrammed; most are like mine, standard-issue Bride School purses, plain linen, strongly sewn.
I give an exemplary curtsy, nothing ostentatious. Rising, I look at the bishop properly for the first time. His face is round and red and weary. His white comb-over has a mitrefurrow around it. Apart from the white, double-plaited beard, he’s greatly ordinary against the magnificent vestments in their case behind him, the gold ribbons of the mitre laid just so on the shoulders of the cape.
The bishop tips his head at me, saying get-out-of-here as much as nicely-executed-curtsy-bless-you-my-child.
Now the Bride walks ahead of her sponsor, out into the body of the church, down the darkened aisle, past the glowing heap of petals at the rear.
Out on the church steps, Pellisson scatters handfuls of petals around my feet. My eyes fix on the middle distance as a good bride’s should, but I can still see him: he backs down the steps without needing to check his footing. He shakes out his black cloth and organises his photographer’s dust. My spine is straight as a pine trunk and my face is empty of everything.
He arranges all his equipment, and then he comes up the stairs and starts to arrange me. It only strikes me then how unsupervised I am, as his gentle adjustments of the hem tug at my waist. There’s no crowd of matrons making sure the thing’s done right, snapping commands at him, or sighing and coming forward to fix me themselves. But he knows what he’s doing; he knows about cloth; he knows with small and professionally exact movements how to tease the maximum width, the maximum puff, out of the skirts, the maximum contrast with my slender-fied, rigidified upper half.
‘Is all satisfactory?’ I say—for he may not speak unless spoken to.
He steps back to judge. ‘If Madam would lift her chin just a touch higher?’
She would. Although she could hug Pellisson, old vinegar-bottle that he is, Madam would be pleased instead to lift her chin, to look down her regal nose past His Nobodyness.
He disappears under the cloth. The dust flashes and thuds. The smoke jumps free like a loosed kite.
earthly uses
‘GET DRESSED, BOY,’ says Gran-Pa, shaking me awake. ‘You’re going for a long walk.’ He stands over me with the lamp while I pull on my trousers and shirt—clothes he won’t wear any more, they’re so stained and frayed. Under his other arm is one of our cheeses, all wrapped in its fancy market-paper.
‘Where am I off to?’ I’m doing up my boots, the leather of which is nailed down to the soles.
‘To find me one of them angels.’
I straighten up and stare.
‘Get on with it!’ he growls. I duck to my boot-tying. ‘You’ll go up the foothills and in at the gorge, and you’ll call one.’
‘Hunh? How?’ I say before thinking.
He stamps his foot nearly on me. ‘How would I know, swivel-head! Have I ever summoned one?’
Over on her bed, my Gran-Nan moans, and Pa doesn’t go on, only breathes a few times as if he would. Then his voice drops to a murmur. ‘You’ll call one. And you’ll give it this cheese. And you’ll bring it back here, for your nan.’
I finish my boots. His face is Like That.
‘Back here to this house,’ I say.
He holds out the cheese.
I take it and stand up. His eyes are a little lower than mine, when I’m in boots and he’s not.
‘Fast as you can,’ he snaps. ‘She won’t last long.’
I look to Nan, the little lump of her in the bed. Her sickness rottens the air. I punch Pa in the shoulder to make him face me. He totters, open-mouthed. ‘And you,’ I say, ‘you leave her right alone ’til I get back. Not a word. Not a touch. Or I’ll axe you, you murderer.’
And I swing away. The full distance to the trees, I expect the axe between my shoulderblades myself.
HE’S AN OLD MAN AND CRANKY, but he’s all I’ve got, so I must put up with him, mustn’t I?
He’s not all, actually. It’s just that Nan, being so small and grey and quiet, seems like a cooking and housekeeping part of him, not really her own self. She used to be her own, when I was a little lad. She was never what you’d call lively, she was never strong or jolly, but she wasn’t so utterly broken by Pa’s treatment that she couldn’t issue me some ration of kindness. It may have been quiet and hidden; it may have been the barest, meanest ration a child could get by on; still I remember it, and if Pa has all my fear and dread, Nan has what little love I bear towards either of them.
Anyway, what’s surprising me now is: he’s never had patience for angels. At their merest mention he’ll get shouty.
‘Don’t talk to me about those things!’ he’ll bellow. ‘What blamed use are they to anyone? What’s worse, they take perfectly good working men and women, and flap their foul wings over them and make them hermits, or wise-women, or prating poets. “Ooh, the eenjels made me do it.” “Ooh, the eenjels told me to drop all my worldly work and stop paying my taxes, and throw my fambly away like you shake a bit of dog-dung off your shoe”—and fly off over the fields like a butterfly, no doubt. And live in the wild, hey, on those bowls of stew,’ he’ll cackle, ‘that nestle under bramble-bushes, and those warm loaves that dangle off the trees—’
‘And they smell! ’ he always finishes, as if that’s the final thing about them that no one can get past. ‘They stink like bad potatoes and death.’ And he spears a chunk of meat with his fork and plugs his ranting mouth with it. As if he isn’t sitting there in his sweaty breeks and jersey, whoofy as a tomcat himself. As if his boots aren’t thrown down at the door, caked in pig-reek.
And Nan nods all righteous: ‘That’s true, too. Foul beasts.’
I smelt angels once, when I was chasing that young sow up the foothills. The sow’s flattened-grass trail had begun to wander; it was forgetting to flee, drawn off by all the wild food smells—that’s always a pig’s undoing. I’d be on it soon.
The angels caught me side-on, like fox-scent catches a hunting-dog and bends its poor brain. Bad potatoes? Hmmm. More like, having mouldy dung forced so far up your nose that it starts tearing out the back of your throat. Death? It was more like—I tell you, I’m cramming a pumpkin into an eggshell, putting that smell in words.
Just as that poor sow did, I went wandering away from my purpose, hunting whiffs of angel-stink through the undergrowth. I was all nose for a while. And it was hard going, without the pig breaking a path for me. Finally, all pulled about and decorated with dead leaves and spider webs, I came to where I could see them ahead, in a clearing. The grass there was well flattened, in some places worn away to shiny earth.
It was like watching two skin tents tangled up together, steaming and rocking. Bit by bit I made sense of them: stretched-leather wings; spine-bumps in two matching curves; glints of horns in their matted brown hair; hindquarters without sex or hole of any kind.
‘They’re always red,’ says Pa, ‘blushing and flushing. It’s not seemly. And their eyes—you look in and there’s no one in there that’s like a normal man—they’re just bright and bright, and empty.’
I didn’t see eyes that day, and didn’t want to. Even walking here through the angel-less darkness, the power of not-wanting-to-see-eyes makes me swerve and shake my head. The fighting was quite enough. The fighting and the fo
reign bodies, bodies of not-people, doing who knew what. It was like running from knot-hole to knot-hole in the back wall of Yoman’s barn at the spring musical, spying on the couples in the hay. I’d shriek like I knew what I was seeing, but there’d be an awestruck, silent why inside me along with everyone else, the very middle, real, unpretending part that didn’t understand. I’d never seen anything quite so far outside my ken as these fighting angels—mine, and Pa’s, too, whose lead on worldly matters I’d dumbly followed ever since he and Nan took me in. Followed without thinking.
Those angels started me thinking; their smell was like crushed mint to my brain, breathing open huge new spaces there that I’d not the faintest notion how to fill. They rocked about, twigs and dirt sticking to their sweaty red backs and wings. I couldn’t see how they’d ever end it, this fighting, this sexing, whatever it was, was so locked, the two were so near equal in weight and passion. And Pa’s sow was waiting just around the corner. And Pa was at home totting up the loss to his market-day grog-money. If these beasts broke apart, if they noticed me, if anything changed or developed from this clearing, I’d be lost to the world of slops and chores and earthly breeding forever. I was too sensible a lad to wait, despite the new worlds gathering under my nose. I fought away from the clearing.
When I got back, Pa was too relieved about the sow to notice I was different, and busy ordering me this way and that to strengthen the pen. He’s powerful with words, Pa; in a flash he can make his shoddy building job your fault, and he’ll work you hard to punish you.
I never told Pa I saw them, and I never talked about angels in any way that would make him think I had.
IT’S NOT A DIFFICULT JOURNEY. I’ve hunted in these foothills all my life. I could reach the gorge in pitch-darkness, using the feel of the land underfoot, and this moon is as good as noon-tide sun to me, sliding over the treetops. When I come near the place where I saw the fighters, I can feel my brain beginning to bend again, as it always does when I come by here. Would they be fighting now, straining and rolling in the night? Are they fighting all the time, keeping the earth polished with their sweat?
But there’s the gorge to think of, and there’s this grand cheese to deliver. Furthermore, there’s Nan, isn’t there? I force my wayward head beyond that place.
EVERY SPRING WHEN THE FOREST was budded-up and beautiful, Nan used to take me to a clearing, like the angelclearing, only under a cliff. She’d hold my hand tight as she walked me out of the brush onto the hardened rolled earth. She’d say nothing while we were there; she’d put out the lunch she’d brought for herself, on its opened paper; she’d draw me back into the scrub. One last look behind and we’d leave. When we were back to the path she’d take a deep relieved breath, and start to talk, about anything and everything but what we’d just done.
‘BUT HOW MANY TIMES have you seen them, Pa?’ I asked him, next time the topic of angels came to our table.
‘Enough to know they’re no good. Enough to know that those women as sings to them and makes prayers and pilgrimages is talking through their skirts. There’s nothing holy about those things; they’re not sacred.’ Sacredness itself was a bad taste in his mouth; he spat it out, and holiness, too.
‘So you’ve seen them lots of times, then? When there was that plague of them, you said?’
‘Not here, that wasn’t,’ he was quick to say. ‘That plague was over past the mountains, in junglier land where the weather’s good and sweaty for them. They’d never breed up big in these parts; it’s too cold.’
‘So how’d you see yours?’ I was sure to sound admiring and curious.
‘At a distance,’ he finally admitted. ‘Over the gorge, like eagles. Only, of course, a different shape, and so big.’
‘So a whole flock of them, like gunney-birds?’
‘Nah, just the one.’ He made busy with his food.
‘Oh, but that wasn’t the only time?’ I was all caution, you’d have thought.
‘Well, there was that dead one. All pulled to pieces like any carcass, by scavengers. I tell you, it stank less than the live ones do.’
‘So they have bones like us, and flesh that gunneys can feed on?’
‘Of course they do. What did you think they was made of, sugar and starlight? You been listening to those women, uh? You been off in a corner with your nan, whispering?’ He chewed as he jeered at me. Nan looked into her lap.
‘Course not.’ I hunched down over my plate, as if embarrassed, but really I was all aglow. Why, he’d only seen a corpse and one in the distance. I’d seen two, up close, and fighting! There weren’t many times I could better Pa, but that was one of them. What’s more, he didn’t know to beat me for it.
CHILDREN LIKE ME OFTEN RUN AWAY to the angels—children who have it worse than me, whose grandparents beat them every day, instead of just at low times, or starve them so badly they think they can manage better on fog-berries and starch-root. In the days after I saw the angels, I was in a real turmoil of understanding those children. I could see myself going back while the pig-trail was still there, while the scrub was still broken through to the fighting ground; in my mind I walked up there—then and later—whenever anything happened at the house, whenever any change or accident or turn of the wind put Pa in a bad frame of mind, even after the trail would’ve been all grown over.
But I wouldn’t leave Nan by herself with angry Pa. And I couldn’t take her, could I?—she wouldn’t go. If I even asked, she’d come over all funked. She might hate Pa worse even than I do, but he’s chewed her away so badly, there’s not enough left of her even to flee.
Anyway, what happens to those children? No one knows whether it’s good or bad. You never hear, do you, of even so much as their bones being found. Maybe they do get to go somewhere, somewhere better, somewhere they can’t find by themselves, but only with angels assisting.
Or maybe the angels eat them whole.
THE FIRST PEAKS TOWER OVER ME, and the scrub is turning into fern-trees and mosses. The ground squeezes out water at every step. The air’s cold and damp on my face, and smells of stone and water, not of greenery any more. We rarely come as far as this in our hunting.
IT’S CHANGED EVERYTHING, Nan being sick. She grows smaller and greyer-looking every time I glance at her. I’m scared to glance nowadays; my eyes and my worry might themselves suck the life out of her, the little that’s left.
Of course, it’s made Pa angrier. I can cook some of Nan’s foods, but not like she can; I can keep the house in a sort of a way, but I’ll always leave a broom where it can be tripped on, or let a mat get rain-soaked and ruined, or something else worth roaring at. At least when Pa’s roaring at me he’s not roaring at Nan, asking where’s this and where’s that, and how you boil a spud, and why all her type of work has to be done in such a fiddling complicated way, and just …wearing the woman away with his cataract of a voice, until she’s bare more than a shadow in the bed, until she can speak nothing like words any more. Up to a day ago, she’d take a tiny sip of food from me, if he were outside the house and not likely to barge in and start raging, and if I talked her up to it. I’d tell her it were me that needed her, not to worry about Pa, just to get a bit weller for her poor grandson that she brought up from a baby. Not to leave me alone with the old bastard.
FOG POURS ACROSS THE MOON, wraps me in cold. The gorge opens up, and now there’s the never-ending noise and pother of the fresh-born river, where before was a crackless wall of silence.
The path turns into a steep, slippery ledge along the gorge wall, hardly wider than my foot in some places. The river bashes at the cliff’s feet below—hard enough, you’d think, to shake me off my perch.
‘So I’m here,’ I pant, hand-over-handing, foot-over-footing along the wall, trying not to think how the weight of the cheese tucked in my shirt might drag me down to a pounding in the river. ‘Whereabouts do the blamed things live? Where’s their cave or crag?’
There’ll be that wider space ahead, where Nan and Pa and I went
that summer, in the days when Pa let Nan walk places instead of hiding her in the house. I remember it as being far, far up the gorge, a terrifying long way in, but now I round a shoulder of rock and there it is, a shallow sloping platform where the three of us might all stand if we pressed close, an angel would never fit there alongside. With my back to the rock, I try to breathe, in the thunder of the falls, in the water-smoke churning across my face, running cold into my neck. At high summer, the falls were a narrow skein, lacquering the rocks, and Pa dived into a blue-green pool that was lined with rounded stones. Fish and fish-hunting birds darted there. Now, there’s only noise and wind and black wetness, with the moon sharpening out of it and blurring back away.
‘Angels!’ I cry. All this water damps my voice; I might be shouting in the hayshed. ‘Angels, come down! Someone needs you!’
Are they asleep, that they need to be woken? Are they near or far? How long and loud do I need shout?
‘It’s my nan! Come down and fix her! I have this cheese!’ I continue, and so on. The falls roar. The mist catches my throat, presses my face. I feel like a mad person, bellowing alone in the night.
I feel so mad, in fact, that after some time I stop, my faith lost that anything can hear me, let alone follow my words. It’s just another twist of Pa’s temper, that he thought this could work, that angels would come ’cause he ordered them, and is used to his will being done. It’s so cold here, and I’m soaked to the bone, and Nan is probably dead by now, without me there to comfort her at her last. And maybe that’s why Pa sent me away, just to be cruel to her, cruel to us both, and make me miss her leaving.