The Gift of Stones (11 page)

An old man called out before they reached the beach. His face was as drawn and bearded as an ear of wheat. There was blood upon his legs and hands. ‘Here, take a goose,’ he said. ‘They’re good.’ He mimed by chewing and by ramming fingers in his mouth. ‘Good meat.’ And then when Doe and father just walked by, he called out, ‘They had to die, those geese. We’d starve if they lived on.’

They stood to hear his reasons for the massacre of birds. He and his friends were all plain farmers – that was his excuse. They had a village and some fields beyond the forest, less than one day’s walk inland. They’d slashed and burned a clearing there about ten years before. The life was good, so far. The earth was rich. The trees cut out the wind. The pigs were fat and happy just as long as there was food and sleep. The people too. There were reeds for thatching and for bedding. There was nettle thread. And, after every gale, a glut of wood.

The old man described a farming year that was as rhythmic as a drum. The first note in the spring was emmer wheat. Then six-row corn. Then beans. Then flax, the last to bed, the hater of the frost. The goats did well all year on fodder mulched from leaves. Their milk and cheese were said to taste of elm or ash depending on the forest where they fed. In autumn there were unearned gifts in mushrooms, nuts and fruit. In winter there were bacon sides and apples wrinkled like a widow’s cheek, and grain from rat-free, stilted stacks. There was a field of fat-hen, too. Each dark and fleshy leaf was cussed like a nostril hair. Each one removed would grow again with doubled strength. The new leaves, stewed, were vegetables. The old ones – picked and dried and stacked like hay – were winter feed for beasts. The fat-hen seeds made fat-hen bread. The roots made beer. Nothing went to waste. Even dead fat-hen was good as kindling for the fire.

The farmers were not rich, of course, or powerful or satisfied. There were hard times. Who could predict the rain? Or the mood of horsemen passing by? Or the vagaries of pigs? Who could ever win the war against the charlock and the couch which were the stifling siblings of their crops? But, for all their curses and their woes, their cheeks were fat, their skins were clear, their guts were tenanted throughout the year with food. Until the geese put down, that is, until the geese discovered that cultivated fields were better than the heath, once eggs were hatched and summer come and goslings trained to fly.

At first the farmers had been pleased to welcome the few geese who came to browse between the rows of fat-hen and of wheat. Goose meat was richer than smoked pork. Goose fat was good for piles. The gosling feathers made pillows which, despite the stench, were softer and more warm than straw. Besides, the geese were cheerful birds. Their calls were melodies compared to conversations held by pigs and goats. Their coats were brighter, too. But then – two years before – the nomads had arrived in strength, their numbers doubled by the young who’d hatched upon the salty heath. They’d harvested the field, these airborne slugs. They’d cropped the emmer and the beans, the fat-hen and the six-row corn. They’d coppiced charlock to the root. And then flown off, inland. They’d done the same the following year. And worse. They’d fouled the pasture. Their green and curly droppings had burned the soil, had overloaded loam with dung, had tainted all the earth. The farmers had no choice. They’d go to war against the caravan of birds. They’d arm themselves with sticks and bows. They’d march down to the heath. They’d show the wild world who was king by wiping out all geese.

‘I
MAGINE THIS
,’ my father said, reconstructing their dilemma. They had no home. There were a thousand dead geese on the heath. Already flies were sated on the blood. And beetles, ants and slugs were searching for a passage through the feathers. The sky – which so recently had been ruffled only by the wind – was bringing in the ravens and the crows. Magpies were feasting on goose eyes, and crabs were straying from the shore, bedevilled and seduced by meat. ‘No one knows where maggots live,’ he said. ‘They cannot fly or swim. But maggots crawled and tumbled in the guts of geese before the birds were cold.’ All this before the wolves arrived and plunged their noses into the moist and pungent dead. All this before the blood enriched the soil and toadstools flourished there and carcass shrubs trailed blossoms on the sinew and the bones.

The farmers had gone home to feast on their achievements. If they’d stayed, my father claimed, they would’ve seen precisely who was king of that wild world. ‘When everybody’s dead, there’ll still be crabs and flies and carcass shrubs and weeds to strip and clothe the world. There’ll still be stone.’

So it seemed to him, the knapper’s son, as he stood with Doe in the carnage of the heath and listened to the old man talk of husbandry, that the world was cut in two – one for chaos, one for coma – just as the scriptures of his village said. All the outside world required was the liberty to pound and crush, to hammer and to bruise. It didn’t matter what. It didn’t matter if the blows were rained on geese or huts or dogs or boys, so long as there were blows and careless brawls and sudden gusts of hardship to blow good fortune down.

At home – that other, duller world, where now my father steered Doe and her daughter to start their lives afresh – the village blows were innocuous and prescribed. They were rained down on flint. He … they, the workers with two hands, were made tame, secure and virtuous by labour. Their skill was their salvation and their numbness. For once the village of my father’s birth, contemplated from that battlefield of geese, seemed – what was his phrase? – as snug as poppy seeds. Such was the gift of stones.

P
ERHAPS NOW IS
the time to make myself quite clearly known to you. It will not do if I stand darkly by to cough and comment at my father’s tale. It is my story, too, and I should show my face. You know me as my father’s daughter and his only child. All that is false. His title ‘father’ was well earned, though not by right of blood. We are not kin.

I am the girl of Doe.

I am the child that he first touched when mother said, ‘Please help.’ She left him standing there, in charge of chicken, dog and child, his gift of samphire fallen at his feet, while she walked off to greet the horseman on the heath. I was the child he rocked to sleep or fed with bean paste and with fish, the one with whom he practised early words like drink and dog and bird. It was for my amusement that he perfected his repertoire of faces and new sounds. I was the first in his adult, one-armed life to barter love with love. So father he became. So father he remains for me.

It was on my father’s arm, with my mother, Doe, exhausted by the slaughter of the geese and the walk along the coast, trailing in our wake, that I first came upon the villagers of stone. My age was not yet two, yet I maintain that I recall that day. We were walking with our backs against the wind and sea. The path was springy, bracken. It led up from the crusty boulders of the shore to the windy brow where Leaf had built his huts. His walls were thick and packed with moss. There was no sign of life – except that, tapping in the wind, there was the rhythmic beat of antler tine on flint, the squeak of bellows, the hum of people hard at work.

Once we had walked beyond the brow and the wind had dropped we heard those beats and taps, those hums and squeaks, in jostling profusion. They sounded like the first and heavy drops of summer rain or like a thousand nutbirds pecking at a shell. The further that we walked into the village, the heavier the rain of pecks, the quieter the sea and wind, the more uniform and tended the walls and pathways that we passed. It must have seemed, to one so young and sensuous as me, that we had sunk into a dream where all disorder had been vanquished by invisible and systematic hands. Compared to what we’d left behind, the turmoil and the passion of the heath, here was a world of symmetry and of composure.

Quite soon we heard the sound of voices. The merchants were at work. We came on to the market green and there – amongst the produce and the crowd

– my father saw his uncle trading stone. Now my recollections become enmeshed in father’s version of that day. How many times since then I’ve watched him mime his uncle’s face, its irritation and dismay, its comic fear of our fatigue and what it meant, as we approached his trading stall. We looked to him for heat and food and sleep. He looked at us as if we were weevils in his bread. He had no choice – in front of all his neighbours and the purchasers of stone – but to welcome father and his family home.

T
HAT EVENING
uncle asked my father to explain. There was no point in telling lies, my father said. If what he wanted was a woman for a tale, he’d not invent one quite like Doe. There she was, reduced and tearful in their midst. They all could see she was no siren from a ship. Her perfumes were of wood smoke and of slott. Who’d want a dab of that around their throat or wrists? Her clothes were brown and grey. Her skin was scarred and pallid, her face a mask of weariness from all the weeping and the walking that she’d done. Her eyes – quite clear and grey and unabashed when she and father had first met – were, in a single glance, both hard and meek. Was she the only story he’d brought home? His cousins were not pleased, though knowing him, they waited for the twist. ‘Why have you brought her here?’ they asked. ‘What use is she to us? What can she do? Whose is the girl? Not yours, for sure. She’s got too many arms.’

Listen now. I’ll tell you what my father said. It was dusk outside his uncle’s house. The uncle’s cronies were all there, the cousins and some merchants, Leaf, some knappers who had left their workshop and its shadows to walk and cough up chalk into the air. Say twenty men, some wives, some boys, a dog, a hen, the first of nighttime’s bats and moths, the moon. Father’s returns to the village always gathered crowds. His stories were – like rare and distant perfumes, cloths and jewels – much prized.

‘You see I have a woman here,’ he said, indicating where my mother sat and dozed on the outskirts of the crowd. ‘A small girl, too. Shhh, let them sleep because what I have to say is meant for you, not her.’ That sent a wave of interest through the people gathered there. What they expected was some fun, some bloated indiscretions or some jokes at her expense. He raised one hand and wagged a finger. Be quiet, be still, it said.

‘This is a story made by life,’ he said. ‘It’s true in every way.’ That caused some cautious laughter and some shouts. ‘You know that when I want to make your eyes stretch wide, I stretch my stories wide to match. You know that when I want some fun, I let my stories tickle truth. You know all that. You are not fools. Well, now, here is a tale that’s meant to make you weep. There is no need for camouflage. The world out there is sad enough. So this is not a dream. This, to a hair, is fact.’ He’d never heard an audience so quiet. They sat and waited to be entertained by truth.

It was a love story of a sort. The girl was pretty with grey eyes. No man could pass her by without blushing at the courage of her gaze. When she was young she met a man who lived close by. Their parents were at war. Some ageing insult was roosting in the trees between their homes. They would not speak. They would not let the daughter see the son. And so the lovers ran away. Why not? Chance is a pear. It isn’t ripe for long. It drops. It rolls away. It rots.

Where did they run? Not far. The man knew of a heath where they could live quite well. The sea was close, with fish and crabs and laver and marshy beds of samphire, too. If she liked rabbits, he’d trap them for her. They’d eat well. And, in the spring, the wind would bring in geese. Had she never tasted goose eggs, or its flesh? Then she would. He took her to a hide which had been built upon the heath when last spring’s geese had arrived late and the people waiting there had grown cold. It was the summer and quite warm. The sea and sky were matching blues. The earth was dry and firm. The man caught fish and gathered samphire. They grilled the fish on hot red stones which crumbled in the fire. They stewed the samphire in sea water. She watched him as he stripped the flesh with his front teeth and threw the stem into the fire. She did the same. Their stems embraced. They whined and bubbled in the fire like spit in love. That night – and here my father’s neighbours held their breath – they lay together on beds of rush. They talked – then dreamed – of what it would mean to live their lives in pairs.

They had two boys. There were no problems with the births. They all grew strong on mussels roasted in hot stones, on baked guillemot, on lobsters, coalfish, kale. If there was any food to spare, or if the reeds were long enough to pull, or if the rabbit traps were generous, then the man would take them for exchange at the villages close by. He’d bring back milk and cheese and beans. And beer. One day he bartered a basketful of laver for a pup. It was the litter runt of hunting dogs. He gave it to the boys. They had a dog and food and fun. They felt as if their heath was blessed. Even the wind, it seemed, which came in steady from the sea was whistling their tune.

‘That chit who’s sleeping there,’ my father said, pointing at poor Doe, ‘was once as serene and fleshy as a seal.’ The circle turned and looked – or tried to look because the dusk was down and, for all they knew, the woman and her girl were gone. But – with my father’s help – they remembered her, the thinness of the skin and hair across her skull, the jackdaw shoulders, the insect hands. You know the storyteller’s tricks; with every detail in the list he mimed and had some fun with jackdaws, insects, skulls.

The task he’d given them was this: transform that woman’s carcass into seal. The stoneys and the mer- chants there were happy to oblige. They’d had an irksome day. Their heads had been in cages since sallow dawn. Their eyes had been fixed on stones and on their merchandise. Constructing seals from bones brought puckers to their noses, eyes and mouths. They saw her there, a sea-going slug upon the beach, weighed down by flesh and happiness.

Now they were ready for the whale. This was the rorqual that the sea had washed onto the red and juicy rocks. The tide backed off. The creature drowned on air. The boys – by now they were the masters of the heath – had never seen a whale before except as spray offshore. This one was twelve men long. Its belly and its chest was bright and fissured like a silver birch. Its back was ash. Quite soon these trunks were red with fruit where the seagulls had pecked holes.