‘Olun’s the Hob-man here, for many years.’
He spits again. His jerking, shadow-coloured hands are trying to point between the huddled dwellings at his back.
‘This night he’s set down-willage at the roundhouse making say, although we fear he has not many sayings left in him. We may walk down that way together, if you like. Are you all right to pluck these birds alone, Coll?’
This is said in way of master juice-jowels, who looks put about and sulky-eyed. He grunts his answer, so to sound more like a man.
‘Aye. What with all the while you take to pull a feather, shaking like a broke-back dog, it’s just as quick to do it on my own. Get off and let me be.’
The elder gateman stands and, spitting once more in the feathers, steps outside the hut. He takes my arm between his spasming fingers and now guides me down a path between the huts towards a looming round of posts, bark stripped away and white wood naked, thatched with reed above. Damp torches hiss, a knot of snakes beneath the eaves. A baby wails, behind us in the willage night.
‘Olun is known to me, both boy and man these many years,’ says he. ‘You are not make like him, nor like young Garn.’
The brother’s name is Garn.
‘No. It’s my mother’s side that shows in me.’ This seems to put him at his rest, and he sets one black hand to quiver at my shoulder, steering me through drawn-back veils of rush into the smoke and stink.
The roundhouse. Many people, some too old or young to talk, are sprawled on mats of reed, with flame-shapes slithering on their knobbled backs and freckled shoulders in a fog of sweat, and breath, and half-cured hide. Up in the shadows of the under-roof a shroud of smoke is spread out carefully upon the air. It trembles with each movement in the hall below, folding and fraying and unravelling.
Towards the round’s far side, across a sprawl of hairy limbs and tallow-light, there sits a monstrous woman, sunk in furs, grey ropes of hair hung to her thighs. A fierce white scar runs through one eye and down across the nose. The other, from a socket swathed with fat, gleams like a bead pressed into dough. About her puffed out bullfrog neck, an ornament of gold. The Queen.
To either side, behind her, stands a man . . . no. Stands the same man. How is this? My gaze stops first with one and then the other. Back and forth, again and yet again. There’s not a fingernail of difference in between them. Shaven skull and brow and jaw, standing with their long arms folded, fixed blue eyes, snake-lipped.
Each smiles upon a different side. Why does this frighten me?
‘That is Queen Mag,’ the old, black-fisted man is whispering, behind my shoulder. ‘Those on either side of her are Bern and Buri, though there’s none but they know which is which. They are her rough-boys. Let them well alone.’
‘What are they?’ My voice, hushed as the gateman’s own. My eyes are moving back and forth between the awful look-akins and may not glance away.
‘A monster birth, but do not say it while they are in hearing. It is said their father puts his seed into their mother while she leans against an oak that’s lightning-split. When they are born, most of us say they must be put to knife, but Mag says no. She takes a pleasure in their oddity and rears them for her own. They put a scare up people’s arses now they’re grown, and Mag takes pleasure in that also.’
Both of them turn their sand-grey skulls as one and look across the room at me. They have one smile, each wearing half of it. A knowledge comes within me now that makes me look away from them: these are the ones that tend the torso garden. They clip back the limbs and gather up the fallen heads.
Dropping my gaze, it falls upon a ruined figure, resting there upon a pallet made of sticks before the seated queen. The figure speaks, a dry voice lower than the drone of bees, within my ears since entering this hall yet only come to notice now. A man. Once fat, he has a sickness eating him within. It sinks his eyes and dries his lips to figs, shrunk back to show the all but empty gums.
Where all but he are clad in robes, he lies there naked save a fine, strange cloak of blackbird quills beneath him, spread upon the bier. His will is long and skinny, bald about the root. A band of antler-twigs is tied, the bare points circling his brow, skin hanging from his bones in folds, and all of it has marks upon. The wasted body swarms with needle-pictures. Every thumbnail’s width of him from head to heel is pretty with tattoo.
‘That’s Olun,’ comes the stale breath by my ear.
A cold blue line that severs him in twain from balls to brow. A red wheel, drawn above his heart with many smaller rings about. Crosses and arrow points, loop within loop on belly and on breast. The pale green patchwork of his thighs.
An eye may find no sense within the curls and turns, no image of a snake nor of a bear, as favoured by the northern men. Shaped after nothing one may see within this world, it is a madness, wild in its device, and speaks
that which we may not know. Star-scalped. The likeness of a womb upon one palm.
The words he speaks are small and dry like beetle husks, spat out as if he does not like their taste.
‘The leaves fall dead at news of Winter.’
(The leaves. Fall. Dead. At news. Of Winter. Every word, he stops to catch his breath.)
‘Now is the sleep of lizards. Now the shortening of the days. The crops is in. The shed is full. Now must we offer thanks.’
Some men are nodding in the crowd. A little boy is led out by his father to make water up against the hut wall, then led back again, picking across the mat of tangled legs. Olun is speaking, sockets staring up into a still, flat veil, the net of smoke cast floating just below the roof.
‘Once, long ago, there is a cunning-man who may make say with all the gods below the dirt. They tell him that he must give up an offering and thank the soil for being good, and full with fruit.
“What must be offered up?” the Hob-man says.