“Your son,” the gods say back.
‘On hearing this he falls to weeping, begging them to spare his child, but they are stern and bid him do the thing they say, for he must show he has more love for them than for his only flesh. And so it is. He binds his son and leads him by the river’s edge, where is a fire built up.’
(The river’s. Edge. Where is. A fire. Built up.)
‘He sets his son upon the wood. The fire’s made ready and the dagger honed.
‘Then speak the gods below the dirt and say that it is good for him to keep his faith and love his gods more than his only flesh. “We are so pleased,” they say, “that we do spare your child. See, yonder is a pig caught in the mud. Take down your son from off the fire, and let us change the pig into a boy that you may slaughter in his place.”
‘And this is done. The pig-boy burns, the child is spared, and from that time we offer up a pig-boy to the fire upon the night.
‘When next the light is come we have one day to stack the wood.
‘We have one day to stalk the pig.
‘We have one night to please the gods.’
He sighs. ‘The gods are good.’ The crowd are muttering a muddy echo to his words, one voice chopped up with morsels lodged in many throats. One day to stack, one day to stalk, one night to please the gods. The gods are good. It seems these mutterings are a sign that Olun makes his say no more this night, for people stand and make to leave. They flow about us like a scum-tide, draining through the door and out into the night, coughing and laughing. Only scattered huddles stay to whisper in the hall.
Black fingers, shuddering, rest upon my spine and push me from behind to urge me on.
‘Go to your father,’ says the gateman.
Father dies of bee stings while we’re passing through the Great North Woods, all wading belly high through hollows deep with wet and shaggy grass. Above us, where the tree’s high branches make a web of twigs against the light, a bird is singing, clear and all alone within the stifling afternoon.
My father cries out, jerks his foot up now to clutch its underside, then topples backwards with a moan, is swallowed in the grass. We reach him, mother and myself, but now he’s twitching, making noises in his throat, the sweat a bright and sudden gloss upon his nose, upon his brow. He wheezes first, then rattles. Both his eyes are open, dull and seeing nothing. One hand clutches at the grass beneath him now and then, but all in all there’s little here for me to look at and nothing to do. Leaving my mother kneeling there beside him, it comes upon my fancy to retrace his last steps through the laked grass.
In the flattened patch where he first grabs his foot and cries out lies a half-pulped bee, a smear of dangerous colour wiped across the print mark of his heel. Somewhere close in the grass my mother starts to low. Taste of my fingers, sour like metal, crammed into my mouth to stop the laughter.
Still the bird is singing. From its perch up in the high woods there it may look down and see me, see my mother and my father and the bee, though separate as we are amongst the grass we may not see each other. As in one flat picture it observes us, with the all of father’s death caught fast there in the bird’s jet eye.
The hag-queen wheezes something to her look-akins. They raise their great moon heads and watch me make my way towards the old man on his bed of sticks and feathers set below them there. Don’t meet their eye. Don’t seem afraid. The pack-dirt floor, arse-warm beneath my slow, unwilling feet.
A woman crouches by the pallet, gathering the Hob-man’s cloak of blackbird quills about his starved and naked shoulders, folding it to cover up the senseless decorations pricked upon his ribs, his sunken breast.
She’s big, this woman; man-boned at the hip and plain to look upon. Hair bound up all one lump atop her head, the colour of a baby’s turd, held with a spike of wood. Red cheeks. A flat face, long about the jaw and nothing clever in her she-ox eyes.
She’s past her child time, yet too young to be the old man’s mate. Another daughter, then? No. No, one son, one daughter, that is all they say to me, the girl and gateman both. What then? His sister, or his sister’s child? A slave? About her thick grey neck a piece of thin bronze, scratched with tear-shaped marks and hung on string twists in the tallow-light.
Now, at my drawing near she turns to look at me, a flat and stupid look that has no spark in it. Pay her no heed. The old man’s lying wrapped within his feather cloak, so that he looks like to some terrible black bird that has an old man’s head and feet. His eyes are closed as if the making of his say tires all the life from him. Him. Talk to him, the old man. He’s the one.
‘Father?’
My voice. It must sound more akin to hers, the girl who met with me upon the track. He may recall the way her mother speaks to him so long ago and know me as one come from other parts. Think. Try to think back how the girl speaks, there upon the river’s edge. ‘Do you go as far south as Bridge-in-Valley?’ ‘Do you like my fancy-beads?’ Her voice, more in the nose than in the gizzard like my own. Yes. Yes, that’s it. Now, call to him once more, but in the way the girl is speaking in my thoughts. And louder.
‘Father?’
Sunk in sockets deep and crumble-edged as earth-bear holes, his dye-stained lids creep back across the wet and yellowed balls below. One eye is green and black, like water in a stump. The other eye is white. Blind white.
He lies there, staring up at me, and slowly frowns. The markings crumple on his brow. Some of the needle-painted lines are spread about their edges with the ageing of his skin, become a faded smear of dirty blue, yet in their centre they are sharp. It is as if he has the markings made again from year to year, gouged deeper still to keep them clear and new. His green eye squints at me, his white at nothing. By his bed, the great slow woman squats to watch us, no more life within her face than is within a stone.
‘Father, it’s Usin.’ Trying to talk down through my nose, not from the throat.
‘It’s Usin. It’s your daughter.’
Your daughter trails her eel-chewed toes through river-bottom sand and dances off towards the sea. Her hair floats out and has the look of weed, more comely when it’s drowned.
She’s far beyond this place by now, tripping her slow dance through the night. Its steps are clumsy, rousing no man with the movement of her flesh, nor ever may again. Only the current holds her, fast against its stinking breast.