It startles me, the ease with which this stolen tale comes tumbling from my lips: the sand fires, seaweed banked, seen through the shore fogs, burning. Men with puckered, flame-scarred hands who tip the ore and curse if it should splash, the reek of singeing beard, a scorching in the lungs and, afterwards, the glazed sands all about the furnace hole made hard, shot through with bitter juice of kelp and bladderwrack and coppered blue. My words pour, effortless, and conjure tangle-headed beachgirls, skirts damped dark about the hem by surf, that pick for skybeads in the fire-struck dunes, as if these sights are ever known to me.
The old man nods and smiles and gazes off downriver where the stone-green waters bend away amongst the western nettle wastes. A bark-boat breasts the current there, two men whose shoulders roil and wheel about their paddle blades, a glittered spray each time these cut the frothing swell. They lean into a turning masked with trees, are gone.
Off on my right a man calls to another, leading me to turn my head and look about. Up by the bridge’s farmost end there’s someone crouched to squint into the belled and ringing hollow underneath its arch, where fray-edged water-shadows shoal to form a ghost bridge, top-side down below the blurring torrent.
Now the figure stands, a grey, pot-bellied man, and calls again to some few fellows who are sitting sharing bread just up slope from the river’s edge. They call back to the man beside the bridge and seem to laugh at him. He speaks again and makes a sign towards the hidden shallows of the underspan. One of the feasters passes on his bread and stands, runs stumble-footed down the bank to join the other by the bridge, where both now stoop to peer. More shouts. Another man trips down the slope to stand with them, and yet one more.
It is some game they play to put aside for now their slog amongst the ditches and fields, which is no great concern to me. My gaze turns back upon the old man, hound-clad on his bier. Side-edged to me, his skull is round and beaked, a grey shaved bird. The eye that’s nearest me stares into nothingness, its socket pool froze white in Olun’s winter. On his leather cheek, a patchen stole of coloured scars.
He asks about my beads: It may be that he waits for me to ask of his tattoos.
‘These markings that you have are of a style that is not known to me. It seems they have not rhyme, nor a device.’
He turns his corpse-bird skull that he may see me with his good eye, sucking in the air to speak. His breath, warm game that’s hung too long, blasts stale against my face and makes me flinch away.
‘Oh, they have a device, girl, and a rhyme. Don’t you think otherwise. They are my crow designs.’
His crow designs? The worm-blue mottle of his shoulder, bowlined red from nipple back across to spine? His firmament skull, scribbled jowl, fern-cornered lips? There’s nothing here that’s of a like to crow or bird of any kind. What is his meaning?
Lifting up my gaze from out this skin maze, back to meet his own and further question him, it seems that he forgets me. Staring past my shoulder to the bridge’s northern end, only his dead eye lights on mine, looks through and out the other side, which makes me shiver with a notion of not being here. It’s plain that he is looking hard at something off behind me. Glance about, to see it for myself.
The men stand in the shallows, wading thigh deep as they gang about beneath the bridge. They reach with sticks to hook out something lodged there; yell like boys, excited, to each other as they poke and splash and heave: Go careful. Here, watch out. It’s coming. Here it comes . . .
Big. Grey and bobbing, water meat. The young men crowd about. A gas-blown calf that’s taken by the flood, or . . .?
A sudden thought’s come into me. The young men grasp the creature fast beneath its arms and draw a silver furrow to the bank, where it is hauled up streaming, flopped out bare and heavy on the grass that we may see it properly.
Oh no.
Boiled fish her breasts. Weed-tongued and staring. Why is she not half-way out to sea by now, couched to her ribs in silt or strangled in the crabnets, sopping, lying still amongst a sprawl of severed hands that writhe and gesture yet? How is it, dead, she has the wit to stop here at the place she seeks while she’s yet quick and warm? How may the dead have destinations? Trickling mouth. Leech ridden, phlegm-black jewels that cling upon her instep there.
They do not know her, do they? Nor the old man. She is not come here before. Weir-carrion, that’s all she is. A poor thing river-born and fish-mouthed at the throat, done in, but no one’s daughter. Usin. That is my name now, and hers is washed away with all her blood and colour. Rotted tide-fruit, bare and nameless, floundered in the stripes of scum that mark the water’s highest reach, she is not anyone’s concern. The bedstream’s ripple-sands are copied, soaked in replica upon her logged and runnelled skin. Cave-nosed, and one cheek holed by sticklebacks.
The old man bids me lift him, pull his stick-wrought bed across the causewayed trunks to where the willeins gather, down beside its farmost end. Legs bristled to the wading line with jewels of wet, the down ringed into hooks and coils, they stand as still as heel-stones all about the stiller yet.
Hearing the racket of the litter drawing near across the wood, the men look up, make frowns at me yet wipe them off when they see who it is dragged here behind me. Olun lifts his head from off the bier and cranes to overlook them, standing closed about the corpse. The bubble-gutted man who sees the body first below the bridge touches one finger to his brow and mutters, ‘Good luck to the Hob,’ then looks away from Olun, staring at the grass as if afraid. The other men do likewise. What is there to fear about this painted bag of sticks? And yet they shuffle there below us on the river bank and wait for him to speak.
‘This morning there is bleeding in my stool, which tells of trouble at the bridge, and brings me here.’
The men look to each other, scared and marvelstruck that this event is known to Olun long before they think to peer beneath the shadowed arch. The laughter chokes and bubbles in my nose: if all his tribe are shit-wits such as these, it is no wonder Olun’s thought the cunning-man. This very morn he lets me drag him leagues, yet makes no mention of this omen given from his bowel, the crook-tongued little fiend. It comes to me he lives by gulling lackards, and in truth we are one kind. Why, he might nearly be my father, all things said.
The man so fat he looks with child now waves one hand towards the throat-cut woman at his feet.
‘Well, here’s the reason to your sign. We find her underneath the bridge, brought up against the beaver dams.’
By all the markings, there’s the why of it! There’s why she is not by now danced half-way to Hotland in the undertow or pecked clean on a reef of crusted salt: the bridge is built upon the backs of beaver dams! The fat man falls again to silence, waits once more for Olun to give voice, his fellows hulking restless by his side.
Now Olun does a queer and frightening thing. He shuts one gaudy lid across his sighted eye, so that the white-yolked blind one seems to stare upon the spraddling girl meat, cold amongst the weeds.
‘Her throat is cut. Her ear is gone, and like to this her thumb.’
It’s plain the old man notes these things before he shuts his one good eye, yet still it makes a weird to see him take her measure with his deadsight only. Mummery and nothing more, yet no less hackling for that.
‘She’s thrown into the river last of all, for it is only reason that her gullet’s slit before. Alike to this, the torture of the ear and thumb may not come after she is dead, so must be suffered first of all. She is not cut for sport, for why then stop with but one ear, one thumb? These cruelties are with purpose, and with purpose served are followed swiftly by the kill. Somewhere up river, not a day since gone.’
No, it is not the slowness of his tribe alone that makes him seem more cunning. Here is clever. Here is clever deep enough to drown in. Looking down, it takes my notice that the woman’s neck is banded by a stain, mould-green. It is not there when she’s thrown to the river, save it’s hidden ‘neath the blood since sluiced away.
‘See that she is not moved. We go to tell the roundhouse what is here.’