Inside of me, the dark thing slowly drags towards the light. There’s something missing here, some knowledge that’s not yet disclosed. A picture comes of Hurna, squatting there by Olun’s body, smiling through the coal-glow of the inner hut. What does she have to be so pleased about? Atop the Beasthill to my left are dancing lights, wherefrom a distant hollow keening rises bare into the night.
‘He’s in a better place,’ she says.
‘He’s on the bright path now.’
The understanding, when it comes upon me, tears a scream from out my throat.
Forget the willage. There is nothing there for me now. Run. Run up the Beasthill. It is not too late. My tears may be misplaced, to make so much out of a word, a look. Keep running, up and up.
Besides, what reason may there be for Olun to consent to such a thing? He has no love for Hurna or her gods, and says time after time that he wants me to have his learnings and his leavings when he’s dead. He has no cause to change his mind . . .
. . . but then
there is the way he looks at me after he takes my fancy-beads. His eyes and voice grow cold and then he asks to speak with Hurna as if . . . No. Forget it. It is nothing. In my side, a pain. My gasping breath, so much like Olun’s.
Stopping half-way up to rest and looking back a pair of torch-lights may be seen, that move along the river path towards the Beasthill’s lower slopes. They seem to come from the direction of the Hobfields, following my own route here. A group of revellers, perhaps, all overfed and drunk with mash, that make for Beasthill so to ask some god’s forgiveness of their gluttony before returning home. The lamp-fires glide along the riverbank, their pace matched perfectly as if the bearers walk in step. They start to mount the Beasthill. Run. Run on.
Across the flattened summit stretch the rings of broken wall, one set inside the other, ancient banks of earth heaped up by men yet now reclaimed by grass that looks like slivered metal underneath the stars. Away towards the hilltop’s further side, beyond the smallest and most central ring, a crowd of women are convened, all wailing.
They are standing in a ring about the fire.
Shouting and screaming, bidding them to stop, my frantic, hurtling form careens across the stretch of grass and dark between us, dodging through the crumbling gaps that separate the turf-capped walls and leaping puddles wide as baby ponds to come at last amongst them, sobbing, half collapsing there at Hurna’s feet who stands beside the pyre.
She smiles down fondly. Off across the field two torches breast the hill and start to move towards us. Bern and Buri. Hurna’s voice is hearty and forgiving, brimming over with dull-witted sisterly affection.
‘We are pleased that you at last decide to share our ceremony. And your father. He is pleased as well.’
She looks up here towards the towering centre of the blaze, much higher than the pig-night fire.
He sits erect upon his burning throne, shrunk to a hideous charcoal infant by the flames. His blackened sockets stare as if to scry the smoke for messages, for intimations of reprieve. Behind these gaping orbits soft grey tendrils smoulder from a soot of brain. Across his breast, held in a death-grip, cindered fingers clench upon his daughter’s fancy-beads. His skin flakes off to rise as great slow moths of ash into the firmament, above the heat where they grow cool and fall to lazy spirals of descent, raining about me.
Bern and Buri stand behind me now, patient and silent as they wait for me to turn and face them. From the sky a frail black fragment, tumbling as in a dream, drifts down to settle on my arm. Upon it, barely visible against its black, the faintest silver tracery of lines may yet be seen: a gentle curve that is perhaps a stream or else some buried lane, the clustered spider-marks that may be trees viewed from above.
It breaks against my wrist and falls to dust, caught by the wind to scatter over the cremation fields.
In the Drownings
Post AD 43
The plaiting of the rushes and the cutting of the stilts. A hollow beak that spits out darts; its making and its use. The method of these things is like a voice inside that endlessly repeats its dull instructions. It’s been in me for so long that I no longer hear it. When I do, it soothes me in that I need think of nothing save this grey, unending list and thus at last may fall asleep with it upon my lips: The plaiting of the rushes and the cutting of the stilts. A hollow beak that spits out darts, its making and its use.
Before I wade upstream towards the shallows, I look back at Salka and our children playing. Water beaded on her breast, she turns and holds me with her black-eyed gaze too long before she looks away and dips her face once more beneath the river’s skin. The young ones splash and circle; build an argument between themselves but then abandon it in favour of some better, louder disagreement.
This looking back whenever I set out and leave my family behind, as if to gather all my loved ones up into my eyes and hold them there, it has become a habit with me lately. Still it gnaws me, this concern that one day I might glance away and, when I look back, find them gone. It seems that I cannot be rid of it and so I stare until their shapes are lost against the rippling glare that dances on the water. Turning, I make away against the current, strong and boiling where it clefts against my thigh.
I had a different wife once, and another family. We did not live here in the Drownings but some way off to the west, up in a great round hill camp high above a burning-ground. One morning I awoke and ventured out between the bubbling breakfast-pots to hunt and fish, and that was all of it. I cannot now recall if I had any kind word for my wife on setting out that day, only that I became ill-tempered when I found the broken draw-string of my boot unfixed, and thought ill of her laziness. I may have said some little thing, some words, I can’t remember. Knotting up the string as best I could for want of thread and needle, I tied up my boot and limped into the dawn and that was all of it.
I kissed my little girl farewell, but could not find my son to kiss. She had just eaten curds. Her breath was hot and sweet upon my cheek, and that was all of it.
As I walked on all hung about with nets and spears amongst the rousing huts, I saw my mother some way off, upon the settlement’s far side. I called to her, but she was old and did not hear me. That was all of it.
I stopped to talk with Jemmer Pickey’s wife, and while we spoke I had some thoughts of her without her skirts and skins, although I knew there would be nothing come of this. I said goodbye, then carried on my way.
Near by the main gate, in amongst the old, grassed over stones of Garnsmith’s Forge I saw our willage Hobman standing lost in thought, the yellow antlers drooping, tied about his lowered brow. All in a ring about his feet were many markings, sketched in meagre soil there with his mistle-rod. He muttered to himself, twisting the grey snarls of his beard between stained fingertips, and seemed more ill at ease than I had ever seen him. Of a sudden he looked up and saw me as I passed. He made to speak, then seemed to think the better of it. I have often wondered what he meant to say.
I passed him by and went out from the camp, making my way down hill and past that lower peak where lie the burning grounds. I’d heard that there were walls there once, great rounds set one inside the other. These were long since worn away, but from the camp-hill’s upper slope the rings could yet be seen; a certain darkening of the grass best looked upon by afternoon. Off to the west, down where the riversiders had their settlement, thin ropes of smoke were strung between still sky and distant fires, and when I’d come too low upon the hill to hear the willage noises at my back, there was a silence, stretched across the world unto the further trees. I walked down into this, with looping bindweed strangles tearing round my feet as I descended. That was all of it.
As I stilt through the water now, less deep here than a forearm’s length, the trees stoop in above me and the river is in shadow. With no sun to dazzle from the water’s face the depths beneath become more plain, so that the fish who move there may be seen. I stop, and am become as still as stones. My wooden legs are two trees rooted in the streambed, whereupon the water folds itself then folds itself again. Beneath its surface I regard my stilts that seem now crooked, bent with age, although I know that this is but some water-trick. I move my sodden cloak of rush aside, and lift my spear, and wait.