When I lived in the hill camp it took more than half a day to reach the Drownings. Horses will not ride there for the ground is treacherous and filled with bogs and pools whereby the midge-flies cloud about, a small and angry weather. Many men have died there. Minnows navigate between their teeth.
I reached my favourite hunting-place at close of afternoon, the twilight raising up like dust before a herd of coming stars. First I collected sticks and sods to build my hide, where I would sleep, more like a swollen grave than like a hut. I laboured next in failing light to gather rushes, that I might have work within my oil-lit hide to keep me busy after dark had settled on the fens.
The horse-hair wick, coiled like a worm in curdled fat, refused to burn until I’d wasted half a bag of tinder and come near to wearing smooth my newest flint. I sat cross-ankled in the shivering light and plaited rushes on into the grey approaches of the dawn. The gown I made was long and green, shaped like a mash-skin that’s turned right-side-down, sealed at the top save for a slit to see through and a hole wherein to fix the hollow beak. I slept for but a small while and was up before first light to cut young saplings for my stilts and find a piece of wood that I might scrape the caulk from out to make my blowing-pipe.
My work was finished as the sun completed its ascent through chilly morning air, only to slump at last exhausted and commence its fall. I took a rolled-up rag from out my sack and opened it to choose one of the iron slivers pinned in rows along the unrolled strip, a tuft of dirty ram’s-wool fastened at their dullest ends. Selecting one, I placed it in between my teeth, point outermost, and crawled head-first into my gown of reed, the bored-through wooden beak clasped tight inside my hand. I struggled for a moment to adjust the hood that I might see, then dragged the stilts inside the gown, to bind with strips of ox-hide to my legs.
The wooden beak was in my mouth, one end protruding through the helmet’s hole, the dart already nestled in its bore. Swelled up with spit, the woollen flight stopped up the hole. Its bitter strands stuck to my tongue and teased inside my mouth so that I had some difficulty in dislodging them without the blow-dart falling from its pipe.
At last, my mummery complete, I lif
ted up my short-spear and tried carefully to stand upon my fresh-cut legs, using a lonely tree trunk as support until I’d found my feet. With this assured, I delicately picked my way, a giant green bird, toward the current’s ragged edge whereby I dipped one wooden toe within, unmindful of the water’s chill.
With great slow steps that left the river’s surface undisturbed, I waded in amongst the witless fish and unsuspecting water-fowl, whence I commenced to hunt.
Standing a-straddle of the shallows now a fat bass moves between my feet to nibble pale grey weed. My fingers tighten on the spear-shaft then relax as it thinks better of its meal. It whips its tail as for a face-slap and is gone.
Sometimes I dwell on how the fish and ducks regard all this. Unseen, I stalk amongst them and they think me one of them. They are too dull to understand that I am of a higher kind and that I mean them ill, and so they disappear, uncomprehending, one by one. They watch the great green bird stride there between them, yet forge no connection with their missing kin. They are made blind by that which they expect to see.
There may be beasts more subtle yet than we, strolling amongst us at their leisure, picking, choosing, bagging now a woman, now a man, and none shall ever know where they have gone, so sparse and scattered are the crimes; so few and far between, save when these subtle monsters feel the need to feast and glut themselves.
Another fish, this time a roach, moves nuzzling between my planted struts. This time I do not wait, but drive the spear down hard. I almost miss and pierce its side instead, lifting it thrashing on my shaft into the sunlight, beads of river-water falling all about it in a mortal dew.
I hunted all that day and yet another day besides, curled in my hide by dark, and at the close of it were many fowl within my sack and many poles of fish, and when another morning came I set out for my home. The air was good and clear that day, as air that follows from a storm, and yet no storm had passed. The blue sky coloured all the pools and puddles of the fen, and vast white clouds passed overhead, piled up into fantastic shapes for which I had not names. My bag was full. The sun was warm upon my back. I sang the only words I could remember of the Old Track Song, about the journey-boy and how he found his bride, and frightened herons off a pond the singing was that bad. It was the last time I was happy.
Now I sit upon the bank and let my wooden legs trail in the current while I eat the fish. When first I came to live for good out in the Drownings, I would cook my food before I ate, but now it seems a nuisance. No one else here cooks their food. I split along the creature’s belly with my nail and feel an odd content at just how large a piece of skin I can peel off in one attempt. (Here, partly flayed, it startles me by flipping once, but then is still.)
About to pull my beak aside and eat, a movement on the south horizon draws my eyes. Red flags. Red, tiny flags that drift apart then draw together as they flap towards me from across the distant fields. I squint, then draw my legs from out the water so as best to stand. I leave my beak in place.
Not flags. Not flags, but capes, red capes upon the backs of riding men. A hand-full by my reckoning. No more.
I know them. Men of Roma, come from lands beyond the sea. Some of the young men in the willage where I lived before said that these Romans had a will to take the land from us, but all this is a puzzle far beyond my figuring, for land is not a thing that one can take, and nor is it a thing that can belong, and so I leave such quarrels to the younger men.
They are much closer now, and have dismounted, leading on the horses by their reins, picking their way between the mudholes and the bright laked silver of the pools. One of them bears a staff crowned with a strange device of gold: there is a snake, a fat man standing, then a mouth wide open with the tongue lolled out, and finally a fat man walking. Metal helmets. Skirts like women. Metal plates across their tits.
Their horses see me first, and shy. While trying to rein in their rearing steeds, the men whirl all about to seek the cause of this disturbance. All in green against the tufted river-bank, at first they cannot see me.
I’ve no quarrel with them. I call out hello, and now they turn and look at me. My voice is sore, unpractised in the speech of men, and from their faces it is plain my greeting sounded terrible and was beyond their understanding. One amongst them starts to babble, high pitched, in their curious tongue. I take another step towards them, rearing high upon my wooden legs, and try again.
The horses scream and bolt. The men run after them. I watch their red cloaks flap away across the fens. The more I call for them to stop and have no fear, the faster do their horses flee, the faster do they follow in pursuit. What must I sound like, after all this time?
They’re gone, and so I sit back down there at the water’s edge to eat my fish. I think of how they’ll tell their friends they saw a bird much bigger than a man, all green, that stalked the marshes on its monstrous legs and uttered dreadful cries. Around a mouth-full of cold fish I start to laugh so that the grease spills out into my beard; onto my feathers made of rush.
After a while the laughter stops, because it sounds bad in this place alone. I eat the fish down to its skeleton.
That day, when I walked home towards my hill camp, I was thinking of my wife, my first wife. It’s a strange thing, but her name was Salka too. I’d known her since we both were small and played at chase-and-kiss out in the Hobfields, which they say is haunted by a murdered boy. Once I told Salka that I’d seen him, standing on the mound there with his throat all cut, his hair all burned. She knew I’d made it up, and yet she made as if she thought it true, and clung to me and let me feel her gilly there inside her breeks.
The hill came into sight, with supper-fires that smouldered on its crest, so that my weary step grew quick to think of being home. I had not had the chance to tell my son goodbye before I left, and thought that I might play with him along the evening paths while Salka cooked the fattest of the fish for us, wrapping our hut about with its delicious stink.
I was halfway uphill towards the camp before I realized that there was no noise.
I throw the slick white fishbones from me, down into the river where they bob for but a moment then submerge. I fancy that I see them swim away beneath the water, and I entertain a river where naught save the skeletons of fishes glide and dart and comb the currents with their naked ribs. I stand and make to wade downstream, back to my family. I feel the sorrow gathering about me, and I want to be with them.
I walked into the willage with my poles across my shoulder and a sack of meat and feathers in my hand. The supper-fires were burning low and somewhere off between the huts I fancied that a dog was barking, though I now remember that the smell of dog was everywhere. It may have been the smell that made me think I heard the noise.
Just past the open gate the relic stones of Garnsmith’s Forge drew my attention. In their centre, where the moss grew brightest green, was now an ugly scorch of black. It looked as though a monstrous red-hot cooking bowl had been set down, dropped in relief by sweating men with blistered hands.
No sound came from the beast-pens of the inner camp to drown my hesitating step which, although light, was deafening amongst the gaping huts. Halfway along the centre street, there in the dust, I found a set of ochred antlers trailing broken strings. I did not dare to pick them up. I gazed at them a moment, then passed on.