She was stupid about it; she was obvious. The damage started at Binder’s Copse and never a step east of it. You could see the line in Binder’s crop, wriggling grey one side, golden and straight the other. And everyone knew, from all his battles, how the town boundary ran across Binder’s land. Didn’t I go cold, standing there with mice patting the toes of my boots, but not the heels! I could have stepped from clear road into the carpet of them, and back out again; they drew the boundary with their bodies.
So once the council saw that, they only had to look for someone with a grievance against them, didn’t they? Someone with a grievance and with no authority except over such as this, except over mice and such.
I did what I could for her, though I barely recognised her. They have not broken her skull. I shouldn’t think she will die. But they shook up her brain in its box fairly fiercely; she has not made much sense since. And who would have thought a head could look so softened, bulging and bleeding and all miscoloured, as if it had been baked wrong? Her beaten eyes, believe it, are bigger than her mashed nose. You can hear the hard work it is, moving the breath in and out of that face. You can smell the blood that won’t be sopped up out of the earthen floor, however hard I press the cloth to it.
Perhaps it was the smell that made me decide to cook – to cover it. More likely it was the moon, which makes all sorts of madness in a person, turns everything into a dream. And I was alone up here, with the town’s rage written into Bet’s face, and my own anger, my own bad conscience, passing through me wave on wave at the sight of her, regular like the mice, keeping me from dozing. Keeping me even from sitting; I threw myself up off the bench and paced about and sought for breath out in the silvery air.
Finally all those things preyed on me enough: the black canister on the shelf, the heap of shavings next to it, the little slabs of bark, the herbs. Serve them right, I thought. Give them the lie if it works. Or some such thinking. I don’t remember. I was eager to try it; that is the truth.
Last moon I came up here, you see. I had lain and lain in my bed and looked up at the shadows in the roof, and every now and again the little rushing passed my door, pitter-patter, like a handful of grain cast across the hard ground there, across the step. I knew she could not get away with it much longer. I would burst and tell soon, if someone else did not.
Bootless and in my nightshirt I went up, as if pretending to myself I was not really going anywhere, not really leaving my home.
I sat out in the dark on a stump and watched her through her open door. Bare-armed and red-faced she was, and busy. She steamed up the water on her fire outside, and then she hurried it to the table and put all the things in, always in the same order, always in the same amounts. And she stirred it and she put the lid on and she held her breath three times as long as she could, and she lifted off the lid again.
And fluffuther-fluffuther over the rim they came like boiling, only the boilings ran away on little grey and pink legs, and pulled grey tails behind them. They poured off the table edges and ran out the door and away to the west, to the town. And Bet came out once more and filled the empty pot from the waterbutt.
I sat there in the dark and watched, again and again. It was a dance, and by dawn I had picked up the rhythm of it, and I knew all the steps.
Many’s the time I would pass Bet on the road, going slowly along and looking, some skinny white root with earth still on it in one hand, some bunch of pulled greeneries in the other.
‘Hey, Bet. What you up to there?’
‘Pedder.’
‘What you hunting?’
‘Bits and bobbles,’ she always said. ‘What is good to eat and good to medicine people.’
Mater Strongarm maintained she saw Bet gathering in the graveyard, of a full moon or a new. But then, you’ve got to ask what the Mater herself was doing wandering that side of town in the night. And you’ve got to remember, this is a woman who considered selling her own daughter to Travellers, that hard winter that nearly never ended. Mater Strongarm would do a lot for coin or her own advantage. I myself think Bet didn’t wish anyone evil that didn’t deserve it.
I put the pot on to boil. I ready everything on the table, the table that is usually such a clutter, but which the paters and maters so kindly cleared with their sticks when they came here to do their punishment. I put the things all in a row in the order I saw Bet use them. I open the canister ready. It is heavy, half-full of black grains. I stand there stuck, my finger in the canister’s mouth. I want to reach in and stir the grains, to know how they feel, to see if they crumble. But something will not let me.
I put canister and lid on the table. I go out and sit on the stump where I watched before. I almost drop with exhaustion there – suddenly sleep is on me, pressing down inside my face. But then the pot-lid clanks and I’m up and collecting it, ready to do the dance.
And dance I do. Rustle go the lamb-leaves, crackle go the bay, plop goes the bark, and the two pinches of black grains turn the whole to murk. The paper and the shrivelled thing, the snip of man-drag root, the wood-shaving and four of the berries. All done, so I pick up the spoon, which is mouse-coloured with this use, and seven times stir one way and seven times the other, just like Bet did the night I watched her.
Then I clap the lid on, and hold my breath. Bet Cransk’s sleeping face watches, warped as some clumsy, child-made mask, all its puffs and pillows shining in the candlelight.
After the third breath, off I lift the lid triumphant, eager for the fountain of mice.
Nothing.
Not quite nothing. The water’s still there, still hot. Hot and empty and clear. All the stuffs I put in it are gone. Wasted, I think. All gone to make a pot of empty water.
I’m about to put the lid back on, to carry the pot to the door and empty the magicked water down the hill. Then I see it.
‘Hah!’
It’s at the bottom on the near side, crawling slowly along the near side.
I reach for the spoon. ‘I’ve made one, at least.’
I lift it out and put it on the table, and bring the candle near.
Eugh. It’s an abomination of a mouse. It has all the elements, but they have come together wrong, all in the wrong places. Pieces that should be inside are outside and dragging, leaving wet marks on the table. One of the eyes is about right, but the other shines out from the back, near the root of the crooked half-tail. There are only three legs. And the whole skin – there is scarcely any hair on the thing – is wrong, shrivelled, boiled, painful-looking. The whole mouse is suffering, the way it shudders and creeps, the way its mouth works in its side there, as if it is trying to scream.
It’s easy to kill a mouse. Jeesh, hasn’t the whole town been stomping and smearing them underfoot these last months? Doesn’t everyone up to the oldest and down to toddlers know the exact force needed to pop out the life of one and not have it stick to your boot and smell there?
I know I will wish I hadn’t killed it quite so fast, hadn’t taken it by its tail-stump and thrown it with such force and so far in among the trees. I’ll want to take another look at it, to see again exactly where its parts are, exactly how it moves, to think about what I made and wonder that I made it, however monstrous it is, that I cooked up a thing that lived, in however much pain.
But while it shudders there and looks in two directions and makes that sticky sound in its mouth, the only thing to do is smack it out of life with the spoon, then cast it away where no one will ever see it again. I stand at the forest edge, wiping my hands down my shirt, over and over, to rid them of the touch of the tail. I hurry into Bet’s house, pick up the water-pot, busily empty and rinse it. I must forget that I even saw the mouse-thing, let alone that I boiled it up myself from Bet’s bits and bobbles. I must put out of my mind, completely and forever, the knowledge that I could do such a thing. For where would that lead? What good could it bring me?
{ Forever Upward
As soon as I saw it, I knew. That was my first time, then, but I did
n’t stop to make sure. Today was the last day we could do anything about it, and the sun was already high.
So I ran.
‘Oh, Valla and Brava and their lazy bums!’
Because it was their chores and their it’s-our-last-day-so-we-don’t-care-if-the-pig-starves-it-won’t-squealuntil-tomorrow that had slowed me getting up to the lookout.
I thumped from step to step. My little dog Liklik skittered down the damp path behind me. I sprang over roots and I swung on the vine over the boggy patch and tied it quickly behind me. Liklik splashed through below.
Around us the forest quietened, its dawn musics and battles finished, the sun leaning on the treetops. Two birds whooped to each other from a northern perch and a southern one.
I slid down the broken path past Widow Split’s garden patch, dodged through the palm grove there and shot out among the huts like an arrow. ‘Mummarn! Mummarn!’
‘She is headed down the lagoon,’ said Brava from the hammock.
‘What!’
‘For to beat out our bedding.’ Valla’s head popped up at the other end of the hammock. ‘To wash all trace of us away,’ he added gloomily.
‘But she mustn’t!’
‘Well, she has.’ Valla sank back.
‘I’ll go after her.’ I waited, hoping one of them would offer his long legs, but of course no. ‘Did she go long?’
‘I wouldn’t say long, would you, Brava?’
‘Oh, a good while, I’d say.’
‘Nooo, no more ’an a cock-crow ago.’ And Valla crowed. ‘Yes, about that long.’
‘No, I’d say a good long spell. Long enough to roast that rooster.’
‘Oh, I’ll be so glad when that Church takes you!’ I burst out as I ran from them. It wasn’t true, but it felt true just at that moment. ‘Come, Lik!’
My brothers’ laughter followed us back into the forest.
This is the way it had been once: all the gods we needed – of fish, fruit, feather, fur, grain and weather, of water salt and sweet – we had found and tamed so that we wanted for nothing.
Then the Church came. I don’t remember that day; I was too little, and Mummarn says she put her hand over my eyes so that I would not see. They broke our stone ancestors and took away the pieces; they burnt our wooden ones. Mummarn took us into the forest. But we could still smell the burning, she says.
They burnt all the guardians; they defiled all the summoning-places so that the gods would not come to them. You don’t need these, they said. You’ve got the one true god now who looks after everything. As if a single god could swell fruit on a tree and set water springing and bring a school of silver-mask over the sandbar for us!
As if a god would be shaped like that, said the widows when you got them going, just like a man, forked and bearded, with a mouth no wider than a spear-hole! How can he be one true, and be so small?
Of our men, all I remembered was that they had smelled strong and taken up most of the space. When the first big rains came after the Church took them, the lung-house was barely half-full. It felt wonderful to me – there was room to play without running into people. But all the widows wept. How can they say their god is kind? they said, when he is a man only, and only allows men near him? What sort of god cuts a family down the middle like a carcass, and leaves the women husband- and sonless, and the children fatherless in the forest? They should cut out our hearts and turn them on spits before our eyes – that would hurt less!
Back and forth down the slope I went with Liklik, through the mud and dimness under the ferns. When we were out of my brothers’ hearing I called again, ‘Mummarn!’, over and over.
Finally a tiny voice called back, well below me: ‘Is that you, Currija?’
‘Mummarn, come back!’ I hurried on.
At last there she was, with the rolled bed mats on her back pointing up behind her head like a meander-bird’s crest, and her dog Charger at her heel. She was as shiny with sweat as the rock beside her was shiny with water weeping out of the ground. She held her head steady under the pot of soap-leaves and scrub-brushes – only her eyes tilted to me. ‘What is it, daughter?’
‘I saw it! The bait! The house on a string! From the lookout!’
She gave such a start, she had to put her hands up to the pot. What a look came onto her face! If she hadn’t been so laden she would have run up and grabbed me.
‘This is not some joke-idea of your brothers’,’ she said fiercely.
‘No, Mummarn! It’s just as you said: a pearly-white house, with a smaller house on top. I even saw the string; sunlight went along it. Out over Pinnacle Cliff, it was going, out over the sea!’
‘You are sure, absolutely? Because there is no time for me to check. We must snatch up our offerings and run!’ She started up towards me with big steps.
‘I am sure! It could not be anything else! It was certainly not a cloud.’
‘A sea-eagle?’ Her eyes had come up level with mine, still fierce, still doubting me.
‘Absolutely could not be an eagle. It had a lo-ong tail, like a flag, as you said. I tried to show her the way the tail had rippled, slowly, its full length.
She watched my arm. Wonderment cleared the fierceness from her face. ‘Here. Take this.’ She pushed the pot into my hands. ‘Gods help us, is it too late?’
I scampered up the path after her muddy heels and the dogs’ curled, muddy tails. What were we going to see? What would we do? All I knew was to check for the house every morning, and that there was hope in seeing it.
What came after, I could only guess.
The snake-heads popped up as we hurried inside.
‘What’s happening?’ called Brava.
‘Don’t tell them,’ said Mummarn, taking the cloths off the glory-basket. ‘Tie up the dogs; they can’t come with us.’
‘Mummarn?’ said Valla.
‘Nothing. None of your business, big boys.’
‘Ah, what? Tell us!’
She pushed two little skins at me. ‘Fill.’
When I came back, the boys were still complaining, but Mummarn was silent, tying a bundle. ‘Get us some of those baby-bulbs that we can eat raw,’ she muttered to me.
I went out and withstood the whining as I dug.
‘What is it? What is so secret? Is it a present for us?’
‘It’s the one thing that’s not for you,’ said Mummarn from inside. She didn’t raise her voice, but they heard it and went silent. ‘It’s for me and Currija.’
‘You’re going away from us?’ Valla sat up straighter and watched me. Valla was the quick one. ‘On our last day?’ His voice wobbled a little.
‘I cannot choose the day,’ said Mummarn, clacking kitchen jars.
I knocked the worst dirt off the bulbs and gathered them into my shirt. Mummarn met me at the door, the tied bundle in one hand, the loose one of water-skins and foodstuffs in the other. She eyed Valla over me as I packed the bulbs and tied the bundle.
He was still playing the sad look – no, he really was sad all of a sudden. He wasn’t pretending.
She went and hugged him, violently, and kissed him in that stinging, deafening way she had.
‘Aargh! Mummarn!’ he laughed, and Brava fought her off too when she came at him. Liklik barked on the end of his cord. Charger watched disapprovingly.
‘Go, go!’ said Brava. ‘Go where you have to go! Just don’t kiss me!’
We went away laughing, and then we were serious and hurrying, all the way down to the beach. Just for me and Currija – I was glad to have heard her say that; I was so glad to be hurrying along with her, because for so long now it had been all about the boys, and spoiling and serving them while we still could. Really I did not want them to go – who would make Mummarn laugh, when Brava was not here? Who would shoo my bad dreams away, when Valla was gone? – but having them here was no good either. Nowadays they upset everybody; some of the widows wept just looking at them.
When we reached the flat, Mummarn rushed ahead of me out of t
he trees. I followed at my same pace. The house was tiny in the sky. Mummarn wept and stamped about in the soft sand.
‘Give me your bundle,’ I said, trying to sound sensible.
She released it to me. Now she had both arms to wave, both hands to catch the tears that were spilling out.
‘Mummarn? We must hurry.’ I didn’t like her like this; I liked her closed-lipped and watchful, taking care of us.
She took my head in her wet hands and cried hard into my hair. ‘My only daughter,’ she wept. ‘My only child.’ The sun stung my shoulders. Her tears fell on me and the breeze cooled the stripes they made.
She took back the bundle of offerings and struck off towards the harder sand where it was easier to walk. She sobbed loudly, freely. She staggered with the crying; sometimes she blindly crossed shallows, soaking the edge of her skirt, her face in her free hand.
As we walked, the high cliffs moved across and hid the pale construction in the sky. The beach narrowed, and we climbed up to the path-marker rock and were back in forest.
Mummarn had less breath to cry with as the path steepened; eventually she stopped altogether. We paused at the spring to refill our water-skins; the rest of the morning we climbed. I thought my knees would break from all their bending; my eyes wearied of the steep brown dirt and white roots of the path. Hunger chewed on the inside of me like a dog on an old bone. But the sun would not let us rest and eat; it would not slow, but climbed ever upward – just like us, only so much faster and farther. Every time I checked where it was, my stomach clenched nervously and I tried to hurry.
At last we reached the tufty top of Pinnacle Cliff. The sunlight blasted down, and the breeze was only a fitful thing in the green-and-purple needle-grasses. I stood at the edge of the tree-cover and swayed with tiredness.
Mummarn had brought me here once before, more leisurely, to show me the frame fixed into the rock. Now a wooden reel sat in that frame, just as she had told it, with a single loop of strong white twine knotted around it. The twine arced away into the blue; sometimes the white speck of the house was out there at the end of it, sometimes there was nothing. The reel, the frame, the clifftop, my very bones, thrummed with the wind that the house gathered at the horizon, and brought to us along the string.
Red Spikes Page 10
