Singing My Sister Down and other stories

by Margo Lanagan

  Bare feet brushed on the floor. ‘What terrible thing are you going to do now?’ Else said, her breath sour at Mirka’s shoulder.

  ‘You don’t want to know. Look how burying Gran’s moon-piece made you screech.’

  ‘Can you stop them making that horrible noise?’ Else was bending down, pulling her sandals to her.

  ‘Why would they listen to me?’

  Mirka stepped out. The darkness wasn’t as empty of clues as she’d feared. She had memories. She had sounds. Her feet told her the path, her fingertips the walls.

  She felt her way down through the town, between the plots. Else followed, and Mirka noted her every movement, ready to jump on her if she lost her nerve, smother any calls for help.

  She had to crawl from block to block across the weir – there was no far bank to look at for balance. She waited for Else to try stepping across, to shout and fall in the water and beg to be rescued. But Else worked out the crawling too. Or gave up and went home – it was hard to tell through the water-noise.

  Then Mirka was at the cliff, hugging the wall, toeing forward for the narrow paths, fingering the stones to find the names of the dead, trying not to think about the invisible emptiness behind her. Or the fullness in front, the voices that buzzed in the rock against her chest, blurring together into not-a-voice, like wind in pine trees. That scuffing on the slope below, it was not, she told her banging heart, a dead person shuffling towards her. It was Else. It was only Else, who couldn’t just stay at Gran’s crying and sleeping and let Mirka get on with things. Else would slip any moment, and wake the town yelling as she tumbled into the river—

  Mirka edged past Breka’s tomb. Past Ansa’s, Holsa’s. And here was Taris Tyton’s.

  Before she could doubt herself, Mirka plucked the sign-stone out and set it next to the offerings shelf. She reached up to pull out the last stones she and Else had pushed in yesterday.

  She carried them along the ledge, placed them at the far limit of yesterday’s rock pile.

  When she turned back, Else had arrived between her and the tomb, breathing hard and trembling.

  ‘Good,’ said Mirka. ‘Pass me more stones and I’ll stack them.’

  ‘Climb around me,’ Else said. ‘You pull them out and I’ll stack them. This is your idea. You should face whatever’s in there.’

  It was quicker with Else, Mirka had to admit. And then light from the moon inside showed between rocks, and they could see better, work faster. The singing was clearer, but it was fading even further now – it was hardly likely to wake the town.

  Mirka stopped pulling out stones and stared into the niche, scratching her stubbled scalp.

  ‘What is it?’ said Else, coming back from the pile.

  ‘Gran’s not there,’ Mirka muttered. ‘She’s got up. She’s gone in. There’s only this.’

  She reached in and pulled out the muslin and night-cloth, scattering stones. The muslin held not a crumb of moon, and both cloths were filthy with stone-dust.

  Else edged forward and stood arm to arm with Mirka, peering through the empty tomb to the cavity beyond.

  The moonlight was brighter than Mirka remembered it ever being. The full moon had chewed out a cavern nearly as wide as the valley, the far wall clean rock marked with its scouring movements. How could something so soft do that?

  ‘But the smell,’ whispered Else, and Mirka noticed it too, stale air flowing out past them, that had long been sealed up tight. Only at its very edge was it sweetly rotten from the things – from the people, these people – it had been trapped with.

  Mirka cleared the fallen stones to either side of the niche. She shook out the cloths and folded them small enough to tuck inside her clothes again.

  ‘You’re not going right in?’ said Else.

  Mirka pulled her shirt down over the cloths. ‘What else did we come for?’

  Else stared. ‘Well, I’m not going in. You can – I’m staying right here.’

  ‘Do what you like,’ said Mirka.

  She crawled through the niche into the smell, into the full-moon light. Her stomach dropped when she saw the depth of the cave, and she swayed on her hands and knees at the lip of the niche. The wall below and on either side of her was crowded with tiny caves, which were tombs like this one, opened from within. The dead sat swinging their bony legs, or lay curled in the openings, or leaned sleepily against the niche walls. Such faces as they had were lit from below.

  The deep bowl of moon-carved rock was paved with the dead, in rags and blankets, shrouds and robes, and some of them naked. Most lay sleeping, but enough still sang for the lullaby to fill the air. Single voices sang from other tombs around Mirka, rasps and rattles and whispers and one good strong woman holding the proper tune, sounding almost as she should, almost alive.

  That woman stood just below Mirka, wrapped in a blanket, her hands still fleshed, her face still a face, a mask pushed up on her forehead. Mirka knew that blanket, knew those hands—

  ‘Else!’ breathed Mirka. ‘I can see Gran!’

  ‘I don’t want to see!’ Else said in a high voice.

  ‘She’s singing!’

  Gran turned and looked right at Mirka. One of her eyes was wrong in her head, but even in the other there was no sign that she knew her granddaughter.

  That was what death did to you, Mirka realised. It took you beyond your family’s reach. It was a different way of being, larger than family, larger than town and valley, maybe even larger than all Three Valleys together.

  ‘I don’t want to see,’ Else sobbed. ‘I don’t want to know. Get in there and do whatever it is you’re planning!’

  She was right – there might not be much time left before sunrise.

  So Mirka dropped from Gran’s tomb and made her way down the moon-scoured rock, among the sleeping dead and the singing. Many things she saw that she might have once called horrors; many times she brushed against cold leather and bone and dry dead hair that she would have shrunk from even yesterday. But now she’d met Gran’s eye. Now she knew her to be truly gone from the living world. All these other people were gone too. It was only that the mad moon, buried where it shouldn’t be and chewing out its own small valley to shine on, had stirred awake what should have been left to lie, left to dry out, to turn to dust in peace.

  Down at the bottom of the basin the moon lay bright, a soft globe balanced on the rock. The dead lay close in around it, some asleep and others basking in the light, rasping out their version of the song.

  Mirka picked her way among them, forcing herself forward into the cool glare. She took out the cloths, shook the muslin from its folds and flung it up over the unsteady sphere.

  The night-cloth took two throws and still fell askew. She walked around the moon, stepping over legs and bodies, tugging both cloths down evenly on all sides. Up on the now-darkened heights of the cliff, the lullaby faltered, but the singers nearby sang on, the dry sound nearly tuneless in their throats.

  Mirka pulled the moon-muslin’s drawstring tight, but left a circle of night-cloth open to see by. She checked for Gran’s niche, grey with pre-dawn light, before she got behind and pushed, rolling the bagged globe up onto the dead. On over them she went, minding her footing. The moon-beam swept around the cavern, and the dead who were awake reached after it. A few raised themselves and tottered forward to follow it, climbing the slope after her, closing in from either side.

  The moon grew heavier as the slope steepened, until Mirka was all but underneath the sphere. She pushed the bag’s opening at the niche, yelling for Else to help. Around her, all teeth and eye-sockets and strung-together bones, the dead yearned upward towards the disappearing light.

  ‘Hurry, Else!’ she shouted. ‘We have to beat the sun!’

  The weight eased and Mirka pushed, she climbed, she forced, she squeezed the musty, dusty bag into the narrow passage of the tomb, and through.

  ‘Hold it, Else! Don’t let it go down the cliff!’

  And Else didn’t. Mirka hung on, a
nd the moon-bag dragged her out of the tomb. She slithered down to the ledge below Gran’s, and there she teetered, just managing to stop the bagged moon from pulling Else off the wall. Together they manoeuvred it along the path to where the cliff gave onto a wooded slope leading up to the valley’s rim.

  Some of the dead followed, the light drawing them out into the wrong world. The whole sky was brightening now, and as Mirka rolled the moon upward she saw their stick figures creep and waver along the cliff paths. Several tangled and fell into the valley’s shadows.

  What could she do? She was running out of time. In the town, living people called out at the sight of the moon’s veering beam.

  Now Mirka was dragging the bag by its drawstrings among the trees, Else behind forcing it between the trunks. Ahead, the sky blurred downward faster than Mirka’s eyes could move.

  And then she was at the top of the hill, the rim of the world. ‘Stop! Stop here, Else!’ She dug in her heels and pressed back into the bag. Right in front of her toes, right in front of her nose, the sky’s lining of glassy beads rumbled into the ground between two of the edge-most trees.

  She dropped the first strings from her shoulders. ‘Pull off the night-cloth, Else!’

  Else pulled. The cloth shrank back, and the muslined moon washed the rushing sky-wall with light. Mirka groped for the nearer tree, so as not to be lured towards that gleaming, not to be smeared away behind the rim.

  Then the night bag was gone, and so was the ground from under Mirka’s feet, the moon lifting her lightly, magically, up this last tree. Grasping branch and leaf-clump to slow herself, she craned past the moon’s glow for the hook in the sky that was racing towards her, somewhere in this sea of gleaming beads, and which she must hurry out to meet. She would never get this chance again now the town had seen her, now that they were raging in the streets. She could hear them—

  The hook, up there!

  She let go the tree’s topmost branch. She jack-knifed so that it was the moon, not her, that bounced first against the speeding sky. She guided it onwards, steered it, with terrified dabs of her feet and hands, into the path of that crooked shadow.

  The hook rushed down and knocked the wind out of her. But she had hold of it, and the valley was flying up to meet her. Breathing or not, she must act.

  She loosed one arm from the moon-muslin’s drawstring, and the moon-stuff poured from the cloth, onto the hook and along it and around, onto the beaded surface and in, spreading and plumping and firming and brightening until it was a cool sphere embedded exactly half-deep.

  Light flushed through the sky-lining all around, every bead paler than before but some sparking up very brightly, the stars of old, not seen since the Daggnegs first stole the moon.

  Mirka swung for a moment, her fingers deep in the cool living glow-stuff of the moon. The moonlit, starlit trees slid up fast at her. The tree she must land in, the branch, grew from pin-size to grasp-size—

  And was not a branch at all but a clambering, reaching rope of dead people, skull-faced, torn-fleshed, bone-handed. Except for that top one, that plump-skinned woman, nearly alive—

  ‘Gran!’ Mirka cried, letting go, dropping from the sky.

  But Gran batted her aside – it was the moon she was after. Mirka scrabbled and fell through the rope of the dead, tearing it down with her. She thumped into the ground below, fought back up flinging limbs and loose grave-cloths aside—

  And saw Gran, who had leaped and clamped herself to the moon-face. Saw the spangled sky sweep her down to the scar in the edge of the world. And fold her away into the wound at the bottom, pursued by numberless stars.

  The dead were dead again. They lay all around Mirka in their bits and bones. She had her breath back, though it hurt to breathe more than shallowly.

  Someone cleared his throat. Civ Tole, one of the headman’s men, stood beyond the field of dead, the usual clump of fellows behind him.

  ‘I hope you’ll come quietly, like your sister.’ He couldn’t stop himself glancing at the dead, revulsion in his face.

  ‘Come and get me,’ Mirka said. She laid one hand on a leathered hipbone, the other on a bare skull paling in the morning light.

  ‘I’ll fetch her out.’ That was Else speaking, elbowing through the men, her hands tied behind her.

  Mirka jumped up, pain grabbing her chest and making her grunt. ‘Don’t tread on them,’ she gasped.

  ‘As if I would.’ Else stepped from space to grassy space among the cloths and body-shards.

  Mirka went to meet her halfway, but the breathing-pain stopped her, bent her over.

  ‘Mirka?’

  ‘It’s just my ribs,’ said Mirka, straightening carefully. ‘Nothing a few nights in a cell won’t fix.

  Else looked up at her and grinned. ‘Your hair’s all sparkles,’ she said.

  ‘Yours too.’

  Mirka put her arms around her sister, and rubbed their stubbled scalps together. Beside them the sky rumbled into the earth, and its far end hoisted the sun up out of the Daggnegs’ horizon, to shine down on all Three Valleys, morning, noon and evening alike.

  ‘MOTHER,’ SAID THE MOTHER, from the middle of the road, ‘can we help you?’

  ‘No,’ I whispered. ‘It would be quite beyond you.’

  Against my cheek the beech stump told its tale. They’re always the same, these end-tales: I grew, I swayed, I shed, I slept away the winters. Then came people and marked me.

  Though the ending never should surprise, it always does: the nip of axe, the deeper bite of saw, the choking, not believing, the toppling away of all the upper self.

  I was listening again despite the sameness. I was listening hard. I was hoping. Would the grief this time be strong enough, to disperse me, to end me? Would the airy part of me at last be free to rise, the earthen to dissolve into the darkness below?

  A child tried to speak, but another child hushed him.

  The beech had stood so tall and strong. When I reached around the trunk, my hands didn’t meet on the other side.

  The stump murmured its end again, long ago past weeping. It was only one tree; I’d lost all of my Brindlewood, hills and vales of trees and all beneath and among them. I had spent my life twining its roots and branches, braiding its creek-waters, pacing with its wolves and letting fly its birds and beetles. But now my whole realm was hauled away, built and burnt, and I was cast out to wander, with nothing left to rule.

  Still this mother stood over me, her children, many seasons’ seedlings, clustered around her staring. And that wheeled thing they had with them – ugh!

  ‘Walk on,’ I said. ‘I am trying to die. How can I die with strangers watching? Take your cartful of woe and go with the others.’

  Now the woman crouched by me. She touched my human guise, my false-cloth sleeve, with her human hand. How dare she! But I’d no fire any more to turn her to spider or stone or weeping willow.

  ‘You may ride in our cart if you wish,’ she said. ‘It’s already so heavy, you’ll hardly make a difference. This mud is very dispiriting to walk.’

  ‘I don’t care about the mud.’ I turned my face from her, laid down my other cheek. The beech’s last cry welled up afresh and shook through me. ‘And why would I climb aboard a cart made of corpses? And carrying some even worse horror?’ I hugged the stump harder. ‘Go on without me, I tell you.’

  They put me aboard the cart anyway. I wept at my lack of fire; at their bullying ways, which they thought kindness; at their strength, which I had no strength to answer; at the thrumming of the cartload, catching in my throat like a growl. I curled up and wept, forced myself at the weeping, strove to peel my air free and dissipate. Beside me the load lay covered with a horse-blanket. Stones? But what stone would fight me as this was fighting, would keep me living when I wanted only to be gone?

  Bump and trundle, squeak and rumble and bump. The boards mourned beneath my head, against my back. Cloud like a furrowed field hid the sun, turned its light to all the one glare, hiding the time f
rom me. The mother breathed and spoke to her chicks, and the chicks piped back, hungry and curious, forging relentlessly on into their futures.

  Wearily I lifted my head, looking for any old copse or hedge where I could rest my gaze, even if I couldn’t crawl there and die in peace. Rain sprinkled now, as if it had seen me wake and must remind me how miserable it could make me, I who no longer had a reason to drink or a realm to drink with, whose home was laid waste, all its creatures killed or fled.

  The road ahead was still empty of the other wanderers, showing only their treadings in the mud, on and on to the horizon. Two older boys were in the shafts; the mother and all the other able children pushed from behind. Younger ones trailed in the muddy road, and the very youngest was half-swaddled in the cart, across the covered load from me, trying to eat its own fingers.

  What was this between us? I felt through the blanket, though every touch locked me tighter into this unhappy body. My air knitted worse to my earth, and air-and-earth nosed about for the other two.

  Finally, I raised myself on one elbow and lifted back the blanket edge.

  A man lay there. A man of iron, of earth-metal, in earth-metal hat and coat and muffler, his hair and whiskers wedges and scrapes of iron.

  I looked on him a long time. Poor fool. His iron eyes showed such surprise and dread. How had he fallen foul of us?

  I’d never pondered one of these before. I’d cursed them myself, and tossed them to their fate. Happening on them – buried, overgrown or abandoned in my own or others’ domains – I’d laughed in their faces of iron or stone and stridden on, my head flaming and my feet soaking up water from the good rich soil.

  Now one of them lay before me, and was iron, and was iron some more, utterly still and so much heavier than he ought to be, his face caught in an emotion that should have long passed on.

  Pity. I felt pity – my fire was burnt as low as that. I should turn and pour scorn on this little family for wasting their time and strength. But instead there seemed something very sweet, very dear, in their putting their little weights before and behind him so as not to break their clan apart, in their trailing so far behind the homeless crowd from love or loyalty or some damned human thing.