The Modern World

by Steph Swainston

  ‘Saker!’ Her voice broke the silence. It rang out with confidence above the rustle of roosting birds. ‘Saker Micawater!’ She called me to the stone. I rearranged the uncomfortable cloak one last time and hurried out.

  Savory stood outside next to the cup-and-ring stone. She was an indistinct figure in the dusk, her hands and face pale patches. As I drew nearer I saw her face was painted with henna: red dots with concentric circles on both her cheeks. Her hair hung in long red braids either side of her face. A plaid cloak pinned at her shoulders reached the ground, and beneath, a short simple cambric dress with a girdle. On her forearms and lower legs she wore half-armour for me. The glittering vambraces and greaves showed her limbs’ slender curves. The contrast between the hard, warm metal and her soft yielding skin made me desperate to touch her. All along her arms and legs she had daubed the double black stripes of Cathee war paint and her first two fingers were still stained from where she had dipped them and drawn them over her skin.

  The dark and glossy smell of wet pine needles was all around, acidic and medicinal, almost like liquorice. The trees’ straight boles stood close together as if at attention. Above them, a crescent moon hung like a cutlass in a sky so dark blue it appeared purple.

  The cup-and-ring stone was as tall as my chest, a natural rock pushing up from the soil and penny-coloured fallen needles. It was rough-grained and uneven at the edges. The cup-and-ring had been carved on its sloping top many centuries ago, Savory had said, perhaps even before the Empire was established. Though privately I doubted that it could be so old.

  In the centre was a shallow round cup, surrounded by five concentric rings, the pattern you see if you drop a pebble in the lake. The carvings had long since taken on the red rock’s patina. From the cup in the centre a channel had been carved, deeper as it cut through the rings, to the edge of the rock. The cup was therefore a tiny basin with a drainage conduit.

  I did not study it for long. I only had eyes for my painted warrior bride, and she smiled at me but we must not speak a word. My heart beat fast and I was suffused with warmth and exultation. I would take her from here to the Castle to kiss the Emperor’s hand and then we would live together forever!

  Savory drew her skinning knife from her belt scabbard. It had been polished and it gleamed. She raised her right hand, the fingers spread wide, the vulnerable palm showing. She pressed the point to the ball of her thumb and it slid under her skin. A dark stripe sprang up. Blood ran shining, down her wrist. Savory fisted her hand and dripped it into the hollow of the cup.

  She passed the knife to me with a solemn nod. I did not take it: the occasion required a grander gesture. I drew my short sword and held it horizontally. Savory’s eyes widened. Hastening to reassure her, I grasped the blade in front of me and slid my hand along it. I felt it bite. My signet ring zipped on the surface; my hand became warm and slick. A trail of blood shrank on the oiled metal into a thin line of crimson beads. I did not let the pain show on my face. I curled up my hand as she had done and let the drops fall into the cup until our blood, mixed together, breached the level, ran down the conduit and began dripping on the ground.

  Quickly we held our wounded hands under the flow and felt drops patter on our cut palms.

  Still separate, still without speaking, I yearned to hold her. The strength of my desire was close to desperation: I couldn’t go without touching her for any longer. She produced some cloth and bandaged my hand tenderly, and I bound hers.

  She nodded. ‘Now we may speak.’

  ‘I love you,’ I said simply. I spread my wings completely around her. In our feathered sanctuary we found ourselves looking into each other’s eyes, and were trapped there. I whispered, ‘What would you have me do for you?’

  She found it hard to say anything at all.

  ‘Kiss me.’

  She tilted her head upward and touched my lips with hers. I smiled and returned the gesture. She took two handfuls of my cloak and pulled me down to the bloodstained grass. We consummated our marriage there.

  Savory stepped happily, leading me along the meagre track. Hatchet nicks on tree trunks marked the way. Among the scuffed fallen needles, the forest’s myriad little white flowers had their petals closed.

  We went through the gate and into the village. A huge bonfire was blazing in the middle of its clearing. The villagers rushed hand in hand in a boisterous, whirling dance around the fire, in and out of the houses in a long, crazed chain, wherever the maiden at the front chose to lead them. Their uncouth music flickered like a flame up and down an insensible scale; it seemed to have no timing, no beginning, no middle; it ended abruptly and started again. Seeing me staring, the guitarist grinned and plucked with his dirty fingers a most ideal arpeggio.

  Some men were digging out a pit in which they’d roasted a wild boar. Five hours ago they had built a fire in a cobble-lined pit, let it burn to heat the stones, then put out the fire. They had laid in the carcass and buried it to cook. Now their spades scraped on hot cobbles, they thrust them underneath and lifted up the boar. They cheered and shovelled it out onto a trestle table. I caught a glimpse of golden crackling and flesh as brown and shining as mahogany. Whole branches of rosemary had been wrapped around it which had cooked onto the skin like fragile and blackened embroidery.

  A delicious aroma drifted over. A shout went up, the chain of dancers broke and ran towards the roast pig. They crowded and shoved around the table.

  Firelight pulsed and merged, making yellow and hollow beasts of their faces. They tore at the crunchy skin and ripped it away to the hot meat. Juices ran between their clawed fingers. They shoved it into their mouths – round black holes – and while they chewed, they flailed both hands to grab more. Boys and women turned away with fistfuls of stringy meat. Still more villagers arrived to join the frenzy. More and more came running and pressed themselves close around the table. Outside the circle of firelight the village lay empty. As the meat stripped away it became pinker, the white fat was bubbling. They dug their fingers into it, split the carcass apart. They dragged it up and down the table, opened it up. With a warm rip they detached a leg and they jostled into two clusters, a smaller group around the leg wiping it this way and that on the table top as they pulled off the shreds of flesh, holding them preciously until they had enough for a mouthful.

  I felt awkward. I was ravenously hungry but was I expected to shoulder between them? I couldn’t bring myself to. I didn’t want to touch them.

  The villagers drew back. They regarded the table: the bones lay stripped clean. Women shrugged and walked away, licking grease from their fingers. Such a show made me feel sick – they had taken less than five minutes to demolish the boar.

  One man was so drunk he staggered towards the pit without seeing it in the darkness, a blacker rectangle on the shifting grey ground. He fell straight in. Then, finding the ashes still warm, he turned on his back looking satisfied up at the overcast sky and went to sleep.

  A woodcutter at the table unbuckled his axe. He cracked open the bones with a few deft blows, and the villagers set to again on the marrow.

  Savory jigged up to me, a succulent earthy smell of roast boar on her breath and an oily shine at the corners of her mouth. She had torn mouthfuls of it with her teeth. She looked surprised, then annoyed: ‘Didn’t you have any?’

  ‘I couldn’t get close.’

  ‘Ay! What will they think, that you haven’t tasted your own marriage feast?’

  She lead me to the edge of the clearing, in front of their log cabins that all face inward. Some bear skins were spread on the damp grass in front of the reeve’s cabin.

  ‘Sit down there, my love; I’ll go and bring you some. Smoked pig, baked spuds and pine beer! Isn’t that a feast for an Awian lord?’ She kissed my cheek and ran lightly towards the smokehouse.

  I watched the party. A travelling troupe were enacting a raucous play. The villagers still paid me little heed and took it to be as much for their benefit as for the bride and groom’s ho
nour. That was of no consequence; I sat and watched happily. I couldn’t understand a word, but I recognised it as a familiar play based on an incident I remembered well. Some five hundred years ago, the Castle’s Master of Horse was beaten in a Challenge. He lost his place in the Circle but in the following years his devoted wife practised so much that she was able to beat the new incumbent and win immortality again for them both. Such is the strength of love.

  In amongst the mummers, children kicked the embers for baked potatoes. I looked around at the few windowless log cabins, thatched with pine branches held down by netting. Big stone weights dangled from them, all carved in the shapes of animals: beavers, cockerels and squirrels. Every doorway had a beaming white plaster face mounted above it.

  The reeve’s house was behind me and, on either side of its door, bas-relief sculptures of naked women adjoined the wall. They were life-sized in smooth plaster, so white they seemed to glow.

  By the woodpile a big cooking pot hung on a thick chain from a tripod. It was smeared with the remains of hide glue, in which boar nets had been dipped to make them stickier. The enormous twine nets were draped on A-frames. All Cathee villages trap wild boar and carry them to Vertigo to be salted, barrelled, and sold as salt pork to the caravels.

  The play was ending and, as usual with dramas of that nature, my character turned up to sort everything out. I was smiling at the actor playing Lightning, when from the corner of my eye I saw two men at the far end of the clearing. They caught my attention because they were skulking at the edge of the firelight. They had a similarity; maybe a father and his grown son.

  They began to walk purposefully towards the smokehouse. Was this part of the play? Their faces were masked with determination. As people noticed them, they fell silent and it stirred a sense of menace. I felt the crowd’s expectation. Should I be doing something?

  The men walked behind the bonfire; its rising heat rippled their figures, and where they passed, people turned aside and the party fell silent. The villagers near me watched, fearful eyes most white and nostrils flared. The two men reached the smokehouse, and axes appeared in their hands! They were wearing cuirasses!

  The blood feud! I jumped up and dashed into the reeve’s house. From the rack I grabbed my crossbow and a bandolier of bolts.

  The backs of the axe men were disappearing through the smokehouse door. I frantically wound the cranequin, but my wound reopened and my hand shook badly. I raised the bow and shot at the father. The bolt snicked into the log wall; the man turned and looked at me, then ducked inside. I missed. I was struck stock-still in shock. I don’t miss. I never miss. I can’t remember the last time I missed!

  I lost sight of him inside the smokehouse. There was no time to reload. I started to run to Savory, but a second later the men were out of the door. They tore across the clearing, eyes popping, fists punching in front of their chests. What had they done to her?

  They passed some distance in front of me, their axes flashing in their hands. From their other hands dangled longbow strings. I had seen enough of the world to know they are used as garrottes.

  I tried to spin the cranequin back but the strength had gone completely from my cut hand, as if it didn’t belong to me. Click-click, click-click was all I could get out of the damned mechanism as it rocked back and forth on one ratchet. The men had reached the gate. A woman of their family pulled it open. They sped into the forest and it swallowed them.

  I yelled and sprinted into the smokehouse. Where was Savory? Hanging hams swung at my touch as I felt my way between the drying racks. My wife’s white dress was a spectral smudge. She lay face-down on the pressed earth floor. I knelt next to her. The back of her neck was cut across cleanly with one axe blow. There did not seem to be much blood.

  I jumped up and dashed after the murderers. As I passed the bonfire I threw in the crossbow, in a flurry of yellow sparks. Who talked me into using that thing? If I had my longbow, I could have put seven arrows through them in the thirty seconds they took to cross my field of vision.

  I dashed through the gate and into the prickly frustration of the forest’s edge. Their fleeing footsteps crackled far in front of me, deep between the trees. The cold leather of my sword grip was damp in my hand.

  I saw pale flashes heading downhill. By god, the bastards were signalling at me! But it was only the reflection of the bonfire on their back plates and it soon vanished.

  I found myself surrounded by a wall of fretted branches, hard cones, bending needles. They clutched my clothes but I pushed further and further in. Shadows and twigs looked like they could be … but they weren’t, when I got closer. I could hardly judge distances, over the nettles and around snarled brambles. Where the trees grew more densely packed, the ground was clear and springy with needles. I couldn’t see in the low space under the branches; it was pitch-black.

  I ducked down and hesitated, trying to catch my breath. All was silent. The murderers could be anywhere; without faithful Lymer I would never find them. They had gone to earth, and even if I flushed them the forest was their world and they might have picked up longbows. I was more lost than I have ever been. I listened carefully, but I only heard wolf howls muted in the far distance.

  The village’s bonfire backlit the trees. Numbly, I turned and stumbled to the palisade, to the clearing, and into the smokehouse, to Savory. Those craven murderers knew she could have beaten them, with her skinning knife and the desperation of self-defence, had they faced her. They had cut her down as she knelt to slice meat onto my plate.

  As my dear wife fell she had upset a sack of kindling and there were pieces of bark all over her. I cleared them away and I turned her over. She was ghastly cold. I used my cloak for a pillow and closed her glazed hazel eyes gently. I kissed dear Savory.

  The pointlessness of it unhinged me. I jumped up suddenly and ran out of the smokehouse, but the village was deserted. Everybody had bolted into their homes and wedged shut the boards serving as doors. ‘Savory is slain!’ I shouted. ‘Help me find the murderers!’

  From inside came small sounds that told me they were busy with other tasks. They were hinting that I should stop causing a disturbance, stop bawling and go away. I stared around the clearing: the bonfire burnt down to a red ember murmur; a clutch of boar ribs on the table; an overturned cup on the bruised grass. Nothing indicated that minutes ago this had been a lively party.

  I ran from cabin to cabin banging on the blank doors. ‘Help! Help me for god’s sake!’ But I could not speak the language properly; nor they mine. I hammered on the reeve’s door. ‘You know me, Asart! We must catch the murderers!’ No answer from within. I clapped my hand flat over the sun brooch on my shoulder. ‘In the Castle’s name, I’m her husband! Tell me who the murderers are! I’ll bring my fyrd! Damn you all – help me or I’ll raze this village to the ground!’

  What was I doing here? Here in the back of beyond? I should never have come to this filthy, tree-dark province at all. These folk had no inkling of my power. My palace where one of their daughters would have lived was no more than a tale to them. They valued their murderous traditions more highly than the distant Castle itself. Here I was the foreigner and how could they understand? With all the time in eternity I would not get through to them! I lost my mind and I curled up, faint, beside the fire.

  At first light people emerged from their houses and went about their daily chores as if nothing had happened. I lay on my stomach on the wet grass watching abstractedly. They spoke not a word of Savory. They shut the events away and went on with tapping sap and lathing wood. How could they – when the world was shattered?

  Years of blood feuds had bred in them a toleration like a collective sickness of the mind. They were quiet and cowed, but acted as if the random murder was fair and justified. She had been, after all, a Savory. Father Savory killed Pannage and was killed by Pannage’s grandson. So it went on. So it still goes on today.

  Day only truly dawned on the village when the sun rose above the trees and slant
ed its rays down into the little enclosure. The dew began to vanish, though it remained, grey and sparkling, in the cobwebs, the palisade’s shadow and each hovel’s woodpile.

  Two men, their sleeves rolled back, went into the smokehouse and brought out Savory on a stretcher. She was naked. They had stripped her naked. I felt a jolt as if I had been punched. My legs went weak but I stumbled to her and tried to cover her body with the cloak. The men put their arms out and blocked me. She was a pale sculpture, she lay on her long hair like a pelt, as red as the hair on her legs and sex. I had last seen her naked when – I had kissed her thighs and breasts – their disrespect was too much for me. ‘I’ll take her back to Awia! I’ll place her in my tomb!’

  My pleas were cut short by the high squeal of a fiddle and a flute. The door of the nearest cabin flung open and the troupe of mummers tumbled out. They started dancing! They began to dance the old, false story where the King of Morenzia steals the King of Awia’s wife and Awia raises its fyrd to bring her back. The dancers whirled furiously around Savory’s stretcher, stamping either side as they acted out the battle. The King of Awia was mock-stabbed by the human king, and he fell. The dancers all jumped on the fallen actor, their hands scrambling under his clothes. They brought out real human bones, all dry and painted black, and began to dance with them, clacking them together.

  What did it mean? I had no idea but the dishonour was too much. I drew my sword and was about to set among them and slay every last man, when the reeve came out of his house.

  He was wearing a mask. It was a human visage, of heavy white plaster, as if his own face had been smeared with thick paste, but for its blind eye sockets, in which were placed cowry shells. Their pursed toothy grooves made blind black lines. In the mouth of the mask real human teeth were set. No, not set: the mask was the front of a real skull, sawn off and covered in plaster. The rest of his clothes were normal and he came towards me walking confidently, as if he could see through some hidden contrivance in the mask.