Secrets of Carrick: Merrow

by Ananda Braxton-Smith

  The fact is, on the rock-shelf above the dark pool was spread before me a skeleton, an entire set of somebody’s bones. I tried to look upon it lightly, as though the burden of my eyes might wake it up. It was all there down to the smallest toe-bone and laying about it, as if likewise dead, were the rags that were once its clothing. There was even, here and there, a tiny rag of its skin still clinging to a rib or a knee.

  I’ve seen lots of dead things, but it still gives me a sad surprise to see how small a creature looks when all that’s left is its bones. The life in a body is so much more than blood and bone; you can only see that plain and clear when life has gone. In spite of Ma and the Prior being so certain about where folk go when they die (the Prior says he’s going to Christ’s Heaven, and Ma’s all for going West, while Auntie Ushag says she’s got enough to do here and now and she hopes whatever happens next she gets to rest), I’ve always found it a bit of a mystery where all the life goes. Everything seems made of the same stuff when it’s dead: rabbits, fish, insects — people. The rabbit-ness is gone, the fish-ness is gone and all that made it whatever it was, and all that’s left is this thing like a rock or a stick. Boneclad everything becomes unified somehow.

  This human was no different. It was small. It was dry. It was like part of the rock.

  How did the bones end up on this rock-shelf in the middle of a mountain? Did it walk in and somehow get knocked senseless and die? But why would it have climbed up onto the rock-shelf first? Perhaps it swam through the tunnel — but then what? I supposed it could have been carried in from outside and dumped on the shelf, perhaps by wreckers or raiders. It didn’t seem likely. Ushag would have remembered strangers in the cove; though she may have set herself not to tell me if she didn’t want me fearful. It may have been a high tide or giant wave, but it would’ve had to fill this cave and rise right over the rock-shelf for a body to sink and then settle onto it. The tide would have had to ebb slowly so as not to drag the body back to the sea.

  It had made peaceful bones, though. It looked like it had been there for years, impossible to say how many. The bones were dried-out and scored in wrigglework. They had fallen to bits: the back-bones dropping from their string one-by-one, the shoulders and ribs collapsing into the grit along with knee-bones, hips, ankles and even the toe-bones lying singular and orderly by the feet where they’d fallen. From where I stood, along the shelf a little, it looked like a drawing of a skeleton in the sand. I could see the dent where the head had rested. Something gleamed there in that shadow and I crawled closer to see, the skull under my arm.

  Before I reached halfway I knew.

  A yell got stuck in my gullet and I couldn’t breathe. Like something out of Ushag’s traps, I was both skinned and gutted. Held in the thinnest of sacks and bound together by the finest of wires, slowly my own bones filled with doom and revolt.

  A pair of silver hoops lay in the sand. They were silver hoops such as some women down south wear in their ears, but finer-wrought and very beautiful. Ear-hoops such as these were for special days. I gagged, just once.

  I leant against the rock-wall. Ice and heat moved up and down me, parts of me froze or burnt in turn. Making some strangled, drawn-out sound I crawled on until I reached her. I put her skull back with her body. Her skull lay with the rest of her but now rested on its cheek, staring blankly into the cave. I straightened it so that it lay staring upward once more, like somebody decently dead and laid out at a wake. Cold and hard, not like a stone but like thin ice on the lake, I picked up the ear-hoops. Good silver. Worth something.

  Colm had bought them for her with half a season’s earnings. She was dead; she was dead. A great quiet consumed me.

  I heard every drip down the cold walls, every whistle of wind through the gap and far off I heard the sea hissing up the beach, but to me there was only one real thing in the world. Mam was dead. Here she was. There was no quarrelling with bones.

  I picked up one of her finger bones. It was so small, like a child’s, and I waited for the tears to fall, or the wailing to start, but nothing happened. I felt I should have been feeling something — even Auntie Ushag would think it worth having feelings over this. But I just felt empty. There was only a whisper in the back of my mind that told me I’d always known.

  My hands picked up the skull again, and for an instant I did want to smash it to bits — but it was just a skull. There was nothing of the woman, the sister, the mother left in it. It was all one with every other dead thing.

  Poor Ven. I didn’t know her at all. Once these bones had been covered with her skin and flesh; in other days I had been borne within those hips. Her eyes had watched me from within their bony hollows. Those tiny hand-bones had swaddled me. I brought the skull to my own face until we were nose-bone to nose-bone, and eye-hollow to eye-hollow. This skull had sat upon that neck and rattled with fancies rather than stones. Where were the stories now? Where were all the plays and games? Had she really walked Carrick on those dried-out, grey bones; down south, up the moaney, through the Cronks, around the cove and at the last had they really walked her into the sea? Could they have walked her in here, and tucked her away on this rock-shelf to die of a broken-heart? The fact is I couldn’t remember anything real about her. Not even the face that would have hung on these bones. I only had the stories. A tear fell.

  I cried three tears for Mam, and then I remembered Ushag and the tears dried up. What was I going to tell her? Mam’s bones proved her human after all.

  The living turn quickly from the dead. We can sit death-watch for a time but at last their great absence will remind us that we are still present, and we will need to get on with being so. Life is not fussy about where it grows, but it is set hard on doing so. Stuck now in a tidal cave in a tow-bound inlet with only Mam’s bones for company and the sky darkening outside, it dawned in me that I was alive. That is, of course I’d known it like you know that sort of thing, without really thinking about it, but now, in the wake of the undertow and faced with the bones I felt it pulsing through me; Live, it said. Live.

  I was, in an instant, all common-sense and something like courage.

  There was only one way out. I had to swim that tunnel by myself, or stay and likely turn to bones myself before they found me. There was no point in being fearful; I would either make it or not, and dwelling on it would make no difference. Soft feelings butter no parsnips. I was cold, I was hungry, and I wanted to be out of my rough tomb and under the broad sky again. Giving myself no time to think more about it, I put my mother’s skull back with the rest of her and scrabbled down the fallen rock into the dark pool.

  Once more the deep aches and icy trembles shook my body. Strangely, I didn’t care as much as last time and this is why: I knew then only the living get to feel aches and trembles. I took the biggest lungful I could and sank again into the black water. The tunnel seemed to reach out to me, and I pulled myself into it with all my will and strength. Straightways I got stuck.

  My shoulders were as a bung, almost stopping the water flowing through the tunnel, and I could go neither forward nor backward. I pushed hard with my feet and pulled with my fists, but I just scraped away my shoulders and hips on the tunnel-walls. Every moment I expected another salamander to snake out of some tight, dark place and curse me with its fevers, face-to-face where I couldn’t turn around. My body had become like the rock itself with the fear. Using all my strength I still couldn’t move. I would need to find another way, and quickly.

  Out of my memory rose all those creatures I’d seen wriggle and fold into tiny places; spiders, crabs, eels and suchlike. I closed my eyes, let my body soften as it had under the weight of the undertow and tried a snaky wriggle of my legs and hips. My body slid forward half-a-span. The jelly-goddess softened me, the eel-goddess lent me her slipperiness, and the spider-god gave each of my fingers the gift of creeping and suckering. Struggling against ice and fear and breathlessness, I prayed and snaked my way through the tunnel. My body became as waves rolling from my head t
o my feet and I shot forward upon them, my shoulders freed and my lungs bursting. The rest was simple. I spluttered up into the dark of the cave of hands.

  The dark outside the cave was almost complete. I would have to goat-foot it down the gorge. My feet carried me through a twilit world of carved spirals and slippery green river-stone. I stepped high and sure like Scully right through that dim place. There was no stopping to doubt even one footfall; if I’d stopped I’d not have known how to start up again, and I believe I’d have just stayed there. In and out of Ushag’s shortcut, past the trees reaching to the light, past the vines drooping to the water, in and out of the stream until the light went entirely and even then I just kept walking. I’d played at being Scully enough to know he never stopped. He kept walking, no matter what, and that was the secret to getting somewhere.

  Warmth held in the rocks guided me, and echoes bouncing from each wall kept me straight. At its bottom the gorge opened out and I could make out the sea ruffling under a bright young moon-wake. The horizon groaned under sky-towers of storm-cloud, and though for the moment Carrick’s skies were clear I stood in the stream and hoped with all my heart for real storms and rain. Down by the waterline someone laughed freely and far-carrying. Lightning lit the cove like full day and in that blaze I saw Ushag and Ulf. They were dots on the shore, playing in the place between the silver sea and black sky.

  She was running toward the sea with Ulf close behind. She could easily have escaped him, wounded and slow as he was, but I plainly saw her slow her steps on purpose. When he reached her, though, she darted behind him making him turn and spin. Then, unlikely as it seems, she leapt like a hare onto his back and buried her hands in his hair. Galloping up and down the sand, he was like a big, yellow-maned horse and my aunt his small dark rider. Into the foaming breakers he dashed with her clinging to him. In a moment they had company.

  The mother seal and her pup were circling them. Rising in shining drops and then slapping the water with their falling bodies, they buffeted Ulf and Ushag who clung to each other at the centre of the whirlpool, still laughing. I couldn’t tell if the seals were playing or besieging them and I ran the last steps down to the waterline, but I needn’t have been troubled.

  The seals were farewelling each other and the people had gotten in the way.

  The pup was now as big as his mother and it was time for them to leave each other and the cove. Their circling closed until they brushed against each other, and the water foamed where they played and touched for the last time. The pup was the first to go, diving away from his mother like he was throwing himself. His body formed a curve hanging in the air, sheets of water ran from his flanks, and then he dropped and was away in a stream of bubbles. His mother rolled on her back watching him, and called as long as he was in the cove.

  Then she turned to us with her black eyes glimmering and her fluke waving. Her speckled body heaved and sank; her eyes were the last of her left above the water. Then the lightning cracked, the sea was as quicksilver, and she was gone. There were no bubbles to mark her trail.

  All summer I’d threshed through the older ones’ stories; picking out the grains of truth in their murders, merrows, kraken and water-horses, their suicides, undersea-paths and Otherworlds. It had boiled away inside me just as if it were natural for a body to hold such a mess. I was almost used to it; it was like I’d learnt to live in many worlds at once. I was often somewhat baffled, but also tranced, by it all.

  Auntie Ushag, though, she likes everything to be singular and whole. She likes one story for each thing, with a good fit and nothing left over. She’d had her story about Ven all sorted out, it may have grown her into a misery but at least it was her story and she knew where she was with it. Then along I came.

  Poor Ushag. She had been right all along. Now she was wrong, but how could I tell her?

  The shock of finding that Ven still lived would be nothing to the shock of finding her sister to be dead again. She’d smiled more in the one day since we’d found the merrow-bones than over the last ten years. I saw her singing cheerful over the pot at home, cheeking and fussing at Ulf, and petting me. I saw her remembering Ven and smiling to herself. Now she was out dancing on the sand and playing in the sea. If I told her the truth, would she throw Ulf out? Would she clamp her mouth and never talk again? Would she ever forgive me? Perhaps she would send me away. Perhaps she would just get up and walk away herself. Perhaps she would follow her sister. It was all my fault. What was I to do? Poor Auntie.

  Would she want to be wrong and happy, or right and miserable?

  Chapter Eighteen

  Breakers

  ULF HAD BUILT THE FEAST-FIRE in a clearing among the hazels, and he stood now in its blaze watching it light a circle of trunks and limbs and faces. The faces belonged to Scully and Ma, who sat wrapped in a rug against an alder, her pipe-smoke curling upward in the firelight, and the Prior. My aunt had dragged all the embroidered curtains and thick tapestries from the wreck-trunk. The rambling roses and leaping hares of the curtains hung between the trees and waved and flapped with the puffs of warm sea-air off the cove. The white stags, wolfhounds and hunting parties of the tapestries covered the ground with their stories. Ulf’s bonfire smelt of apple-wood and once inside the grove we were encompassed entirely by Ushag’s feast.

  I had never seen such a spread. There was a spit stretching across the deepest embers and along it, rabbits roasted dripping fat and filling my mouth with water. There was one each. Smallish clay balls baked in the embers. Soon we would open them and with a lot of smacking of lips and pulling away of prickles, devour the hedge-pig inside. There was already a dish of collops from which everybody picked bare-fingered and greasy, and the roots were buttered and salted in their pot on the ground, next to what smelt to be a sea-broth rich in herbs and even adorned with wood-violets. I’d never known my aunt to adorn food before.

  There was even a hare in a jug, all hacked up and seethed in mead and spices from Shipton market, and a salad of burnet, brook-lime and suckery. My aunt doesn’t commonly use such things, saying that raw food is unhealthy and unnatural, but she had made an exception because of the uncommon weather. She thought it would do us good to eat something cool in the heat. Suddenly I was hungrier than I had been for weeks and I sat, laying Mam’s finger-bone by me in the grass, filled my trencher and tucked in.

  I would think what to do about Mam’s bones later. Everybody was happy and stuffing themselves right now. I couldn’t spoil it. We ate in silence, with only the sound of the fire, our chewing and spitting, and the wind rising in the hazels. Halfway through the jug-hare Ushag lifted her mug and spoke.

  ‘I’m glad you’ve come and you’re welcome to my house. Every one of you.’ She gave us a gracious face and we nodded and drank, our mouths larded with weed and eel-flesh, as we all toasted the feast. We waited. She’d started talking in the Old way, and now we expected her to keep on. She did her best, in spite of a red face and a mouthful of stutters. ‘What is mine is yours, as it was in better days, and I hope you won’t be leaving before you’ve eaten all of this and grown new bellies to keep it in.’

  Our laugh seemed to ease her.

  ‘Anyway, you know how all that rigmarole goes. And while you’re eating I have a story for you.’ We all stopped eating, and Ma and I swapped troubled glances.

  ‘I know,’ said Ushag. ‘But you’ll like this one. It’s new. It’s never been told before.’

  ‘We’re listening,’ I mumbled through mouthfuls of rabbit.

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘Here goes.’

  ‘I have a friend who in the course of her youth misplaced all her happy memories. They were quite lost to her through accidents in her childhood, this woman, and she’d lived without them her whole life and never thought to miss them. In recent days she made a remarkable journey together with a young kinswoman; a daughter of their house and the one who would inherit the holding and everything in it.’

  ‘Oh, a journey-story,’ whispered Ma to me
.

  ‘Any mother, mortal or fish or otherwise, would have been proud to claim this girl. This woman I know was proud, but part of that pride was because she herself had once been just like this young one. She felt that she herself had something to do with the girl’s delightful qualities. The girl was tall and strong; she could hurl the net and tend the byre, she could chop wood and build the fire, she could butcher and store meat, and work wood and sharpen blades. She had good wits and liked to sit and think about why and how and so forth. The girl was big-hearted; she knew the ways of the bees and talked with birds and seals, the poor knew her to be their friend and the weak were drawn to her, she saw the liars and the cruel ones for what they were. Her face was brown like the Old-ones, her hair hung black like shading vines on each side of her face and her eyes were dark and true of gaze. The woman looked at her and felt content for the future.’

  I drooped my face to my food. I could feel everybody looking at me.

  ‘But the girl wanted the woman, my friend, to have her happy memories back so they could remember them together at their hearth. She knew their story, the story she would one day tell her children, couldn’t be complete without these memories so she asked the woman to go with her to search them out.

  ‘The journey took a long road right through a country where folks talk in riddles, the whole country thinking it uncivil to speak plain and direct. They passed by an abbey where all the monks walk a foot above the earth and take their own crown of cloud with them, like the tallest of the Cronks. They keep a stable full of high, white horses with blood-red mouths, each one as swift as swallows, which they ride only to Sunday chapel. They were even carried part of the way by a north wind that sang in human tones.