Rawblood

by Catriona Ward

  Grief pulls at me. Rawblood burning to its bones, a dark skeleton against the tower of flame. Everything I have left in the world, all that I am.

  A great crack as something vital gives. The house screams. The roof caves gently in. Slates fall from the roof in showers, hot into the molten centre. Smoke boils out, great acrid clouds. I scramble away, the black follows, billows, filled with sparks, a multitude of tiny red eyes. The fire reaches up. It blossoms into the sky, towering over me. The air’s too hot to breathe and my lungs are bursting. Good. It’s right to die with Rawblood. Neither of us has a place in this world, any more.

  I fall through walls and waves of black. Red stars everywhere.

  *

  I come to slowly. Warm light on my face. I sit upright, heart hammering. Rawblood rises quiet around me. I’m in the hall. Flames dance neat in the hearth. Everything is as it was. It didn’t work.

  I could burn it again. I could throw myself into the fire. It will make no difference. I will never get out. I am trapped. My howl rings through the rafters and shatters the air. My terrible face reflected in the windowpanes, repeated darkly, over and over. A skull, mouth agape. A reflection on water.

  Where would I go, if I could? Where do monsters find refuge? I look long at myself. I trace the white ghastly lines of my face. Papa was right, at the end. I’m not Iris. Iris died. They made holes in her head and she died. I am all that’s left. It’s too hard to cling to memories, to life. The void is all there is. You gleam for a moment as you fall. You wink out in the black.

  My hand holds an ornate silver doorknob. All about me, the song. The door itself is mahogany, prettily carved. Through it I hear weeping. A woman. Her cries mingle with the music. Delightful. Why should I not go in? It all happened, long ago. Surrender need not be a gentle act. She’s in me like a pulse.

  The knob gives a pleasurable little squeak. I open the door.

  A dark room heavy with the scent of disturbed sleep, stillwarm wax; a candle recently extinguished. I move quietly to the bed. Two white bundled shapes. A man, a woman. There has been an argument. She weeps quietly, turned away. Piles of golden hair. My business isn’t with her anyhow. Her turn comes later. A glowing poker, flame.

  The man sits up. Watchful, elegant face. You, he says. He is leaden, pale and sweating.

  Come, I say. I’ll show you my eyes.

  I don’t touch him. I don’t need to. I show him. The pick on my skull, the bone dust. A half-life in the underworlds of the mind. Days and years. I spread my knowledge through him like sickness, spoiling everything I touch. I rot his heart.

  He cries out like a child and runs from the warm room, from his weeping wife. I cling to him like smoke. She cries after us, Leopoldo! In the stables he flings saddle and bridle on a startled horse. The horse shows the white of its eye. It shies and curvets and tries to throw him. It knows that death is near. He beats its quarters with the whip until it leaps forward, sweating. I curl about his shoulders as he rides. Faster and faster under the moon, as though he could outrun the thing which sits all about him. Me. When the ground begins to soften, the horse knows, and slides to a halt in a tangle of legs and hooves. He flies over its head and into the mire. He’s waist-deep, struggling.

  It wasn’t the holes in my head alone, I say. In the end. Malnourishment. Infection, strokes. Abscesses in the brain. It was slow. I’ll show you what it was like to die my death.

  The bog takes its time. He goes under after some hours. Before that he claws his eyes out, rather than see what’s in mine.

  When it’s done I am alone and cold on the desolate land. Despair drops like a hawk from the sky. The rotten bog fills the air. I am sick and shaking. What have I done? How do I get out, how do I stop? I clutch at the tussocks of sedge. I look to the horizon, a line of pink where the day’s pushing in. If I go, now … How can I escape her, who travels with me always? But I must try. I must.

  The little thing stirs inside me, the dark flower. It grows, unfurls. Too late to think of flight. She strokes me, comforting. She seeps through my organs, my limbs and eyes. She spreads like a hundred little fingers, little tongues. Too late to fight. The dawn, the land, my memories all fading, receding into nothing. The black rises once more. It fills me, gentle. She comes.

  I will take them all. Then I will never have been. Door after door and high hills and cities open before me. I show them my eyes. Some rave, some plead. Take others’ lives as they go. Many trembling hands grimed with blood. In the end it’s the same. Their soft hearts stop beating. And I am at peace. I tumble through nothing, full of dark and song. How long have I fallen? Was I ever anything but this? Her.

  * * *

  Tom Gilmore starts up, coughing. Something in his dream has made its way into the waking world. Through the window it’s red in the east but surely it’s not yet dawn. He presses palms against the freezing glass, leaving white ghosts. The sky is red above Rawblood. But Rawblood burned long ago … He was dreaming of fire. Or red hair, perhaps. His mind is heavy with it still. Orange, red, roaring. The dream world and this lie atop one another. Red hair. Fire.

  Go and dig the grave. Go. The long white bugles of funeral flowers. Lilies.

  Since demob he’s been adrift in the vast sea. He only just keeps afloat. Each day, only just. The bewildering profusion of everyday things. The farm. Taxes. The calf with the broken leg. He feels at once too young for it all to be expected of him, and too weary to care about it. Everyday things and the other, darker matters, lurking always just below. He was managing. After a fashion.

  But last night she was there. In the coffin, and also in the dark, outside the narrow light of the barn door. Within, without. Below him, before him. Dead. Not dead. Pale, awful. Drawn. He felt it like a blow to the throat or the heart. He felt the deep pull of the tide. How to stay afloat?

  He could arrange for burial at Manaton, a churchyard, anywhere. Legal and safe and done. But it’s not what she would have wanted. He knows what’s being asked of him. There’s no means of knowing the cost. He thinks bitterly of all they took from him, the Villarcas. Why should he go?

  Before the war he thought you could withstand things. You would recover and replenish yourself. Now he knows that it’s not true. What little reserves you have – of pity, kindness, courage and so on – must be guarded. Stay afloat. Or let go. Drift into the deep. He stands and thinks.

  ‘Right,’ he says at last and whistles for the dogs.

  The wind’s up on the moor. The pony raises her nose. She snorts at the gale, at the ghosts of horses on the air. Tom walks beside her, hand on her neck, eyes watering. The tarp on the cart flutters. Underneath are picks, a shovel, stout ropes and pegs. And the long box. The dogs race ahead of the cart and back again, long pink tongues out, wild eyes. They’re brown, brindled, lurchers with great tails like masts. They pant, joyous. They were messenger dogs in the trenches. They don’t know that they’re farm dogs now. They’re still bewildered by the land, the light. One of them is deaf, the other half blind. They have no names.

  He is going inexorably towards something. Perhaps he’ll not come back. The wind buffets. He’s exhilarated, despite it all.

  Rawblood in the distance, blackened and broken.

  * * *

  Someone is calling. It’s faint at first. It’s a name, or something like it. Once I knew.

  I am seized, as if by the scruff of the neck. I land hard on the flags of Rawblood in a haze of firelight. Something dark and dreadful on my hands. I wipe them clean as best I can. What have I done? Someone is calling.

  She sits by the cavernous hearth, hair red and burning like the fire before her. I come close to look at her, really look at her. I have never seen a picture. I do not believe there are any. But I know her, I would know her anywhere. Face intent like a cat glimpsing prey. In the uncertain light I see the wet rims of her pond-green eyes. Not intent. Sad.

  Come, I say. I’ll show you my eyes.

  She flings her hand up. You must stop, she says. The worl
d coils and uncoils with power. The lines and colours of her shiver in the air. I am stopped in my tracks. She’s not a memory. She’s here. In one way or another.

  Let me go, I say. What does it matter? It was all long ago. I do not want to think of the things I’ve done.

  She looks at me. Cold, green, intelligent. It matters. You burned the house, did you not?

  Papa said burn it, I say. Didn’t work. We go round and round and round and round. No way out of the circle.

  Did Tom Gilmore dig the grave?

  The question is meaningless, enraging. I don’t care, I say. Why? How has this happened to me?

  I went to the cave when the time came, she says. To let you into the world. It is an old place. Too old, perhaps. I should have known. The earth and the stone remember. The cave does. Then Tom Gilmore left your ring on the stone … That the ones you love may never die, they say. Foolish to dismiss old tales. So how are you here? How do we come to such things? I do not know, except that it is by slow degrees and unknowing. And it is all connected. My daughter. Her hand light on my face, her look. It brings the scent of fresh grass, the memory of sunshine. You can get out. If Tom Gilmore digs the grave. I told your father to look after him. He forgot. Some feeling in her face I can’t read. He is the only one of us left, now.

  Tom’s not one of us, I say.

  Of course he is, she says. You made him one. It’s love that does it.

  Well, Tom’s forgotten me, I say. He won’t do it. Everyone’s dead or forgotten me …

  Iris.

  That’s not who I am. I’m not her, anymore.

  She tuts. Come, she says and takes my hand. The front of her cambric nightgown. The gentle swell. I am somehow both here and there, warm inside her and alone in the cold dark. She puts her hand over mine. The love that moves then between my mother and I is as tangible as a shared road or a ribbon. It fills the spaces between us. We sit together on the cold stone floor before the dying fire.

  I can’t stop, I tell her. And I can’t get out.

  I’ll give you a memory, she says. And she does. It’s of warmth and Papa and the scent of iodine. The ache of bruises. It was a bad day, but then the fire cracked in the grate and I was safe in the sheets and he read to me of a grave, and a woman, and a sword.

  Somewhere in the distance, the keening of old hinges. A door, swinging open.

  * * *

  Tom stands irresolute among the ruins of Rawblood. Black spires of charred wood rise in the afternoon air. Winter sun pours through the ruined windows. Behind is the grey land. The great curving staircase is gone, the slate roof is gone. The hall is open to the sky. The vast marble mantle remains above the hearth, blackened and cracked. Once there flowed cherubs and devils in its chilly white folds. He said he would never come here again. But you can’t escape some debts.

  It was a year ago the house burned. In Dartmeet they say the fire raged for three days. Everything obliterated in a great welter of flame. All gone. No cause for it to be found. Some said they saw a blazing figure running through the house, setting it alight with burning brands. To hear others tell it, a flaming sword. Starved, bald, with eyes afire. Of course Rawblood has been haunted always. The old man Shakes was sleeping in the stable, as he always had. He never woke. Or so it must be assumed, for there was no trace of him after. People are sorry about Shakes in Dartmeet and all around. He was well known in these parts. They’re not sorry about the Villarcas.

  The dogs circle on the grass. They turn elegantly and make no sound. The soft incessant patter of their feet tells their distress. The dogs know fear and death; they’re accustomed. But they won’t set foot in what’s left of Rawblood. They don’t like it. They tell Tom this with upturned brown eyes, quivering bodies.

  He goes to the place, already chosen, under the cedar tree. He paces out the hard ground. Eight feet long. Four wide. Eight deep, at least. He recalls a night in a cave, talk of a murdered girl beneath the cedar … An old tale. This is now.

  What’s in the box seems to have nothing to do with her. A scarred, hungry thing, died in its sleep. ‘We never had a chance,’ he says to the air. ‘Not a chance.’ He’s surprised by his fury. Deep, sudden.

  He breaks ground. The pick rings as if on metal. The earth resists then breaks open. He sinks into the rhythm of it. Wintry light sits on him. His straining arms, the shovel, the dogs’ worried faces.

  It takes most of the afternoon. He stops when he thinks he should. He’s not tired. He pours water into the shallow of a shovel for the dogs and the pony. They all drink noisily.

  When at last it’s done he lets the coffin down gently into the hole. It’s difficult. His arms and back hum with weariness. The sun’s low, now, in the sky. Not long till dark. That old story she loved. The graves opened like doors to yield their dead.

  * * *

  The great tree murmurs at my back. The moon falls through the leaves. Dappled shade. It’s not a cedar now, but something older. The branches are dark and knotty, the leaves are shaped like blades. The tree and the cave. They call to one another. The same people made them and for the same purpose.

  There has always been a tree here on this hill. They hung sacrifices from the branches. Pieces of bread, amber beads, lengths of perfect linen, oxen hearts. They hung the children dressed in white. The blood ran down the bark. The man who does it is wizened, small and ancient. Face like cooling lava. He treats them gently. He soothes them as he slips the noose about their necks. Then the knife. The old man does it in her name. Places remember. Rawblood. Not such a gentle name after all.

  The grave’s half in shadow under the spreading branches. It lies quiet, newly dug. A pile of earth beside it. There has always been a tree here and beneath it a grave. Someone buries me here. Will bury me here. Has buried me here. Comes to the same thing. How are ghosts set free? Graves are doors too.

  A circle of lamplight blooms soft beneath the tree. Someone stands by the grave. Was he always there? Blue eyes. Scarred face solemn in the shifting light.

  * * *

  Tom throws a handful of cold earth. It scatters on the thin coffin wood. The dark is coming and the air’s cold. The sky is a blazing orange line behind the ruins of the house.

  He unhitches the pony from the cart. ‘Go now,’ he tells her, and the dogs. ‘Go on. Bugger off home.’ The pony goes gladly with a ladylike kick of her heels. The dogs don’t want to leave him but in the end they go too, trotting across the fading land.

  He lights the lamp. It throws a warm circle on the winter ground. He leans on the spade. He waits. He thinks, We made one another who we are. He thinks of her and all the times. A crack is opening in him, or the world. Forward or back, he thinks. Something races through him like colour or approaching thunder. Forward or back? The sun is nearly down. He wills the night on. The air is uncertain, lustrous. He looks about him sharply. In the dark, beyond the lamplight, something gently stirs.

  ‘Iris,’ he says.

  ‘She died,’ says a voice like stone grinding upon stone. Like the death of hope, like battlements falling.

  * * *

  ‘She died,’ I say. ‘I’m not her. Any more.’

  ‘Iris.’ The light’s warm on his face, young beneath its river of scars. He’s afraid.

  ‘You gave me up,’ I say. ‘Forgot.’

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘That’s the problem. Can’t forget it. All our lives.’ I try to think what he means but it’s so distant, removed. Tiny, lit-up scenes, caught in time.

  I say, ‘Put out the light.’ The winter night rises about us. Multitudes of cold, cold stars. He comes towards me in the dark, breath white and fine-spun in the air.

  ‘Those days,’ he says. ‘Won’t let me go. You and I.’ The black is rising, a tide. I welcome it in.

  ‘You think you know me,’ I say. ‘But I am more dangerous than you could dream.’ The thoughts come fast and lovely like thrown knives. His ignorance, his obstinacy. He did this, somehow, he put the ring on the stone. My every fibre burns with the
dark. Sweet singing in my bones and my veins. I am made of malice and full of power. I am made of nothing. Look at me. This is who I am. I show him my eyes.

  He breathes me in. The sickness. The despair washes in, bitter. It rots and curdles his insides. It runs through him spoiling everything it touches. He coughs. Blood swells within his lower lip, spills to his chin in a thin eager line. He’s afraid, of course, like all the others.

  ‘Go on,’ he says fiercely. ‘If you have to.’ I curl about his bones. I show him everything. He stares. Blank, blue look. Without warning he reaches out and passes a hand over my head. His palm warm on my bare skull. His fingers touch the ridges of the scars, which cover the broken holes. ‘Oh,’ he says sadly. Years since anyone touched me in kindness.

  ‘Get away,’ I say. ‘Get off.’ The black scatters. I release him. I come back into myself with a thump. He doubles over, coughing, rubs his chest through his thin, patched shirt. He pounds his heart with a fist.

  ‘You all right?’ I say.

  ‘Lungs,’ he says briefly. ‘Gas did for me. Hold on.’ He coughs.

  ‘We’re quite the pair,’ I say.

  He says, ‘What was done to you, Iris?’

  I tell him. The words taste of tin. ‘I can’t be this, anymore,’ I say.

  A pause and then he says, ‘What, then?’

  I think of Hervor and the door of the dead. ‘At dawn,’ I say, and it’s me who’s frightened now, ‘I think I go.’ I look at the horizon, and I see: the line of Rawblood is wrong against the sky. Unfamiliar. Jagged, broken. Twisted, skeletal angles. I peer into the dark. Heavy scent of old, old ash.

  ‘Did it burn?’ I say. ‘Tom, did Rawblood burn?’

  ‘Yes,’ he says, wary. ‘It’s gone. Burned last summer.’

  ‘I set it on fire,’ I say. ‘Last night.’ It worked, after all. Rawblood, my home, my prison. I look at its shattered silhouette. It wells up strong in me, still. That love. Even now.

  I think I could stay, if I wanted. Burned or not, I could wake beside the fire in the great hall. Go through the endless doors. Do what has already been done and give in. Forget. Rawblood will always be there. All I’ve done.