Travellers #2

by Jack Lasenby

  It took much of the night, rounding up the animals. Jess found the last goats up to their knees in the river, shivering. They crowded around as I stirred the embers, got the fire going again, and called their names. I dragged in more wood, kept the flames high. The rest of the night, the animals were tense. I had to go round them again and again, rubbing rough coats, fleeces, scratching heads, patting necks. They were afraid, and so was I. What monster had such a roar?

  When the light came up, I was cold down one side. Het and her pups lay against my other side. We had burned all the wood. Little heat came off the grey ashes.

  I might have loaded the donkeys and escaped that place, but somebody had stolen our tent, and two of the basket-work panniers full of woven blankets, clothes, tunics, trading goods, the same stuff I had taken to swap with the Metal People. Why should we lose the tent Hagar and I had made? A good tent woven tight to shed rain. I would not be pushed any further. We had lost Tara, Dinny, and the boys, as well as the Hawk Cliffs. Instead of rounding up the animals, loading the donkeys, and fleeing, I looked in the mist for tracks.

  Jess found them pugged in a marshy spot, large, split-hoofed. I squatted, ran my finger around them, knew now there was nothing to be afraid of, no ghost. I wished I could tell the animals that. Instead I grazed them beside the river all day and, late in the afternoon, drove them into a cliff-walled gully and waited for the dark. I had led the dogs back and forth over the tracks, accustoming them to the scent. They should be all right, even if the other animals were scared again.

  The bellow when it came was just as loud, but I was not afraid, and the animals felt that. I shouted back, loud as possible. A few animals broke and ran, but the dogs followed my orders. Het led the others to round them up, while Jak and Jess sprang into the dark and bailed up the monster. Beneath the dogs’ snarls, the bray changed to a blubbering shriek.

  Fresh wood on to the fire. The torch ready, a brand of resinous wood frayed so it ignited as I thrust it into the embers. I held it above my head.

  Down in the Whykatto Cave, before each Journey began, we used to see the Animals’ Dance: the Stag Man, the Ram, the Goat, and we saw many others, the animals that had vanished, some without names, some with names like the Boar Man, the Horse, and the Bull Man. Through the smoke swirl, the leaping light from the torch, that was what I saw now. Struggling, kicking on the ground, a man as far up as the waist, with a slabbed bull’s chest, shoulders, and horned head above. The Bull Man. Beside him lay a huge curved trumpet made from a horn, a wooden mouthpiece at its narrow tip.

  The Animals’ Dance had been the signal for the beginning of the Journey, time for us to close the Cave, strike tents, and cross the Narrower Ford of the Whykatto River. And here was the Bull Man, one of the Gods of the Travellers, down on his back, the dogs worrying at his throat, slashing the heavy folds of skin like a cape.

  “Ah! Ah!” the Bull Man groaned, legs thrashing. “Ah! Ah!” he blubbered, a throaty unformed roar. “Ah! Ah!” the bellow diminished to a terrified wet cry.

  The dogs came off reluctant, rumbling in their throats, lips still drawn up and back, ravening for blood. The monster lay and shook and blubbered that wet sound. I took the cape low down, tugged upwards, and skinned it off, hide and head, like a mask. Under the bull’s head and horns, under the folded skin of its great shoulders and dewlapped neck lay the upper body of a man twisting on the ground, blubbering, mouth open, dribbling, crying, “Ah! Ah!” both terrified and laughing, all at once.

  What made me do it, I still don’t know. I fingered the green stone fish at my neck and laughed, too! My mind was full of memories of the Bull Man in the Animals’ Dance, full of last night’s terror at the bellow, full of our combined fear of the unknown. Yet I laughed. Jak and Jess joined, open-mouthed, white teeth flashing. Frolicking around me. Laughing, all of us. And the Bull Man, stripped of pelt and mask, bellowing, slobbering, laughing loudest of all.

  A tall, heavy man, he sat up, shaking his ponderous head that hung forward off his great neck. The bull’s mask, its head and horns, draped its empty cape beside him. When I took up the great horn and blew in its mouthpiece, a grunt came out, and the Bull Man laughed himself helpless, a shout of a laugh.

  As he opened his mouth wider, laughed louder, deeper, as I laughed with him, and the dogs leapt around us both, I saw somebody had torn out his tongue, so his voice came out in that unformed bellow, a booming slobber, even as he laughed. I saw that awful stump and fell silent until he looked at my eyes in the flames of the torch and was silent, too.

  We led him to the closed-in gully, sat him by the fire, and offered food, some dried fish. He tried a little, thanking me with the bawled rough notes from throat and chest, chewed a fragment, then stood and beckoned. With the torch I followed him, Jak and Jess, one each side. He led to the end of the grassy flat above the river, to a dark slot hidden there, the entry to a cave. He gestured to wait, disappeared, and returned carrying a large pot of fresh milk, neither goats’ nor sheep’s, a bundle of herbs, and a piece of cheese.

  Back at the fire, the animals gathered around, the goats jostling to watch, curious. The Bull Man put the dried fish in a cooking pot, added some of his milk, the herbs and cheese, and heated it. Some of the herbs I recognised, most were strange.

  I spooned the fish from the pot, delicious, much better than on its own. The Bull Man, enjoyed the cheese and milk but ate little of the fish, avoiding the larger pieces though trying not to let me see, as if he did not want to appear ungrateful. He received my thanks with roars so loud I put my finger to my lips.

  I was beginning to hear a pattern to his noise, the language in it. I asked him what was the milk, from what animal? Who was he? What was he doing living here? And what had happened to his tongue? The first question was easily answered.

  The Bull Man took a piece of charcoal. Clumsy, intent as a child, on a split piece of timber he drew an animal, one with horns. I recognised it from the paintings of the animals in the Whykatto Cave. I looked around, asking him where was it, using my fingers as horns, looking around again, and he laughed and roared, shook his head, and held up his hands. We wouldn’t see them tonight, he was saying. Tomorrow. He drew a circle with rays, the sun rising, over his picture.

  The dogs on guard, the animals quiet, we lay, feet towards the fire. All my fear had gone. Tomorrow the Bull Man would show me the animal. And tomorrow I would draw something myself.

  “Where’s my tent? My baskets with the blankets?” I demanded in the morning, and the Bull Man gulped strangled noises in his throat. Too quickly, he raised one arm, jabbing his finger. Jak and Jess leapt, carrying him to the ground.

  “Don’t move so fast,” I said to the sobbing creature who rocked and rubbed his arm bruised and bleeding.

  “Ah! Ah!” said the Bull Man. “Ah, glup, ah!”

  I rested a hand on Jak’s neck, one on Jess’s. “Take it slowly. Don’t lift your arm near me again. Can you stand up?”

  “Glup, glup, gargh!” Jak trembled as the Bull Man got to his feet, enormous in the morning light.

  “Show me where you hid my tent, and the other gear. Don’t try to run away, or the dogs will have you down again, and I won’t call them off this time.”

  “Glug, gulp, glargh!”

  He led to a track among trees upstream. I sent Tek and Trick back to stay with the animals. Jak and Jess accompanied me, hackles bristling along their necks, ears pricked, eyes locked on the Bull Man who stumbled ahead, mumbling his grotesque speech, turning to see if I was following, rolling the eyes in his heavy head, and grinning. Poor monster, he was pleased to have company. And I, too, even the company of this cumbersome, tongueless giant who had stolen our tent and blankets.

  The track widened, became distinct. I saw more of the heavy animal marks. We came out on a clearing fenced around with posts and rails. Several huge animals grazed, bigger than donkeys, slow-moving creatures, the air sweet with their smell of dung and milk. I knew these beasts from the paintings in t
he Whykatto Cave, from the Animals’ Dance. And amongst them a bull, ponderous-headed, slab-shouldered, heavy-horned.

  “Graw! Glugh! Gawh!” gurgled the Bull Man, and the cows lifted their mild eyes and shambled high-hipped towards him, bellowing sudden, raucous, the noise that had terrified the animals – and me.

  Chapter 5

  The Comfort of His Presence

  Their udders distended, the cows needed milking. So that was why the Bull Man had been keen to get moving early! Used to milking sheep and goats, I found her teats large, but my first cow was soon letting down her milk. The others rolled their eyes, tossing their horned heads until I sent Jak and Jess to lie outside the fence.

  As they were milked, the Bull Man rewarded the cows with a brown rock which they licked. The bull shoved in for his share. I tasted a fragment. Rock salt! My heart lurched.

  “Glaw, urgh, flawff!” the giant roared, and the bull raised its heavy head and bellowed with him. I staggered, almost deafened. The salt lick was good for the cows, the Bull Man was trying to say, but Jak and Jess leapt to protect me. They took some convincing before they would return outside the fence, snarl-faced, rumble-throated.

  The Bull Man reassured the cows with shouts and slaps. I tried to ask him about the rock salt, but he did not understand. Besides, it seemed less important now we had left Squint-face the other side of the burning mountain.

  We carried the pots of milk to the cave, poured them into broad, shallow dishes, not metal but pottery. I looked at their polished sides, inside and out, with wonder. Hagar and I made pots, dried some in the sun, fired others in clay ovens. Many broke, but enough came out whole. We wove nets of thick cord and slung them on the donkeys. They held dry things such as grain.

  The Bull Man’s clay pots and dishes shone with a surface that held in liquids as well. He roared, drew, and described a mixture of something like sticky sand to daub the pottery. In the oven, it melted and ran, a waterproof glazing. I turned a bowl around, admired its shifting colours, and wondered if I could make patterns, even pictures.

  Hagar used to talk of the days when the Travellers had cows and made butter and cheese, but the milk from our few goats and sheep was hardly enough to be worthwhile. The Bull Man’s cows gave so much we could not drink it all, not even with the help of the dogs. He set the shallow dishes of milk aside, skimming off and working the cream until it came to butter. The cheese took much longer to make.

  There was another food he made from the milk, between a liquid and a solid, thick and white. He roared its name, and I roared back, but we were both frustrated and finished in shouts of laughter, pointing at each other, tears running down our cheeks.

  We tried drawings. The Bull Man shouted his words, and I drew what I thought he was saying in the dirt, on a handy cliff face, or with charcoal on slabs of wood. Each day I understood more of his bawl. There was nothing wrong with his hearing, and he understood my language.

  He was fascinated by my drawings. His own were like a child’s. He was unable to observe something in front of him and draw it. I helped him, guiding his hand, but he could not draw what he was thinking.

  “I am Ish. My name is Ish.” I pointed at myself. “I am called Ish. Ish,” I said. “Ish!”

  “Urgsh.”

  “Ish. Ish.”

  “Urgsh. Urgsh.”

  “What’s your name?” I pointed at him. “Who are you?”

  “Aw.”

  “Aw?”

  From side to side he shook his head. “Aw. Awsh.”

  “Awsh?”

  He clicked in his throat, so his roar had a harder sound. “Gaur. Gaur.”

  “Gaur?”

  He nodded. I was getting closer to it.

  “Aw. Aw. Gaur.”

  “Aw,” I said, and he half-nodded. “Gaur?” I asked, and he shook his head.

  “Ah!” I realised he could only make that G sound, that his tongue stump prevented the sound he wanted.

  “Jaur?” He shook his head. “Kaur?” I asked. “Taur!”

  “Gaur!” he bellowed so my ears rang. “Gaur! Ugh! Ugh!” His head went up and down in huge nods as he leapt. “Gaur! Gaur!”

  “Taur! Your name is Taur!

  “Gaur! Urgsh!”

  “Taur!”

  We danced, the Bull Man so delighted he smacked my shoulder and knocked me down. The dogs did not bite him this time. They were learning his ways and joined in, barking as he lifted and dropped me on my feet with a jolt. And I was learning to watch out for Taur’s friendly gestures.

  “Taur!” I said to them, and pointed at the Bull Man. “Taur!”

  They barked. “Jak!” I said to Taur. “Jess!”

  “Awk!” He shook his head. “Gawk!” That was as close as he could get to Jak. He tried making various noises, asking me to repeat Jess’s name, pointing at her, raising bushy eyebrows.

  “Jess.”

  “Garg? Garph?” He kept trying.

  Despite his mutilation we began to understand each other. Shouts, drawings, and gestures made us a language. We grew close.

  On the clearings beside the river there was feed for the animals as well as for his cows. The dogs kept watch, and the Bull Man tried to teach me his secrets. I practised blowing the great horn, but only spit dribbled out the end. Taur chuckled, took the horn, and sent me running from the ear-splitting bray.

  Taur lived in a thatch-roofed log hut. The whole of one end was a brick chimney and fireplace with a bench one side. The bricks were made from clay mixed with sand and chopped up straw. Taur baked them, like his pots, in an oven cut into a cliff.

  I learned to make bricks and, after many attempts, how to glaze pots. Some we glazed all over, waterproof inside as well as out. And sometimes I managed to get the glazing to take the forms I wanted, though learning that was a slow, difficult thing. I was often disappointed when a fine pot broke in its last firing, sometimes delighted by a pot pleasing both to look at and use.

  With downcast eyes, Taur told me he had to kill most of his cows when summer ended – because of winter and the lack of feed. It upset him to tell me. He described how he salted and dried the skins. The meat he preserved in huge pots of brine. I wondered why he kept so many cows, where he got all the necessary salt, but it was not the time to ask.

  He would have far more meat and skins than he could use, but I forgot that. If we stayed in the valley with our new friend, when winter came most of our animals would have to be slaughtered, too! Though there was no cave big enough to shelter the animals, the clearings along the valley floor were separated by stands of tall timber. Using drawings, describing how we survived last winter at the Hawk Cliffs, I showed Taur how we could keep his cows and the animals alive.

  I had brought the scythe, the grass rake, and the long-handled fork. Taur turned them over in his big hands, shouting his pleasure. I thought I was good with the scythe, but it became part of Taur as he moved in a sort of dance, felling great swathes.

  We worked well up the valley, to find long grass the cows had not grazed. The fierce sun dried the early morning’s mowing. When it was safe to go outside in the evening, I raked and turned yesterday’s cut and carried it away on the donkeys. The sweet smell of hay filled the valley, but Taur mowed so fast, I was unable to keep up.

  One day, as we lay under trees from the sun, I told Hagar’s story of the cannibal grandfather. Taur wept when the baby was eaten. He didn’t like the cannibal’s punishment, either, but cheered up when I drew a picture of the sleds.

  “Aw-aw! Aw-aw!” he brayed, imitating the donkeys. I sketched one, just its long ears, its four legs, and Taur tried to draw a contraption behind it. He waved his hands and shouted, but I did not understand. “Grawgh!” he bellowed.

  “I am not a fool!”

  “Grawgh, Urgsh! Grawgh!”

  “You’re the fool, not me!”

  “Grawgh! Grawgh! Grawgh, Urgsh!” I laughed back but was careful to dodge when he clapped my shoulder.

  Taur found a young tree with
an even fork. Knocked it down with several huge blows of his axe. Paced out three of his long steps, and smote off the two branches well above the fork. Three or four hand’s-breadths below the fork, he hacked through the trunk. Suddenly his attempt to draw something behind the donkey was clear to me.

  “Grawgh!” I cried, and Taur nodded till his head almost came off.

  We lashed long planks across the two branches above the fork, chopped and shaped the trunk end so it curved up from the ground and, using my woven harness straps, dragged the sledge down with a load of hay, braying like donkeys, tripping each other, laughing at our cleverness.

  “Shegz!” Taur roared. “Shegz!”

  Roping towers of dried grass, using the donkeys to pull the sledge, I kept up to his scything. I thought of building haystacks, a little village around the hut, but Taur showed me where he kept a few cows in winter, beneath a stand of big trees. The ground underneath was dry, the animals warmer than in the open.

  Between the trees, I stacked hay to break the coldest winds. Between two trunks left a gap for a gate. Wild dogs would have to pass our own before attacking the animals. We scythed and sledged reeds from the river to thatch the stacks. Any rain or snow would run off. We saved more hay than I had dreamed possible.

  Busy on a thousand jobs that summer, we still found time to play in the river. Taur liked splashing around with the dogs, and we were always catching each other unawares, pulling each other under. He bellowed and shook his fist when I ducked him and swam out into the deep where he could not follow. I told him to take off his heavy cow-hide kilt, and I would teach him to swim, but he always shook his head, kept in the shallows.

  Earlier, we had planted potatoes. Now we dug them, and they broke out of the soil in great numbers, plump and white. When I paused, remembering my plans to grow them at the Hawk Cliffs, Taur looked at me and asked, “Urgsh?” I smiled at his questioning face and tried to put Tara, Dinny, and the boys out of mind.