by Layla Lawlor
"One night the year, only," Meham said. "That is—" and she said a word I didn't know.
I looked to Su.
"Shaking Out," he said. "What your village calls Closing Night, I think."
I learned through further questions that this would be soon, when the Ox Star touched the side of the mountain. Our own festival was later in the year, but this valley was farther north here where I'd grown up.
Throughout all of this, Liss stared at her bowl of stew and twisted a piece of flatbread between her hands, and said nothing at all.
Su was given a place by the hearth downstairs, while Meham moved the two littlest girls into her own bed and let me share with Liss. In the night I woke to find the bed beside me cold, and the girl's shape at the tiny attic window. She was not doing anything, just standing with the shutter open and her night shift fluttering in the cold breeze, looking out at the dark.
In the morning I asked Su if it would be all right if we stayed in the village until the festival. "I'd like to see it, and to hear more of their stories in the meantime. They have some unusual variants here I haven't heard before. If you can't stay, I can get by with Meham to translate for me."
"I wouldn't want to miss it," Su said, with that crinkle-eyed smile that grated on me, suggesting he was having a laugh at my expense.
Still, it was a pleasant time to be guesting in the high country. A sharp wind blew down from the northern peaks, swirling leaves before it. The upper slopes of the mountains were purple and red, but in the village the leaves had only begun to turn. Children ran through the muddy paths between houses, laughing and trailing long ropes of plaited straw—normally used for tying goats—with which they tried to snare unwary passersby. In the pasture, late wildflowers bloomed.
This far north the herders only sheared in the spring instead of twice a year as they did down in the warm lowlands where my adopted city and the University were, so the goats and sheep were putting on their heavy winter coats. The nights were sharp, the days warm. The early crop of grain lay drying on biers in the field, while the late crop was still ripening.
"It seems early in the year for a harvest festival," I said to Meham while I helped her beat laundry on rocks by the mill creek. My fingers were swollen and red from the icy mountain water. I had not missed this aspect of my childhood, and I found myself nostalgic for the damp, hellish heat of the University laundry; at least it was warm. "My people always waited until the full measure of the crop was gathered in. Is there a reason why you do it now?"
"It is not harvest really," she said. "It is ..." She groped for the word. "Needful? For the harvest." Then she broke into a sharp tirade in her own language at Liss, whose idea of helping us was apparently to sit with her feet trailing languidly in the water, gathering late-blooming goldenrod from the bank.
Later, one of Meham's elderly aunts showed me the village's harvest clock. It was carved into a flat plank with a recognizable depiction of their mountain and a few round holes that went all the way through. You held it up to the sky, she explained, demonstrating, and when certain stars shone through the holes, it was time to plant or to harvest or to do the proper things to make sure the crops came in as they ought. When the Ox Star showed through a particular hole drilled into the edge-line of the peak, it was time for Shaking Out.
"In what ways does Shaking Out help the harvest?" I asked, but she only shrugged. Meham was functioning as my translator today, Su having gone off with some of the village men; since we had decided to stay for a while, he'd been spending more time with them. I was starting to pick up some words and phrases of the local language, but was nowhere near being able to piece a story together.
And Meham didn't know or care about the answers to my questions, such as who had made the clock or when. To her it was simply that the clock showed when the proper things were meant to be done, to keep the seasons marching in their normal way.
It was very old, the plank worn black with the hands of all those who'd held it. The women agreed that it was fine to draw it, so I made a drawing of the clock in my notebook. I had heard of devices such as this, but had not seen one before.
I might be short on translators, but I had no shortage of people who wanted to talk to me, and no one seemed to mind me wandering freely around the village. The one warning I received was to stay away from the trails up the mountain—though of course this just made me wonder who had made those trails, and when. Still, you didn't make friends in a new place by breaking the rules. My childhood village had off-limits places as well. We wouldn't have taken kindly to a visitor poking into the Children's Well or nosing around the sacred grove.
In the city, it was easy to forget the depth and strength of those old beliefs. But here, in the thin clear air of the mountains, I felt as if the old gods walked one step behind me, breathing their enduring truths gently into my ear. Autumn, like spring, is a liminal time, when the gates of the old year close and the new begin to open. As my notebook filled with the locals' tales of giants and ghosts and invisible folk who lived in cellars and behind garden gates, I couldn't help becoming caught up in the old habits of my childhood, blended with local customs. I carefully latched the gate so the egg-stealing Skobanick wouldn't come in, relying on willow-wands woven into the fence to keep it out. The windows must be latched at night, and if you hear a fox crying in the forest, turn your back and don't answer it.
And, like the girls of the village, I didn't go outside after dark, for though I was older by a decade or more than my young informants in the meadow, I too was unmarried and—unlike my mother all those years ago—I had no wish to meet the Old Man of the Mountain if I could help it.
She was a strange, fey girl, my mother. People in my village still spoke of her cleverness and strangeness and, eventually, her madness. She went barefoot in all weather, even when her feet blistered from cold. She talked to people who weren't there. She would go to milk the goats only to be found hours later, motionless on a streambank, staring fixedly at a flower that was, to others' eyes, no different from the hundreds of flowers around.
Mother was the youngest of eight, and I grew up surrounded by my aunts and uncles and older cousins. My family never really understood me, but they loved me. Because of them, I never had a chance to be hungry, my hair unbrushed, my clothes unwashed, as I probably would have been if I'd been left entirely in my mother's keeping. There was really something wrong with her, I realized now.
But oh, her stories. The bedtime stories she told, the songs she sang. If my mother was strange, maybe it was only because she had one foot in those stories and not enough of herself in the real world.
And then she became a story herself, when I was seven years old and she walked away barefoot into the forest and never came home.
People always said my mother fell in love with the mountains. It wasn't meant to be taken literally. That was just what they said about the mad in my village.
But I thought about it now when I woke in the night to see Liss gazing out the window—a window, I couldn't help thinking, which faced directly toward the great peak hanging over the village. It was too long ago now for me to remember my mother's strangeness in any great detail. But Liss's odd, dreamy expression, her way of stopping what she was doing to gaze off into the distance as if listening to a song only she could hear, might be what people were describing when they talked about Mother.
The villagers' stories were, for the most part, typical of this part of the mountains. They had their own local flourishes, of course, but as I collected more of them, I was able to consign most to one or another category in my increasingly complicated folklore indexing system in the back of my notebook.
It was the wooden idols that haunted my waking hours and my dreams. They were everywhere around the village. Su said wooden figures of that type were common in the mountains hereabouts, including his own village. I suppose I had seen them in other places, but I couldn't remember being somewhere that had quite so many of them, especially where peopl
e were likely to run into them. Mostly, like in my village, they were brought out for certain festivals or they were off in remote groves near waterfalls or sacred wells or other important places. Here, though, they were scattered seemingly at random around the village and its environs, decaying slowly into the brush, some eerily faceless, some no more than stumps.
I had noticed the locals avoided them. It was so casual I doubt they even thought about it. They simply went around, turned their heads, did not meet the carven stare. I asked Su if they did that in his village, and if so, why.
"It's just something one does," he said, and smiled at me, his eyes crinkling in their folds. He wasn't an old man—maybe a few years older than me—but he had an outdoorsman's perpetual squint, and there was a dusting of gray in his long, wiry black hair. He was a small, quick man, not unlike the goats he spent his days with. "Most people think it's best not to ask questions about certain things. Why don't you think so?"
"I left my village because I was curious about the world beyond it," I said. "I've never stopped being curious, about people most of all. I'm interested in what people think and believe."
"Is that the only reason you ask questions, just because you're curious?"
"Why else?" I asked. "And how did this get to be about me all of a sudden?"
Su grinned at me. The old goat was flirting, I thought, annoyed. As if he didn't have a wife at home! But suddenly the smile dropped away. "Where I come from, they say it's best not to look at them too closely, miss. You wouldn't want them looking back at you."
They certainly were not comforting to look at. Their carved wooden faces might have had serene expressions once, but decay and wood-worms had broken down their features until now they seemed to writhe in frozen torment. The nearest to the weaver's house, which I saw every day because it was on the path to the water-dipping place at the mill creek, had lost its arms and gazed at me beseechingly from eyes like the hollows in a skull.
It seemed a terrible shame to let them get into such a state. We would never have allowed this to happen to our old Barley-Men. I paused in my walk back from the creek one morning, and set down my laden buckets so I could reach out to that tormented face and pluck a bit of moss off the worm-eaten brow. A chunk of the dry-rotted forehead came with it, splitting all down its cheek. I pulled my hand back in guilty alarm. Its face had been agonized before, but now it looked absolutely demented. And I was not sure what to do with the piece I'd broken off. Looking around to be sure no one had seen, I crouched and hastily buried it in the scrub at the idol's feet. From this low angle, its face had a terrible angry aspect, and I could almost imagine it was looking down disapprovingly at me.
"I'm terribly sorry," I said. "I didn't mean to do it."
At breakfast I slipped a piece of a flatcake into the pocket of my skirt, and left it at the statue's feet later, as I would have done for our Barley-Men at home.
On a different day, I climbed a flight of overgrown steps above the mill and came upon a twisted and tangled ruin where another mill had stood, decades ago. The old millpond was now an upper retaining dam for the new mill, with a spillway to the side that I guessed was meant to control heavy runoff in the spring. From the state of the old mill, its walls nothing but a jumble of broken stones with trees growing up through them, I guessed it had been taken out in a flood. And the idols here were many: heads and shoulders rising from the thickets surmounting the fallen walls; empty wooden faces peering out of the woods around the overgrown clearing—even one, I saw as I leaned over the stream, staring sightlessly up from the bottom of the creek. It looked as if it had swept down from somewhere higher up the mountain and become trapped against the stone dam. Now it was buried in leaves and silt, only its head and one shoulder emerging.
I hadn't yet decided whether I found the idols creepy or comfortingly reminiscent of home, but there was nothing sinister about them in the bright afternoon sunshine. I sat in the sun on the fallen mill wall and ate lunch while the idols watched me from the shadows. There was a warm sense of presence to the place, as if something lived here but did not mind me sharing its space for a while. I got out my notebook and, mindful of Su's warning, sketched some of the idols from the side or the back, never their faces. Then I took the leftover bits of bread and cheese from my meal, and placed them at the feet of the idols. I had never seen local people doing this, but I had been raised to treat the Barley-Men well, and whatever these were, it seemed polite to thank them for sharing their space. "Feast well and look kindly upon us, grandmothers and grandfathers," I said in my own tongue.
A flicker at the corner of my eye made me jump and spin so quickly I made myself dizzy. I thought I'd seen—but no, nothing had moved, nothing had changed; the clearing was serene and still in the sunshine, and I felt no more sense of menace than I had before.
And yet I'd fancied, for a moment, the hollow eyes of the nearest idols turning my way.
"You'll end up like Mother, Heddy, if you keep this up," I murmured to myself on my walk back down the overgrown stair to the village.
I also found, by accident, the place where they made the idols. Up to that point, I think a certain, credulous part of my brain had not quite managed to shake off the idea that there was something truly sinister about the origins of the idols—this is what happens to little girls who go out at night, whispered a voice at the back of my head, vaguely reminiscent of all my most disapproving aunts rolled into one.
But no, they were just logs, carved in the usual way. The carving place was a flat clearing beside the mill creek, upstream of the old mill on the slopes of the mountain that was supposedly off limits. I really hadn't meant to go up there; I'd simply been poking around the mill ruins, following paths through the brush, and stumbled upon a road that was clearly well used. From the scrape marks in the rocky soil, someone had been dragging heavy things here. I followed it up the mountainside and soon could hear the ring of axes and the low murmur of men chatting while they worked.
I didn't meant to spy, but the road topped a ridge and I found myself looking down at their workplace. There were about a half dozen of the village men, most of them stripped to the waist in the way of working men who don't expect women about. They were working in log-peeling teams, one man cleaving off branches while the other went behind him to lay bare the fresh yellow wood beneath long curls of bark. The creek chatted and burbled in the background before plunging over the edge in a series of short falls, leaping and bounding down the mountainside through brush-choked gullies to eventually fetch up at the mill.
The logs were not the scrubby mountain trees that grew on the slope; they were straight, thick pine and ash, cut in the valley below and sledged up here. I would have thought the workmen were preparing lumber for a new building of some kind, except the carving had already been started on some of the logs that were stripped and cut to lengths of six or seven feet. There was nothing at all mystical about them right now, with their faces half finished and holes drilled for the attachment of arms not yet added. And even for the workmen, whatever fey thing came to inhabit the idols was clearly not there yet, because the men laughed and joked as they worked in the clear autumn sunshine.
I started to take a step forward to go down and greet them, when my eye was caught by a pair of sentinels on either side of the road. They were two stone slabs, each about the height of a man, standing erect on the windswept mountainside like a gateway leading down to the clearing beside the stream. I didn't recognize they were of a piece with the other idols until I looked more closely and saw faces had been pecked out in the stone—crude faces, barely more than eyes and a suggestion of a mouth, worn nearly smooth with age.
I went closer to inspect them, and as I did, I glimpsed the familiar sight of wooden idols in the brush around them. The ones around the village usually stood alone, but here they seemed to cluster thickly, as they had at the old mill site. I looked down the hill and kept picking them out: a head visible in an elder thicket, a very old and decayed figure
leaning out of a clutch of blueberry bushes. They were everywhere, marching down the hill in both directions to form a wide, ragged circle around the men's workplace. Every last one of them was facing outward.
I had the eerie feeling they were all watching me.
Foolish, I told myself. They are only wood. I took another step, nearly to the base of the sentinels beside the road. Here, the road was worn deep in the mountain's thin, rocky soil. Many generations of feet had passed this way, so that the stones stood above me, their shadows blocking the sun. From here they seemed to lean slightly toward me, as if they might topple if I walked under them, crushing me beneath tons of stone.
I broke out in a cold sweat. It was stupid, I told myself. There was nothing to be afraid of. They were only stone and pieces of wood. I clutched my notebook like a talisman and tried to step forward.
I couldn't. I was too afraid.
I turned and walked quickly down the road. I thought I could feel the idols' gaze on the back of my neck, and my skin didn't stop crawling until the folds of the mountainside had hidden them from sight.
It was the men that worried me, not the idols, I told myself. I didn't wish to cause unpleasantness by appearing at a scene where I had no right to be. In my village, some kinds of things were meant for men or women alone. Our broom dance was like that, and merely to have a man look upon the dancing grove meant that we had to abandon it and use somewhere else. I felt guilty. I shouldn't have spied on them. The sentinel-stones were right to drive me away.
Just above the old mill site, I nearly ran into Su coming quickly up the path with two of the herd boys. "Hello, story lady!" he called. "There you are! These boys have a tale from their grandfather's time they wish to share with you."
By the time I had extricated myself from the boys, the shadow of the mountain had fallen over us and the Ox Star glimmered faintly—it was nearly brushing the mountain's upper slopes now—and it was time to go down to Meham's for supper. I found a moment to take Su aside by the garden gate. "Su, what do you know about how the wood figures are made in your village?"
