Red Spikes (16 page)

It was a cold night and, as I said, fine. I walked out onto my path in my blanket and the moonlight was silver all around me, throwing down hard black shadows, their edges fine as a butcher-knife’s. Up the hill where the mice had come from, a wisp of smoke floated over Bet Cransk’s place, and I couldn’t say I was surprised.

I could have protected her. I could have stood up and spoken for her. I’m not small. I’m not the most respected man, I’m no Pater, but neither am I no one; I am not of no account.

I could at least have given them pause. A better neighbour might have been there and said something, made them think what they were doing.

She was stupid about it; she was obvious. The damage started at Binder’s Copse and never a step east of it. You could see the line in Binder’s crop, wriggling grey one side, golden and straight the other. And everyone knew, from all his battles, how the town boundary ran across Binder’s land. Didn’t I go cold, standing there with mice patting the toes of my boots, but not the heels! I could have stepped from clear road into the carpet of them, and back out again; they
drew
the boundary with their bodies.

So once the council saw that, they only had to look for someone with a grievance against them, didn’t they? Someone with a grievance and with no authority except over such as this, except over mice and such.

I did what I could for her, though I barely recognised her. They have not broken her skull. I shouldn’t think she will die. But they shook up her brain in its box fairly fiercely; she has not made much sense since. And who would have thought a head could look so softened, bulging and bleeding and all miscoloured, as if it had been baked wrong? Her beaten eyes, believe it, are bigger than her mashed nose. You can hear the hard work it is, moving the breath in and out of that face. You can
smell
the blood that won’t be sopped up out of the earthen floor, however hard I press the cloth to it.

Perhaps it was the smell that made me decide to cook – to cover it. More likely it was the moon, which makes all sorts of madness in a person, turns everything into a dream. And I was alone up here, with the town’s rage written into Bet’s face, and my own anger, my own bad conscience, passing through me wave on wave at the sight of her, regular like the mice, keeping me from dozing. Keeping me even from sitting; I threw myself up off the bench and paced about and sought for breath out in the silvery air.

Finally all those things preyed on me enough: the black canister on the shelf, the heap of shavings next to it, the little slabs of bark, the herbs. Serve them right, I thought. Give them the lie if it works. Or some such thinking. I don’t remember. I was eager to try it; that is the truth.

Last moon I came up here, you see. I had lain and lain in my bed and looked up at the shadows in the roof, and every now and again the little rushing passed my door, pitter-patter, like a handful of grain cast across the hard ground there, across the step. I knew she could not get away with it much longer.
I
would burst and tell soon, if someone else did not.

Bootless and in my nightshirt I went up, as if pretending to myself I was not really going anywhere, not really leaving my home.

I sat out in the dark on a stump and watched her through her open door. Bare-armed and red-faced she was, and busy. She steamed up the water on her fire outside, and then she hurried it to the table and put all the things in, always in the same order, always in the same amounts. And she stirred it and she put the lid on and she held her breath three times as long as she could, and she lifted off the lid again.

And
fluffuther-fluffuther
over the rim they came like boiling, only the boilings ran away on little grey and pink legs, and pulled grey tails behind them. They poured off the table edges and ran out the door and away to the west, to the town. And Bet came out once more and filled the empty pot from the waterbutt.

I sat there in the dark and watched, again and again. It was a dance, and by dawn I had picked up the rhythm of it, and I knew all the steps.

Many’s the time I would pass Bet on the road, going slowly along and looking, some skinny white root with earth still on it in one hand, some bunch of pulled greeneries in the other.

‘Hey, Bet. What you up to there?’

‘Pedder.’

‘What you hunting?’

‘Bits and bobbles,’ she always said. ‘What is good to eat and good to medicine people.’

Mater Strongarm maintained she saw Bet gathering in the graveyard, of a full moon or a new. But then, you’ve got to ask what the Mater herself was doing wandering that side of town in the night. And you’ve got to remember, this is a woman who considered selling her own daughter to Travellers, that hard winter that nearly never ended. Mater Strongarm would do a lot for coin or her own advantage. I myself think Bet didn’t wish anyone evil that didn’t deserve it.

I put the pot on to boil. I ready everything on the table, the table that is usually such a clutter, but which the paters and maters so kindly cleared with their sticks when they came here to do their punishment. I put the things all in a row in the order I saw Bet use them. I open the canister ready. It is heavy, half-full of black grains. I stand there stuck, my finger in the canister’s mouth. I want to reach in and stir the grains, to know how they feel, to see if they crumble. But something will not let me.

I put canister and lid on the table. I go out and sit on the stump where I watched before. I almost drop with exhaustion there – suddenly sleep is on me, pressing down inside my face. But then the pot-lid clanks and I’m up and collecting it, ready to do the dance.

And dance I do.
Rustle
go the lamb-leaves,
crackle
go the bay,
plop
goes the bark, and the two pinches of black grains turn the whole to murk. The paper and the shrivelled thing, the snip of man-drag root, the wood-shaving and four of the berries. All done, so I pick up the spoon, which is mouse-coloured with this use, and seven times stir one way and seven times the other, just like Bet did the night I watched her.

Then I clap the lid on, and hold my breath. Bet Cransk’s sleeping face watches, warped as some clumsy, child-made mask, all its puffs and pillows shining in the candlelight.

After the third breath, off I lift the lid triumphant, eager for the fountain of mice.

Nothing.

Not quite nothing. The water’s still there, still hot. Hot and empty and clear. All the stuffs I put in it are gone. Wasted, I think. All gone to make a pot of empty water.

I’m about to put the lid back on, to carry the pot to the door and empty the magicked water down the hill. Then I see it.

‘Hah!’

It’s at the bottom on the near side, crawling slowly along the near side.

I reach for the spoon. ‘I’ve made
one
, at least.’

I lift it out and put it on the table, and bring the candle near.

Eugh. It’s an abomination of a mouse. It has all the elements, but they have come together wrong, all in the wrong places. Pieces that should be inside are outside and dragging, leaving wet marks on the table. One of the eyes is about right, but the other shines out from the back, near the root of the crooked half-tail. There are only three legs. And the whole skin – there is scarcely any hair on the thing – is wrong, shrivelled, boiled, painful-looking. The whole mouse is suffering, the way it shudders and creeps, the way its mouth works in its side there, as if it is trying to scream.

It’s easy to kill a mouse. Jeesh, hasn’t the whole town been stomping and smearing them underfoot these last months? Doesn’t everyone up to the oldest and down to toddlers know the exact force needed to pop out the life of one and not have it stick to your boot and smell there?

I know I will wish I hadn’t killed it quite so fast, hadn’t taken it by its tail-stump and thrown it with such force and so far in among the trees. I’ll want to take another look at it, to see again exactly where its parts are, exactly how it moves, to think about what I made and wonder that I made it, however monstrous it is, that I cooked up a thing that lived, in however much pain.

But while it shudders there and looks in two directions and makes that sticky sound in its mouth, the only thing to do is smack it out of life with the spoon, then cast it away where no one will ever see it again. I stand at the forest edge, wiping my hands down my shirt, over and over, to rid them of the touch of the tail. I hurry into Bet’s house, pick up the water-pot, busily empty and rinse it. I must forget that I even saw the mouse-thing, let alone that I boiled it up myself from Bet’s bits and bobbles. I must put out of my mind, completely and forever, the knowledge that I could do such a thing. For where would that lead? What good could it bring me?