Red Spikes (4 page)

Several of us came out of the overhang and did so.

There He was, flat along Top Ledge.

‘He looks dead already. Paw Him, someone. Go up there.’

‘You go. You paw Him.’

‘No, you. I’ve got this babby. Go on. He should be up and running about. Look, everywhere, they’re popping up, those smellies.’

A growl bubbled inside Hannimanni, but there was no gleam of eyes. Every other head of us, though, the eyes were opening –
plink
here,
plink
there, mammies and babbies alike. Heads were poking up all about, look-look, foreheads wrinkling. On every rock and ledge the piles of us were clamming together tighter, while all around our borders loser-heads bobbed up, bobbed down, bobbed up somewhere else.

I sat in the middle of a pile; all the bobbing, all the looking about, made me feel chittery. I had to chew on an old, not-very-choice piece of sweet-rooty to stop myself bursting out of the clammed pile and running – running anywhere, anywhere there wasn’t a bachelor bobbing up right in front of me – which wasn’t smart, with so many of them about.

Everyone was getting to the same state. The ones with the babs was worst, crooning and twitching and trying to talk away their fear.

‘If we were to go right up on the top of the House,’ said someone, ‘right up onto the lap of that carvenservant, onto its head, maybe a ring of our teeth would keep them back, keep them off us.’

‘Yeah,’ said Broketooth nastily. ‘Or maybe if we grew wings. Or maybe if we just now grew twice as big as we are, with twice as long teeth.’

‘There’s got to be some way,’ whimpered a mammy.

Broketooth just sucked on her tooth. Everyone would have preferred to hear her scoff more, but she didn’t.

The bachelors were getting bolder, particularly as the centre of us was deadish grey Hannimanni lying there, instead of the explosion of danger that He usually was. Any moment now, I thought, He will bound up and start priding around and snapping His lips back, going big at these smelly boys, pissing on everything, making the world smell right again. Any moment.

But He continued to lie. His eyes, among all our fearful ones, were idle, soft in the firstening light, as if this were a day of leisure just dawning, not of battle. I swallowed a hard piece of rooty and chewed off another.

A loser – a big one! I didn’t know they grew so big in the wild – he danced right up the House and paused by Top Ledge. Then he came forward to sniff the situation of our Hannimanni.

‘Insolence!’ chattered a frightened mam.

‘You
stink
!’ shouted another at the line of bachelors creeping towards us. Everyone at the edge drew in their tails, and some showed teeth at them.

The big one leaned right in close to Hannimanni, who lay there drowsy, showing the very tips of His teeth, His lip too languorous to roll back and cover them.

On a House-ledge across from us, a pile of wives blew apart. I heard the scutter and the screaming, but I didn’t look. I was busy – we were all busy – watching these dancers mince forward, shrink back, try different roundabout ways at us. Bachelor heads hung out from the stone above, whiskers against the sky; they were there at the edge of my eye just as the fleeing mammies and children were there, even while I was fixed, all of me, on the biggest, nearest dancer as he propped and sneaked towards the overhang.

I could see everything, smell all the smells; everything was still. Even this bachelor was still, for the moment, because Broketooth had snarled. I smelled the sparky smell from the wires, and the poor-food funk of bachelor, and the sweetness of morning garden; the last star faded with a smell just like a drop of water drying off sunny carvenstone.

Then they jumped in among us.

‘Never!’ someone screamed.

We ran – except we weren’t
we
any more. Each was a lone dottie, without help or hero, a tiny sole vulnerable, running across the rocks, bounding up among the carvens, smelly shadows at her tail. I seen one of those paws dash a little babby-head to the rock, like breaking an egg. I turned and seen that mother taking it, all teeth and trembling, the bloke behind her keeping her in place with his claws, working at her all intent. They’re everywhere, the filth, the grey filth, each sprouting a sex that’s the first proper colour of the day. They bound and they look and they follow and we can’t be not seen, none of us can.

Here’s one and another, finishing off, pulling out, running after.

‘Hannimanni, help us!’ is calling my auntie and one of my sisters as we run.

I save my breath, but it makes no difference. In the middle of my skitter one of them is on me, smacking me down, knocking out my breath. He takes me in his claws and he shafts me; he breaks open the back of me and forces himself right up inside me, all the way up through to my gaping head. It doesn’t take long to bang and pump me full of pain, full of his stink of wild rocks and untapped water, and the breath you get when all you eat is thorn bushes.

Then he stops and is gone, and all the losers have run on, and I’m dropped like a bit of cake-crust, or a rooty-end that’s chucked aside for fresher food. Except I hurt; I lie on the rock and I hurt; I lie still so as not to hurt worse.

Kinnick-Tiddit sits nearby and shivers. She makes the rock wet with her sitting. She’s holding someone’s bab, that’s chewed and dying. The fight is moved out from us all around, a ruff of noise at the edges, like the pale fur around a face.

Kinnick-Tiddit hovers her nostrils over the torn parts of the bab. ‘This one have had the gong; that bachelor have killed it, the rough bugger.’

I can’t speak yet; I’m not yet returned from the wild. The pain is all up inside and around me like a stinging mud. I sit in it and be surprised, closed-eyed and tremor-ing just like Hannimanni yesterday.

They’re chasing Him off.

‘Byaa!’ they shout in the distance. ‘Go and feast your fat face on slave-garbage!’

‘Aye! Donkey-dung! Try that!’

‘Mouldy cake-crusts! See how you do!’

Closer is Broketooth’s voice, queered in such a way that I know she have took it too: ‘Don’t you come to me bleeding and weeping. Don’t you go thinking Our Father behaved any different when he came to us.’

And around her whimper all the mothers torn of children, all the dotties hollowed out behind.

Our servants came, but just to look; they had no food. They found the dead bachelor below us. The stupids, they gathered him onto a cloth just as if he were a proper creature; they covered him with powders and flowers and carried him off for veneration – when there were all these babbies, some on the rock and stone like rubbished fruit-skins, some still in the arms of mams and cousins, staining and mystifying them.

They tidied them away eventually. By then the babbies smelled bad, and had all been laid down by their mams. The first big mams were climbing the watch-rock and the new Hannimanni was letting them come at Him and groom. My pain was pretty much gone by then, and I was clearing in my head about it all.

The funk of wildness is fading from the new man’s smell; He’s beginning to be right for us, essential, handsome. Little fights are breaking out all the time, mild better-n-you fights; I myself have bested old Drumbreast, who was a touch too big for me before.

I sit at the edge. The new Hannimanni struts here and there, chasing off any bachelors that still hang around, clawing up a girlfriend as His fancy takes Him. I keep well away from Him yet.

Food! Food is the thing now. From here I reckon I can smell the fruits being chopped in our servants’ houses. I can hear the juice drip to board and floor, and the breads and cakes swelling in their cookers. The sawing of knife through rooty is like an itch all over me. Our servants bring us broad platters crowded with coloured smells. We run to meet them, farther from the House than I’ve ever been.

All us dotties, we’re all running, we’re all grabbing more than we can hold, we’re all eating like mad, each enough for two.

{ A Good Heart

I loved Annie Stork and she loved me.
We never done the dancy-dancy, but I most certainly thought we would end up wed. I were looking babies into that girl’s eyes, even if I weren’t putting them into her below.

So smack yourself, Arlen Michaels, smack yourself in the head and get out of this bush and away from here. What do you want to cause yourself such pain for?
You
ought try always,
don’t Nanna say,
to add to the tally of happi-nesses
in the world and good works, in everything you do. You
ought be trying for no one’s harm
.

Well, I aren’t. No one’s harm at all. Or at least no one’s but my own, and what should that matter?

Ooh, there sounds the horn, off among the trees. Soon they’ll be here, and I won’t have the choice to run off. I dither, bunching my shirt-neck with my nervous hands. The white ribands loll down from the trees all round the clearing. How can I bear to walk away from them? How can I bear to stay? All those small evidences of the Lord-son’s riches are like this, like watching Baker Marten pull from his oven some vast cake I will never get a piece of.

Now it’s voices. Some of them still sing the song that swept the happy pair out of town. Some call and laugh over the music. The footfalls of the two horses thud uneven and slow through the whole hill. Now it is too late; now I must stay put or I’ll be seen. Fool. Knot-head.

What are you doing, hiding, peeping, like Dotty Cinders through women’s winders? Why aren’t you off fishing or dogging or being of some useful help to someone?

There’s movement, the colour on something, the Lord-son’s sleeve, maybe, or that cloth around the horse that is like a broidered tent. Hup, here they come.

The leaves wag in front of my face, in front of my great sad sigh. Here come the two splendid lord’s beasts in their tents, and borne upon their backs the Lord-son in his robes and Annie Stork in her bride-raiment, oh my gracious, white as a waterfall and with that yellow cloak over all, stiff with gold-thread embroidery. Don’t know why you’re so surprised, Arlen. You saw all this down in the square before you took flight up here. Don’t know why your heart is choosing
now
to split, tube from chamber and all your blood pour out the opening.