The Gift of Stones (15 page)

What would you have done if you were me? Run up and tell the stoneys, Look, the smoke is thick, the rooks are high, they’re not there now but there were ships upon the sea, your world is coming to an end? Would that have caused alarm? It would have caused, instead, delight. They would have sent for me at night and asked me to repeat it all while they relaxed and ate. And if I made them step outside and look beyond the hill at smoke and rooks? What then? They’d only marvel at the power of my tongue. The ritual of our trade was this – I did not tell the truth. They looked to me for comfort not for gloom.

Of course, a man must eat and food for me was earned by talk. I did invent for them another breed of tales in which a fleet of ships with crews, half rook, half man, had come to land. They lived on fire. Flames were their meat. Their drink was smoke. Or else (for children) a tribe of giants had come ashore and in their haste to devastate the land had knocked a rook’s egg from its nest. The story was the rook’s revenge. The moral was the power of the weak. Or else the men that came ashore were armed with weapons that were gleaming in the oddest way. The stones that made them were as light as leaves; their arrows sped like swallows. Compared, our arrows were like pigeons, plump and clumsy in the air.

This last was not a favourite tale. The stoneys and the merchants were aware that trade in flint was bad. The marketplace was not the bustle it had been. There were fewer horsemen passing through with enticing goods to trade for arms. Although the farmers still arrived to barter what they grew for what we made, there were old trading friends who seemed to disappear.

Who dared discuss this, openly, aloud? Not anyone I knew. They only whispered that perhaps there was a plague, a war, some floods, which kept the trade away. They did not doubt that life – despite its passing oddities – would go their way quite soon. This was the lesson they had learned whenever trade had slackened in the past: the outside world was never free from stone. There was no sickling of the corn, no scraping hides, no fishing, hunting, wars, no cutting flesh, no knives, no fires, except for stone and stoneys. Without the stoneys men would have to fight with sticks. And what would women use to cut the cord when children came? Their teeth? What next? Were people just as mean as wolves?

And so the merchants waited, unconcerned. They had stocks. They did not barter with the stoneys for more tools. They’d wait – and, maybe, falling trade would prove to their advantage in a while. They’d pay the stoneys less for flints while demand was low. And when demand increased again? Only a fool expects largesse in trade.

What of the stoneys? It was clear that for a while their flints could not be sold in quite the numbers that they’d hoped. They used the time they saved on making tools by mending walls or building beds or finishing those thousand tasks that had built up, like dust, around the house. If anything, a mite unnerved, they worked a little harder than before. They were like bats. They had to flap and fly. If they put down upon the ground for rest, they knew they’d never fly again.

So, to the point. What do I know of Doe? One thing’s for sure, her sled was not at work. The stoneys were not making tools. There was no merchant with the will to say More Stone and for his will to set the villagers to work and for the villagers to despatch Doe for sleds of flint. Where there’s no work then people starve. Doe and her daughter were the first to learn. They searched for rabbits, berries, nuts. But there were none. The villagers lived where they lived because the hill was full of stone, not because the soil was rich or the undergrowth a busy universe of untrapped, unpicked food.

I could not invent for you a better recipe for mischief – the world haywire with ships and fires; the woman, hungry, desperate; the men, denied their stone, with time and minor tasks upon their hands. It does not take a minstrel to make that story rhyme. It only needed Doe to put her hand upon the arm of some shy stoney passing by, or for some man, emboldened by the bony weakness of poor Doe, to touch her buttocks or her waist, for what I’d witnessed on the heath to happen in our village, too. I’ve said before, I spied on her. Why not? I only dreamed that I might save her or the girl from falling rocks, or wind, or wolves. So watching her was just my way of mounting guard. Yet it was not rocks or wind or wolves that made me want to run clear from my hiding place and save her from herself. It was my eldest cousin, the slow and cheerful one. She took him to the bracken and returned with apples and with cheese. He walked off by himself, more stooped and thoughtful than he had been when Doe had met him on the path.

I watched her other times with other men. She did not starve. And once there was a bonus. She found mushrooms near the spot where she and one young man had lain. She shared them with the girl that night, while I awaited dawn, as cold, unloved and venomous as viper’s dew.

I was a man made hollow. I cannot tell if it was rage or love or lunacy that sent me running at first light through the village to the shore and then along the coast in search of samphire for my Doe. We’d let the flesh embrace; we’d watch the stems whine and bubble in the fire like spit in love. My stem, her flesh, our love. That was my thought as, arm in pain, I ran and ran along the path that took me to the heath.

You know the route. I’ll not detail the landmarks that are old friends to us. The samphire was moist and smooth, and flourishing, unpicked, where once the geese had died. There were no signs of huts upon the heath. There were no rooks or ships or fires. There was just the samphire and the juicy rocks and wind. I picked her fill. Me filling her was all I had in mind. I marvelled at my speed and skill, and at the luck which brought me through the bracken, over rocks, without a sprain or scratch.

I reached the village at the end of evening with a little owl-light, dim and looming on the land. I went straight to her home. I called out, “Rabbit, Rabbit, Doe,” and held the samphire high above my head – a challenge – in my one and only hand. This was no gift. I’d come to pay. But she had gone. Her daughter ran to me as if I were the only one to trust. She hung on to my waist. Her tale was this – that Doe had gone off with a man at noon. She still had not returned.’

‘W
HAT COULD
I do at night? Not much, except to stay awake and sketch out in my mind the likely fates of Doe. The girl was still too young to fear much more than being by herself at night. Now I was there she stretched out on her back and slept. I did not try to sleep. I sat up like a widow on a grave. If Doe came back, I would not wish to be a snuffling body in her bed.

Perhaps, I thought, she’s found some coterie of men who want her for the night. They’ve paid her extra nuts or eggs to sleep with them till dawn. I ought to light a brand and walk about the village, calling out, “Own up! Who’s tupping Doe? Which men are blunting blades with her?”

Instead I dwelled on what might seem a less than likely reason for her absence in the night. She’d taken off, like me, and, desperate with loathing for her life, had run towards the heath. Perhaps she’d blundered past me as I returned. What I had taken as a rabbit, sent frantic in the undergrowth by me, had been a Rabbit of a larger kind. If we had met, both breathless on the clifftop path, among the winkle-berries and the ferns, and our collision had not spun us crashing to the beach, then what certain congress there’d have been. Imagine how the village kept us both apart. Imagine how the cliff, the wind, the sea, the samphire on my arm would bring us close again. At last, the prospect sent me off to sleep.

Doe did not return that night. I asked the villagers who passed if they had seen her. They had not. I spoke in whispers to those men I knew had been with her. They shook their heads. They had no time to talk. No, they’d never been such friends with Doe, they said. It was their view that my tongue was running loose again. And they’d see to it that if I didn’t strap it down I’d find myself in trouble, and quite soon.

It seemed that no one knew of Doe. They had more pressing problems of their own. While I’d been picking samphire on the heath a troop of horsemen had ridden through the village at great speed. Their horses had knocked merchants down, and injured some. And frightened all. They had not stopped to trade. The villagers were now subdued and inward, like bleatless sheep who’ve smelt the scent of circling wolves and turned for comfort to an open patch of grass.

Was I the only one that moved at speed? I ran towards the hill, exactly in the way that I had run that morning long ago when all the village boys and girls had helped open up the new flint shaft, that morning when I slipped away to dine on rabbit with outsiders in the distant wood. I passed Doe’s house of stones where her daughter – at my bidding – sat and waited at the door. I passed between the sentries made of rock. And when I reached the summit of the hill I stood upon the fattest, tallest flint. I was the one-armed sentinel of all the land and sea below. I looked for rooks and ships and smoke. There were no ships. The only rooks were labouring the air about their roosts with calm and even wings. What smoke there was was ours. It came from stoney fires.

I knew no sight more sad than that – the sight of that small, kempt place, its walls as ordered and as uniform as ribs laid bare, its life as timorous, fettered and discreet as that enjoyed by barnacles on stone. And all around and all beyond, in blues and greys and greens, and fading far away into the whites of distance and of sky, was all the outside world. It seemed as if the outside world was like a mist and the mist was closing in. And all our world was shrinking, breath by breath. Someone, something, was hovering between our village and the sun.

They say in villages more fanciful than ours that when you die you hover like a hawk above your home. Your life assembles there. Your mother and your father who died so long ago are sitting side by side. You see yourself as baby, child and man. You shed no tears. You – like a hawk – spread out your wings and fly between your lifetime and the sun. The beating shadow that you cast falls like a blessing and farewell on to yourself as baby, child and man. “Beware the shadow of a hawk,” they say. “It buries men.”

It was a hawk that led me to poor Doe. The shadow that I’d felt at first was cloud. It touched me with its drops of rain. But the dimming, stubborn shadow that held my eye was hawk. It hovered over bracken on the exposed brow between Leaf’s home and sea. The bracken looked as if it had been hit by wind. It was flattened in a swathe. So that was where the horsemen had galloped through in so much haste and disarray. I wondered if the hawk was seeking beetles in the horses’ dung. I watched it drop and walk, as cocky as a magpie, in the swathe. And then I saw what seemed like someone dozing in the bracken a little distance from the horses’ path. The shadow of the hawk – I swear – passed over it and did not stop until it was a speck above the sea.

You think I’m weaving words? Then run with me down to the bracken path. Your heart is stone if you are not afraid. That “someone dozing” must be Doe. That body must be dead.

I found her flat upon her back. Her head was on its side. The gulls had had her eyes. One leg was twisted, one arm was turned. Her hands were weighing down her smock. Her fingers were as straight and cold and blue as razor shells. At her side a dozen scallops lay, sticky with her blood. I could not see the wound until I knelt to straighten out her arm and leg. And then I saw the wound deep in the shallow waist-dell of her back. I saw the arrow, too. And pulled it out. And wiped it clean. And wondered at its weight and shape and shine.’

‘T
HIS IS
the story of Doe’s Death.

A man had come for her at noon. We do not know his name – but let it be my cousin. He will do. He was his usual timid self. He gave Doe apples and some bread.

“Why can’t we do it here?” he asked. “The girl can play outside.”

But Doe said no. “This place is ours. Not yours.”

They went outside and when she saw the way he looked along the path towards the village to check that no one came, her indifference for him was transformed. Her mood was fashioned out of equal helpings of levity and spite. Why should he feel such shame at passing time with her? She had the apples and the bread. What else was there to lose?

My cousin took Doe by the wrist and pulled her to the beaten bracken where normally she lay down with her men. There was a freckled patch of flattened bracken pits as evidence of trade.

“Not there,” she said. “My daughter is too close.”

She pulled my cousin back onto the path.

“Come on,” she said, in a voice more intimate and teasing than she had used before. “I know a private place.”

She took him by the hand and walked with him downhill towards the village. His passion for her soon became embarrassment. He took his hand away from hers. He tried to make it seem that their descent into the village was a chance encounter, nothing more. He grew alarmed when he heard voices or the rasp of bellows or the click of stone. He fell behind – so now she walked ahead as if she were the greater of the two. And he hung back, half mesmerized by Doe and how she walked and the allure of when she’d said, “I know a private place,” and half wishing that he’d never left the workshop with the excuse that he was looking for some wood for hafts.

“Come on,” she called, as they approached the market green where, idle from the dearth of trade, the merchants were like owls, fat-faced, big-eyed and missing nothing. They saw the woman. It was true what they had heard. She was as wild and skinny as a stoat. Yet, like a stoat, she was a pleasing sight. I wonder what she’d do for, say, a bone of perfume, one merchant wondered in a whisper meant for everyone to hear. And then they saw my sheepish cousin in her wake. He had no choice. He became as solemn as a stone. He asked some merchants if they had good wood for hafts. They saw his hands were empty and they asked what goods he had to trade. They said that wood was not so cheap that it could be purchased with fistfuls of air. My bashful cousin blushed. No one there was fooled. His contract with Doe was as visible as if the two were sharing just one smock. Besides, the woman was beckoning and holding out her hand and calling, ‘Come on, come on, you were so hurried just a while ago.’