The Gift of Stones (17 page)

Instead I remained hidden while the horsemen galloped past. They were in too much haste and fear to even notice those two people, those two nearly naked bodies standing waist high in the bracken. We could hear cries from the market green. My cousin was alarmed. He wondered what had happened to his family, his home. He ran – his clothes half on and off – into the swathe of broken stems where the riders had just passed. He called to Doe that she should dress and hurry, too. Who knows what dangers there might be with horsemen so close by?

There was no time for her to leave. In moments I was at her side and throwing samphire in her face and pelting her with shells. The riders had invaded me. Their flight, their speed, their carelessness. What must it be to simply fly on hooves like that, to be the two-armed horseman in the wind? That demon part of me which lived in caves was now set loose. It was as weathered as a piece of bark. It had a horseman’s squint. You’d take its face to be a leather purse with teeth. It knew no bounds. The woman’s dignity beneath its blows, her independence as she fell, only increased its rage. She was a goose. She was a mortar full of corn. She was no more than stone. And yet she spoke. She said, “What kind of friend are you? You don’t touch me.”

She would have crawled away, just bruised, if that odd, smooth arrowhead had not fallen from my bag. I picked it up and – so the gossip goes – I plunged it in her back.’

E
NOUGH
. My father’s stories are a mask. I owe it to my mother and to him to tell you only what is known and not what he would wish us to believe. Doe had bled to death for sure and father had, indeed, found her beneath the shadow of the hawk. He had wiped clean the arrowhead, and placed his ear against my mother’s chest. She was entirely cold and still. In that my father told the truth. She was no more than stone.

It was not easy for a one-armed man whose stump was swollen and in pain, whose eyes were full, to lift my mother from the ground and balance her across his back. And then to stoop and to pick up the arrowhead. And then to walk with them through bracken to the springy path which joined the village and the shore. For once he did not feel the wind and spray upon his back. My mother was his shield.

The stoneys and the merchants were quite used to seeing father on that path. It was the path which led him to the outside world and on which he would return weighed down and weary with new tales. The magic ship had come that way. The talking goose. The boy who had the gift of flames. It would not seem so strange to see my father stooped and slow returning to them by that route. What he carried on his back, that shining something in his hand, they took to be some teasing evidence with which he’d complicate his lies.

In fact he did not say a word. He had no breath. He put the body on the grass and, holding mother by an ankle, sat down at her feet. He placed the arrowhead on her chest.

It was some time before the first brave men found time and inclination to take a closer look. My father’s world and Doe’s was hardly theirs. They felt no duty to the corpse. Unlike the people from beyond the wood they did not fear the dead. They saw no need to truss up the bodies of the slain or to placate them with provisions for the grave. For them the dead were powerless. They could not punish those who lived. They had no weapons of revenge. They had not been liberated from this world to carry out some mischievous design. There were no ghosts. But still, a woman dead and murdered – at a guess – by those same men who had swept through the marketplace and knocked the merchants down, was cause for some alarm. There’d be no recompense, for sure. Those horsemen did not seem the sort who’d pay their debts or recognize the rules of trade. They were the sort to fear.

‘What happened here?’ My father wet his lips to make reply. But he had no chance to speak. A stoney had sunk down onto his knees and, leaning over Doe, was staring at the weapon on her chest.

‘What’s this?’ he said. He hesitated for a moment as if to seek some reason why he could not take the object off the corpse. And then he reached and lifted it. ‘So light,’ he said. ‘So smooth.’

My father’s neighbours turned their backs on Doe. They passed the arrowhead from hand to hand and shook their heads. They did not know this stone – if stone it was. There were no flattened planes or impact dents where the hammer stone had struck. There were no fractures at the arrow’s stem, or facets where the arrow had been flaked. The blade was flat and thinner than a cuttle shell. It was hard and sharp. Its surface was the colour of winter oak leaves and as smooth and cold to touch as bacon skin. Then one man noticed what the rest had missed. He pulled the broken wooden shaft from the arrowhead. He pushed his little finger in the hole it left and held it up for all his friends to see. At first they were confused. And then they knew that flint was second-best. This stem was something flint could never be, as hollow as an acorn cup and twenty times as deep.

They turned upon my father now. What kind of tale was this? Invention was my father’s craft. They thought the arrowhead was father’s trick. ‘Come on,’ they said. ‘Let’s hear.’

I do not know which of the many tales he told or who he blamed or how my mother died. If he’d invented naked warriors who’d slid down lightning from the sky, or animals, half horse half wolf, who’d sworn vengeance on the world, the stoneys would have taken it. Their sense of what was true or not was punctured by the arrowhead. A world that could produce a weapon as perfect and as beautiful as that could produce a thousand wonders of my father’s sort. In fact my father did not try to concoct a story to explain the arrowhead. He turned it in his hand and shrugged and claimed he was as ignorant as them. But we know father and we tense when we hear him using phrases of that kind. ‘I’m just as ignorant as you,’ he said, ‘of where this arrow has come from, or where the stone, or where the people with such craft. Not here. Not us, for sure.’ And then the one-armed village story-teller voiced the one thought that lay siege to everybody’s mind. He said, ‘So now we know why trade in flint is bad.’

T
HERE WAS
no point in asking father to say more. That winter was the worst he’d known. It froze what bones he had. He was a silent man. He feared the questions, Where is my mother? What’s become of Doe?

Together we found food enough for two. We lived, but thinly. I’d learnt and father guessed or knew which plants were good, what seaweed could be warmed and chewed, how grubs took refuge under bark, where toadstools could be found, where nuts. Each morning we went gathering ebb meat on the shore, dead fish or crabs. We were competing with the seagulls and the tide. And on those days when there was nothing else my father showed me how to pull the frosted roots of famine grass. The secret was to twist and tug. The roots were sweet to taste but bitter in the gut.

You need not fear for us. We’d come through worse, and still had tales to tell. You might, instead, direct your sympathy downhill. The stoneys were a dying breed. This was the age of smiths. There was no trade for us at all. Who’d want to hoe their soil with stone when stone might splinter on the frost? Who’d go for flint when tools in flint would flake with too much use? Now flint was only good for walls and tombs. For implements and arms, the world demanded bronze.

The gift of bronze, they said, had come by ships. My father nodded; he had seen the fleet. The sailors and the merchants and the smiths had put ashore. They’d found where metals could be mined. They settled there. The merchants who passed through – and, seeing our dilemma, did not stop for trade – would, pestered by the knappers, tease us all with displays of their bronze, their repertoire of shapes and decorations, their startling merchandise.

Here were heads for hoes and mallets, scythes, with moulded holes and knobs to hold the wooden shaft. Here were blades with ribs, with spines, with knuckles where the swordsman put his thumb. And here were knives that matched the shape of chestnut leaves, the curve of carps’ tongues, the coolness of icicles. The merchants showed us axes that had wings, and helmets horned like rams, and beaten shields as round and gleaming as the sun, and knives with pommels engraved with claws or snakes or eyes. In rabbit skins were wrapped the finest works of bronze: necklaces and rings, pins and brooches, plates and harness bells.

The stoneys looked on in dismay. Their flint could not compete. It was too innocent and dull. They listened without comprehension while the passing traders told of how the bronze was mined and mixed and made. It took, they said, two hands of copper to each thumb of tin. And then you’d need some charcoal and a pit and some bellows with a mouth of clay. A fire was lit inside the pit. And when it cooled a metal plug was formed. That was the easy part. A child could tackle that. The craft was in the moulding and the beating of the bronze, the removal of the flashes and the casting jets, the details of design.

There was a question that they asked amongst themselves. The question was, Who found this out and why? Who first thought to mine for copper, tin, to measure it in hands and thumbs, to charge it in a pit with charcoal, to pour it in a mould? With what in mind? And why? It was quite clear how the first knappers got to work. You only need to throw a stone to see it break and view the sinews and the flesh within. An idle child with nothing else to do would soon find out that flint was sharp and hard. But bronze? It made no sense.

My father had some stories which would explain the mysteries of bronze. But the stoneys did not wish to hear. They knew their village was exposed. They were obsessed by that. The scripture – that they could not be touched because they had the gift of stones – had been proved false. They felt like carcasses while all around were gulls and rooks and wolves.

Have pity, then, on gulls and rooks and wolves. They’d not dine well. Our neighbours were as thin as Doe. Their carcasses were only skin and bone. The sockets of their eyes were large and rimmed from sleeplessness. Their skin was rough and dry, their noses damp. They lived on what was left from better days. They were too timorous to forage on the hillside or the shore. They couldn’t tell good food from weed. They’d drink salt water from the sea. They’d feed themselves with sand.

Of course, our merchants remained fat. They had reserves of food. They’d set aside some grain and meat to trade with in the early spring. So now they traded with themselves. A merchant who had dried fruit could make a friend of one with hams. But merchants are not merchants without fresh merchandise. It was not very long before some traders packed and left. There was no profit left in flint and they would have to start anew, elsewhere, before their riches were used up. They bartered for some horses and some sleds and, while we gathered round to watch, they packed all their possessions and set off towards the place where bronze was made. Their future was with bronze, they said. They only hoped that if the outside world was wild with horsemen and with war, their tongues and merchandise could purchase passage to a market which was as safe – and profitable – as ours had been. We did not wish them luck – or well. Not even when the final trader left. We did not doubt that they’d be wealthy once again. They’d pick up riches like a rabbit picks up ticks. That was their skill.

My father’s six cousins and his uncle were amongst the first to leave. His uncle did not say to father, ‘You are family. So is the girl. You both must come with us. I promised your dying mother years ago that I’d look after you.’ He simply disappeared at night.

When traders left, the stoneys squabbled over who should occupy their homes. The victors lived in grandeur without food and with no purpose to their lives. They maintained walls, of course. They observed the rigid courtesies of life. They made no noise at night. And there were some who still sat at their anvils working flint as if they thought that bronze, brought in by boat, would tire of us and go to sea again.

The wiser ones sat on the stones outside their homes to warm themselves in winter light. Why waste good wood on heating flint? They needed all the wood for night when, opened by their hunger to the cold, they could not sleep. They were not tired. Their muscles were unused. They had not spent the day silently engaged with stone. For once, low conversations filled the night. What if? What if? What if we stay here, will we live? What if we leave, what then?

And in the day what was there else to do but talk? The village seemed a shabby and a friendly place at last. People did not shut themselves inside. They strolled. They lingered. They paused for chat and gossip and for news. They took an interest in each other’s grieving, empty inside worlds and in the outside world as well. How could they not? The outside world was closing in like lichen on a stone. Unless the stone is busy, turning all day long, the lichen creeps and clothes and wraps. And so the hill, the forest and the sea wrapped us up too. The paths became unused, the pits fell in, the wind reorganized our lives. We lived like rabbits, sociable and bored and easy prey.

When horsemen came we hid. They did not come, of course, for arrowheads, or tools. They only came to ride between our homes and to shout obscenities and threats. They were our masters now. Some nights they used an empty merchant’s house for stables and for sleep. They drank, and were as rash and ragged as small boys. We feared the time when they would help themselves to women or to food. Was it in our lifetime or just a dream when stoneys had told such riders to dismount and leave their horses in the care of boys, when we could turn our backs on them and tell ourselves, ‘Anyone can ride a horse and shake a stick. Where is the skill in that?’

At last the truth was plain. My father broke his silence to pass his wisdom on. ‘So now you know,’ he said. ‘You can’t eat stone. You can’t burn stone. You can’t make clothes from flint. You’ll have to leave this village or you’ll die.’ His audience told him, ‘Hold your tongue.’ They preferred – we all preferred – the entertainment of his lies.

W
E TOOK
our leave in spring. There were old people there, too frail to walk. They chose to stay behind and take their chances in the village of their births. They would not be alone. There were the horsemen who passed through and might be grateful for some help with caring for their mounts or cooking food. A pair of sisters and their stoney men refused to leave as well. They’d spoken – or much more – with passing merchants. They thought that they’d survive by living off the trees. The merchants promised that they’d trade food for charcoal. The cost of charcoal was too high near where the bronze was made.