With this, he bids me lug him back across the river, juddering down the bridge’s southern slope, and now along the balded turf that ribbons by the waterside. Back past the marsh-pond white with rush, its island with a firewood crown whereby the unhaired boys bask naked, belly down on sun-cooked rock. Atop his pyre their rag-child sits, his straw head tipped upon one side, regarding us as we pass on, though yet without a face. The same leaves rise, a dry gold splash about my heel.
The silence holds ‘til
we are near to half-way home, whereon my question may no longer go unasked.
‘What happens now, about that poor killed woman?’ Lightly spoken, this, and sounding free of care.
His voice comes back above the creak and crackle of his bier, a whisper from the blaze.
‘Oh, nothing much to speak. The river brings us matters like to this from while to while. All nature of occurrences take place amongst the passes north, their remnants fetched up here: unwanted newborns, oxen with too many eyes, or the encumbering old. Saving for if they have the mark of plague we put them to the earth within a day, with flowers offered in the stead of goods. That is the custom here . . .’
He pauses. On the east wind comes a wail, as from far off. Before me, turning to look, stretch the sodden fields and then the hill, its summit wound about with smokes. The tiny figures fling their arms up, keening in the distance.
‘Although there are some who wish it otherwise,’ the cunning-man concludes, and we go on from there to come at last upon the bracken-fortressed settlement. There Olun tells the gateman, with his bat hands flapping black, about the murdered woman by the bridge, and bids him pass along the story.
‘Good luck to the Hob,’ say all the willeins as we groove the dirt between them, dragging back to Olun’s dwelling. ‘Good luck to the Hob.’
It comes upon me now that they are speaking to the both of us.
No. No, not me. To be a Hob-wife is no lot for me, the tiresome learning of each chant, a hut you may not move within for all the tokens sinister. To know each duty and each ceremony, dressing in a robe of faces. No.
Nor is the thought of wasting moons while learning all the old man’s mummery a pleasing one. There is no saying how long it may be before he dies. It’s up to me to find some quicker way of worming out his secrets.
Here’s a thing: though he casts off his son and has no love for him, it may be that the son has knowledge of the father’s ways. Aye. Aye, that’s neatly thought, that it may be as well to pay a visit to my brother Garn before the shadows grow much longer. He may tell me of the tunnels that his father walks in dog-dreams.
What are dog-dreams?
After a while, big Hurna lumbers back to Olun’s hut from her devotions on the hill, her slab face flushed with blood, all bright after her sing-song in the smoke. The old man tells her she is lazy, and that he has need for her to caulk his sores. ‘They’re bad today,’ he grumbles. ‘It’s a long job that you have.’
She nods, without complaint, and pulls him from the sun and through the cram of charm that bounds his hut. Let here alone, it seems that now may be a while as good as any for to visit with the Hob-man’s son. Hurna is talking deep inside the hut, still trying to persuade the old man to her faith while she attends his weals. Scraps of their converse drift out past the swing-woods hung to one side in the doorway there.
‘The world is made in fire, which is thereby superior, and ends in fire as all the prophets say. The grave-soil may bring pests and blights to rack the living, and yet we who choose the bright track into dream-while leave no miseries behind. All that is pure within us rises, save our residue. We that proclaim this creed . . .’ and on and on, her voice flat as the murmur of a hive. It is a marvel how these godly bodies manage it, to be at once both mad and dull. Let me steal off, between the dozing huts and leave them prattling, away into the noon.
There are no spirit-women in the trees, there are no gods below the dirt, else that they be as daft as Hurna. People all are born with no more why to it than some poor sagging fieldgirl shows her arse off in the high weeds, and there’s scarcely better reason in the dying of us neither. Where is there a god that strikes us down with venom from a trampled bee? Who puts us in this place then floods the crop that there is not enough to feed us with; drops ashes from the sky and strikes our cattle blind? If it be gods, they have queer sport.
And yet in every willage there are fat-faced little men and sickly girls who scourge themselves and fast to please some spirit-bear, or else a tree they fancy speaks with them. How can the gods demand starved ribs and lash-striped backs above the sufferings that they already fashion for us? If we in this world are cruel by harsh necessity, how much more wicked are the gods who want for nothing yet torment us to the death? Such things there may not be.
It is not gods that welcome us beyond the grave, but only worms.
Small children shriek and dart between the willage huts, where men smoke fish above low fires and women flint away the last few bloodied snots of meat from off the wool-stripped hides. Their mothers chew the skin to make it soft. The squeal and bark of chatter everywhere. Amongst the cauldron steam a dog limps by the mouldered pelvis of another fast between its jaws. With eyes like bile it watches me walk on.
A gaunt man milling grain upon a flat-stone tells me Garn has made his forge upon the valley’s eastern edge, above the Beasthill. This is all the worse for me, that my bare feet must walk again this morning’s great long round, but there is nothing for it, and the day is warm.
Outside the settlement’s north gate, a lard of men is settled thick about the bowl-rim of a fresh-dug pit, wherein an earth-bear’s set against a brace of dogs. One of the hounds is near to gutted, sundered by the earth-bear’s shovel paw. It drags its hind legs in the bloodied dirt and whines, its purples bulging through the belly’s rent.
The other dog is stronger and starved mad, to see its eyes. It snaps and lunges, scores a stroke of pink across the white stripe of its adversary’s brow, which trickles down until the earth-bear is made blind in its own juice. The men about the hole crowd in and laugh, so that a quiver ripples through their soft, grey-spidered tits. They cheer. They fiddle with their balls and do not know it. In the pit, now hidden from me by a wall of wart-hung backs, the earth-bear screams in triumph, else in agony.
Continuing along my path that winds out from the willage gates across the marsh, the torso orchard comes upon me in the bluing flesh even before it comes upon me in my thoughts.
They seem like giant, severed heads, sex-mouthed and nipple-eyed, each with a plume of meat-flies trailing in the breeze. Ant freckles moving, out the corner of my eye. Don’t look. Walk on, and stop my nose against the maggot sweetness in the air.
Across the dampland hulks the bare-flanked pile they call the Beasthill, with the fires about its top extinguished now, its silver crown of smoke dispersed, all wailing stilled. Above this, on the valley’s eastern slope, a yarn of grey twists up alone through paling sky from out the coppermonger’s forge.
This is the last age of the world, for we are come as far now as we may along our path from what is natural. We herd and pen the beast that’s born to roam. In huts we cling like snailshells to the fenland that it is in our great-fathers’ way to stride across and then pass by. We cook the blood from out the earth and let it scab to crowns and daggers; pound our straight track through the crooked fields and trade with black-skins. Soon, the oceans rise and take us. Soon, the crashing of the stars.
Across the reaches, lush and puddle-sored; the beds of quaking sphagnum moss; midge thunderheads above a stream as dull as tin. The massive wildsheep grazing on the lower slopes regard me from a distance, watch me circle warily about them and continue to the valley’s brim, up track beside the Beasthill’s northmost face.
Above the hill now, looking back. The dirt-walls ringed atop it, seen by daylight, plainly once hold beasts within them, yet are given to another purpose now. Amongst the banked up rounds huge flowers of soot are seared into the dirt, the shadow petals flared about a grey and crumbling heart, still warm. There are no people to be seen, and so my climb continues up to where the trees are burned away to stumps along the torn sky’s ragged edge. Tooth-coloured smoke is ravelling from the forge in tatters, brief and dirty flags to guide me there.