Odolghes had promised that once we had what he called some proper organization, the small grey stone we had gone to such pains to retrieve could be turned into unlimited quantities of gold. Meaning that it would make us rich again. It seemed a puzzling and far-fetched claim when I first heard it, and even now, when I understand what Odolghes meant by organization and have seem the claim fulfilled beyond his boldest dreams, some of the puzzle still remains as regards the actual way the transformation came about.
It happened swiftly, yet in such tiny steps we were hardly aware of taking them. The stone, you see, didn’t alter our work much, not as far as methods go, but it helped us to carry it out far more efficiently in far less time. If we had an order of, say, two cartloads of iron ore, which was the usual amount customers wanted, we could now deliver in a fortnight instead of the three or four months it had taken us before when we had no pointers to guide us but our eyes and noses. This meant, to begin with, merely that we could take on more work. Which we did, job after job, so that in terms of health and comfort we were worse off than ever before: tireder, hungrier, grimier and with such sore feet that when the evenings came round some of us – particularly the crushers like me and the other children – could scarcely hobble.
Another month, another fortnight even, of such punishing effort and Odolghes might have had a rebellion on his hands. Or hand. Our people were intrigued by him, were lured by the promises he made, but the old habit of mockery had left its trace and they weren’t quite prepared to follow him yet, not the way they had followed my grandfather before the toothache – right or wrong, thick or thin. A state of affairs which Tusky, sapping away like a mole - a dig here, a tunnel there – was quick to exploit. I caught him more than once spreading grumbles, calling Odolghes ‘the half-man’ and accusing him, on account of his disability, of doing only half the amount of work. ‘Yet he eats twice as much as you and me,’ he went on each time, giving his listener a double prod in the belly so that the reckoning would be clear. ‘And he is twice as big. Remember we used to call him Cuckoo-pate? Well, that’s what he is: a cuckoo, a great idle cuckoo in our nest, growing fat while we little birds slave to do his bidding. Where’s all the gold he promised us, eh? Where’s the food? Where’s the perks?’
Still inside the stone, would have been Odolghes’s answer. Work, have faith, have patience, and you will see. And luckily, before Tusky’s grumbles had any real effect, see we did. With all the work offers, the Miners who had left began to come back. First in drips, then in a trickle, then in a steady flow – at least two families a day. They came back thin as sticks, and in filthy tempers, but more workers meant shorter shifts, and we gradually found ourselves with time for other sorts of jobs which hadn’t been done in a long, long while, like rubbish carting and de-fleaing the dogs and mending clothes. The camp began to look smarter as a result, so did we. Perhaps this gave us confidence, bargaining power, because we began to up our prices and be a little bit choosier about the contracts we accepted. I can remember the first time Odolghes actually turned down a customer, hunching up his unlevel shoulders and striding away from the man – I think he was a Trusani – telling him we wouldn’t even dig for wurzels on those terms. And I remember too how the man, after a moment’s surprise, began hurrying after Odolghes, insisting and coaxing and offering higher and higher payment, almost with every step. It was strange, like seeing an almsgiver and a beggar suddenly change places, or a mouse suddenly begin to eat the cat that has caught it.
I have been rich and then poor, and happy and then sad, enough times to know that the two highs and the two lows don’t necessarily go together, but the period that now began for us brought a kind of upward thrust of its own which it was difficult to resist. I felt like a noodle in a pot: obliged to come to the surface by the force of the bubbles. Even the thought of my mother, which troubled me often, especially at nights, couldn’t keep me down for long. And the same went for Odolghes and indeed all of us, with the sole exception of Tusky, who continued to grumble even where there was next to nothing to grumble about.
Every day brought improvements of some kind to our lives. New tastes, new smells, new feelings – all of them nice. The taste of butter on our corn-cobs, for example, that since babyhood we had gnawed on dry, butter being too precious a remedy against metal poisoning to waste on children. The smell of soap, that we could now afford to buy again off the Wanderers (thus doing away with a lot of other smells I won’t list). The feel of warm beds and full stomachs and proper fitting breeches with no holes in them to let the weather through. The still more foreign feeling, on a rest day, of wanting to get up and do things instead of just lying still and dozing. And most thrilling of all – to the older people anyway, who seemed to prize it more highly than butter or soap or clothes or bounce – the sight of an empty tub we had used to keep nuts in, slowly filling up with more and more lumps of finest, purest gold, just like Odolghes had promised.
The making of this gold went on at night, amid such buzz and excitement that any outsider watching would have thought it was a game and not at all the hard, skinblistering work that in fact it was. What was called the ‘parting’ of the gold from the baser metals had not been performed in the camp since the beginning of the Great War, and there was consequently a whole new generation of Miners who had only heard talk about it, never seen it done, and to whom the idea of learning this secret skill and putting it at last into practise was like the coming true of a dream.
We children were not supposed to take any part in the proceedings at all (for safety reasons: what you don’t know you can’t tell), but on the night the first parting was due to take place the atmosphere in the camp was so tense, and the young Miners so eager to get started, and the old Miners so busy looking out old bits of equipment and preparing new ones and grinding bones and pounding ashes and whatever else it was they had to do, that nobody paid much attention to us, and under cover of darkness a small group of us was able to creep up behind the shed where the work was going on and crouch down outside and watch – the whole procedure, almost from beginning to end. We saw quite well, too, because the walls of the shed were full of holes to let the heat out and there were many more holes than we had eyes.
It made a fascinating sight. In the middle of the shed a smelting furnace had been set – one of the little round open-air ones that were used on digs for ore testing, but much fatter and squatter, with extra reinforcements at the base, and drain spouts coming out of the sides. Called tap holes to be correct. It must have been lit much earlier because its lid was already glowing; and in the light cast by the glow, the faces of those present in the shed could be seen to be glowing on their own account with a mixture of heat and sweat and keen expectancy. Some of them looked close to melting. That, incidentally, was another reason why we youngsters were kept away: our skins would not have withstood the blast.
To one side of the furnace, just out of scalding range, all the special long instruments for smelting were set out in a huge sand-filled tank, ready for the Master Smelter to grab at as needed: rods, rakes, rabbles, rammers, ladles, crowbars, tapping-bars, chipping-bars and many other bars – some so peculiar that they had no real names, only nicknames, like Nobby and Hookie and Little Scratcher. They were planted upright, in a special order, heads down and handles uppermost, and put me in mind of the prickles of a porcupine. The Smelter must have had a wonderful memory to pick the right prickle each time, because with their tops hidden they all looked exactly alike.
A little further off on the opposite side lay the fireproof vessels – dipping pots, crucibles, cupels and whatnots – again carefully arranged by shape and size so that the Smelter’s assistant could pass them over to him in a trice. And beyond these, in tidy piles of varying height – the lower closer, the higher farther – were heaped all the different materials used for the parting, each one marked with a little coloured flag planted at its base: white for salt, yellow for sulphur, green for beech ash, red for bonemeal, black for lead powder. A sieve, a pair of scales and a measuring mug completed the set-up, plus naturally the measurer in person: Jet’s mother, who had the only really trustworthy pair of eyes in the entire camp.
The arrangement looked finicky, and sounds more finicky still, but once the work started in earnest you could see there was a reason to be tidy. Any muddle, any delay, any tripping over a crucible, or passing the wrong amount of whatever it was, and the whole process might have been wrecked. It was that precise, that touch-and-go. Added to which, the furnace itself needed tending constantly. But this was done from the back, by the stokers, so as not to interfere with the rest.
‘She’s not breathing right!’ the Chief Smelter would shout at them, when his expert ear picked up some tiny variation in the furnace’s roar. Or else, ‘She’s caking up! She’s clogging! She’s running too hot! To cool! She’s dying on us! She’s choking!’ And the stokers, after bandaging up their heads and dunking them in water (which they had to do each time afresh or their brains would have broiled), would gather round the stoke-hole and open it up and begin fanning or feeding or raking or blowing or smothering or whatever it was needed doing to put things right.
It shows my ignorance, but what with the noise and the bustle, and the water-carriers coming and going, and the full round furnace sitting there at the centre of things, puffing and wheezing while everyone else hovered around it in a high state of excitement waiting to see what would come out, the scene reminded me of the Queen of the Cajutes’ lying-in. So much so that when at last the Smelter reached for his tapping-bar and began, one by one and with extreme caution, to ease open the tap holes coaxing, ‘There we are now, sweetheart. Gently does it, outcha come, outcha come,’ I expected the gold to issue forth like a baby does, ready made and shining.
Instead of which, all that trickled into the dipping pots placed beneath the taps was some dirty black dross, lumpy and scummy, which was quenched at once by the water carriers, and then glanced at briefly by the Smelter and tossed onto a cake pile in the corner and forgotten.
The Smelter didn’t seem too displeased with this result, though, and neither did the other Miners, since they went on working just as hard and cheerfully as before, but most of my companions felt the disappointment and, one by one, yawning and stretching and rubbing at their eyes, they left their spy holes and nipped off back to bed. ‘Parting!’ I heard one of them mutter. ‘Farting’s what I’d call it. Didn’t see no gold, just muck and bubbles.’
In the end only Jet and I remained at our posts, and after we had watched the same disappointing process several times over with no change in it at all, except that the cakes of dross got slightly smaller and paler with each tapping, we too were about to call it a night and take ourselves off to bed, when suddenly the Smelter fished out from the sand-tank a crowbar in place of his tapping bar and began thumping it endwise on the ground to gain attention. ‘Time’s ripe!’ he announced. ‘The dross is off and our beauty should be in there now, clean as saltlick. No crowding round, please…’ (In their excitement some of the onlookers had already surged forward towards the centre of the shed). ‘No scuffling, no sneezing neither, last thing we want is dust. Everyone keep nice and still – that’s it, that’s it – while I just life the cover here…’
And so saying he fitted the head of the crowbar into the ring on top of the furnace lid, placed a tall metal pole underneath the staff, and with a loud grunt, almost a groan, levered the lid into the air and swung it sideways, revealing the raw, red belly of the furnace with at its centre a small round dish containing a ball of something so fierce and bright it made the rest of the fire seem almost colourless in comparison.
‘There she is!’ he shouted. ‘There’s the button, bless her scorching heart! Whadderyersay, Miners?’
I had never heard gold referred to as a button before, but that in fact is the proper metal worker’s term for it. I suppose, by giving it such a homely name, they think they can control it better.
The light from the furnace fire lit my kinsfolk’s faces in a strange way, casting heavy shadows and making them look ugly, even those few that weren’t. ‘We say Oyoyoy!’ they screamed. ‘We say Oyoyoyoyoyoyoy!’
‘And whadderwewant, eh?’ the Smelter asked, slightly condescending, as if he was the teacher and everyone else his pupils.
‘More! We want more!’
‘That’s right. And when we got it, whadderwedo with it?’
There came a brief puzzled silence, during which I too wondered what the Smelter was angling for by way of reply. What do you do with a great deal of gold? You can’t eat it; you can’t wear it – not much of it anyway; it doesn’t keep the cold out; it doesn’t really, when you come to think of it, serve any useful purpose at all.
‘We put it in the tub,’ came an uncertain voice from the back.
‘Yeah! Grubagrub grub, we put it in the tub!’ the others joined in.
But this was still not what the Smelter was after. ‘And then?’ he urged. ‘And then? Where do we put the tub to keep it safe, eh? Where did out grandparents keep their gold, and their grandfathers before them? Think, you blockheads! They kept it in Au… in Au…’
‘In ore stacks?’ came the same voice as before.
‘In orchards?’ came another.
‘I know!’ squeaked Jet at my elbow before I could stop her. ‘In Aurona! They kept it in Aurona!’
Silly Jet, but it didn’t really matter because the last word was snatched out of her mouth almost before she had finished saying it and taken up by the entire assembly and shouted for so long that we had plenty of time to run back to our beds without being discovered. From where we could still hear it, booming out into the night like a stag’s love cry. Or, noisier, like the roar of an avalanche as it hits the tree line. ‘Au-rona! Au-rona! Au-rona! Au-rona!’
Next morning a crown was presented to Odolghes for him to wear on special occasions. The smiths had made it from the button overnight: a thick ring of beaten gold with an empty space in the front for the setting of the famous Raietta stone. He never wore it, however. First because he said he was not a King but a Chief and preferred the old feathered headdress, and second because when the casket containing the Raietta was opened there was found to be no stone inside, simply a note from my mother saying, Sorry, but for her journey she needed something valuable and easy to carry, and this bauble was just the job.
(Chapter 8 coming up next sunday, 6th june 2010)
Sunday, 30 May 2010
Sunday, 23 May 2010
chapter 6
Magic stone back in Miners’ hands again, Odolghes and me swept into the camp in triumph, my mother there to welcome us, my grandfather too, everyone anxious to hear our story – I had expected our homecoming to be one of the happiest moments of my life. Instead it was one of the saddest.
There hardly was a camp to speak of any more. We had been away -what could it have been? It seemed a lifetime to me but probably wasn’t more than half a year, if that, and in this space of time our former home had seen terrible changes. Most of them linked to our departure, too, which made it all the sadder when we found out about them.
The first thing I noticed was the tents. Before – well, I had never really counted them but there must have been close on a hundred. Now there were less than half that number. Thirty-nine to be exact. Before, too, each tent had been carefully looked after: cleaned, mended, neatly pegged out, with in most cases a goat outside on a tether and a little patch of vegetables, just beyond reach of the goat. Makeshift maybe and always ready for a new move, but ours had been a proper village in its way. Now it was like a Wanderer’s squat: everything, from the roaming, hungry-looking dogs, to the sagging grubby tents, to the scarred patches of earth where other tents had been planted and now were gone, spoke of abandon and neglect. Save for one area, in the centre, where a huge pine tree grew, and this spot was crowded with people, milling about untidily without direction, the way bees do when they have lost their queen.
Odolghes and I walked right into their midst almost unnoticed, and when we were noticed you might have thought we were ghosts, from the silence that fell and the stares we were given. Old Tusky, my grandfather’s bailiff and chief advisor, was the first to find his voice. Brushing Odolghes aside with a, ‘Huh! You! Fine time to show your face!’ he came towards me and took me, quite roughly, not at all in his usual friendly manner, by the elbow. ‘So,’ he said, ‘you’re back. Our young mongrel princess is back. He brought you back. Well, better late than never, I suppose. At least you’ll have time to see him before he goes.’
See who? And why was Tusky wearing my grandfather’s helmet with the blackcock feathers on it?
‘She’s back, folks,’ he announced to the gathering of ditherers around the tree, making no mention of my father.
Several of my old playfellows were there among the crowd: Spino, Franci, Agnes, Agnes’s sister Jet, but they gave no sign of recognition and waved no waves. ‘So we see,’ said one woman, a relative of my mother’s, almost an aunt, speaking very flatly. ‘So we see,’ another echoed, just as flat. They seemed resentful, almost hostile, and very soon I was made to understand why: in the shadow of the tree, so thick and dark that it took time for your eyes to pierce it, my grandfather lay dead and awaiting burial. Dead of a poisoned tooth as immediate cause, but since the toothache had come upon him when he was out combing the valleys in search of my mother, and since my mother, true to her word, had left the camp not long after Odolghes and I had embarked on our adventure and had not been heard of since, I was partly held responsible. Although it was Odolghes, of course, who was blamed the more.
And in part to punish me, they told me these thing all in a rush, just as I have set them down here, so it was some moments before I could sort out the bad from the worst, and longer still before I could fully take them in. Missing? How could my mother, who had always been there when I needed her, be missing? Where had she gone to? Why? Why hadn’t she waited for our return? When would she be back? Would she ever be back? Oh cruel, cruel world – how could I live in it without a mother? How could I live, not knowing where she was or what had become of her? And dead? How could my grandfather be dead? Of a toothache too? He had so few teeth, and the ones he had were so crumbly – how could a tooth have killed him?
At this point, in my strange rusty voice, I let out a wail of such misery that my kinsfolk relented and began crowding round, behaving in a much kinder fashion and saying much kinder things intended to cheer me up. There, there, I wasn’t to take on so. It was my mother’s fault as much as anyone’s. She wouldn’t listen, wouldn’t reason. Always had been like that: a hothead, proud as a hawk. Flouncing out of the camp the way she had done, without a word, just because for once she had been crossed – why, it was a shocking way to behave. She ought to have told her father where she was headed, and then he wouldn’t have caught his death going to look for her. And he ought to have wrapped up warmer, and worn his hat, and come back the moment the tooth started playing up. Stubborn old man, rest his bones. And as for the others – the ones who had lost heart and moved off already – they ought to have had more faith, more patience. True, the old Chief had lingered, and work had become very scarce and food scarcer in the meantime, but at the very least they ought to have waited for the funeral.
In the face of so many disasters, our finding of the stone seemed a slight achievement, hardly worth mentioning. And in fact Odolghes didn’t mention it, not yet. Tactfully, discreetly, he remained on the fringe of the assembly where Tusky’s push had sent him, waiting for things to calm down and tempers to settle and for everyone to go back to doing what they’d been doing when we had interrupted them.
Which was not, as it had seemed to me at first sight, dithering without purpose, but chopping down the pine tree as a token of honour to my grandfather. A sacrifice of something grand and noble that would strike the ground with force, to warn the Earth Goddess that a person of consequence was on their way.
The funeral catafalque being so close to the trunk, it was of course important that the tree should fall in the opposite direction, or the ceremony would have been a shambles. And to this end, ropes had been tied to the branches for everyone to pull on at a given signal. When all the bad news had been broken, therefore, and they had nothing left to tell and no more comfort to offer except a few more Never mind’s and She’ll be back soon’s and pats on the head, my kinsfolk went back to their task. Two to the saw, already deep in the base of the trunk, and the rest to the guide ropes.
Tusky, puffed up with importance, placed himself alone on the danger side, acting as overseer. Or underseer, considering that he was looking upwards, towards the crown of the tree. ‘Steady!’ he ordered everyone, sounding anything but steady himself. ‘No tugs yet, or you’ll trap the saw. Plenty of time, plenty of time. No panicking, it’s all going as it should.’
Was it though? Tree felling is a very delicate business. I remembered that my grandfather had used to have rope-holders on all sides, not just one, to check any swing the trunk might make in the wrong direction. Did Tusky really know what he was up to?
As if in answer there was a sudden creaking noise; the pine tilted right over my grandfather’s casket in a kind of bow and stayed there swaying, and the two sawyers shot from their posts like rabbits, leaving the saw twanging in the cleft. Everyone dropped their rope ends and began shouting at once. This side! That side! Hold it! Run for it! Save the Chief! Leave the Chief, he’s dead already! Too late! Gerraway, gerraway! Back! Back! Back! It was like being down a mineshaft when the danger gong is sounded.
Tusky, his face and indeed all his visible skin parts the colour of a ripe plum, tried to make himself heard above the din but in vain: his orders just added more noise. Then the treetop did another little series of bobs, settling each time lower, and in the sudden hush that greeted this development I saw Odoghes come forward quietly and begin picking up the discarded cords and handing them out again, one by one, telling each holder what to do and where to stand. In no time at all it looked as if he would have everything safe and right again, but Tusky, whose voice could now be heard very clearly, must have spotted a different kind of danger: a personal one, to his authority. Strutting, clucking, and indeed looking just like the bird whose feathers he was wearing, he hurried over to Odolghes and gave him another hefty shove. ‘Out of the way, Moon Eyes!’ he ordered. ‘Out of the way! This is no time for fiddling. This is men’s work, this is. Stand clear and let us get on with the job, there’s a good fellow.’
I half expected Odolghes to obey without murmur, and half expected him to do just the opposite: tower over Tusky and roar at him that he was not a good fellow, that his obeying days were over and that he was Chief of the Miners now. But he did neither. Like a large animal bothered by a gnat he simply lifted his good arm and swatted out at the bailiff, sending him flying one way and the helmet the other, and went on handing out ropes and giving instructions until he had got everyone placed exactly where he wanted them.
By the time Tusky had overcome his surprise and collected the headdress and jammed it on his head again, the tree was already well under control and leaning in the reverse direction, ready for the ceremonial drop. The rope holders’ eyes, out of habit, swivelled towards him and away from Odolghes. Perhaps, even now, it was from their old deputy leader that they ought to await the final command? Or not?
Tusky was quick to spot his chance, and at the top of his voice began calling out the farewell count with which the new leader salutes the old and sends him on his journey: ‘Ten: message from the world of men. Nine: hear the falling of the pine. Eight: hear the knocking at…’
But Odolghes seemed to have been expecting this ploy, and instead of trying to silence the little man or shout him down he merely crossed over to where he was standing, picked him up, tucked him under his arm and began to count with him. The next two couplets came out a bit confused, losing much of their solemnity in the process, but by the time the count reached, ‘Four: grant him rest for evermore’, Tusky had given up his struggles and Odolghes was in full and undisputed charge of the ceremony.
And indeed of everything else. It is often hard to put a finger on a moment in time and say, It was now that such a thing happened, or first began to happen: like winds or currents, events are never usually that clear-cut. But in the case of Odolghes’ leadership of our tribe, I think it can be traced back, without any fear of error, to that very instant. Exactly and precisely from the ‘Four’ onwards. At ‘Ten’ his claim was still dubious, at ‘Eight’ it looked to be overthrown, by ‘Six’ it had crawled back again and hung wobbling in the balance, but on the ‘Four’ he was in effect, without anyone realising it yet, not even himself, the new Chief of the Miners.
I didn’t realise either, no, not then, but I remember standing there watching my father conduct the opening stages of the burial service, and feeling suddenly, in the midst of all my uncertainty, a great sense of safety. I suppose because for the first time I had seen his strength put to use, and seen others see it too. Three:’ his loud, calm voice rang out, unchallenged by Tusky’s (which had dried up completely now: it is difficult to give convincing commands from under someone else’s armpit). ‘Set his soul for ever free. Two: Earth Goddess, we pray to you. One:’ and with a lift of the chin he signalled to the rope holders to let go their cables, so that his last words were almost lost in the crash that followed, as the pine fell dead on target, harming no one, landing just where it should. ‘Welcome back your Miner son.’ And then, with his musician’s sense of timing, while everyone was standing there in perfect silence listening to the echoes of the crash, he clinched the matter of leadership for good by fishing under his cloak for the magic stone and holding it up high for all to see.
(Chapter 7 next sunday, May 30th 2010)
There hardly was a camp to speak of any more. We had been away -what could it have been? It seemed a lifetime to me but probably wasn’t more than half a year, if that, and in this space of time our former home had seen terrible changes. Most of them linked to our departure, too, which made it all the sadder when we found out about them.
The first thing I noticed was the tents. Before – well, I had never really counted them but there must have been close on a hundred. Now there were less than half that number. Thirty-nine to be exact. Before, too, each tent had been carefully looked after: cleaned, mended, neatly pegged out, with in most cases a goat outside on a tether and a little patch of vegetables, just beyond reach of the goat. Makeshift maybe and always ready for a new move, but ours had been a proper village in its way. Now it was like a Wanderer’s squat: everything, from the roaming, hungry-looking dogs, to the sagging grubby tents, to the scarred patches of earth where other tents had been planted and now were gone, spoke of abandon and neglect. Save for one area, in the centre, where a huge pine tree grew, and this spot was crowded with people, milling about untidily without direction, the way bees do when they have lost their queen.
Odolghes and I walked right into their midst almost unnoticed, and when we were noticed you might have thought we were ghosts, from the silence that fell and the stares we were given. Old Tusky, my grandfather’s bailiff and chief advisor, was the first to find his voice. Brushing Odolghes aside with a, ‘Huh! You! Fine time to show your face!’ he came towards me and took me, quite roughly, not at all in his usual friendly manner, by the elbow. ‘So,’ he said, ‘you’re back. Our young mongrel princess is back. He brought you back. Well, better late than never, I suppose. At least you’ll have time to see him before he goes.’
See who? And why was Tusky wearing my grandfather’s helmet with the blackcock feathers on it?
‘She’s back, folks,’ he announced to the gathering of ditherers around the tree, making no mention of my father.
Several of my old playfellows were there among the crowd: Spino, Franci, Agnes, Agnes’s sister Jet, but they gave no sign of recognition and waved no waves. ‘So we see,’ said one woman, a relative of my mother’s, almost an aunt, speaking very flatly. ‘So we see,’ another echoed, just as flat. They seemed resentful, almost hostile, and very soon I was made to understand why: in the shadow of the tree, so thick and dark that it took time for your eyes to pierce it, my grandfather lay dead and awaiting burial. Dead of a poisoned tooth as immediate cause, but since the toothache had come upon him when he was out combing the valleys in search of my mother, and since my mother, true to her word, had left the camp not long after Odolghes and I had embarked on our adventure and had not been heard of since, I was partly held responsible. Although it was Odolghes, of course, who was blamed the more.
And in part to punish me, they told me these thing all in a rush, just as I have set them down here, so it was some moments before I could sort out the bad from the worst, and longer still before I could fully take them in. Missing? How could my mother, who had always been there when I needed her, be missing? Where had she gone to? Why? Why hadn’t she waited for our return? When would she be back? Would she ever be back? Oh cruel, cruel world – how could I live in it without a mother? How could I live, not knowing where she was or what had become of her? And dead? How could my grandfather be dead? Of a toothache too? He had so few teeth, and the ones he had were so crumbly – how could a tooth have killed him?
At this point, in my strange rusty voice, I let out a wail of such misery that my kinsfolk relented and began crowding round, behaving in a much kinder fashion and saying much kinder things intended to cheer me up. There, there, I wasn’t to take on so. It was my mother’s fault as much as anyone’s. She wouldn’t listen, wouldn’t reason. Always had been like that: a hothead, proud as a hawk. Flouncing out of the camp the way she had done, without a word, just because for once she had been crossed – why, it was a shocking way to behave. She ought to have told her father where she was headed, and then he wouldn’t have caught his death going to look for her. And he ought to have wrapped up warmer, and worn his hat, and come back the moment the tooth started playing up. Stubborn old man, rest his bones. And as for the others – the ones who had lost heart and moved off already – they ought to have had more faith, more patience. True, the old Chief had lingered, and work had become very scarce and food scarcer in the meantime, but at the very least they ought to have waited for the funeral.
In the face of so many disasters, our finding of the stone seemed a slight achievement, hardly worth mentioning. And in fact Odolghes didn’t mention it, not yet. Tactfully, discreetly, he remained on the fringe of the assembly where Tusky’s push had sent him, waiting for things to calm down and tempers to settle and for everyone to go back to doing what they’d been doing when we had interrupted them.
Which was not, as it had seemed to me at first sight, dithering without purpose, but chopping down the pine tree as a token of honour to my grandfather. A sacrifice of something grand and noble that would strike the ground with force, to warn the Earth Goddess that a person of consequence was on their way.
The funeral catafalque being so close to the trunk, it was of course important that the tree should fall in the opposite direction, or the ceremony would have been a shambles. And to this end, ropes had been tied to the branches for everyone to pull on at a given signal. When all the bad news had been broken, therefore, and they had nothing left to tell and no more comfort to offer except a few more Never mind’s and She’ll be back soon’s and pats on the head, my kinsfolk went back to their task. Two to the saw, already deep in the base of the trunk, and the rest to the guide ropes.
Tusky, puffed up with importance, placed himself alone on the danger side, acting as overseer. Or underseer, considering that he was looking upwards, towards the crown of the tree. ‘Steady!’ he ordered everyone, sounding anything but steady himself. ‘No tugs yet, or you’ll trap the saw. Plenty of time, plenty of time. No panicking, it’s all going as it should.’
Was it though? Tree felling is a very delicate business. I remembered that my grandfather had used to have rope-holders on all sides, not just one, to check any swing the trunk might make in the wrong direction. Did Tusky really know what he was up to?
As if in answer there was a sudden creaking noise; the pine tilted right over my grandfather’s casket in a kind of bow and stayed there swaying, and the two sawyers shot from their posts like rabbits, leaving the saw twanging in the cleft. Everyone dropped their rope ends and began shouting at once. This side! That side! Hold it! Run for it! Save the Chief! Leave the Chief, he’s dead already! Too late! Gerraway, gerraway! Back! Back! Back! It was like being down a mineshaft when the danger gong is sounded.
Tusky, his face and indeed all his visible skin parts the colour of a ripe plum, tried to make himself heard above the din but in vain: his orders just added more noise. Then the treetop did another little series of bobs, settling each time lower, and in the sudden hush that greeted this development I saw Odoghes come forward quietly and begin picking up the discarded cords and handing them out again, one by one, telling each holder what to do and where to stand. In no time at all it looked as if he would have everything safe and right again, but Tusky, whose voice could now be heard very clearly, must have spotted a different kind of danger: a personal one, to his authority. Strutting, clucking, and indeed looking just like the bird whose feathers he was wearing, he hurried over to Odolghes and gave him another hefty shove. ‘Out of the way, Moon Eyes!’ he ordered. ‘Out of the way! This is no time for fiddling. This is men’s work, this is. Stand clear and let us get on with the job, there’s a good fellow.’
I half expected Odolghes to obey without murmur, and half expected him to do just the opposite: tower over Tusky and roar at him that he was not a good fellow, that his obeying days were over and that he was Chief of the Miners now. But he did neither. Like a large animal bothered by a gnat he simply lifted his good arm and swatted out at the bailiff, sending him flying one way and the helmet the other, and went on handing out ropes and giving instructions until he had got everyone placed exactly where he wanted them.
By the time Tusky had overcome his surprise and collected the headdress and jammed it on his head again, the tree was already well under control and leaning in the reverse direction, ready for the ceremonial drop. The rope holders’ eyes, out of habit, swivelled towards him and away from Odolghes. Perhaps, even now, it was from their old deputy leader that they ought to await the final command? Or not?
Tusky was quick to spot his chance, and at the top of his voice began calling out the farewell count with which the new leader salutes the old and sends him on his journey: ‘Ten: message from the world of men. Nine: hear the falling of the pine. Eight: hear the knocking at…’
But Odolghes seemed to have been expecting this ploy, and instead of trying to silence the little man or shout him down he merely crossed over to where he was standing, picked him up, tucked him under his arm and began to count with him. The next two couplets came out a bit confused, losing much of their solemnity in the process, but by the time the count reached, ‘Four: grant him rest for evermore’, Tusky had given up his struggles and Odolghes was in full and undisputed charge of the ceremony.
And indeed of everything else. It is often hard to put a finger on a moment in time and say, It was now that such a thing happened, or first began to happen: like winds or currents, events are never usually that clear-cut. But in the case of Odolghes’ leadership of our tribe, I think it can be traced back, without any fear of error, to that very instant. Exactly and precisely from the ‘Four’ onwards. At ‘Ten’ his claim was still dubious, at ‘Eight’ it looked to be overthrown, by ‘Six’ it had crawled back again and hung wobbling in the balance, but on the ‘Four’ he was in effect, without anyone realising it yet, not even himself, the new Chief of the Miners.
I didn’t realise either, no, not then, but I remember standing there watching my father conduct the opening stages of the burial service, and feeling suddenly, in the midst of all my uncertainty, a great sense of safety. I suppose because for the first time I had seen his strength put to use, and seen others see it too. Three:’ his loud, calm voice rang out, unchallenged by Tusky’s (which had dried up completely now: it is difficult to give convincing commands from under someone else’s armpit). ‘Set his soul for ever free. Two: Earth Goddess, we pray to you. One:’ and with a lift of the chin he signalled to the rope holders to let go their cables, so that his last words were almost lost in the crash that followed, as the pine fell dead on target, harming no one, landing just where it should. ‘Welcome back your Miner son.’ And then, with his musician’s sense of timing, while everyone was standing there in perfect silence listening to the echoes of the crash, he clinched the matter of leadership for good by fishing under his cloak for the magic stone and holding it up high for all to see.
(Chapter 7 next sunday, May 30th 2010)
Monday, 17 May 2010
chapter 5
At first Odolghes tried to be angry with me for what I had done, but he was so pleased with the findings he couldn’t keep a cross enough face. ‘You’re sure, aren’t you,’ he kept asking, uncreasing his frown each time in his eagerness, ‘those weren’t just breadcrumbs in those pouches?’
Yes, I was sure. Bits of metal fuzz were still lodged under my nails. Take a look if he needed convincing. Besides, no one, surely, no matter how greedy, had a secret pouch specially sewn into all their dresses for keeping bread in.
The brow smoothed altogether and the eyes underneath sparkled like azure chips. I loved the colour of his eyes; mine are just an ordinary brown. ‘Then our job’s as good as done. All we’ve got to do is to winkle the stone out of the dress the Queen is wearing and make off with it as fast as we can. Simple.’
‘With the stone, Father, or the dress?’
Odolghes didn’t think this was funny. Nor did I really because the problem that faced us was enormous. It was quickly said, Winkle the stone out of the Queen’s pocket, but to do it, to actually stand there and winkle it, that was another matter. We had agreed at the start that the Cajutes’ habit of seldom changing their clothes was their affair, but now, suddenly and most inconveniently, it had become ours.
I had the bright idea, seeing how the other ladies had reacted, of getting Odolghes to tell the Queen he’d seen a mouse run up her skirt, in the hope she’d go berserk and strip all her clothes off on the spot, or at least the bits of clothes we were interested in, but it didn’t work very well when he tried to put it into practice. ‘A mouse?’ was all she said incuriously, lifting her eyes from her weaving as if they were tied to the warp and yawning straight into his face. ‘Whereabouts, pray?’
‘There, Majesty!’ Odolghes cried, pointing to where the Queen’s waist should have been if she’d had one. We had agreed beforehand it was best to aim high. ‘Right up there! With respect, I can see it moving, I can see the bulge!’
Thwack! she went with they shuttle on the place he had indicated. ‘Bet you don’t see it moving now.’ And without more ado went back to her loom. No, undressing the Queen, unnerving the Queen, or even unsettling the Queen by so much as a whisker twitch was no easy task.
Luckily, though, nature was on our side, since there is one thing you can’t very well do with all your clothes on, no matter how unparticular you are, and that is have a baby. I don’t know whether the whack had anything to do with it, or whether her time was up anyway, but only a short while after this incident the Queen went into labour, giving us what both Odolghes and I realized immediately was likely to be our only chance, if we were not to wait for the next royal farrowing. Briskly for a change she took to her bed; the dress was – at long last – removed and stuffed into a clothes-basket on the landing, and in the hurry and flurry of the birth, with all the ladies rushing backwards and forwards carrying things and tripping over one another and sloshing water and swearing in a most unladylike manner, I was able to sit on the landing unnoticed, in the lee of the basket, and winkle at my leisure.
Over what to do afterwards, Odolghes and I had had our first real quarrel since we were in partnership, and I have to admit that this time he showed more sense than I did. I was for stealing and running: making off down the underground passage with our prize, overcoming the guard at the other end, preferably with a swipe of Odolghes’s hard metal arm, and then footing it as fast as we could through the mine tunnels and out into the open country. But Odolghes said this was madness and that I needed my head trepanning. What we must do, he insisted, was to keep our nerve and sit tight and make sure nobody connected us with the missing stone, either now or later. Missing stone, mind you, not stolen. Because when I did my winkling I was to make a hole in the pocket of the dress so that it would look as if the stone had simply fallen through it by mischance, plop, somewhere onto the ground. Then, once we had the stone safely in our possession, we would hide it in an unfindable place (what place? Why, in a stony place of course, you ninny: up on the ramparts, in the middle of a pile of sling stones) and wait until all the fuss died down before collecting it and making our departure. Departure, mind you again, not escape. For we would run nowhere, we would just grow more and more slipshod with our singing, and repeat ourselves over and over, until the Cajutes grew so tired of us they would chuck us out themselves and send us on our way.
Odolghes’s plan had its dangers: ‘chucking’ was not the sort of thing the Cajutes were likely to do in a tender fashion, and their boredom would probably be just as nasty as their rage - to us on the receiving end. It also had the drawback – almost unbearable to me, who was getting very homesick by now and longing for my mother – of being slow. However I had to admit in the end it was better than mine, that was no sort of plan at all, and the moment I felt the stone slip through the broken seam and into my grasp I closed my hand over it in triumph, wiggled quietly out of the bustle, unseen, and obediently took it straight to the agreed hiding place on the ramparts.
Once I had found a suitable hole for it, though, on the side of one of the heaps of stones, and fitted it into place, a worrying thought struck me. Would we be able to find it again when we wanted it? Would anyone? A little darker maybe, a little rougher to the touch, but it looked like all the others. (Indeed to be quite honest I was already having slight difficulty picking it out. Was it this one? No, silly, it was the other one, next door, the one that was still warm from my hand.) I looked around for a marker but found nothing, not even a twig or a leaf, so I just had to be content with rubbing my foot on the face of the stone in the hope the smell would linger, and numbering the stone’s position: seventh pile ahead as you emerged from the stairwell, eighth layer left-hand side from top of pile, fourteenth stone from left-hand corner, twelfth (not counting a tiny one which was out of line) from the right.
These numbers I muttered to myself all the way back to our hut and then repeated them to Odolghes, who, not being very strong on memory, engraved them on his iron arm with the tip of a knife. Once he’d done that, see, he explained, whistling while he scraped away, we were in the cow’s belly. Meaning that we were sitting comfortably as regards the stone. Stones didn’t move and numbers didn’t lie, and when we needed our precious pebble, there it would be, in that exact position.
Cow’s belly? Well, all I can say is our cow must have had the collywobbles for all the comfort its belly gave. The rest of our stay with the Cajutes, waiting and indeed working for our dismissal, was so grim and wearisome I hardly like to record it. Odolghes was right and nobody thought of linking us to the disappearance of the famous iron-stone, let alone blaming us, but tempers were so soured by the loss that we came in for a good share of punishment all the same. And that was before we began muffing our songs.
Together with the other serving people we were made to crawl on hands and knees criss-cross all over the castle grounds, picking up whatever stones we found there and putting them into a special basket for the Queen to examine. This search, all the drearier to us who knew that it was useless, lasted for three whole days. (Which sounds nothing, but just you try it.) Then we were taken to the mines, along the underground passage trodden by the Queen, and made to repeat the same procedure: up and down every corridor, in and out of every nook. My breeches had holes in the knees by the end of the second day, and after that it was the knees themselves. I kept begging Odolghes to change his mind and let us escape from this drudgery, especially now we had learnt the way out but, although he paled when he saw my sores and carried me on his back from then on to stop them worsening, he wouldn’t listen. ‘We have put up with a great deal, picera,’ he said (picera meant little one, or loved one, in Fanish and was a name he had never called me by before), ‘we must grit our teeth and put up with a teeny bit more.’
Only it wasn’t a teeny bit, it was a lot. Having fed and housed us for so long, the Cajutes were unwilling to let us go, no matter how slack our performance. If we played worse they would treat us worse, this seemed to be their reasoning: they would take away our mattress, skimp our food, deny us rest and get their outlay back that way. Dud dogs that didn’t do their work on the hunting field were given kicks and cornhusks; dud musicians would fare the same.
Odolghes stole food for me when he could, and gave me his when he couldn’t, and tried to shield me from all the cruellest insults and hardest kicks, but by the time the winter weather started to set in I could see from the way he looked at me, and especially from the way he felt my knobbly wrist bones and listened to my night time coughing, that he was changing his mind about escape. In fact we had already begun to plan our route, or at least to talk about it at night to keep our spirits up, when suddenly, almost magically, a stray flute player turned up at the gate, rather like we had done ourselves all those months ago, and in the space of a pot-boil – the time it took for the flute player to get the Queen’s new baby off to sleep – we found ourselves dismissed.
With such harshness, too, as you can imagine, and such a shower of Scram’s! and Good Riddance’s! and Clear out, caterwaulers! from the soldiers who came to deliver the news, that we scarcely had time to do the most important thing of all, namely to go and fetch the stone from its hiding place before we left.
Luckily we were given a few moments alone for the packing of our belongings and the cleaning of the hut: it must have been needed for the flute player. So while Odolghes, deliberately slowly and clumsily, was doing just this, I clambered up to the ramparts as fast as I could and made straight for pile no. 7 where the stone was hidden.
Or should have been, according to my calculations. But when I reached the spot, instead of searching or counting, I just crumpled up in despair and began to cry. It wasn’t a question of numbers or smells or remembering or not remembering: the pile was quite a different shape. For some reason – perhaps because it had collapsed in the rain, or the stones had been used for bird shooting, or maybe for no reason at all, just evil luck – it had been completely rearranged. Although disarranged is the better word. Before, it had been tall and square-based and the stones had been in layers; now it was a mound shaped like a pudding, with the stones jumbled about any old where.
Through my tears I sniffed the contours of the pile, trying to pick up a trace. Half-heartedly at first, then with no heart in my search at all. The stones smelt of wet and nothing else; the one I wanted might be right in the middle or might not be there at all.
I was still sitting there, snivelling rather than sniffing, when Odolghes emerged from the stairway, wild-eyed and out of breath. ‘Got it?’ he puffed, running towards me with his funny lopsided run. ‘Give it here! We’ve got to go now. The guards will be back in a shake to hoof us out. There’s one on my tail already.’
So then I told him what had happened and waited to see how he would take it: whether he would be cross with me or the Earth Goddess or with himself, or whether he would just be sad.
He wasn’t any of these, he was wonderful. He sat down beside me and took me in his arm and said, Too bad and, Who cared, and to stop crying because anyway, stone or no stone, we were free now, and perhaps it was better so. The magic stone had caused such trouble in the past: perhaps it was better lost, with no one to claim it but the soil. And so saying he hoisted up his false arm, which felt no pain, and swung it hard against the pile, as much as to say, ‘There, take that! Go your way, stone, we can do very well without you!’
A moment later, mind you, he seemed to change his mind and began scrabbling urgently at the heap with his good arm, picking out several stones at random and asking me, ‘Is this the one? Is this the one? Is it this? Could it be this? Or this?’ But he had to stop quickly and shove them back in again, as the guard who had been following him appeared in the stairway and began scanning the ramparts to see where we were.
Having spotted us, he came towards us threateningly, walking crab-wise, hand on sword hilt. What was this shifty Senger couple up to? Couldn’t trust them a spit span. But as he drew nearer he relaxed and allowed himself a superior kind of smile. Whynen, he said to Odolghes, pointing at me and then tapping his cheeks just under his eyes to indicate tears. (As if we didn’t know what whining meant.) The kidden was whynen, didn’t want to leave, didn’t want to lose its bread, that’s why it had come up here to hide. Ha! Too late now for whynen. Should have done its job better and then it could have stayed. Pouss! March! Both of us! Foui! At the doppel!
Still barking out commands he chivvied us down the long twisting staircase and out into the courtyard, where the rolled up bundle of our belongings was already waiting for us, spattered with what looked like raindrops. Only it wasn’t raining so I’m afraid it was something else. On top of the bundle lay the zither.
To more taunts from the bystanders we picked up our gear and, eyes screwed up against any more drops of whatever it was, we walked across the courtyard, through the narrow, unwelcoming threshold, and began to cross the drawbridge, towards freedom and the outside world.
The Cajutes were taking their precautions though. Halfway across the bridge another pair of guards stopped us, felt us all over with probing fingers the way they had done on our arrival, made us turn out our pockets, splay our legs, open our mouths, raise our arms, brocken one excepted, and, on finding nothing, told us with very bad grace to leave our bundle and continue without it. I looked pleadingly at Odolghes - the things inside were nearly all mine, and there was food for the journey as well – but he shrugged and made sign to do as the guards said.
‘Zitter too!’ they ordered. And without even waiting for it to be properly unstrapped, the more senior of the pair dragged the zither from around Odolghes’s neck and threw it on the ground, where he trampled on it like a child in a temper until it was only splinters.
So it was with completely empty hands and empty pockets and empty stomachs and empty everythings that Odolghes and I finally made our getaway from the Cajutes’ fortress. No clothes except the ones we wore, no food, no pay, no means of earning any without our instrument. No toothpicks either, unless you count zither fragments, some of which I had picked up as a keepsake: it was such lovely wood. And, saddest of all when you think how hard we’d worked for it and all the risks we had run, no Miners’ stone.
Or so we thought. Right up to the moment when Odolghes decided we were far enough away from the castle for him to remove his arm, which was chafing more than usual. And then, clinging to the lower part of the arm, near where the wrist was, quite as if it were a living thing with a mind and a will and a strength of its own, we found it.
Magic? Yes, but not as magic as you might think. Nor as we thought ourselves in our first rush of amazement. Later, when we put our heads together, we worked it out and did some trials to prove it. The stone could find iron, you see, but by the same token iron could find the stone. Not at any great distance - the range was about a thumbnail’s breadth - but placed within that range the two materials, iron and stone, would seek each other out and strain to come together, quivering like the noses of two truffle hounds. It was fascinating to watch, and rather frightening when you consider that neither nose was alive.
So when Odolghes had struck out at the pile like that with his imitation arm, that is what must have happened: by incredible good luck he must have touched the stone, or at any rate come very close to touching it, and strain and quiver and seek and reach, the invisible pull had done the rest. Another long hungry journey lay ahead of us now, but this time we felt so light inside we sped across the mountains like chamois. I didn’t talk much because my voice had gone rusty from lack of exercise, but Odolghes sang at the top of his, and now and again he tossed the arm in the air, with the stone still sticking to it fast, and looked at me as he caught it again, and together we laughed and laughed.
(Chapter 6 next sunday, may 23rd 2010
Yes, I was sure. Bits of metal fuzz were still lodged under my nails. Take a look if he needed convincing. Besides, no one, surely, no matter how greedy, had a secret pouch specially sewn into all their dresses for keeping bread in.
The brow smoothed altogether and the eyes underneath sparkled like azure chips. I loved the colour of his eyes; mine are just an ordinary brown. ‘Then our job’s as good as done. All we’ve got to do is to winkle the stone out of the dress the Queen is wearing and make off with it as fast as we can. Simple.’
‘With the stone, Father, or the dress?’
Odolghes didn’t think this was funny. Nor did I really because the problem that faced us was enormous. It was quickly said, Winkle the stone out of the Queen’s pocket, but to do it, to actually stand there and winkle it, that was another matter. We had agreed at the start that the Cajutes’ habit of seldom changing their clothes was their affair, but now, suddenly and most inconveniently, it had become ours.
I had the bright idea, seeing how the other ladies had reacted, of getting Odolghes to tell the Queen he’d seen a mouse run up her skirt, in the hope she’d go berserk and strip all her clothes off on the spot, or at least the bits of clothes we were interested in, but it didn’t work very well when he tried to put it into practice. ‘A mouse?’ was all she said incuriously, lifting her eyes from her weaving as if they were tied to the warp and yawning straight into his face. ‘Whereabouts, pray?’
‘There, Majesty!’ Odolghes cried, pointing to where the Queen’s waist should have been if she’d had one. We had agreed beforehand it was best to aim high. ‘Right up there! With respect, I can see it moving, I can see the bulge!’
Thwack! she went with they shuttle on the place he had indicated. ‘Bet you don’t see it moving now.’ And without more ado went back to her loom. No, undressing the Queen, unnerving the Queen, or even unsettling the Queen by so much as a whisker twitch was no easy task.
Luckily, though, nature was on our side, since there is one thing you can’t very well do with all your clothes on, no matter how unparticular you are, and that is have a baby. I don’t know whether the whack had anything to do with it, or whether her time was up anyway, but only a short while after this incident the Queen went into labour, giving us what both Odolghes and I realized immediately was likely to be our only chance, if we were not to wait for the next royal farrowing. Briskly for a change she took to her bed; the dress was – at long last – removed and stuffed into a clothes-basket on the landing, and in the hurry and flurry of the birth, with all the ladies rushing backwards and forwards carrying things and tripping over one another and sloshing water and swearing in a most unladylike manner, I was able to sit on the landing unnoticed, in the lee of the basket, and winkle at my leisure.
Over what to do afterwards, Odolghes and I had had our first real quarrel since we were in partnership, and I have to admit that this time he showed more sense than I did. I was for stealing and running: making off down the underground passage with our prize, overcoming the guard at the other end, preferably with a swipe of Odolghes’s hard metal arm, and then footing it as fast as we could through the mine tunnels and out into the open country. But Odolghes said this was madness and that I needed my head trepanning. What we must do, he insisted, was to keep our nerve and sit tight and make sure nobody connected us with the missing stone, either now or later. Missing stone, mind you, not stolen. Because when I did my winkling I was to make a hole in the pocket of the dress so that it would look as if the stone had simply fallen through it by mischance, plop, somewhere onto the ground. Then, once we had the stone safely in our possession, we would hide it in an unfindable place (what place? Why, in a stony place of course, you ninny: up on the ramparts, in the middle of a pile of sling stones) and wait until all the fuss died down before collecting it and making our departure. Departure, mind you again, not escape. For we would run nowhere, we would just grow more and more slipshod with our singing, and repeat ourselves over and over, until the Cajutes grew so tired of us they would chuck us out themselves and send us on our way.
Odolghes’s plan had its dangers: ‘chucking’ was not the sort of thing the Cajutes were likely to do in a tender fashion, and their boredom would probably be just as nasty as their rage - to us on the receiving end. It also had the drawback – almost unbearable to me, who was getting very homesick by now and longing for my mother – of being slow. However I had to admit in the end it was better than mine, that was no sort of plan at all, and the moment I felt the stone slip through the broken seam and into my grasp I closed my hand over it in triumph, wiggled quietly out of the bustle, unseen, and obediently took it straight to the agreed hiding place on the ramparts.
Once I had found a suitable hole for it, though, on the side of one of the heaps of stones, and fitted it into place, a worrying thought struck me. Would we be able to find it again when we wanted it? Would anyone? A little darker maybe, a little rougher to the touch, but it looked like all the others. (Indeed to be quite honest I was already having slight difficulty picking it out. Was it this one? No, silly, it was the other one, next door, the one that was still warm from my hand.) I looked around for a marker but found nothing, not even a twig or a leaf, so I just had to be content with rubbing my foot on the face of the stone in the hope the smell would linger, and numbering the stone’s position: seventh pile ahead as you emerged from the stairwell, eighth layer left-hand side from top of pile, fourteenth stone from left-hand corner, twelfth (not counting a tiny one which was out of line) from the right.
These numbers I muttered to myself all the way back to our hut and then repeated them to Odolghes, who, not being very strong on memory, engraved them on his iron arm with the tip of a knife. Once he’d done that, see, he explained, whistling while he scraped away, we were in the cow’s belly. Meaning that we were sitting comfortably as regards the stone. Stones didn’t move and numbers didn’t lie, and when we needed our precious pebble, there it would be, in that exact position.
Cow’s belly? Well, all I can say is our cow must have had the collywobbles for all the comfort its belly gave. The rest of our stay with the Cajutes, waiting and indeed working for our dismissal, was so grim and wearisome I hardly like to record it. Odolghes was right and nobody thought of linking us to the disappearance of the famous iron-stone, let alone blaming us, but tempers were so soured by the loss that we came in for a good share of punishment all the same. And that was before we began muffing our songs.
Together with the other serving people we were made to crawl on hands and knees criss-cross all over the castle grounds, picking up whatever stones we found there and putting them into a special basket for the Queen to examine. This search, all the drearier to us who knew that it was useless, lasted for three whole days. (Which sounds nothing, but just you try it.) Then we were taken to the mines, along the underground passage trodden by the Queen, and made to repeat the same procedure: up and down every corridor, in and out of every nook. My breeches had holes in the knees by the end of the second day, and after that it was the knees themselves. I kept begging Odolghes to change his mind and let us escape from this drudgery, especially now we had learnt the way out but, although he paled when he saw my sores and carried me on his back from then on to stop them worsening, he wouldn’t listen. ‘We have put up with a great deal, picera,’ he said (picera meant little one, or loved one, in Fanish and was a name he had never called me by before), ‘we must grit our teeth and put up with a teeny bit more.’
Only it wasn’t a teeny bit, it was a lot. Having fed and housed us for so long, the Cajutes were unwilling to let us go, no matter how slack our performance. If we played worse they would treat us worse, this seemed to be their reasoning: they would take away our mattress, skimp our food, deny us rest and get their outlay back that way. Dud dogs that didn’t do their work on the hunting field were given kicks and cornhusks; dud musicians would fare the same.
Odolghes stole food for me when he could, and gave me his when he couldn’t, and tried to shield me from all the cruellest insults and hardest kicks, but by the time the winter weather started to set in I could see from the way he looked at me, and especially from the way he felt my knobbly wrist bones and listened to my night time coughing, that he was changing his mind about escape. In fact we had already begun to plan our route, or at least to talk about it at night to keep our spirits up, when suddenly, almost magically, a stray flute player turned up at the gate, rather like we had done ourselves all those months ago, and in the space of a pot-boil – the time it took for the flute player to get the Queen’s new baby off to sleep – we found ourselves dismissed.
With such harshness, too, as you can imagine, and such a shower of Scram’s! and Good Riddance’s! and Clear out, caterwaulers! from the soldiers who came to deliver the news, that we scarcely had time to do the most important thing of all, namely to go and fetch the stone from its hiding place before we left.
Luckily we were given a few moments alone for the packing of our belongings and the cleaning of the hut: it must have been needed for the flute player. So while Odolghes, deliberately slowly and clumsily, was doing just this, I clambered up to the ramparts as fast as I could and made straight for pile no. 7 where the stone was hidden.
Or should have been, according to my calculations. But when I reached the spot, instead of searching or counting, I just crumpled up in despair and began to cry. It wasn’t a question of numbers or smells or remembering or not remembering: the pile was quite a different shape. For some reason – perhaps because it had collapsed in the rain, or the stones had been used for bird shooting, or maybe for no reason at all, just evil luck – it had been completely rearranged. Although disarranged is the better word. Before, it had been tall and square-based and the stones had been in layers; now it was a mound shaped like a pudding, with the stones jumbled about any old where.
Through my tears I sniffed the contours of the pile, trying to pick up a trace. Half-heartedly at first, then with no heart in my search at all. The stones smelt of wet and nothing else; the one I wanted might be right in the middle or might not be there at all.
I was still sitting there, snivelling rather than sniffing, when Odolghes emerged from the stairway, wild-eyed and out of breath. ‘Got it?’ he puffed, running towards me with his funny lopsided run. ‘Give it here! We’ve got to go now. The guards will be back in a shake to hoof us out. There’s one on my tail already.’
So then I told him what had happened and waited to see how he would take it: whether he would be cross with me or the Earth Goddess or with himself, or whether he would just be sad.
He wasn’t any of these, he was wonderful. He sat down beside me and took me in his arm and said, Too bad and, Who cared, and to stop crying because anyway, stone or no stone, we were free now, and perhaps it was better so. The magic stone had caused such trouble in the past: perhaps it was better lost, with no one to claim it but the soil. And so saying he hoisted up his false arm, which felt no pain, and swung it hard against the pile, as much as to say, ‘There, take that! Go your way, stone, we can do very well without you!’
A moment later, mind you, he seemed to change his mind and began scrabbling urgently at the heap with his good arm, picking out several stones at random and asking me, ‘Is this the one? Is this the one? Is it this? Could it be this? Or this?’ But he had to stop quickly and shove them back in again, as the guard who had been following him appeared in the stairway and began scanning the ramparts to see where we were.
Having spotted us, he came towards us threateningly, walking crab-wise, hand on sword hilt. What was this shifty Senger couple up to? Couldn’t trust them a spit span. But as he drew nearer he relaxed and allowed himself a superior kind of smile. Whynen, he said to Odolghes, pointing at me and then tapping his cheeks just under his eyes to indicate tears. (As if we didn’t know what whining meant.) The kidden was whynen, didn’t want to leave, didn’t want to lose its bread, that’s why it had come up here to hide. Ha! Too late now for whynen. Should have done its job better and then it could have stayed. Pouss! March! Both of us! Foui! At the doppel!
Still barking out commands he chivvied us down the long twisting staircase and out into the courtyard, where the rolled up bundle of our belongings was already waiting for us, spattered with what looked like raindrops. Only it wasn’t raining so I’m afraid it was something else. On top of the bundle lay the zither.
To more taunts from the bystanders we picked up our gear and, eyes screwed up against any more drops of whatever it was, we walked across the courtyard, through the narrow, unwelcoming threshold, and began to cross the drawbridge, towards freedom and the outside world.
The Cajutes were taking their precautions though. Halfway across the bridge another pair of guards stopped us, felt us all over with probing fingers the way they had done on our arrival, made us turn out our pockets, splay our legs, open our mouths, raise our arms, brocken one excepted, and, on finding nothing, told us with very bad grace to leave our bundle and continue without it. I looked pleadingly at Odolghes - the things inside were nearly all mine, and there was food for the journey as well – but he shrugged and made sign to do as the guards said.
‘Zitter too!’ they ordered. And without even waiting for it to be properly unstrapped, the more senior of the pair dragged the zither from around Odolghes’s neck and threw it on the ground, where he trampled on it like a child in a temper until it was only splinters.
So it was with completely empty hands and empty pockets and empty stomachs and empty everythings that Odolghes and I finally made our getaway from the Cajutes’ fortress. No clothes except the ones we wore, no food, no pay, no means of earning any without our instrument. No toothpicks either, unless you count zither fragments, some of which I had picked up as a keepsake: it was such lovely wood. And, saddest of all when you think how hard we’d worked for it and all the risks we had run, no Miners’ stone.
Or so we thought. Right up to the moment when Odolghes decided we were far enough away from the castle for him to remove his arm, which was chafing more than usual. And then, clinging to the lower part of the arm, near where the wrist was, quite as if it were a living thing with a mind and a will and a strength of its own, we found it.
Magic? Yes, but not as magic as you might think. Nor as we thought ourselves in our first rush of amazement. Later, when we put our heads together, we worked it out and did some trials to prove it. The stone could find iron, you see, but by the same token iron could find the stone. Not at any great distance - the range was about a thumbnail’s breadth - but placed within that range the two materials, iron and stone, would seek each other out and strain to come together, quivering like the noses of two truffle hounds. It was fascinating to watch, and rather frightening when you consider that neither nose was alive.
So when Odolghes had struck out at the pile like that with his imitation arm, that is what must have happened: by incredible good luck he must have touched the stone, or at any rate come very close to touching it, and strain and quiver and seek and reach, the invisible pull had done the rest. Another long hungry journey lay ahead of us now, but this time we felt so light inside we sped across the mountains like chamois. I didn’t talk much because my voice had gone rusty from lack of exercise, but Odolghes sang at the top of his, and now and again he tossed the arm in the air, with the stone still sticking to it fast, and looked at me as he caught it again, and together we laughed and laughed.
(Chapter 6 next sunday, may 23rd 2010
Sunday, 9 May 2010
chapter 4
The ‘Guesters’ were Latrones: three of them, two men and a woman. Youngish, gawky, dressed like scarecrows - all rags and fray-ends and bits of twine. The woman stared at me and Odolghes when we came in and I was afraid for a moment she might have recognised us from the winter we had spent working in their mines, but it wasn’t that, she was just eyeing our clothes with envy. Think of being envious of my bulgy breeches.
It was the first of several visits from neighbouring tribesfolk, and since the Cajutes were very proud of having some kind of entertainment to offer and show off about, Odolghes and I were now kept very busy. After the Latrones we played for Peleghetes, Trusani, Lastojeres and for a group of noisy Ampezzani who talked in gibberish to each other all the way through, greatly annoying the King. I felt very sorry now for the birds we Miners took down the earth with us in cages, because that was what I felt like: a caged-up song bird. My fingers were starting to peel from all the playing, and Odolghes’ voice was getting hoarse.
(I felt quite sorry for the Ampezzani too, because after they had left the chamber, the King turned to the Chief Counsellor and made a slitting motion across his throat with his finger and said, ‘Schlagen!’ and the Chief Counsellor motioned back and nodded. Stiff punishment, just for not appreciating music.)
It seemed like ages before we were able to go back to our quest again, but when we did we learnt a lot. We learned, for example, that the iron works were situated close to the castle but not inside the walls, and that they were reached by an underground passage whose entrance lay in the scruffiest and remotest corner of the castle, close beside the sheep pens. We worked this out for ourselves, without so much as setting a foot down the passageway, on account of the metal dust that wafted out of the entrance and settled on the sheep’s legs and bellies, turning them black. We discovered, from seeing some children sneak into the passage laughing and then shoot out again holding their backsides and not laughing any more, that the entrance was guarded on the far side and that no casual visitors were allowed in.
The deliveries of metal puzzled us for a while because we never seemed to see or hear carts of any kind coming up the hill, but one day when we were exploring the tower in the same far-off area, trying to get a bird’s eye view of the forge and outbuildings, we felt a kind of rumble under our feet and the mystery was solved: the underground tunnel continued in the other direction as well, right down to the bottom of the hill, and it was through this unseen pathway that the carts passed on their way to the forge.
Odolghes looked very pleased about this discovery and I couldn’t think why until he explained it to me. I thought it meant the mines must be miles away from the castle. But ‘Just the opposite,’ he said. ‘It means they’re close, right under our silly noses. Why should the Cajutes go to all the bother of digging an underground passage for the iron to come through? It’s not as if they had anyone to hide it from. If it came from far afield it would come openly, along the road. No, they’re working the veins in this very hillside, and it’s in this very hillside, somewhere, in someone’s bag or someone’s pocket or in some secret place that only the person who uses it knows about, that the magic stone is kept.’
So at last we could set about our main quest. Who was it that used the magic stone or was allowed to use it, and where did they keep it when it wasn’t in use? I thought it would most likely be entrusted to the head metal scout, or else to the master smith or someone like that with a high-up job in the armoury process, but Odolghes disagreed. ‘Use your muffin, Mara, I mean Vanna,’ he said. Vanna was the new name he was supposed to call me by but he kept on forgetting. ‘It’s not the sort of thing you leave to a worker, not even a head worker. You know who used to use it in the old days when it belonged to your kinsmen? Your great grandfather in person. The other Miners knew about it and what it looked like, but he was the only one with the right to use it. My mother saw him at it, several times. He used to wait until the scouts thought they had found a good thick vein, or a good place for the diggers to start their chipping, and then he’d go down and check it for them, spreading his cloak around him like a tent so that nobody but he could see the actual way the stone performed its magic. That’s how secret it was.’
‘So you think the King is the one to watch out for, eh, Father?’ That would make things difficult. The King was hardly ever to be seen in the castle except at suppertime, and by then he was usually dribbling drunk and halfway under the table.
‘The King,’ Odolghes said, ‘or the Chief Counsellor, or the Commander of the Guard. One of these three, I should say for choice. We’ll have to keep our eyes skinned to find out which. It shouldn’t be too difficult. Whoever it is is bound to be using the passage fairly frequently, every time a metal check is needed, so all we have to do is to stay as close to the entrance as we can, as often as we can, and keep watch.’
‘And keep count.’
‘Of course, and keep count.’ I’m not sure Odolghes like me telling him what to do all the time, it may have reminded him of my mother. ‘And keep our mouths shut, dumb girl,’ he added rather tartly.
So that was what we did. Every moment we were not working we spent sitting in the far-off area by the sheep pens, trying to look natural, as if we were there because we liked the sheep and felt at home among them, but in fact observing all the comings and goings through the underground passage.
In the course of the next fortnight we saw the King go down there and out again twice, the Commander of the Guard fourteen times, once a day exactly, the Chief Counsellor twice, with the King, so that didn’t help much, not for drawing differences. And once, just once, we saw the Queen do so, all on her own, without any of her usual attendants.
Odolghes wouldn’t pay heed to me at first. For some reason (probably to do with Sommavida again and the way she bossed him) I don’t think he wanted the guardian of the stone to be a woman. But I was sure from the moment I set eyes on her that it was the Queen, the person we were looking for. She was hugely fat for one thing, and she was expecting another baby on top of it: what was she doing visiting the iron works in that condition? Certainly not in order to fit herself out with armour. And what was she doing there alone? She was never alone; always with a fluttery group of older ladies round her, winding her wool for her and straightening out her skirts and brushing away the flies and doing things she could perfectly well have done for herself. ‘Here, you Majesty, There your Majetsy, Let me, your Majesty, Oh, let me, let me.’
‘She could just be nosey,’ Odolghes said shortly, dismissing the matter. He was plumping for the Commander and his count of fourteen.
But the Queen wasn’t nosey, she was about the most droopy and lethargic member of the whole Court, and that was saying something. Odolghes hadn’t observed her properly like I had; hadn’t seen the way she huffed and puffed and trailed her fat swollen feet as she waddled down the opening of the passage, kicking up the iron-dust. She wasn’t making the trip out of curiosity or pleasure: she was going because she had to, because it was her duty.
Of course I might have been wrong: her purpose might have been quite different. But a hunch is a hunch, and my hunch was so strong that I decided to follow it up - without saying anything to Odolghes who would only have fussed about my safety. Next morning I told him I had a pain in my middle, and stayed put on the mattress while he went back to our lookout post to continue the watch over the passage. When he was gone, I got up, put on my shoes, thought better of it and put on my bed socks again, and slowly, cautiously, stopping every now and then in the shadow of the walls to make sure nobody was paying attention to me, made my way towards the large round tower where the large round Queen’s apartments were.
I had no intention really of doing anything except look, the way Odolghes recommended. (Even if I was secretly getting a bit fed up with all this caution and longed for us to be doing something more adventurous.) I reckoned either that the Queen herself would be there breakfasting, or whatever she did at this time in the morning, or else that the place would be full of her attendants, smartening things up in her absence. However, when I reached the doorway and peered inside, all was emptiness and silence, save for a boy pushing a grey rag about the floor with his foot. He stood with his back to me, so I couldn’t resist padding a little way up the staircase, just to see what went on on the floor above. I suppose it was risky, even foolhardy, but it didn’t seem so at the time, it seemed the obvious thing to do.
The stairs were wet under my socks: the boy had already wiped them. Good, that meant he wouldn’t be coming up again in a hurry. The upstairs floor, when I reached it, was dampish too. It didn’t take me long to find the Queen’s bedroom because there was only the one round room occupying all the space. It was divided into four by curtains, but the Queen’s bit was easy to recognize on account of it being much bigger and with a much wider bed. Who slept in the other sections? The little Princesses, I imagined, and the Queen’s ladies.
And perhaps the Queen’s dogs. The smell from the bedclothes was so strong it made me want to sneeze, and I put my finger under my nose just in time to stop a snorter. If I was caught downstairs I could bluff my way out of it – me being mute, the Cajutes all thought I was half-witted as well – but up here was a different matter. In next to no time I would find myself out on my ear and dangling from one of the spikes.
I drew the curtains of the Queen’s compartment together, screening myself from the rest of the room, and began looking around. Not searching for anything in particular – you couldn’t hope to search in such a higglepiggle – but just curious to see the way she lived. There was a metal pot beside the pillow. What was that for? To drink out of? Ugh! No, it was for piddling in! Just imagine keeping a piddling-pot right under your nose while you sleep. My mother would have had a fit. And what was that beside it, all covered with brownish spots? It looked like a lynx fur but, oh, no, it wasn’t a lynx fur, it wasn’t a lynx fur at all. And all those chests? What were they in aid of when the Queen and the Princesses so seldom changed their clothes?
Gingerly I opened the lid of the largest one and began examining its contents: they were clothes, they were dresses, dozens of them, all different stuffs and colours. I had never seen so many dresses before belonging to one single person. They must be part of the Queen’s dowry: outfits for a lifetime. Some of them were lovely too, with ornaments sewn on the front: corals, beads, feathers, all sorts of pretty, dangly things.
One by one, I began taking the dresses out of the chest to have a closer look at them, and laying them on the bed. From my gropings I could feel there was something else in the chest underneath, something different, harder, lumpier: maybe shoes, maybe jewels. All Miners are fascinated by jewels and I was no exception. Just as I was getting down to the interesting part, though, I heard a noise of feet on the stairway, and then voices – women’s voices. It was the Queen, or the Queen’s ladies, or both, coming back from breakfast. Help! I must cover up my traces before they found me.
Hastily I started packing the dresses back in the chest, but for some reason, perhaps because I didn’t fold them properly, they wouldn’t fit. Still more hastily, close to panic now, I yanked them out again and stuffed them under the bed, upsetting the contents of the metal pot as I did so and splashing some of the hems. Would anyone notice? I doubted it. They would notice the empty chest, though, if anyone chanced to open it. So instead of crawling under the bed with the dresses, as had been my plan, I snatched up a few of the ones that had lain on top and jumped into the chest with them, covering myself entirely (or so I hoped), then pulled shut the lid and began praying as hard as I could to the Earth Goddess to watch over me. Not that she is a very reliable deity, but she is supposed to protect Miners in tight spots, on account of all the service we do her with our digging.
I was only just in time. The footsteps were inside the room now – more than one set of them, stompity, clompity, stomp - and from my muffled position I heard a swishing noise as the curtains were swept aside, and then a groan and a creaking sound, horribly close to my ears, as someone of considerable weight plumped themselves down right on the chest where I was hidden. The Queen?
‘Fatty’s slopped her night-pot again,’ said a voice. Or something of this kind: many words of the Cajutes’ language were still strange to me but I could nearly always pick up the gist. ‘Dirty swinchen. Lazy hen.’
No, it was not the Queen. And yes, whoever it was had noticed the spillage.
‘All the better,’ said another voice, and there came a great thud as its owner flopped down on what I presumed from the sound of it was the Queen’s mattress. ‘Less work for us.’
‘Gerrup, you ninny!’ came a third voice, an older sounding one. ‘Off the bed. She’ll have you skinned if she finds you there.’ But the order was given without much drive, and shortly afterwards there was another, lighter flop and a murmur of, ‘Move over, then, make room for a littl’un,’ as the older speaker joined her colleague on the mattress.
After this there was silence, at first welcome, but then, as it began to be riven by grunts and one or two actual snores, rather worrying. I could foresee the chest, which had been my refuge, turning into a death-snare. I tried to move the lid a titch to let some air in, but it was useless, you might as well try to move aside a mountain. It is the Miners’ nightmare to be buried alive under a heavy weight; the stories I was told as a tiny child were always full of it: villains being crushed by landslides, heroes wiggling their way out of underground prisons. We call it the Mouse’s End – ‘u Fin du Ratt’ – and now it looked as if I might be going to suffer it myself. Oh, Earth Goddess, I pleaded silently, hear me! Do something, I beg of you! Save me from such a fate!
The Earth Goddess gave no sign – trust her. So to take my mind off things I began feeling around with my fingers, trying to identify the objects underneath me in the bottom of the chest. As I thought, they were mostly trinkets and jewellery, and very uncomfortable too if you had to lie on them for any length of time. I began cautiously to shift the sharpest objects to one side, out of spiking distance. If I could still bother about that, it struck me that suffocation was not yet a problem: air must be getting in somehow even if I couldn’t see from where. This calmed me down a bit, and from the jewellery I passed to the dresses, which were easier to get at, being on top. What sort of fastenings did they have? How well were they sewn? Did they have any pockets? And if so, was there anything interesting inside?
Timewise, I suppose, it must have been round about now that I made my great discovery, but what with the fright and the kafuffle its significance didn’t sink in till later, when I was telling Odolghes all about it in the safety of our hut. I remember coming across the three identical little secret pouches, sewn into each dress at exactly the same spot, and remember probing my fingers into them by turn and feeling the same prickly, gritty substance inside that clung to my fingertips and slid under my nails, but I think that was as far as I got.
I must have made a noise, you see, or made some sudden movement. Large posteriors are probably more sensitive than we give them credit for. Anyway, one moment I was lying there in total darkness, fiddling around with these pocket arrangements and their contents of grainy powder, drawing my conclusions or not as may be, and the next moment a bright shaft of light shot down the side of the chest as the lid was taken off.
I still couldn’t see anything but material: the dresses luckily covered me completely, but I could hear much more clearly than before. And what I heard made my scalp prickle. My hiding place had been discovered and I was being ordered, in the plainest possible terms, to leave it. ‘Yaar! Gotcha! Come on out, you little varmint! I know you’re there, I heard you scratching around!’
I was about to obey – it seemed I had no choice – but then the voices of the other two ladies, aroused from their slumbers, started to join in, and I decided to stay where I was.
‘Wàswara?’ they shrieked together. ‘Wàswaraaa?!’ And I heard the bedboards creak as they leaped off the mattress to their feet. Was it a snake? Was it a rat? Let it be, Hedjar, for the sake of gravy! Don’t go prodding around or the wretched thing would bolt and then they wouldn’t know where it was. Better in the chest than running loose around the room. Ugger! Shugger! Eeeyak! Horrors! I have never heard such a fuss over a small wild animal, which was fortunately what they thought I was. These ladies should have taken a turn down the mines.
‘I think it’s a rat, not a snake,’ the Hedjar woman said, her voice fading a little as she backed away. She was evidently braver than the other two, but not that brave. ‘A big one. Un grosser. I’ll show it, the cheeky beast, scrabbling about right under my you-know-what!’ And through the folds of the dress that covered me I saw the point of something – maybe a stick, maybe the tip of a shoe – make a light dent in the material and then a heavier one.
One toe’s breadth deeper and I really would have been done for, but the fright of the woman’s two companions must have been catching. Either that or else they must have bounded towards her and grabbed her, because amidst a noise of crashing and flapping and struggling, the stick or shoe or whatever it was suddenly withdrawn, and the next thing I heard was the sound of all six of their feet clattering across the room and down the stairway to safety.
So the end of the mouse is not always a bad one, not when there are stout-hearted warrior ladies like that around. Quickly, before anyone else arrived on the scene, I climbed out of the chest, piled all the dresses back into it any old how – the mouse would take the blame for the untidiness – and slipped across the room and down the stairs the way I had come in. Past the boy, past the three women, who were still there shouting orders at him, and out into the open unnoticed. I must say, I was glad to see the sky.
(Chapter 5 coming up next Sunday, 16 May 2010)
It was the first of several visits from neighbouring tribesfolk, and since the Cajutes were very proud of having some kind of entertainment to offer and show off about, Odolghes and I were now kept very busy. After the Latrones we played for Peleghetes, Trusani, Lastojeres and for a group of noisy Ampezzani who talked in gibberish to each other all the way through, greatly annoying the King. I felt very sorry now for the birds we Miners took down the earth with us in cages, because that was what I felt like: a caged-up song bird. My fingers were starting to peel from all the playing, and Odolghes’ voice was getting hoarse.
(I felt quite sorry for the Ampezzani too, because after they had left the chamber, the King turned to the Chief Counsellor and made a slitting motion across his throat with his finger and said, ‘Schlagen!’ and the Chief Counsellor motioned back and nodded. Stiff punishment, just for not appreciating music.)
It seemed like ages before we were able to go back to our quest again, but when we did we learnt a lot. We learned, for example, that the iron works were situated close to the castle but not inside the walls, and that they were reached by an underground passage whose entrance lay in the scruffiest and remotest corner of the castle, close beside the sheep pens. We worked this out for ourselves, without so much as setting a foot down the passageway, on account of the metal dust that wafted out of the entrance and settled on the sheep’s legs and bellies, turning them black. We discovered, from seeing some children sneak into the passage laughing and then shoot out again holding their backsides and not laughing any more, that the entrance was guarded on the far side and that no casual visitors were allowed in.
The deliveries of metal puzzled us for a while because we never seemed to see or hear carts of any kind coming up the hill, but one day when we were exploring the tower in the same far-off area, trying to get a bird’s eye view of the forge and outbuildings, we felt a kind of rumble under our feet and the mystery was solved: the underground tunnel continued in the other direction as well, right down to the bottom of the hill, and it was through this unseen pathway that the carts passed on their way to the forge.
Odolghes looked very pleased about this discovery and I couldn’t think why until he explained it to me. I thought it meant the mines must be miles away from the castle. But ‘Just the opposite,’ he said. ‘It means they’re close, right under our silly noses. Why should the Cajutes go to all the bother of digging an underground passage for the iron to come through? It’s not as if they had anyone to hide it from. If it came from far afield it would come openly, along the road. No, they’re working the veins in this very hillside, and it’s in this very hillside, somewhere, in someone’s bag or someone’s pocket or in some secret place that only the person who uses it knows about, that the magic stone is kept.’
So at last we could set about our main quest. Who was it that used the magic stone or was allowed to use it, and where did they keep it when it wasn’t in use? I thought it would most likely be entrusted to the head metal scout, or else to the master smith or someone like that with a high-up job in the armoury process, but Odolghes disagreed. ‘Use your muffin, Mara, I mean Vanna,’ he said. Vanna was the new name he was supposed to call me by but he kept on forgetting. ‘It’s not the sort of thing you leave to a worker, not even a head worker. You know who used to use it in the old days when it belonged to your kinsmen? Your great grandfather in person. The other Miners knew about it and what it looked like, but he was the only one with the right to use it. My mother saw him at it, several times. He used to wait until the scouts thought they had found a good thick vein, or a good place for the diggers to start their chipping, and then he’d go down and check it for them, spreading his cloak around him like a tent so that nobody but he could see the actual way the stone performed its magic. That’s how secret it was.’
‘So you think the King is the one to watch out for, eh, Father?’ That would make things difficult. The King was hardly ever to be seen in the castle except at suppertime, and by then he was usually dribbling drunk and halfway under the table.
‘The King,’ Odolghes said, ‘or the Chief Counsellor, or the Commander of the Guard. One of these three, I should say for choice. We’ll have to keep our eyes skinned to find out which. It shouldn’t be too difficult. Whoever it is is bound to be using the passage fairly frequently, every time a metal check is needed, so all we have to do is to stay as close to the entrance as we can, as often as we can, and keep watch.’
‘And keep count.’
‘Of course, and keep count.’ I’m not sure Odolghes like me telling him what to do all the time, it may have reminded him of my mother. ‘And keep our mouths shut, dumb girl,’ he added rather tartly.
So that was what we did. Every moment we were not working we spent sitting in the far-off area by the sheep pens, trying to look natural, as if we were there because we liked the sheep and felt at home among them, but in fact observing all the comings and goings through the underground passage.
In the course of the next fortnight we saw the King go down there and out again twice, the Commander of the Guard fourteen times, once a day exactly, the Chief Counsellor twice, with the King, so that didn’t help much, not for drawing differences. And once, just once, we saw the Queen do so, all on her own, without any of her usual attendants.
Odolghes wouldn’t pay heed to me at first. For some reason (probably to do with Sommavida again and the way she bossed him) I don’t think he wanted the guardian of the stone to be a woman. But I was sure from the moment I set eyes on her that it was the Queen, the person we were looking for. She was hugely fat for one thing, and she was expecting another baby on top of it: what was she doing visiting the iron works in that condition? Certainly not in order to fit herself out with armour. And what was she doing there alone? She was never alone; always with a fluttery group of older ladies round her, winding her wool for her and straightening out her skirts and brushing away the flies and doing things she could perfectly well have done for herself. ‘Here, you Majesty, There your Majetsy, Let me, your Majesty, Oh, let me, let me.’
‘She could just be nosey,’ Odolghes said shortly, dismissing the matter. He was plumping for the Commander and his count of fourteen.
But the Queen wasn’t nosey, she was about the most droopy and lethargic member of the whole Court, and that was saying something. Odolghes hadn’t observed her properly like I had; hadn’t seen the way she huffed and puffed and trailed her fat swollen feet as she waddled down the opening of the passage, kicking up the iron-dust. She wasn’t making the trip out of curiosity or pleasure: she was going because she had to, because it was her duty.
Of course I might have been wrong: her purpose might have been quite different. But a hunch is a hunch, and my hunch was so strong that I decided to follow it up - without saying anything to Odolghes who would only have fussed about my safety. Next morning I told him I had a pain in my middle, and stayed put on the mattress while he went back to our lookout post to continue the watch over the passage. When he was gone, I got up, put on my shoes, thought better of it and put on my bed socks again, and slowly, cautiously, stopping every now and then in the shadow of the walls to make sure nobody was paying attention to me, made my way towards the large round tower where the large round Queen’s apartments were.
I had no intention really of doing anything except look, the way Odolghes recommended. (Even if I was secretly getting a bit fed up with all this caution and longed for us to be doing something more adventurous.) I reckoned either that the Queen herself would be there breakfasting, or whatever she did at this time in the morning, or else that the place would be full of her attendants, smartening things up in her absence. However, when I reached the doorway and peered inside, all was emptiness and silence, save for a boy pushing a grey rag about the floor with his foot. He stood with his back to me, so I couldn’t resist padding a little way up the staircase, just to see what went on on the floor above. I suppose it was risky, even foolhardy, but it didn’t seem so at the time, it seemed the obvious thing to do.
The stairs were wet under my socks: the boy had already wiped them. Good, that meant he wouldn’t be coming up again in a hurry. The upstairs floor, when I reached it, was dampish too. It didn’t take me long to find the Queen’s bedroom because there was only the one round room occupying all the space. It was divided into four by curtains, but the Queen’s bit was easy to recognize on account of it being much bigger and with a much wider bed. Who slept in the other sections? The little Princesses, I imagined, and the Queen’s ladies.
And perhaps the Queen’s dogs. The smell from the bedclothes was so strong it made me want to sneeze, and I put my finger under my nose just in time to stop a snorter. If I was caught downstairs I could bluff my way out of it – me being mute, the Cajutes all thought I was half-witted as well – but up here was a different matter. In next to no time I would find myself out on my ear and dangling from one of the spikes.
I drew the curtains of the Queen’s compartment together, screening myself from the rest of the room, and began looking around. Not searching for anything in particular – you couldn’t hope to search in such a higglepiggle – but just curious to see the way she lived. There was a metal pot beside the pillow. What was that for? To drink out of? Ugh! No, it was for piddling in! Just imagine keeping a piddling-pot right under your nose while you sleep. My mother would have had a fit. And what was that beside it, all covered with brownish spots? It looked like a lynx fur but, oh, no, it wasn’t a lynx fur, it wasn’t a lynx fur at all. And all those chests? What were they in aid of when the Queen and the Princesses so seldom changed their clothes?
Gingerly I opened the lid of the largest one and began examining its contents: they were clothes, they were dresses, dozens of them, all different stuffs and colours. I had never seen so many dresses before belonging to one single person. They must be part of the Queen’s dowry: outfits for a lifetime. Some of them were lovely too, with ornaments sewn on the front: corals, beads, feathers, all sorts of pretty, dangly things.
One by one, I began taking the dresses out of the chest to have a closer look at them, and laying them on the bed. From my gropings I could feel there was something else in the chest underneath, something different, harder, lumpier: maybe shoes, maybe jewels. All Miners are fascinated by jewels and I was no exception. Just as I was getting down to the interesting part, though, I heard a noise of feet on the stairway, and then voices – women’s voices. It was the Queen, or the Queen’s ladies, or both, coming back from breakfast. Help! I must cover up my traces before they found me.
Hastily I started packing the dresses back in the chest, but for some reason, perhaps because I didn’t fold them properly, they wouldn’t fit. Still more hastily, close to panic now, I yanked them out again and stuffed them under the bed, upsetting the contents of the metal pot as I did so and splashing some of the hems. Would anyone notice? I doubted it. They would notice the empty chest, though, if anyone chanced to open it. So instead of crawling under the bed with the dresses, as had been my plan, I snatched up a few of the ones that had lain on top and jumped into the chest with them, covering myself entirely (or so I hoped), then pulled shut the lid and began praying as hard as I could to the Earth Goddess to watch over me. Not that she is a very reliable deity, but she is supposed to protect Miners in tight spots, on account of all the service we do her with our digging.
I was only just in time. The footsteps were inside the room now – more than one set of them, stompity, clompity, stomp - and from my muffled position I heard a swishing noise as the curtains were swept aside, and then a groan and a creaking sound, horribly close to my ears, as someone of considerable weight plumped themselves down right on the chest where I was hidden. The Queen?
‘Fatty’s slopped her night-pot again,’ said a voice. Or something of this kind: many words of the Cajutes’ language were still strange to me but I could nearly always pick up the gist. ‘Dirty swinchen. Lazy hen.’
No, it was not the Queen. And yes, whoever it was had noticed the spillage.
‘All the better,’ said another voice, and there came a great thud as its owner flopped down on what I presumed from the sound of it was the Queen’s mattress. ‘Less work for us.’
‘Gerrup, you ninny!’ came a third voice, an older sounding one. ‘Off the bed. She’ll have you skinned if she finds you there.’ But the order was given without much drive, and shortly afterwards there was another, lighter flop and a murmur of, ‘Move over, then, make room for a littl’un,’ as the older speaker joined her colleague on the mattress.
After this there was silence, at first welcome, but then, as it began to be riven by grunts and one or two actual snores, rather worrying. I could foresee the chest, which had been my refuge, turning into a death-snare. I tried to move the lid a titch to let some air in, but it was useless, you might as well try to move aside a mountain. It is the Miners’ nightmare to be buried alive under a heavy weight; the stories I was told as a tiny child were always full of it: villains being crushed by landslides, heroes wiggling their way out of underground prisons. We call it the Mouse’s End – ‘u Fin du Ratt’ – and now it looked as if I might be going to suffer it myself. Oh, Earth Goddess, I pleaded silently, hear me! Do something, I beg of you! Save me from such a fate!
The Earth Goddess gave no sign – trust her. So to take my mind off things I began feeling around with my fingers, trying to identify the objects underneath me in the bottom of the chest. As I thought, they were mostly trinkets and jewellery, and very uncomfortable too if you had to lie on them for any length of time. I began cautiously to shift the sharpest objects to one side, out of spiking distance. If I could still bother about that, it struck me that suffocation was not yet a problem: air must be getting in somehow even if I couldn’t see from where. This calmed me down a bit, and from the jewellery I passed to the dresses, which were easier to get at, being on top. What sort of fastenings did they have? How well were they sewn? Did they have any pockets? And if so, was there anything interesting inside?
Timewise, I suppose, it must have been round about now that I made my great discovery, but what with the fright and the kafuffle its significance didn’t sink in till later, when I was telling Odolghes all about it in the safety of our hut. I remember coming across the three identical little secret pouches, sewn into each dress at exactly the same spot, and remember probing my fingers into them by turn and feeling the same prickly, gritty substance inside that clung to my fingertips and slid under my nails, but I think that was as far as I got.
I must have made a noise, you see, or made some sudden movement. Large posteriors are probably more sensitive than we give them credit for. Anyway, one moment I was lying there in total darkness, fiddling around with these pocket arrangements and their contents of grainy powder, drawing my conclusions or not as may be, and the next moment a bright shaft of light shot down the side of the chest as the lid was taken off.
I still couldn’t see anything but material: the dresses luckily covered me completely, but I could hear much more clearly than before. And what I heard made my scalp prickle. My hiding place had been discovered and I was being ordered, in the plainest possible terms, to leave it. ‘Yaar! Gotcha! Come on out, you little varmint! I know you’re there, I heard you scratching around!’
I was about to obey – it seemed I had no choice – but then the voices of the other two ladies, aroused from their slumbers, started to join in, and I decided to stay where I was.
‘Wàswara?’ they shrieked together. ‘Wàswaraaa?!’ And I heard the bedboards creak as they leaped off the mattress to their feet. Was it a snake? Was it a rat? Let it be, Hedjar, for the sake of gravy! Don’t go prodding around or the wretched thing would bolt and then they wouldn’t know where it was. Better in the chest than running loose around the room. Ugger! Shugger! Eeeyak! Horrors! I have never heard such a fuss over a small wild animal, which was fortunately what they thought I was. These ladies should have taken a turn down the mines.
‘I think it’s a rat, not a snake,’ the Hedjar woman said, her voice fading a little as she backed away. She was evidently braver than the other two, but not that brave. ‘A big one. Un grosser. I’ll show it, the cheeky beast, scrabbling about right under my you-know-what!’ And through the folds of the dress that covered me I saw the point of something – maybe a stick, maybe the tip of a shoe – make a light dent in the material and then a heavier one.
One toe’s breadth deeper and I really would have been done for, but the fright of the woman’s two companions must have been catching. Either that or else they must have bounded towards her and grabbed her, because amidst a noise of crashing and flapping and struggling, the stick or shoe or whatever it was suddenly withdrawn, and the next thing I heard was the sound of all six of their feet clattering across the room and down the stairway to safety.
So the end of the mouse is not always a bad one, not when there are stout-hearted warrior ladies like that around. Quickly, before anyone else arrived on the scene, I climbed out of the chest, piled all the dresses back into it any old how – the mouse would take the blame for the untidiness – and slipped across the room and down the stairs the way I had come in. Past the boy, past the three women, who were still there shouting orders at him, and out into the open unnoticed. I must say, I was glad to see the sky.
(Chapter 5 coming up next Sunday, 16 May 2010)
Wednesday, 5 May 2010
chapter 3
At first, far from making up for lost time, we lost still more of it: I had no more idea the Odolghes did where the Cajutes’ stronghold lay, and we stumbled around the mountains for another whole day and night, getting tireder and tireder and hungrier and hungrier, before we finally met up with some shepherds who put us on the right track. And even then the way was so long it was almost sundown when we came out of the shadows of the last valley and caught sight of the castle on a pink-lit hill before us.
I had never seen a real castle at close range before, except once, in winter, when we did some mining work for the Latrones. Who are a shabby sort of tribe anyway, and keep their livestock indoors with them and live much the same easy-going, muck-and-manger life.
The home of the Cajutes was altogether different. It was a huge stone dwelling in the shape of a slightly wonky necklace, covering the entire hilltop, with high walls running all the way round and towers let into them at intervals, like beads. On top of the walls were wooden spikes, thick as bullocks’ shinbones, pointing outwards in an unfriendly fashion, and on top of the towers were piles of just as unfriendly looking stones. Like a well made necklace, too, at first sight you could hardly see where the opening was, but as my father and I drew nearer we caught sight of a narrow black slit at the base of one of the towers, which we imagined, for want of any other hole to choose from, must be the entrance.
‘How do the horses get in without being squashed?’ I whispered to Odolghes, scarcely moving my lips. We were still too far away for anyone to see us but I reckoned it was best to be careful.
‘Hang the horses!’ he said crossly, so I realised he was a bit jumpier than he let on. ‘How do we get in without being squashed? There are sentinels posted on every blasted tower. Look, you can see the points of their helmets sticking up behind the crenels.’
I couldn’t see anything, but then my eyes aren’t very good, never were. Mole eyes as Alexa called them. Maybe it’d have helped if I’d known what crenels were. ‘Wave your zither at them, Father,’ I suggested. ‘Start up some music so they know we’re not dangerous.’
Odolghes nodded and unstrapped the zither and passed it on to me. We were dangerous, he said in a tough voice meant to reassure both of us; we were dangerous as wolves if only the Cajutes knew it. ‘And you start up the music, Bossy Breeches. That’s what you’re here for.’
So, my fingers trembling a little, I began playing a few strummy bits on the zither, and Odolghes, rather too loudly to sound comfortable, began singing one of his back-to-front songs, and in this way we approached the castle, right up to the door, without any trouble at all, not even a stone in our faces.
The Cajutes must have been keener on music than we’d dared hope, and starved of it too, because there was a whole crowd of them waiting inside the narrow doorway to meet us, eyes popping and mouths gaping and feet jiggling up and down in the rudiments of a clumsy dance. Not at all the ferocious welcome we had feared from the spikes.
But not a kind welcome either, more of a greedy sniffing at something appetizing that had come their way. Their language was quite similar to ours really, though they spoke it with a funny accent, so I was able to pick up some of their words straight away. Speelers, they gabbled to one another excitedly, Sengers (meaning singers). Guk at en (look at them) – un mon end un kidden. (That was me, the kidden.) Wofon kommen en? Wàswara wollen en? Was it safe (their word was ‘sikker’, like our ‘secure’) to let us in?
Although maybe I am wrong and they were talking about sicker in the sense of disease, because they drew back a bit now and made signs at us to open our mouths and undo our clothing at the neck and bare our chests at them, and didn’t in fact let us past the door until they had looked us all over like livestock at a fair. It was a good thing they didn’t touch as well as look, or they might easily have discovered the iron arm, and with it Odolghes’ identity, but all they did when they noticed it hanging lifeless by his side was to point to it and say, ‘Brocken?’ To which Odolghes replied, ‘Brocken’, and that was it.
And the music, they wanted to know? The kidden would play the music? Yes, the mon would sing and the kidden would play the music. The kidden wouldn’t sing because the kidden’s voice was brocken like the mon’s arm, but the kidden would play the music.
If the outside of the castle was grand, the inside knocked me speechless (really speechless, not just pretending) by its finery and the number of things it contained. There were rooms for everything: for cooking in, for eating in, for sleeping in, even for dawdling around and talking in, the way most of the high rank Cajutes seemed to do most of the time. The rooms weren’t just empty shelters either, like our Miners’ tents, there were cupboards in them to keep things in – bundled away, out of sight – and tables to put things on, and hooks to hang things on, and shelves for stacking and chairs for sitting and hammocks for reclining and little low footstools for propping up the feet: every sort of contraption for making life comfortable.
Odolghes seemed to take all this splendour in his stride and told me, later that night when we were safe in our sleeping quarters near the kennels, that Fànes had been grander still, grander that I could ever imagine, with embroidered hangings on the walls and copper candlesticks and cushions stuffed with feathers to rest your backside on, and fancy things like that. But whether this was true or he was just boasting, to me our new surroundings were quite magnificent enough.
I wish I could say the same for the Cajutes themselves, only I can’t; I find it hard to say anything nice about them at all. That first evening at their court I was too tired and hungry and worried about playing properly to notice much about them; all I remember is a line of wobbly faces staring down at Odolghes and me from behind the grease-lamps on the high table, tilting this way and that as the diners listened to our music, and later on a jumble of legs and skirts and feet and corns, very close to us, as all of them – eaters and servers and cooks and children – took to the floor in a wild after-supper stampede. Next day, however, I began to pick out details and to realise that, for all their riches, we had indeed entered the homestead of a very rough and savage lot of people. It showed in various things: in the way they groomed their hair, for example, or the way they didn’t groom it but twisted it up in a fat-smeared topknot and left it there, never more to disturb save for poking in a bodkin now and again to still the itching. Men, women, even children, even babies, it made no difference, all sported the same greasy, wispy knobble. It showed in the way they wore their clothes, which, fine though they were, they seldom changed, not even to go to bed. And it showed in the beds themselves: feathered and pungent as the earths of foxes and, like them, full of scraps of left-over food for the occupant to chew on at night, or else breakfast on without bothering to leave the bed.
Because, gracious, they were an idle lot for a warrior race. Miners aren’t that famous for their cleanliness, I know, but at least we have a reason for being dirty, and at least we try to get the worst of the grime off. These people, no, they seemed to glory in it. I saw one of the women change her baby’s dress once (it must have got too small for the child to wear), and, I swear, the discarded dress, instead of flopping to the ground, stood straight up like a tent, it was so stiff with ugg.
‘A nos ne san valel nia,’ as the Fanes say, according to Odolghes who had taken to speaking to me in his own language now when we were alone. No business of ours. But it wasn’t just the dirt, or the smells, or the way they peed (and worse) wherever they happened to be standing, or the way they kept the blood on their hands after hunting and licked at it, and messy things like that, it was the sullenness of their characters that really made them so unpleasant to live with and work for. They rarely smiled; their eyes rarely lit up, either with interest or with anything else. Even when they danced there was something dull about them, something heavy and plodding and ox-like that prevented them from having what I call fun.
Odolghes and I had feared questions, but after the first quizzing on our arrival they didn’t ask us any. We were there to serve them music when they felt like it, not to speak to or bother about. What we did for the rest of the time didn’t concern them, any more than it concerned them what the dogs did in the kennels next door when they were not wanted for hunting.
We were the ones anxious for information. Whereabouts were the Cajutes’ metal works now that they did their own excavating and forging? Were they inside the castle precincts or somewhere outside? Where did they store their metal? Where did it come from? Who brought it to the works, and when, and how often? Until we knew the answers to these questions our search for the magic stone couldn’t even begin. And both of us, I think, were becoming more and more eager with every passing day not only to begin it but to end it as soon as possible.
Lacking the language and not wanting to draw a shred of attention to ourselves, not even from the castle cats, we started by just looking. Roaming around the various courtyards, pretending to practise our songs, and looking for all we were worth. Music was hardly ever called for in the daytime except when there was a hunting party setting off or the Queen felt whimsy, so we were usually free to go where we liked. Nobody seemed to mind us, nobody seemed to care. Sometimes one of the guards - probably an officer, only they were all so crusty it was difficult to tell - would prod his scabbard into my father’s stomach and grunt, ‘Seng!’ at him, and we would have to do as we were bid and seng; but usually they just let us go on our way without comment, chewing on whatever plant it was they chewed all day long and scratching their mail-clad backs against the wall.
One or two of the smaller children sometimes showed a bit more interest, staring at me with my zither and pointing and making hopeful ‘Brrm’ noises, but usually its mother clapped it on the head to silence it and hauled it away. Not angrily, just forcefully, the way you would haul a hay bale.
‘They’re so slack we could steal anything from them,’ I whispered to Odolghes after our first stroll, which had taken us to the bakery and the dairy but no further. Free to roam we might be, but we wanted things to stay that way.
He shook his head and told me not to count on it. They were confident, he said, they had nothing to fear, and why should they? There was no other tribe could match their strength, not while they’d got the stone to find their metal for them.
Mmmn, I agreed, only half convinced, but what if they didn’t have the stone? Odolghes seemed so sure they must, but what if this Mulebones character or whatever his name was had kept it for himself? Sold the secret of the iron making but kept the stone for future use? That’s what a really clever person would have done, surely? And by all accounts Mulebones was the cleverest man alive.
Odolghes shrugged his shoulders and winced: the arm didn’t fit very well and often bothered him. Seeing that we were alone in our hut and unlikely to be needed till evening he began unstrapping it, but then thought better and let it be. ‘Alive…’ he said slowly, as if weighing the word inside his head or testing it out in some way. ‘Hmm, alive. Now that’s one thing he can’t be. You may be right about the stone, my sweet: it is just possible Mulebones hung on to it, or tried to, although I think it very unlikely, knowing how greedy he was for the gold. But that he’s still alive, no, that’s out of the question. His hair was white already when I knew him. All of it.’
White? All white hair? That was more unusual in people than in horses; I didn’t think I had ever seen anyone with all white hair. Streaky, yes, like my grandfather’s, but not all over white. I was very relieved I’d never have to meet such a man, although for some reason he fascinated me, this Mulebones, and I wanted to know more about him. ‘If he’s dead like you say,’ I insisted, ‘then where’s all the gold got to? What did he do with it? Who did he leave it to?’
My father forgot his arm and shrugged again, and winced again. ‘That,’ he said, ‘is something we’ll probably never know, but we won’t let it bother us either. Once we have the stone, and some proper organisation, we can turn it into as much gold as we like.’
Could we, I wondered? How? But I didn’t have time to ask because at that very instant a young Cajute soldier barged into the hut without warning and clicked his fingers at us and said we were wanted in the great hall, on account of there being ‘Guesters’.
How wise Odolghes had been to keep his arm on. I promised myself to follow his example and play safe always. I had seen the spikes on the wall at close range now and noticed some very nasty bits and pieces clinging to them, not unlike the pumpkins of Alexa’s description.
(Chapter 4 coming up next Monday, May 10 2010)
I had never seen a real castle at close range before, except once, in winter, when we did some mining work for the Latrones. Who are a shabby sort of tribe anyway, and keep their livestock indoors with them and live much the same easy-going, muck-and-manger life.
The home of the Cajutes was altogether different. It was a huge stone dwelling in the shape of a slightly wonky necklace, covering the entire hilltop, with high walls running all the way round and towers let into them at intervals, like beads. On top of the walls were wooden spikes, thick as bullocks’ shinbones, pointing outwards in an unfriendly fashion, and on top of the towers were piles of just as unfriendly looking stones. Like a well made necklace, too, at first sight you could hardly see where the opening was, but as my father and I drew nearer we caught sight of a narrow black slit at the base of one of the towers, which we imagined, for want of any other hole to choose from, must be the entrance.
‘How do the horses get in without being squashed?’ I whispered to Odolghes, scarcely moving my lips. We were still too far away for anyone to see us but I reckoned it was best to be careful.
‘Hang the horses!’ he said crossly, so I realised he was a bit jumpier than he let on. ‘How do we get in without being squashed? There are sentinels posted on every blasted tower. Look, you can see the points of their helmets sticking up behind the crenels.’
I couldn’t see anything, but then my eyes aren’t very good, never were. Mole eyes as Alexa called them. Maybe it’d have helped if I’d known what crenels were. ‘Wave your zither at them, Father,’ I suggested. ‘Start up some music so they know we’re not dangerous.’
Odolghes nodded and unstrapped the zither and passed it on to me. We were dangerous, he said in a tough voice meant to reassure both of us; we were dangerous as wolves if only the Cajutes knew it. ‘And you start up the music, Bossy Breeches. That’s what you’re here for.’
So, my fingers trembling a little, I began playing a few strummy bits on the zither, and Odolghes, rather too loudly to sound comfortable, began singing one of his back-to-front songs, and in this way we approached the castle, right up to the door, without any trouble at all, not even a stone in our faces.
The Cajutes must have been keener on music than we’d dared hope, and starved of it too, because there was a whole crowd of them waiting inside the narrow doorway to meet us, eyes popping and mouths gaping and feet jiggling up and down in the rudiments of a clumsy dance. Not at all the ferocious welcome we had feared from the spikes.
But not a kind welcome either, more of a greedy sniffing at something appetizing that had come their way. Their language was quite similar to ours really, though they spoke it with a funny accent, so I was able to pick up some of their words straight away. Speelers, they gabbled to one another excitedly, Sengers (meaning singers). Guk at en (look at them) – un mon end un kidden. (That was me, the kidden.) Wofon kommen en? Wàswara wollen en? Was it safe (their word was ‘sikker’, like our ‘secure’) to let us in?
Although maybe I am wrong and they were talking about sicker in the sense of disease, because they drew back a bit now and made signs at us to open our mouths and undo our clothing at the neck and bare our chests at them, and didn’t in fact let us past the door until they had looked us all over like livestock at a fair. It was a good thing they didn’t touch as well as look, or they might easily have discovered the iron arm, and with it Odolghes’ identity, but all they did when they noticed it hanging lifeless by his side was to point to it and say, ‘Brocken?’ To which Odolghes replied, ‘Brocken’, and that was it.
And the music, they wanted to know? The kidden would play the music? Yes, the mon would sing and the kidden would play the music. The kidden wouldn’t sing because the kidden’s voice was brocken like the mon’s arm, but the kidden would play the music.
If the outside of the castle was grand, the inside knocked me speechless (really speechless, not just pretending) by its finery and the number of things it contained. There were rooms for everything: for cooking in, for eating in, for sleeping in, even for dawdling around and talking in, the way most of the high rank Cajutes seemed to do most of the time. The rooms weren’t just empty shelters either, like our Miners’ tents, there were cupboards in them to keep things in – bundled away, out of sight – and tables to put things on, and hooks to hang things on, and shelves for stacking and chairs for sitting and hammocks for reclining and little low footstools for propping up the feet: every sort of contraption for making life comfortable.
Odolghes seemed to take all this splendour in his stride and told me, later that night when we were safe in our sleeping quarters near the kennels, that Fànes had been grander still, grander that I could ever imagine, with embroidered hangings on the walls and copper candlesticks and cushions stuffed with feathers to rest your backside on, and fancy things like that. But whether this was true or he was just boasting, to me our new surroundings were quite magnificent enough.
I wish I could say the same for the Cajutes themselves, only I can’t; I find it hard to say anything nice about them at all. That first evening at their court I was too tired and hungry and worried about playing properly to notice much about them; all I remember is a line of wobbly faces staring down at Odolghes and me from behind the grease-lamps on the high table, tilting this way and that as the diners listened to our music, and later on a jumble of legs and skirts and feet and corns, very close to us, as all of them – eaters and servers and cooks and children – took to the floor in a wild after-supper stampede. Next day, however, I began to pick out details and to realise that, for all their riches, we had indeed entered the homestead of a very rough and savage lot of people. It showed in various things: in the way they groomed their hair, for example, or the way they didn’t groom it but twisted it up in a fat-smeared topknot and left it there, never more to disturb save for poking in a bodkin now and again to still the itching. Men, women, even children, even babies, it made no difference, all sported the same greasy, wispy knobble. It showed in the way they wore their clothes, which, fine though they were, they seldom changed, not even to go to bed. And it showed in the beds themselves: feathered and pungent as the earths of foxes and, like them, full of scraps of left-over food for the occupant to chew on at night, or else breakfast on without bothering to leave the bed.
Because, gracious, they were an idle lot for a warrior race. Miners aren’t that famous for their cleanliness, I know, but at least we have a reason for being dirty, and at least we try to get the worst of the grime off. These people, no, they seemed to glory in it. I saw one of the women change her baby’s dress once (it must have got too small for the child to wear), and, I swear, the discarded dress, instead of flopping to the ground, stood straight up like a tent, it was so stiff with ugg.
‘A nos ne san valel nia,’ as the Fanes say, according to Odolghes who had taken to speaking to me in his own language now when we were alone. No business of ours. But it wasn’t just the dirt, or the smells, or the way they peed (and worse) wherever they happened to be standing, or the way they kept the blood on their hands after hunting and licked at it, and messy things like that, it was the sullenness of their characters that really made them so unpleasant to live with and work for. They rarely smiled; their eyes rarely lit up, either with interest or with anything else. Even when they danced there was something dull about them, something heavy and plodding and ox-like that prevented them from having what I call fun.
Odolghes and I had feared questions, but after the first quizzing on our arrival they didn’t ask us any. We were there to serve them music when they felt like it, not to speak to or bother about. What we did for the rest of the time didn’t concern them, any more than it concerned them what the dogs did in the kennels next door when they were not wanted for hunting.
We were the ones anxious for information. Whereabouts were the Cajutes’ metal works now that they did their own excavating and forging? Were they inside the castle precincts or somewhere outside? Where did they store their metal? Where did it come from? Who brought it to the works, and when, and how often? Until we knew the answers to these questions our search for the magic stone couldn’t even begin. And both of us, I think, were becoming more and more eager with every passing day not only to begin it but to end it as soon as possible.
Lacking the language and not wanting to draw a shred of attention to ourselves, not even from the castle cats, we started by just looking. Roaming around the various courtyards, pretending to practise our songs, and looking for all we were worth. Music was hardly ever called for in the daytime except when there was a hunting party setting off or the Queen felt whimsy, so we were usually free to go where we liked. Nobody seemed to mind us, nobody seemed to care. Sometimes one of the guards - probably an officer, only they were all so crusty it was difficult to tell - would prod his scabbard into my father’s stomach and grunt, ‘Seng!’ at him, and we would have to do as we were bid and seng; but usually they just let us go on our way without comment, chewing on whatever plant it was they chewed all day long and scratching their mail-clad backs against the wall.
One or two of the smaller children sometimes showed a bit more interest, staring at me with my zither and pointing and making hopeful ‘Brrm’ noises, but usually its mother clapped it on the head to silence it and hauled it away. Not angrily, just forcefully, the way you would haul a hay bale.
‘They’re so slack we could steal anything from them,’ I whispered to Odolghes after our first stroll, which had taken us to the bakery and the dairy but no further. Free to roam we might be, but we wanted things to stay that way.
He shook his head and told me not to count on it. They were confident, he said, they had nothing to fear, and why should they? There was no other tribe could match their strength, not while they’d got the stone to find their metal for them.
Mmmn, I agreed, only half convinced, but what if they didn’t have the stone? Odolghes seemed so sure they must, but what if this Mulebones character or whatever his name was had kept it for himself? Sold the secret of the iron making but kept the stone for future use? That’s what a really clever person would have done, surely? And by all accounts Mulebones was the cleverest man alive.
Odolghes shrugged his shoulders and winced: the arm didn’t fit very well and often bothered him. Seeing that we were alone in our hut and unlikely to be needed till evening he began unstrapping it, but then thought better and let it be. ‘Alive…’ he said slowly, as if weighing the word inside his head or testing it out in some way. ‘Hmm, alive. Now that’s one thing he can’t be. You may be right about the stone, my sweet: it is just possible Mulebones hung on to it, or tried to, although I think it very unlikely, knowing how greedy he was for the gold. But that he’s still alive, no, that’s out of the question. His hair was white already when I knew him. All of it.’
White? All white hair? That was more unusual in people than in horses; I didn’t think I had ever seen anyone with all white hair. Streaky, yes, like my grandfather’s, but not all over white. I was very relieved I’d never have to meet such a man, although for some reason he fascinated me, this Mulebones, and I wanted to know more about him. ‘If he’s dead like you say,’ I insisted, ‘then where’s all the gold got to? What did he do with it? Who did he leave it to?’
My father forgot his arm and shrugged again, and winced again. ‘That,’ he said, ‘is something we’ll probably never know, but we won’t let it bother us either. Once we have the stone, and some proper organisation, we can turn it into as much gold as we like.’
Could we, I wondered? How? But I didn’t have time to ask because at that very instant a young Cajute soldier barged into the hut without warning and clicked his fingers at us and said we were wanted in the great hall, on account of there being ‘Guesters’.
How wise Odolghes had been to keep his arm on. I promised myself to follow his example and play safe always. I had seen the spikes on the wall at close range now and noticed some very nasty bits and pieces clinging to them, not unlike the pumpkins of Alexa’s description.
(Chapter 4 coming up next Monday, May 10 2010)
Sunday, 25 April 2010
chapter 2
CHAPTER TWO
How did my mother know the change in Odolghes was so serious? How did she know what it would lead to? Do wives have a secret way of finding out these things? Do mothers? Or was it that she had always known in her heart of hearts that her misfit husband was lent to her by Fortune, not given for keeps? ‘Who do you belong to, Honeycake? To me, to Sommavida.’ Was that why she had to repeat this phrase so often: because she knew it wasn’t really true and never would be? Poor Mother, so drab, so plain, like a little brown she-sparrow, with her beautiful captive eagle that was now spreading its wings and preparing to fly. What could she do to stop him?
In fact she could do quite a lot, and did. Although her strongest weapon she was too generous, and perhaps too proud, to use. For a start she persuaded her father (not that that was very difficult) to give Odolghes no help in his task. He wanted to forge an iron arm for himself, did he, to wear under his cloak so as to hide his deformity? Very well, let him forge it himself if he was able. He wanted a companion to take with him and play the zither? Let him whistle for one: no Miner, male or female, young or old, would have the Chief’s permission to leave the camp. Then, when these threats failed, and Odolghes could be seen busy at the anvil every day, pounding away with his one good arm, using toes and teeth and the little red stump of a hand that grew on his right shoulder, she refused to pack his bags for him, or plait his hair or tie his laces, or do any of the two-handed tasks she had always done for him so willingly before. And when it was clear not even this would thwart him, she began secretly, as a last resort, to add poppy juice to his evening meal, hoping in this way to bring the clouds back. Which it might well have done, had not one of the cooks eaten some of the food on the sly and gone all dopey, exposing the trick.
I don’t know about my father, whether the shock helped him speed up his decision to leave, or whether he was ready in any case, but as far as I was concerned it was this business of the poppy juice that made up my mind for me. I had been wondering for days, Whom should I side with? Which parent should I choose? Loyalty told me, my mother, who needed me and worked so hard for me. Pity told me, my mother, who would miss me terribly. Caution told me, my mother; comfort told me, my mother; even greed told me, my mother (because what would I get to eat if I had to rely on Odolghes’ cooking?). But pity also told me, my father, for having treated him so badly in the past and paid so little heed to him. Loyalty also told me, my father, who’d never had any from me yet. And another thing – I don’t know what it was: curiosity, daring, sense of adventure – told me my father too. My father, and new places and new people, and the court of the Cajutes with the riddle of how to get in and how to get out again, and the thrill of coming back with the famous stone that everyone set such store by, and hearing them say (instead of Mara the Mongrel), Mara the Marvellous did this with her brave and clever dad!
The two pulls remained about equal though, so I really didn’t know which way to go. Not until I saw the cook lying by the fire with his upturned belly and his squiffy, dreamy eyes, and then anger at my mother for wanting to reduce Odolghes to this state in order to keep him, got the better of me and I made my choice.
Or, as Alexa would say, I cast my die, whatever a die is. Quickly, stealthily, without saying anything to anybody, I collected a few useful things like clothes and nuts and cheese and toothpicks (I hate having bits of nuts in my teeth) and tied them into a bundle, of a size I could easily carry. I put on my strongest shoes too, the ones I used for ore-crushing, and my leather hat and jacket and my thickest fur-lined breeches. Then, fat as a thrush, with the bundle on my back, I went and sat in the shadows, a good distance from the fire where all the fuss was going on, and waited for my father to finish his leave-taking. He was so furious I knew he wouldn’t be long.
From where I was, it was difficult to hear what he was saying, but words reached me like ‘trap’ and ‘cage’ and ‘smother’ and ‘apron strings’, and I guessed he was accusing my mother – perhaps my grandfather too – of treating him as a sort of prisoner all these years. Which I suppose in their different ways they had.
My mother’s voice was shriller and carried better. ‘Go then, you antwit,’ she shrieked at him, ‘if that is what you want! Go and play the hero! Walk right into the ogre’s den! Show everyone how brave you are! Nice satisfaction it’ll bring you when you’re roasting on the Cajutes’ gridiron, to know that everyone thinks you’re brave!’
Odolghes must have said something soothing at this point about performing his task in a twinkling and coming back soon, but it didn’t seem to soothe my mother. Her voice went down a notch but remained just as loud. ‘If you do ever come back I shan’t be here!’ she shouted, biting at her hands until it looked as if she must wound them. ‘Remember that. If you leave me now it is for ever!’
It was her last desperate attempt to keep him, but my father was unmoved. I don’t think he believed her really, any more than I did: she was always threatening to do drastic things if she didn’t get her own way, it was something to do with being the Chief’s daughter and an only child. And even if he had believed her I don’t think it would have made much difference. Not that he wasn’t fond of Sommavida, but in his new state he needed to prove so many thing to himself, not least that he could manage without her help. It’s sad isn’t it, between couples, how the needs on one sometimes go flat against the needs of the other?
I saw him turn from her curtly, shrugging his shoulders so that the new false arm swayed and looked for a moment as if it might come off. He was so keen to be going, I’m not certain he even said goodbye. And then, as I got up and prepared to follow him, I saw my mother (and will always see her so, whenever I think of her) sink to her knees and take her hands from her mouth and cross them over her belly, as if all the wrangling had given her the tummyache. Only it wasn’t that, I know that now.
It was almost dark by this time, and I am not at ease in darkness, being only half a Miner, but I didn’t catch up with my father to let him know I was there until we were miles away from the camp: I was afraid he wouldn’t want me and would send me back.
It was hard going. Odolghes had good ears, and I had to keep a fair distance between us, so I was in constant danger of losing him. He didn’t know the country either, or even where he was going, and instead of sticking to the paths he wove around all over the place, stomping through woods and slopping into streams, climbing and descending all the steep places, walking, in short, like a blind man.
The Salvans say that with animals nerve is everything, and perhaps his stumbly, noisy progress was not such a bad idea because we had no trouble from the night prowlers, I didn’t even hear a growl. Eventually we hit on a track of some kind, man-made and widish, and it was here, when he reached the first clearing and tripped over a tree stump, that Odolghes took a breather and I made my presence known.
As I feared, his first reaction was to tell me, pretty sharply, to beat it back to the camp. He couldn’t possibly take me from my mother, he said, she was unhappy enough as it was, and he couldn’t possibly take me where he was going because it was far too dangerous.
Now I am not wily and I am not particularly clever at getting round people, but in this case I was so anxious to share Odolghes’ adventure that I did just the right thing to persuade him: instead of pleading or wheedling or indeed saying anything at all, I tied up his trailing laces for him that had been part of the reason for his tripping, fixed his plaits and his undone cloak-strap and ran my hands over the strings of the zither hung round his neck, making a loud Ploing! noise in the darkness and conveying my message for me: I can be you right hand for you, Odolghes, I can be your music-girl, take me along and you will not regret it. Then, still without saying anything, I opened my bundle and took out some nuts and began to crack them. Because I knew unpractical Odolghes would have forgotten about food.
A proper grownup father wouldn’t have been won round so easily maybe, but mine was not a proper grownup father, not yet, and he laughed and squeezed my hand and took some nuts from me and said, hardly bothering to think the matter over at all, ‘Very well then, Miss Mongrel, so be it, we will go into the ogre’s den together. You’re not afraid, are you?’
‘Ttt,’ I shook my head. If we went as music makers I reckoned I wasn’t afraid. Nobody kills singers; at worst they push them out into the cold if they don’t like the song.
‘Good,’ my father said. ‘No more am I.’
‘You mustn’t call me Mongrel though,’ I warned him, ‘or the Cajutes may begin to wonder who we are. Not Mara either. And I mustn’t call you Odolghes. We mustn’t use any Miner words when we are together; we must be new, mysterious people from a far off place nobody has heard of. I know! I could pretend to be dumb and you could talk to me in sign language – like that we can be sure we won’t make any blunders.’
‘Ye-es,’ said Odolghes doubtfully, and then ‘Yes’ again as he warmed to the idea. ‘But what about my songs? I can’t very well sing them in sign language, can I? What do I do about my songs?’
Of course, I was forgetting, the songs were in Fanish, and Fanish was more dangerous for us than Miner-speak. ‘You make up new words for them,’ I said after a moment’s thought. ‘Or else you sing the old words backwards.’ I nearly added, ‘And then, when you have picked up enough of the Cajutes’ language, you sing to them in that,’ but I didn’t, because the thought of a long stay with such horrible people as the Cajutes made me shiver.
My father laughed again and kissed my fingertips and said he was glad to have me with him. Then in a different voice, hesitant, slightly uncomfortable, he said, Sorry to ask such a question, but how old was I?
I tried not to sound surprised. In fact I wasn’t really surprised: the years without memory must have passed for him in a muddling, stretchy way, sometimes long, sometimes short. ‘I’m six and a half, Father. The age you were when you came to the camp.’
‘Six and a half.’ He cracked a nut with his iron hand, picking it up with the other and letting it fall hard on the tree stump. (He mustn’t do that in front of the Cajutes.) ‘Six and a half. Well, well, well. How time gallops.’ And then, still more uncomfortable, ‘And I? Do you know how old I am?’
Poor Odolghes, so he didn’t know this either. I wondered whether to lie to him but decided truth was better. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘You are twenty-two.’
The iron hand jerked again, but from the shoulder this time, unaided. ‘Twenty-two!’ he echoed. ‘Twenty-thundering-two! Trust me: backward in everything! That makes - what is it? Sixteen, sixteen lost years. Gone. Wasted. Chucked out with the slag.’
There was little I could say to this because at twenty-two Odolghes was one of the oldest fathers in the camp, and this had used to embarrass me about him too. Old a babyish together, what could be worse in a parent? However the ‘visidàja’ and the easy life must have kept him fresh, because luckily he didn’t look his age at all. ‘Don’t worry,’ I comforted him, reminding him of all the excitement in store once we got inside the Cajutes’ castle. ‘We’ll make up for lost time now.’
(next chapter next wednesday, may 5th 2010
How did my mother know the change in Odolghes was so serious? How did she know what it would lead to? Do wives have a secret way of finding out these things? Do mothers? Or was it that she had always known in her heart of hearts that her misfit husband was lent to her by Fortune, not given for keeps? ‘Who do you belong to, Honeycake? To me, to Sommavida.’ Was that why she had to repeat this phrase so often: because she knew it wasn’t really true and never would be? Poor Mother, so drab, so plain, like a little brown she-sparrow, with her beautiful captive eagle that was now spreading its wings and preparing to fly. What could she do to stop him?
In fact she could do quite a lot, and did. Although her strongest weapon she was too generous, and perhaps too proud, to use. For a start she persuaded her father (not that that was very difficult) to give Odolghes no help in his task. He wanted to forge an iron arm for himself, did he, to wear under his cloak so as to hide his deformity? Very well, let him forge it himself if he was able. He wanted a companion to take with him and play the zither? Let him whistle for one: no Miner, male or female, young or old, would have the Chief’s permission to leave the camp. Then, when these threats failed, and Odolghes could be seen busy at the anvil every day, pounding away with his one good arm, using toes and teeth and the little red stump of a hand that grew on his right shoulder, she refused to pack his bags for him, or plait his hair or tie his laces, or do any of the two-handed tasks she had always done for him so willingly before. And when it was clear not even this would thwart him, she began secretly, as a last resort, to add poppy juice to his evening meal, hoping in this way to bring the clouds back. Which it might well have done, had not one of the cooks eaten some of the food on the sly and gone all dopey, exposing the trick.
I don’t know about my father, whether the shock helped him speed up his decision to leave, or whether he was ready in any case, but as far as I was concerned it was this business of the poppy juice that made up my mind for me. I had been wondering for days, Whom should I side with? Which parent should I choose? Loyalty told me, my mother, who needed me and worked so hard for me. Pity told me, my mother, who would miss me terribly. Caution told me, my mother; comfort told me, my mother; even greed told me, my mother (because what would I get to eat if I had to rely on Odolghes’ cooking?). But pity also told me, my father, for having treated him so badly in the past and paid so little heed to him. Loyalty also told me, my father, who’d never had any from me yet. And another thing – I don’t know what it was: curiosity, daring, sense of adventure – told me my father too. My father, and new places and new people, and the court of the Cajutes with the riddle of how to get in and how to get out again, and the thrill of coming back with the famous stone that everyone set such store by, and hearing them say (instead of Mara the Mongrel), Mara the Marvellous did this with her brave and clever dad!
The two pulls remained about equal though, so I really didn’t know which way to go. Not until I saw the cook lying by the fire with his upturned belly and his squiffy, dreamy eyes, and then anger at my mother for wanting to reduce Odolghes to this state in order to keep him, got the better of me and I made my choice.
Or, as Alexa would say, I cast my die, whatever a die is. Quickly, stealthily, without saying anything to anybody, I collected a few useful things like clothes and nuts and cheese and toothpicks (I hate having bits of nuts in my teeth) and tied them into a bundle, of a size I could easily carry. I put on my strongest shoes too, the ones I used for ore-crushing, and my leather hat and jacket and my thickest fur-lined breeches. Then, fat as a thrush, with the bundle on my back, I went and sat in the shadows, a good distance from the fire where all the fuss was going on, and waited for my father to finish his leave-taking. He was so furious I knew he wouldn’t be long.
From where I was, it was difficult to hear what he was saying, but words reached me like ‘trap’ and ‘cage’ and ‘smother’ and ‘apron strings’, and I guessed he was accusing my mother – perhaps my grandfather too – of treating him as a sort of prisoner all these years. Which I suppose in their different ways they had.
My mother’s voice was shriller and carried better. ‘Go then, you antwit,’ she shrieked at him, ‘if that is what you want! Go and play the hero! Walk right into the ogre’s den! Show everyone how brave you are! Nice satisfaction it’ll bring you when you’re roasting on the Cajutes’ gridiron, to know that everyone thinks you’re brave!’
Odolghes must have said something soothing at this point about performing his task in a twinkling and coming back soon, but it didn’t seem to soothe my mother. Her voice went down a notch but remained just as loud. ‘If you do ever come back I shan’t be here!’ she shouted, biting at her hands until it looked as if she must wound them. ‘Remember that. If you leave me now it is for ever!’
It was her last desperate attempt to keep him, but my father was unmoved. I don’t think he believed her really, any more than I did: she was always threatening to do drastic things if she didn’t get her own way, it was something to do with being the Chief’s daughter and an only child. And even if he had believed her I don’t think it would have made much difference. Not that he wasn’t fond of Sommavida, but in his new state he needed to prove so many thing to himself, not least that he could manage without her help. It’s sad isn’t it, between couples, how the needs on one sometimes go flat against the needs of the other?
I saw him turn from her curtly, shrugging his shoulders so that the new false arm swayed and looked for a moment as if it might come off. He was so keen to be going, I’m not certain he even said goodbye. And then, as I got up and prepared to follow him, I saw my mother (and will always see her so, whenever I think of her) sink to her knees and take her hands from her mouth and cross them over her belly, as if all the wrangling had given her the tummyache. Only it wasn’t that, I know that now.
It was almost dark by this time, and I am not at ease in darkness, being only half a Miner, but I didn’t catch up with my father to let him know I was there until we were miles away from the camp: I was afraid he wouldn’t want me and would send me back.
It was hard going. Odolghes had good ears, and I had to keep a fair distance between us, so I was in constant danger of losing him. He didn’t know the country either, or even where he was going, and instead of sticking to the paths he wove around all over the place, stomping through woods and slopping into streams, climbing and descending all the steep places, walking, in short, like a blind man.
The Salvans say that with animals nerve is everything, and perhaps his stumbly, noisy progress was not such a bad idea because we had no trouble from the night prowlers, I didn’t even hear a growl. Eventually we hit on a track of some kind, man-made and widish, and it was here, when he reached the first clearing and tripped over a tree stump, that Odolghes took a breather and I made my presence known.
As I feared, his first reaction was to tell me, pretty sharply, to beat it back to the camp. He couldn’t possibly take me from my mother, he said, she was unhappy enough as it was, and he couldn’t possibly take me where he was going because it was far too dangerous.
Now I am not wily and I am not particularly clever at getting round people, but in this case I was so anxious to share Odolghes’ adventure that I did just the right thing to persuade him: instead of pleading or wheedling or indeed saying anything at all, I tied up his trailing laces for him that had been part of the reason for his tripping, fixed his plaits and his undone cloak-strap and ran my hands over the strings of the zither hung round his neck, making a loud Ploing! noise in the darkness and conveying my message for me: I can be you right hand for you, Odolghes, I can be your music-girl, take me along and you will not regret it. Then, still without saying anything, I opened my bundle and took out some nuts and began to crack them. Because I knew unpractical Odolghes would have forgotten about food.
A proper grownup father wouldn’t have been won round so easily maybe, but mine was not a proper grownup father, not yet, and he laughed and squeezed my hand and took some nuts from me and said, hardly bothering to think the matter over at all, ‘Very well then, Miss Mongrel, so be it, we will go into the ogre’s den together. You’re not afraid, are you?’
‘Ttt,’ I shook my head. If we went as music makers I reckoned I wasn’t afraid. Nobody kills singers; at worst they push them out into the cold if they don’t like the song.
‘Good,’ my father said. ‘No more am I.’
‘You mustn’t call me Mongrel though,’ I warned him, ‘or the Cajutes may begin to wonder who we are. Not Mara either. And I mustn’t call you Odolghes. We mustn’t use any Miner words when we are together; we must be new, mysterious people from a far off place nobody has heard of. I know! I could pretend to be dumb and you could talk to me in sign language – like that we can be sure we won’t make any blunders.’
‘Ye-es,’ said Odolghes doubtfully, and then ‘Yes’ again as he warmed to the idea. ‘But what about my songs? I can’t very well sing them in sign language, can I? What do I do about my songs?’
Of course, I was forgetting, the songs were in Fanish, and Fanish was more dangerous for us than Miner-speak. ‘You make up new words for them,’ I said after a moment’s thought. ‘Or else you sing the old words backwards.’ I nearly added, ‘And then, when you have picked up enough of the Cajutes’ language, you sing to them in that,’ but I didn’t, because the thought of a long stay with such horrible people as the Cajutes made me shiver.
My father laughed again and kissed my fingertips and said he was glad to have me with him. Then in a different voice, hesitant, slightly uncomfortable, he said, Sorry to ask such a question, but how old was I?
I tried not to sound surprised. In fact I wasn’t really surprised: the years without memory must have passed for him in a muddling, stretchy way, sometimes long, sometimes short. ‘I’m six and a half, Father. The age you were when you came to the camp.’
‘Six and a half.’ He cracked a nut with his iron hand, picking it up with the other and letting it fall hard on the tree stump. (He mustn’t do that in front of the Cajutes.) ‘Six and a half. Well, well, well. How time gallops.’ And then, still more uncomfortable, ‘And I? Do you know how old I am?’
Poor Odolghes, so he didn’t know this either. I wondered whether to lie to him but decided truth was better. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘You are twenty-two.’
The iron hand jerked again, but from the shoulder this time, unaided. ‘Twenty-two!’ he echoed. ‘Twenty-thundering-two! Trust me: backward in everything! That makes - what is it? Sixteen, sixteen lost years. Gone. Wasted. Chucked out with the slag.’
There was little I could say to this because at twenty-two Odolghes was one of the oldest fathers in the camp, and this had used to embarrass me about him too. Old a babyish together, what could be worse in a parent? However the ‘visidàja’ and the easy life must have kept him fresh, because luckily he didn’t look his age at all. ‘Don’t worry,’ I comforted him, reminding him of all the excitement in store once we got inside the Cajutes’ castle. ‘We’ll make up for lost time now.’
(next chapter next wednesday, may 5th 2010
Sunday, 18 April 2010
the refuge of Fanes - Part One: The Stone
FOREWORD
Strange. In the turmoil of the past few days, with everything so upside down we can’t even find our cooking gear and have to heat up our food in buckets and stir it with sticks, my grandmother Alexa’s book, which Aunt Lulu has been looking for in vain for months, has suddenly come to light.
Not all of it unfortunately – the second volume is still missing – but the most interesting part, the part that goes from Alexa’s twelfth birthday at the castle of Fànes to that terrible night, fourteen years later, when she escaped from the same castle through an underground passage in the company of her daughter Lujanta (Aunt Lulu to me) and a small band of survivors, never more to surface. Or not permanently, that is, not to settle, not to live.
I have been reading it: there’s not much else for me to do in my present condition, I certainly can’t help with the unloading. And I have been thinking, why shouldn’t I write my story too? Alexa wrote at a time of great distress, alone save for snoring Salvans, hidden in a burrow, betrayed, bereaved, defeated in all her aims, and seems to have drawn great comfort from her scribblings. The story gets grimmer, I mean, as it goes on but the actual hand gets perkier and perkier, and so does the tone. Why shouldn’t I do the same, with the same results?
Because your story is untellable, says a voice (I think it must be my own, coming from deep inside). Your story, you know quite well, if it is not to end in disaster for everyone, must remain a secret.
Yes, I know this. I have fought for this and paid for this and I am not likely to forget it. But Alexa’s book has shown me, amongst other things, that it’s not the keeping or telling of secrets that is important, so much as a clear setting out of the facts. Secrets lose their punch, like beer does, with the passing of time; go all flat and watery (and please the Gods my own will do the same). Who gives an apple pip now about the workings of the mysterious twin-swapping pact that caused Alexa such anguish, or about who sired her three children, or who they took after – the dirty Duke or the sleepy Salvan – or whether they had fingers or paws or hair or fur? Not even my father and Aunt Lulu, who were directly concerned in the matter, were much interested when they discussed it, that I recall.
But the facts, no, they keep their value. So much so that I am tempted as I read and come across certain descriptions to bite at my hands in typical Miner fashion and say to myself, if only I had know this before, perhaps I would have realised in time and wouldn’t have…
Which is silly and leads nowhere: what is done is done, and it is the future I must worry about, not the past. So I will write, because if I don’t I think I will go mad, waiting to know the worst; and then I will either tear up what I have written or else (if the worst turns out to be the best and my untellable crime goes unpunished) I will do as Alexa did and hide the manuscript in a clever place for some great-great-great-grandchild to find during a spring turnout.
What follows I dedicate to her, the grandmother I never met, save now, in her writings. I wonder what she would have thought of me? In her book she is often rude about Miners, unfeelingly likens my poor great-grandparents’ lopped-off heads to ‘a couple of undersized pumpkins, badly rotted’, mocks their stature, calls my mother ‘the Floor-mop’ on account of her ugliness and grubby clothes. What would she have said, I wonder, had she known it would be me, half Miner myself, the one to carry on her story – and perhaps (a big perhaps) her line?
CHAPTER ONE
My mother the Floor-mop was a princess, and Odolghes my father was a prince (even if he had forgotten he was one for the time being), so I must have been a princess too, like Alexa, but I was known from as far back as I can remember as Mara the Mongrel.
My parents’ was not a popular marriage. My grandfather probably thought he was doing a very cunning thing in luring the heir of Fànes to his court and wedding him, still a child, to his only daughter Sommavida, but as things turned out it was a great mistake in policy. Only a short while after the wedding, Fànes fell to its enemies in the great battle described at the end of Alexa’s book, its inhabitants were slaughtered (all of them, it was thought at the time), its timbers burned, its walls flattened, and instead of the heir to a rich and powerful kingdom he had set his hopes on, my grandfather found himself landed with a one-armed son in law who had no prospects and no connections and no memory, and nothing to recommend him at all except a sweet singing voice and a pretty pair of dark blue eyes.
The Miners were furious with my grandfather and I think quite rightly: as their Chief it was his duty to see clearer into the future. But the marriage knot had been tied and there was no untying it, so the Miner people just had to accept the fact that their beloved baby princess was spliced for life to this large, strange, moony, malformed pauper boy who could do nothing to earn his keep but sing songs in a language they hardly knew. When his voice started breaking they wanted to castrate him, so I’m told, in order that the voice at least would keep, but my mother, who could evidently see further into the future than her father, wouldn’t allow this. She couldn’t have been more that seven at the time but apparently she flew into a great temper and said that her husband’s body was incomplete enough as it was, thank you very much, and she would stand for no more missing bits.
Good for her. If left to himself, I doubt my father would have raised a finger in protest, because at that time – before his memory came back, and with it all the rest – he was still in what the Fanes call ‘visidàja’, or waking sleep, and what the Miners called, much more simply, the clouds. The voice kept anyway; got even better when it changed.
He was a terrible embarrassment to me. It was bad enough being Mara the Mongrel, twice as tall as the other children and with great big sturdy feet and floppy hair, without being the daughter of the Loon, the Crooner, the Empty-Head and all the other rude names they called him by. Sometimes I even used to think I hated him, but I didn’t because you couldn’t hate him, he was so gentle, so patient, so good-natured. And of course the memory trouble made him so easy to hurt. ‘Where d’ya come from, Woad-eyes?’ the young men used to taunt. ‘Why don’t ya go back there? Lost yer way? Lost yer wits? Or did you never have none?’ And instead of answering back my father would blink at them, worried, and his brow would go all wrinkly as he tried to jolt his sleeping memory back to life.
Who was he? Where did he come from? Who gave him this strange name Ododghes, which meant eagle, or baby eagle, in Miner language, and made everyone laugh and flap their arms at him when they said it? Who taught him the songs that only he, among this race of little dark hireling metal-grubbers, appeared to know? Why was he such a misfit? Why could he never do anything useful to please people? Why was his own daughter ashamed of him, to the point of hiding her feet in shoes by day and bed socks by night and chopping off her lovely rippley hair? They told him he was a Fane, but what was a Fane? Was it a disease? It certainly felt like it. These are the thoughts that I now imagine used to go through my father’s poor misty head in the days of his visidàja, but at the time I didn’t imagine anything, I just turned my back on him like everyone else and laughed.
My mother was the only person who seemed to care for him, but even she did so in an offhand, jokey way. He had come to her as a playfellow, and a playfellow he had remained, even if their games had changed a bit in the meantime. She used to plait his hair for him, I remember, in the evenings, twisting his head from side to side as if he were a doll, and dress him up nicely and play the zither for him while he sang his songs. ‘Odolghes,’ she used to say, ‘Honeycake, Sweetiepud, who do you belong to?’ And then, not waiting for a reply (because questions of this kind always puzzled him), ‘To me, that’s who. To Sommavida. You are Sommavida’s pet eagle.’ Only she treated him, of course, like we all did, more as a pet duck.
I have already said how pointless it is to ponder over the past with it ifs and might-have-beens, but all the same I can’t help wondering what would have happened if those Wanderers with their strange package had never arrived that evening in our camp. Or if they had never unwrapped the package, the way they did, in order to try and sell its contents to us. Would my father have gone on always the way he was: a harmless, dreamy creature, bumbling about in uncomplaining idleness on the fringes of our lives, singing on command, smiling always, holding pins in his mouth for my mother while she sewed and smiling even then? Or would something inside of him have stirred at some point and eventually led him to rebel?
And what about our Miners’ way of life? Would we have continued our perilous hoppings from place to place in search of work that was less and less easy to come by? Carried on with our ill-paid scrabblings for metal that was harder and harder to find? We were like Wanderers ourselves in those days. Worse, we were like bears: used, like them, to sniff out the honeycombs and then hunted for our skins. I was born to such a life so I saw no hardship in it, but the elders, round the dampened embers of our fires at night, used to moan and grumble and speak of happier times when the Miner folk had been rich and respected. ‘Aurona,’ they used to sigh. It was a good sighing word. ‘Those were the days, before the wars, when we lived in Aurona. Remember? Didn’t have to douse the fires then. Used to let them burn into the night like beacons.’ And someone else, always an oldie, would grunt and say sadly, Yer, yer, how could they ever forget?
And me too? What about me? Would I have gone on despising my father, who I loved? Or would I have got over my shame and become friends with him, accepting his differences? I like to think I would have discovered him for myself, later on, and perhaps helped him to discover his past as well, which was part of mine. But anyway it wasn’t necessary because the object inside the Wanderers’ package did the work for both of us.
It was the oddest thing. It was latish when it happened, almost the time for drowsing, not for awakening. Work was over for the day and we younger ones were scurrying around doing all the usual things that needed doing every evening – fetching water for cooking and for the diggers to wash their hands in, stoking up the fires, putting away the tools and so forth – when suddenly the pack-dogs set up a great noise, and a group of four straggly Wanderers appeared out of the dusk, carrying something the size of a smallish piglet, wrapped in a blanket.
Not that there was anything so strange in this. The Wanderers always came by in the evenings, when they knew the camp was full. They always brought goods for sale too – mostly food, mostly stolen, mostly pretty stale. But this time you could tell from their faces and the care with which they handled the package, not letting any of us touch it or peek under the folds of the blanket, that they had come by something special.
‘Where’s Chief?’ they asked, pinching at us rudely the way they always did. ‘Where’s all your mummies and daddies? Go and fetch ’em, truffle pups, we’ve got something they might like to see.’
Truffle pups! Normally I wouldn’t have bothered about fetching my father, but he and my mother were together that evening, in one of their giggly plaiting sessions, so as chance would have it he came along too, together with everyone else. In fact he was one of the first to arrive and had a very close view.
When we were all gathered in a circle around them, the Wanderers, who have a great sense of occasion and are good about puffing up their wares, leaned forward in concord and took a corner of the blanket each between thumb and finger, ready to uncover whatever it was they lay underneath. ‘Oohoo!’ said their leader, ‘Wait for it, wait for it!’ Then with a loud, trumpety ‘Ta-ta-ra-ta’, he gave the signal to his companions to twitch away the cover.
Without Odolghes and his curious behaviour the object would have come to all of us, I think, as a disappointment. It was just another piece of blond iron – curiously fashioned, yes, very finely wrought and well decorated, but basically just another metal corselet of the kind worn by our one-time allies and now sworn enemies the Cajutes. Of which we had already seen more than enough.
The head Wanderer, sensing the letdown, had begun to add a bit more patter. ‘Small,’ he was saying. ‘See? Miner size. Just the job. Lovely bit of work. Don’t get this quality often, not on the market. Only one armhole, ’course, but that can soon be fixed. Must have been made for…’
But he never finished, because at that point, like a drunkard or a rabid dog, my father Odolghes reeled forward into the circle and began spinning round in circles of his own, his hands clasped to his head as if fearful it would burst open at the seams. ‘It’s my suit!’ he screamed, to everyone’s amusement and delight, and then consternation. ‘It’s my suit they stole from me! My birthday present that the traitors stole the night they left Fànes. Arrgh! Take it away! Cover it up!’ Then, twisting and snapping, still more dog-like (because the Wanderers, alarmed by the mention of stealing, had begun to replace the blanket), ‘No, don’t! Leave it there! Let me look. It’s coming back to me now. The suit of armour… The fittings with Nurse… My room in the turret… My cloth bear… Fànes, Alexa, Dolasilla… Everything… Arrgh!’ And he screamed that throaty scream again and began hitting his head with his hands instead of holding it. ‘What have they done to me? Where have they gone? Where have I been living all this time?’
The Wanderers, quite sure by now that they were being accused of theft, or would be in a moment, began protesting, and one of them tried to catch my father by his arm to stop him spinning, but everyone else seemed to understand that something important was happening inside his fuddled head. My mother most of all.
‘Let him be, you silly pedlars!’ she shouted. ‘Leave the armour where it is! No one’s blaming you for anything. Can’t you see it’s his memory coming back to him?’
And so it was. It must have been a terrible moment for my father. I sometimes try to put myself in his position and think what it must be like to have your mother and your sister and your father and your nurse, and your friends and your toys and your pets and your games, all whooshing into your head together like the waters of a blocked stream that has just come unblocked; churning and swirling and jostling for space, and shouting out, Here I am! Look at me, look at me, look at me! I’m your ma, remember? I’m your pa. (And what a pa!) Whooshing in and then – which I suppose must have been even worse – whooshing out again when you learn that they are all dead and gone and vanished for ever. No wonder Odolghes had to hold his headbones. No wonder, after we had bought the suit of armour off the Wanderers for him to keep, he spent the best part of the next fortnight crouched over it on all fours, murmuring to himself and tracing patters on the metal with his finger. He was travelling, you see. Backwards in time. Meeting people. Talking to them. Saying hello and goodbye. Forgiving them perhaps in some cases; in others not; in others still, just marking up the loss.
Our kinsfolk found him funnier than usual, and on their way to work would stop and ask him questions: ‘How’s it going, Odolghes? Found that cloth bear yet? Gonna wear that armour on your next birthday? Fit you a treat, it will.’ Silly things like that, no harm meant. But I could already see a change in him, a look in his eye I had never seen before, and for once I played no part in the teasing but sat by him instead and tried to help him on his journey.
He didn’t seem to notice me much but I think he was grateful, and, like the first stones of a wall that go underground but nevertheless keep the structure standing, I think this was when the foundations of my love for him were planted. Or perhaps they had been there all along. What is sure is that by the end of the fortnight, when my father finished his travelling in time and came to join us in the present as a proper thinking, feeling, remembering person, I was for the first time in my life, not proud exactly – that would come later – but unashamed to be his daughter.
I had learnt so much about him, you see, during this interval. Not from the story he told - which came out in bits and remained confused in my mind: just a jumble of treachery and bloodshed and poison and magic weapons and huge fat Dukes and wicked tutors and I know not what - but from certain incidents in the story that came across so clear they painted themselves inside my head like pictures. The day he received the suit of armour for his birthday, for example, and got such a wigging from his mother Alexa because he used the sword to chop up the toy bear that had been her present to him. I could just see him standing there in the huge castle bedroom, red-faced, puzzled, protesting, ‘But it was a fair fight, Mother. I cut off its arm to make us equal!’ Poor little Eagle Prince, caught up in things so much more complicated than he was, how could he understand the way Alexa felt about warfare, and why?
I could see him, too, on the dangerous day he came across the tutor, Mulebones, trafficking with the magic stone, and could hear the wobble in his voice (which luckily Mulebones missed) as he replied to the man’s angry questioning. ‘Notice? No, Muley. Why? What? I didn’t notice anything, I swear, I just wanted us to play chequers.’
I could see him in the forge, watching the making of the deadly blond iron that had made his people so powerful and so detested; see him trotting along in the wake of his bossy elder sister Dolasilla as she trained for battle, copying her movements, trying in spite of his drawback to cut the same dash. But clearest of all I could see him, six years old and still a little lost in the grownups’ world, as he climbed onto the Miners’ sledge that was to carry him away from his homestead for ever. How much had Alexa told him? Did he know the peril that hung over Fànes and everyone who remained there? Did he know he was being taken to safety? Or did he think, as children often do when they are caught up in tragedy, that he was being punished for something he had done wrong? And, if so, was that why the clouds came down and blanketed his memory: to protect him from things that were too sad to dwell on?
Yes, I think that is the way it must have been. Anyway, a bit late in the day maybe, but now the clouds had lifted. That evening, almost as if he had forgotten his usual place by my mother’s knee and took his new one for granted, he sat himself down in the middle of the ring of tired workers and asked for their attention. He got it too, more or less straight away, which shows how much he had altered in the interval. ‘You have been good to me, Miners,’ he began, quelling the titters of laughter with a flash of his new wide-awake eyes – still blue and kind but now not half so smiley. ‘And you have been patient with me. It is time I did something for you in return. Until now I have eaten your food and sung songs for you, much like the linnets you keep in cages and take down the mines with you to warn you of the vapours. But now that I have more to offer than just my voice, I intend to show my thanks.’
Such a flow of words, so well strung together, seemed to act on my kinsmen like a biff on the head, half stunning them. Miners are gruff talkers themselves and have a great, if grudging, respect for fine speaking.
‘You have always reminded me that I am a Fane,’ my father went on in the silence. ‘But in your kindness you have never reminded me what I owe you as a Fane. I was sent here by my mother as a guest, I remember that now, as part of an agreement. But I also remember – correct me if I am wrong – that another part of the agreement concerned the recovery of your most prized possession: your magic iron-finding stone. The Fanes, unless I am mistaken, undertook to find this stone for you and to return it to you at the earliest opportunity; and this, so far, has not been done.’
Nobody corrected him, although my grandfather, who was probably feeling a bit uneasy at this sudden and detailed awakening of his son in law’s memory, down to the very terms of the agreement (which had said nothing about marriage), started to cough and mumble something about not keeping people to impossible promises and letting bygones be bygones.
‘Ah,’ my father intervened, pulling himself up to his full sitting height. He had always been large compared to the Miners but now he looked like a giant. ‘That’s just it. The promise is not impossible and I intend to keep it. Mulebones the Traitor stole the stone, I know this beyond a doubt. Just as I know what he did with it later: he sold it to the Cajutes along with the secret of the blond iron, in exchange for the gold.’
This last word broke the silence that up till now, apart from my grandfather’s mutterings, had been almost total. ‘Our gold! Miners’ gold!’ everyone shouted, rattling their knives on their bowls so loud that my father had to wait a while before he could go on again. ‘Our stuff! Our pretty yellow treasure!’
‘Indeed,’ Odolghes said when his voice could be heard again. Which I thought was a very dignified way of half-agreeing: it was true, the gold had belonged to us Miners once, but my grandfather had spent it all in the wars, paying the Cajutes to fight on our side, and the expense still rankled. ‘So who has the magic stone now, eh? The Cajutes, of course. And it is from them that I propose to rescue it and bring it back to its rightful owners.’
If there had been silence before, now there was a hush as deep as the one you get down a mine shaft on a rest day. Was this a joke, I could sense my kinsfolk thinking? Was this the Loon up to another of his fooleries, wasting everyone’s time? Or was the fellow serious?
My mother was the first to find an answer to this question, but then she had been watching her playfellow-husband for days now, seeing him grow into something different and unpredictable under her troubled eyes. ‘No, Odol, please!’ she begged, breaking into the circle and rushing up to him and putting her arms round his shoulders. Protecting him like she always did. ‘You’re tired, you’re confused, you don’t know what you’re saying! He doesn’t know what he’s saying!’ she repeated loudly for everyone else’s benefit. ‘No one can enter the Cajutes’ stronghold. How can he recover our stone for us?’ This she repeated too, but quietly, in the other direction, towards my father. ‘No one, sweetest, can enter the Cajutes’ stronghold. How can you recover our stone for us? Be sensible, how can you?’
My father had always welcomed this way of hers of cushioning him against the world, acting as his mouthpiece and his interpreter, but this evening he seemed to resent it. He shook her hands off his shoulders almost rudely and addressed himself again directly to the Miners. ‘Think of me what you like, Miner people,’ he said, ‘call me what names you like, but do not call me a braggart. I know I haven’t done much so far to earn your trust, but, by the womb of the Earth Goddess whom you fear so greatly, I swear to you that from today onwards I will not rest until I have returned to you your magic stone.’
I think he added, ‘And much else besides,’ but it was lost in the hooha that followed. Cheers, clapping, footstamping, yells of ‘Good old Cuckoo-pate, at last he’s waking up!’ more clattering of knives and banging of bowls, and above it all, on a thinner, higher note, the sound of my mother’s wailing. ‘No-oooo, Odol, no-ooo!’ like a mother who has lost a child, or fears she is about to lose one. Which she was, of course, although nobody realised this yet, myself least of all.
(Chapter 2 will be posted on Sunday, April 26th 2010)
Strange. In the turmoil of the past few days, with everything so upside down we can’t even find our cooking gear and have to heat up our food in buckets and stir it with sticks, my grandmother Alexa’s book, which Aunt Lulu has been looking for in vain for months, has suddenly come to light.
Not all of it unfortunately – the second volume is still missing – but the most interesting part, the part that goes from Alexa’s twelfth birthday at the castle of Fànes to that terrible night, fourteen years later, when she escaped from the same castle through an underground passage in the company of her daughter Lujanta (Aunt Lulu to me) and a small band of survivors, never more to surface. Or not permanently, that is, not to settle, not to live.
I have been reading it: there’s not much else for me to do in my present condition, I certainly can’t help with the unloading. And I have been thinking, why shouldn’t I write my story too? Alexa wrote at a time of great distress, alone save for snoring Salvans, hidden in a burrow, betrayed, bereaved, defeated in all her aims, and seems to have drawn great comfort from her scribblings. The story gets grimmer, I mean, as it goes on but the actual hand gets perkier and perkier, and so does the tone. Why shouldn’t I do the same, with the same results?
Because your story is untellable, says a voice (I think it must be my own, coming from deep inside). Your story, you know quite well, if it is not to end in disaster for everyone, must remain a secret.
Yes, I know this. I have fought for this and paid for this and I am not likely to forget it. But Alexa’s book has shown me, amongst other things, that it’s not the keeping or telling of secrets that is important, so much as a clear setting out of the facts. Secrets lose their punch, like beer does, with the passing of time; go all flat and watery (and please the Gods my own will do the same). Who gives an apple pip now about the workings of the mysterious twin-swapping pact that caused Alexa such anguish, or about who sired her three children, or who they took after – the dirty Duke or the sleepy Salvan – or whether they had fingers or paws or hair or fur? Not even my father and Aunt Lulu, who were directly concerned in the matter, were much interested when they discussed it, that I recall.
But the facts, no, they keep their value. So much so that I am tempted as I read and come across certain descriptions to bite at my hands in typical Miner fashion and say to myself, if only I had know this before, perhaps I would have realised in time and wouldn’t have…
Which is silly and leads nowhere: what is done is done, and it is the future I must worry about, not the past. So I will write, because if I don’t I think I will go mad, waiting to know the worst; and then I will either tear up what I have written or else (if the worst turns out to be the best and my untellable crime goes unpunished) I will do as Alexa did and hide the manuscript in a clever place for some great-great-great-grandchild to find during a spring turnout.
What follows I dedicate to her, the grandmother I never met, save now, in her writings. I wonder what she would have thought of me? In her book she is often rude about Miners, unfeelingly likens my poor great-grandparents’ lopped-off heads to ‘a couple of undersized pumpkins, badly rotted’, mocks their stature, calls my mother ‘the Floor-mop’ on account of her ugliness and grubby clothes. What would she have said, I wonder, had she known it would be me, half Miner myself, the one to carry on her story – and perhaps (a big perhaps) her line?
CHAPTER ONE
My mother the Floor-mop was a princess, and Odolghes my father was a prince (even if he had forgotten he was one for the time being), so I must have been a princess too, like Alexa, but I was known from as far back as I can remember as Mara the Mongrel.
My parents’ was not a popular marriage. My grandfather probably thought he was doing a very cunning thing in luring the heir of Fànes to his court and wedding him, still a child, to his only daughter Sommavida, but as things turned out it was a great mistake in policy. Only a short while after the wedding, Fànes fell to its enemies in the great battle described at the end of Alexa’s book, its inhabitants were slaughtered (all of them, it was thought at the time), its timbers burned, its walls flattened, and instead of the heir to a rich and powerful kingdom he had set his hopes on, my grandfather found himself landed with a one-armed son in law who had no prospects and no connections and no memory, and nothing to recommend him at all except a sweet singing voice and a pretty pair of dark blue eyes.
The Miners were furious with my grandfather and I think quite rightly: as their Chief it was his duty to see clearer into the future. But the marriage knot had been tied and there was no untying it, so the Miner people just had to accept the fact that their beloved baby princess was spliced for life to this large, strange, moony, malformed pauper boy who could do nothing to earn his keep but sing songs in a language they hardly knew. When his voice started breaking they wanted to castrate him, so I’m told, in order that the voice at least would keep, but my mother, who could evidently see further into the future than her father, wouldn’t allow this. She couldn’t have been more that seven at the time but apparently she flew into a great temper and said that her husband’s body was incomplete enough as it was, thank you very much, and she would stand for no more missing bits.
Good for her. If left to himself, I doubt my father would have raised a finger in protest, because at that time – before his memory came back, and with it all the rest – he was still in what the Fanes call ‘visidàja’, or waking sleep, and what the Miners called, much more simply, the clouds. The voice kept anyway; got even better when it changed.
He was a terrible embarrassment to me. It was bad enough being Mara the Mongrel, twice as tall as the other children and with great big sturdy feet and floppy hair, without being the daughter of the Loon, the Crooner, the Empty-Head and all the other rude names they called him by. Sometimes I even used to think I hated him, but I didn’t because you couldn’t hate him, he was so gentle, so patient, so good-natured. And of course the memory trouble made him so easy to hurt. ‘Where d’ya come from, Woad-eyes?’ the young men used to taunt. ‘Why don’t ya go back there? Lost yer way? Lost yer wits? Or did you never have none?’ And instead of answering back my father would blink at them, worried, and his brow would go all wrinkly as he tried to jolt his sleeping memory back to life.
Who was he? Where did he come from? Who gave him this strange name Ododghes, which meant eagle, or baby eagle, in Miner language, and made everyone laugh and flap their arms at him when they said it? Who taught him the songs that only he, among this race of little dark hireling metal-grubbers, appeared to know? Why was he such a misfit? Why could he never do anything useful to please people? Why was his own daughter ashamed of him, to the point of hiding her feet in shoes by day and bed socks by night and chopping off her lovely rippley hair? They told him he was a Fane, but what was a Fane? Was it a disease? It certainly felt like it. These are the thoughts that I now imagine used to go through my father’s poor misty head in the days of his visidàja, but at the time I didn’t imagine anything, I just turned my back on him like everyone else and laughed.
My mother was the only person who seemed to care for him, but even she did so in an offhand, jokey way. He had come to her as a playfellow, and a playfellow he had remained, even if their games had changed a bit in the meantime. She used to plait his hair for him, I remember, in the evenings, twisting his head from side to side as if he were a doll, and dress him up nicely and play the zither for him while he sang his songs. ‘Odolghes,’ she used to say, ‘Honeycake, Sweetiepud, who do you belong to?’ And then, not waiting for a reply (because questions of this kind always puzzled him), ‘To me, that’s who. To Sommavida. You are Sommavida’s pet eagle.’ Only she treated him, of course, like we all did, more as a pet duck.
I have already said how pointless it is to ponder over the past with it ifs and might-have-beens, but all the same I can’t help wondering what would have happened if those Wanderers with their strange package had never arrived that evening in our camp. Or if they had never unwrapped the package, the way they did, in order to try and sell its contents to us. Would my father have gone on always the way he was: a harmless, dreamy creature, bumbling about in uncomplaining idleness on the fringes of our lives, singing on command, smiling always, holding pins in his mouth for my mother while she sewed and smiling even then? Or would something inside of him have stirred at some point and eventually led him to rebel?
And what about our Miners’ way of life? Would we have continued our perilous hoppings from place to place in search of work that was less and less easy to come by? Carried on with our ill-paid scrabblings for metal that was harder and harder to find? We were like Wanderers ourselves in those days. Worse, we were like bears: used, like them, to sniff out the honeycombs and then hunted for our skins. I was born to such a life so I saw no hardship in it, but the elders, round the dampened embers of our fires at night, used to moan and grumble and speak of happier times when the Miner folk had been rich and respected. ‘Aurona,’ they used to sigh. It was a good sighing word. ‘Those were the days, before the wars, when we lived in Aurona. Remember? Didn’t have to douse the fires then. Used to let them burn into the night like beacons.’ And someone else, always an oldie, would grunt and say sadly, Yer, yer, how could they ever forget?
And me too? What about me? Would I have gone on despising my father, who I loved? Or would I have got over my shame and become friends with him, accepting his differences? I like to think I would have discovered him for myself, later on, and perhaps helped him to discover his past as well, which was part of mine. But anyway it wasn’t necessary because the object inside the Wanderers’ package did the work for both of us.
It was the oddest thing. It was latish when it happened, almost the time for drowsing, not for awakening. Work was over for the day and we younger ones were scurrying around doing all the usual things that needed doing every evening – fetching water for cooking and for the diggers to wash their hands in, stoking up the fires, putting away the tools and so forth – when suddenly the pack-dogs set up a great noise, and a group of four straggly Wanderers appeared out of the dusk, carrying something the size of a smallish piglet, wrapped in a blanket.
Not that there was anything so strange in this. The Wanderers always came by in the evenings, when they knew the camp was full. They always brought goods for sale too – mostly food, mostly stolen, mostly pretty stale. But this time you could tell from their faces and the care with which they handled the package, not letting any of us touch it or peek under the folds of the blanket, that they had come by something special.
‘Where’s Chief?’ they asked, pinching at us rudely the way they always did. ‘Where’s all your mummies and daddies? Go and fetch ’em, truffle pups, we’ve got something they might like to see.’
Truffle pups! Normally I wouldn’t have bothered about fetching my father, but he and my mother were together that evening, in one of their giggly plaiting sessions, so as chance would have it he came along too, together with everyone else. In fact he was one of the first to arrive and had a very close view.
When we were all gathered in a circle around them, the Wanderers, who have a great sense of occasion and are good about puffing up their wares, leaned forward in concord and took a corner of the blanket each between thumb and finger, ready to uncover whatever it was they lay underneath. ‘Oohoo!’ said their leader, ‘Wait for it, wait for it!’ Then with a loud, trumpety ‘Ta-ta-ra-ta’, he gave the signal to his companions to twitch away the cover.
Without Odolghes and his curious behaviour the object would have come to all of us, I think, as a disappointment. It was just another piece of blond iron – curiously fashioned, yes, very finely wrought and well decorated, but basically just another metal corselet of the kind worn by our one-time allies and now sworn enemies the Cajutes. Of which we had already seen more than enough.
The head Wanderer, sensing the letdown, had begun to add a bit more patter. ‘Small,’ he was saying. ‘See? Miner size. Just the job. Lovely bit of work. Don’t get this quality often, not on the market. Only one armhole, ’course, but that can soon be fixed. Must have been made for…’
But he never finished, because at that point, like a drunkard or a rabid dog, my father Odolghes reeled forward into the circle and began spinning round in circles of his own, his hands clasped to his head as if fearful it would burst open at the seams. ‘It’s my suit!’ he screamed, to everyone’s amusement and delight, and then consternation. ‘It’s my suit they stole from me! My birthday present that the traitors stole the night they left Fànes. Arrgh! Take it away! Cover it up!’ Then, twisting and snapping, still more dog-like (because the Wanderers, alarmed by the mention of stealing, had begun to replace the blanket), ‘No, don’t! Leave it there! Let me look. It’s coming back to me now. The suit of armour… The fittings with Nurse… My room in the turret… My cloth bear… Fànes, Alexa, Dolasilla… Everything… Arrgh!’ And he screamed that throaty scream again and began hitting his head with his hands instead of holding it. ‘What have they done to me? Where have they gone? Where have I been living all this time?’
The Wanderers, quite sure by now that they were being accused of theft, or would be in a moment, began protesting, and one of them tried to catch my father by his arm to stop him spinning, but everyone else seemed to understand that something important was happening inside his fuddled head. My mother most of all.
‘Let him be, you silly pedlars!’ she shouted. ‘Leave the armour where it is! No one’s blaming you for anything. Can’t you see it’s his memory coming back to him?’
And so it was. It must have been a terrible moment for my father. I sometimes try to put myself in his position and think what it must be like to have your mother and your sister and your father and your nurse, and your friends and your toys and your pets and your games, all whooshing into your head together like the waters of a blocked stream that has just come unblocked; churning and swirling and jostling for space, and shouting out, Here I am! Look at me, look at me, look at me! I’m your ma, remember? I’m your pa. (And what a pa!) Whooshing in and then – which I suppose must have been even worse – whooshing out again when you learn that they are all dead and gone and vanished for ever. No wonder Odolghes had to hold his headbones. No wonder, after we had bought the suit of armour off the Wanderers for him to keep, he spent the best part of the next fortnight crouched over it on all fours, murmuring to himself and tracing patters on the metal with his finger. He was travelling, you see. Backwards in time. Meeting people. Talking to them. Saying hello and goodbye. Forgiving them perhaps in some cases; in others not; in others still, just marking up the loss.
Our kinsfolk found him funnier than usual, and on their way to work would stop and ask him questions: ‘How’s it going, Odolghes? Found that cloth bear yet? Gonna wear that armour on your next birthday? Fit you a treat, it will.’ Silly things like that, no harm meant. But I could already see a change in him, a look in his eye I had never seen before, and for once I played no part in the teasing but sat by him instead and tried to help him on his journey.
He didn’t seem to notice me much but I think he was grateful, and, like the first stones of a wall that go underground but nevertheless keep the structure standing, I think this was when the foundations of my love for him were planted. Or perhaps they had been there all along. What is sure is that by the end of the fortnight, when my father finished his travelling in time and came to join us in the present as a proper thinking, feeling, remembering person, I was for the first time in my life, not proud exactly – that would come later – but unashamed to be his daughter.
I had learnt so much about him, you see, during this interval. Not from the story he told - which came out in bits and remained confused in my mind: just a jumble of treachery and bloodshed and poison and magic weapons and huge fat Dukes and wicked tutors and I know not what - but from certain incidents in the story that came across so clear they painted themselves inside my head like pictures. The day he received the suit of armour for his birthday, for example, and got such a wigging from his mother Alexa because he used the sword to chop up the toy bear that had been her present to him. I could just see him standing there in the huge castle bedroom, red-faced, puzzled, protesting, ‘But it was a fair fight, Mother. I cut off its arm to make us equal!’ Poor little Eagle Prince, caught up in things so much more complicated than he was, how could he understand the way Alexa felt about warfare, and why?
I could see him, too, on the dangerous day he came across the tutor, Mulebones, trafficking with the magic stone, and could hear the wobble in his voice (which luckily Mulebones missed) as he replied to the man’s angry questioning. ‘Notice? No, Muley. Why? What? I didn’t notice anything, I swear, I just wanted us to play chequers.’
I could see him in the forge, watching the making of the deadly blond iron that had made his people so powerful and so detested; see him trotting along in the wake of his bossy elder sister Dolasilla as she trained for battle, copying her movements, trying in spite of his drawback to cut the same dash. But clearest of all I could see him, six years old and still a little lost in the grownups’ world, as he climbed onto the Miners’ sledge that was to carry him away from his homestead for ever. How much had Alexa told him? Did he know the peril that hung over Fànes and everyone who remained there? Did he know he was being taken to safety? Or did he think, as children often do when they are caught up in tragedy, that he was being punished for something he had done wrong? And, if so, was that why the clouds came down and blanketed his memory: to protect him from things that were too sad to dwell on?
Yes, I think that is the way it must have been. Anyway, a bit late in the day maybe, but now the clouds had lifted. That evening, almost as if he had forgotten his usual place by my mother’s knee and took his new one for granted, he sat himself down in the middle of the ring of tired workers and asked for their attention. He got it too, more or less straight away, which shows how much he had altered in the interval. ‘You have been good to me, Miners,’ he began, quelling the titters of laughter with a flash of his new wide-awake eyes – still blue and kind but now not half so smiley. ‘And you have been patient with me. It is time I did something for you in return. Until now I have eaten your food and sung songs for you, much like the linnets you keep in cages and take down the mines with you to warn you of the vapours. But now that I have more to offer than just my voice, I intend to show my thanks.’
Such a flow of words, so well strung together, seemed to act on my kinsmen like a biff on the head, half stunning them. Miners are gruff talkers themselves and have a great, if grudging, respect for fine speaking.
‘You have always reminded me that I am a Fane,’ my father went on in the silence. ‘But in your kindness you have never reminded me what I owe you as a Fane. I was sent here by my mother as a guest, I remember that now, as part of an agreement. But I also remember – correct me if I am wrong – that another part of the agreement concerned the recovery of your most prized possession: your magic iron-finding stone. The Fanes, unless I am mistaken, undertook to find this stone for you and to return it to you at the earliest opportunity; and this, so far, has not been done.’
Nobody corrected him, although my grandfather, who was probably feeling a bit uneasy at this sudden and detailed awakening of his son in law’s memory, down to the very terms of the agreement (which had said nothing about marriage), started to cough and mumble something about not keeping people to impossible promises and letting bygones be bygones.
‘Ah,’ my father intervened, pulling himself up to his full sitting height. He had always been large compared to the Miners but now he looked like a giant. ‘That’s just it. The promise is not impossible and I intend to keep it. Mulebones the Traitor stole the stone, I know this beyond a doubt. Just as I know what he did with it later: he sold it to the Cajutes along with the secret of the blond iron, in exchange for the gold.’
This last word broke the silence that up till now, apart from my grandfather’s mutterings, had been almost total. ‘Our gold! Miners’ gold!’ everyone shouted, rattling their knives on their bowls so loud that my father had to wait a while before he could go on again. ‘Our stuff! Our pretty yellow treasure!’
‘Indeed,’ Odolghes said when his voice could be heard again. Which I thought was a very dignified way of half-agreeing: it was true, the gold had belonged to us Miners once, but my grandfather had spent it all in the wars, paying the Cajutes to fight on our side, and the expense still rankled. ‘So who has the magic stone now, eh? The Cajutes, of course. And it is from them that I propose to rescue it and bring it back to its rightful owners.’
If there had been silence before, now there was a hush as deep as the one you get down a mine shaft on a rest day. Was this a joke, I could sense my kinsfolk thinking? Was this the Loon up to another of his fooleries, wasting everyone’s time? Or was the fellow serious?
My mother was the first to find an answer to this question, but then she had been watching her playfellow-husband for days now, seeing him grow into something different and unpredictable under her troubled eyes. ‘No, Odol, please!’ she begged, breaking into the circle and rushing up to him and putting her arms round his shoulders. Protecting him like she always did. ‘You’re tired, you’re confused, you don’t know what you’re saying! He doesn’t know what he’s saying!’ she repeated loudly for everyone else’s benefit. ‘No one can enter the Cajutes’ stronghold. How can he recover our stone for us?’ This she repeated too, but quietly, in the other direction, towards my father. ‘No one, sweetest, can enter the Cajutes’ stronghold. How can you recover our stone for us? Be sensible, how can you?’
My father had always welcomed this way of hers of cushioning him against the world, acting as his mouthpiece and his interpreter, but this evening he seemed to resent it. He shook her hands off his shoulders almost rudely and addressed himself again directly to the Miners. ‘Think of me what you like, Miner people,’ he said, ‘call me what names you like, but do not call me a braggart. I know I haven’t done much so far to earn your trust, but, by the womb of the Earth Goddess whom you fear so greatly, I swear to you that from today onwards I will not rest until I have returned to you your magic stone.’
I think he added, ‘And much else besides,’ but it was lost in the hooha that followed. Cheers, clapping, footstamping, yells of ‘Good old Cuckoo-pate, at last he’s waking up!’ more clattering of knives and banging of bowls, and above it all, on a thinner, higher note, the sound of my mother’s wailing. ‘No-oooo, Odol, no-ooo!’ like a mother who has lost a child, or fears she is about to lose one. Which she was, of course, although nobody realised this yet, myself least of all.
(Chapter 2 will be posted on Sunday, April 26th 2010)
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