CHAPTER ONE
In a way – in many ways, indeed in almost all save one – instead of beginning a whole new part of it I wish I could finish my story here. Just adding a little tailpiece to say that the storm in the mountains was the last danger that ever threatened us, and that after we got back home to Mill Brook Odolghes and I settled sown to a quiet, regular, humdrum life: he looking after the Miners and getting good contracts for them and sorting out their squabbles, and me looking after him and doing my lessons and receiving a pair of gold earrings on my next birthday, and another on the next, and so on until my lobes were loaded with them. No more adventures, no more changes, nothing to break the peace except the usual workaday upsets like collapsing tunnels and the odd trapped leg and corroded toe.
Unfortunately, though, our mother the Earth Goddess, or whoever it is decides these things, had different plans, and of changes and upsets we were to see all too many all too soon. Barely a month after our return Odolghes went and married this Friska woman he had been making up to, and she came to live with us and took over the running of the household. Altering all our habits and shifting our possessions and – probably without malice, merely because with my mother still unaccounted for she was unsure of her position – digging a kind of invisible ditch between Odolghes and myself which neither of us was ever really able to fill in again, not completely. We used to make up songs together, for instance, almost every night before I went to bed; Friska stopped that, she said the music made her mopey. We used to laugh together about silly things that happened during the day; Friska stopped that too by asking, every single time, what it was we were laughing about and then staring at us with wide blank sheepy eyes when she was told. If I was given something, she wanted it too: bigger, better. If I had a ring she wanted a bracelet, if I had a new dress she wanted three. At first Odolghes tried to find time for both of us, but days were short and he was busy, and eventually, to my surprise and disappointment, it was the new wife who won most of his attention. If I’d known more about marriage I would have understood and waited for the Dove Days to pass, but I was ignorant and proud and my nose was badly out of joint, so I turned my back on Odolghes, pretending it was me who had no time for him and not the other way round. Then it was he who took offence, and so it went on.
These were private changes that touched the lives of just the three of us. The other changes, which started up a little later, were not only to touch but rock, and in some cases wreck, the lives of everyone. It was round about the time Friska’s first son was born, if I remember rightly. (She had three sons altogether: Handsome, Huge and Strongbones – not names I would have chosen myself). Yes, it was round about then that we started having what Odolghes called Rich People’s problems. First it was just hungry outside workers turning up now and then looking for a day’s hire. Then it was beggars hanging around on the outskirts of the settlement, scavenging among the slops, seeking leftover food and cast-off clothes. Then it was Outcasts creeping out of the woods at night, clanking their bells, terrifying everyone. Then a whole group of hangers-on of various kinds came and camped in the field on the opposite side of the road, practically on our doorstep, refusing to be shooed away.
We put up with them all, bearing them like an oak tree does its mistletoe: Odolghes said it was our duty – the price we had to pay for being so strong and thriving so well. We were not to fill these people’s bellies for them - that would be foolish – but we were not to leave them empty either, because that would be wrong. We must ride a middle course. Like the tree and the creeper, we must learn to live together.
And so we did, on our side, for a while. Only need is a powerful spur, and not very long after the arrival of the campers the thefts started. Food, tools, poultry, odds and ends of jewellery, and finally someone broke into the gold store itself and tampered with the padlock on one of the chests (which luckily held). This caused such outrage that some of the older Miners wanted to go back to Aurona on the spot, regardless of discomfort; but eventually it was decided by vote that we would stay where we were and build a proper wall instead – all around the settlement. Shutting us in and shutting trouble out.
A good idea? Probably not, seeing that trouble, when it came, came over or under or through the wall (we shall never know which) as if it were not there at all. But at the time it seemed we had no choice. Just as we had no choice, once the wall was in place, but to man it. Which meant forming a guard. Which meant training the Miners to become soldiers and to carry arms themselves instead of merely digging up the metal to make them for other people. (Which meant, incidentally, great fun for Odolghes, who I’d never seen so happy as he was then, turning his diggers into warriors insofar as he was able.) But military strength, like the sword which is its emblem, had two edges: it makes you feel safe, but it makes your neighbours feel uncomfortable; it fends off attackers, but at the same time it encourages other forces to attack who otherwise might never have thought it worth their while. I won’t say our new defences led us into war – despite what the songs say, our ‘battles’ were never anything more glorious than a few scuffles over firewood with the Latrones, and a night raid or two from bands of travelling robbers which we beat off easier than a swarm of gnats – but they put us on a different, more prickly footing with our former friends. People still came to do deals with us, but they came in bigger groups now and kept their weapons by them and rode off as soon as the deal was struck. They no longer unsaddled their horses and sat down by our fires to warm themselves, calling for a song, or asking to be shown a pair of Miner feet so that they could marvel over them. The Wanderers too, when they came by with their wares, no longer pinched our children and called them names. We were not just metal-grubbers now, to be hired for a task and then left to our own devices, we were a proper fighting tribe like all the others, to be reckoned with, respected, and by the same token mistrusted and feared.
I remember these years as being long and empty, and (although it is silly to think of years as having colours) in my memory they form a large sort of brownish grey path like the stripe on the back of a donkey. Silent, awkward, resentful of my little brothers and yet deeply fond of them, I was no longer looked on as the heir to anything, except possibly Odolghes’ role of singer when his voice went. Sommavida’s name was mentioned less and less often and then pretty well forgotten; mine went back to being Mara the Mongrel or, occasionally, Mara the Moody or Mara the Mute. Friska, who love to poke fun at me, put about word that I was in love and shy on that account, but this was untrue, I felt no attraction to my male companions at all. Partly, I suppose, due to the fact that I had grown so tall I could only see their scalps most of the time, and partly (mostly?) because they felt no attraction towards me.
I don’t know what my life would have been if the disaster hadn’t happened when it did. There was a woman among us called Sarry who’d never married and belonged to no particular family and did no particular job and whom everybody used as a kind of spare aunt, dumping their babies on her when they were busy and getting her to do their mending and stuff: I suppose I would have ended up like her. Minding my brothers for Friska, helping Odolghes with his reckonings, counting things for Tusky, doling things out, cleaning things up, storing things away. Knitting mining mittens perhaps in my spare time if I was granted any – clickety, clickety, click.
Instead, at the age of sixteen and a bit, I suddenly found myself, in the space of a few horrendous days, seated on the newly gilded throne left empty by Odolghes, ruling in his place. Oh, the nightmare of it all. The speed, the shock. The sufferings of those that went. And the dreadful, aching loneliness of those others, like myself, who remained. For almost a year afterwards I would wake up in the morning unawares and then recoil, like someone lobbed by a swinging sack of sawdust, as the terrible weight of reality hit me. I don’t know why I couldn’t have kept the memory in my head while I slept, it would have been better. But no, for some reason I had to wake up happy and then go through bereavement afresh each time.
The disaster began harmlessly enough, almost comically, with just a chorus of sneezes. Everyone was sneezing that morning. Choo! went the cook into the junket. Choo! went Odolghes as he helped himself and the others and passed around the bowls. Snissh! went Friska as she blew on the children’s portions. Whh… whh… whharrgh! went the other breakfasters, one after the other. I had a cold already and had had it for days and I was past the sneezing stage. I mopped Handsome’s none too handsome nose for him and told him not to laugh and to get on with his meal. Outside in what was now the courtyard, the second mining shift was preparing to relieve the first, and you could hear ‘Watchoo!’s issuing like trumpet blasts from dozens of noses.
‘It’s like the nits,’ Friska remarked. ‘It’s catching.’
And so it was, but it was not like the nits. By mid-morning several of the mineworkers had come back, pleading headaches. There was a bit of grumbling from their replacements, some of whom were also feeling off colour, but no real objections; the sick workers were sent off to the kitchens where the work was lighter and the air warmer, and that for the time being was that.
Odolghes too had a headache. I remember because I was with him that morning, helping with the bookwork, and halfway through he pulled off his Chief’s headdress saying it was too heavy. It was made of feathers, as I think I’ve already said: it weighed hardly anything at all. By noon he, my three brothers, and a score of others had given up resisting and taken to their beds. It was snuffling now, instead of sneezing, to be heard on every side. Snuffling and one or two moans.
Friska was still bustling around – she didn’t give up till the morning of the next day when the second batch was struck – and we did the rounds of the sickrooms together. None of the snufflers had an appetite, and none of them was so bad that they couldn’t reach the squat-pail, so there wasn’t really much for us to do in the way of nursing. Their heads hurt, that was all, and their noses ran and their eyes tickled and they complained of being too hot; so Friska and I went round with strips of linen soaked in flower-water and spread them on the burning foreheads, and fanned the flushed faces, and pulled to the shutters to keep the light out of smarting eyes, and generally tried to make everyone comfortable and unafraid.
It was easy to be reassuring at that stage. We were unafraid ourselves: what was there to fear in just rheum, a distemper, a collection of runny noses? Not so many of us down together maybe, but we had outbreaks like this every winter. By evening, however, the screaming of the worst affected victims had started, and Oldoghes, in whom the disease seemed to run fastest of all, had begun holding his head the way he’d done on the day his memory came back, and rolling about on the floor of his room. Not screaming – he didn’t scream until he’d lost the knowledge of who he was and what his duty was as Chieftain – but groaning quietly, moaning, begging for something to be done to ease the pain.
It was the prologue to panic. The sick screamed; those on their way to sickness screamed too, knowing what they were in for; and the healthy screamed for the poor screamers – children, sisters, mothers, brothers – watching their agony grow and grow, unable to understand what was happening, powerless to help.
Tusky, drained of all his colour so that his knobbly face under his hat looked like a dusty old cauliflower, said he’d heard his grandfather speak of the disease, or one very like it. It was called Brain Fever because the brain was where it lodged, and it was the worst and deadliest illness in the world – worse than the Cheese Sickness that makes holes all over your skin, worse than Rabies, worse than the Bone-rot that tormented the poor Outcasts. There was no remedy for it and no safeguard against it and precious few recoveries either: once you’d got it you were as good as gone. We were lost, he said between sobs, taking my hand and squeezing it (and then, forgetting he was still holding it, raising it to his mouth and chewing on it instead of his own). Lost. Condemned. Done for, all of us. It was the end of the Miner people, the worst end our cruel Goddess could devise for us; u fin du Ratt was nothing in comparison. Farewell, Mistress Mara, and forgive him: while his head was still whole he was going to go and put slag cakes in his pockets and jump in the river. Quicker that way. Quieter. Cooler.
I had always disliked Tusky since the business of the tree. Now I felt I loved him like a dear irreplaceable friend. ‘You can’t do that, Tusky,’ I said. ‘You can’t leave us. There must be something we can do, someone we can turn to? What about the Chief Smelter? He knows all sorts of things about heat and burns and dressings. Why don’t we ask him?’
The tears were coursing down Tusky’s face now and he wiped them away fiercely, still using my hand. ‘Smelter’s low,’ he sniffed. ‘One of the first to go down.’
This was bad news indeed. ‘How about his second in charge, then? What’s his name.. Rudy?’
Tusky shook his head. ‘Rudy’s a rough nugget. Knows nothing beyond his own job.’
‘And Jasper - the one who looks after the horses when they’re poorly?
‘Nagra!’ Tusky dropped my hand at last and waved his own dismissively. ‘Jasper doesn’t know that first thing about horses, he’s scared stiff of them. Anything that crops up, he has to call in Tarlui.’
He pronounced this second name with even more scorn as if saying, Has to call in a rat, or, Has to call in a beetle, but all the same it had a sound to it that made me curious. Perhaps, without registering it, I had heard it already. ‘And who’s Tarlui?’ I asked. ‘And why can’t we call him in too?’
Tusky said, ‘Nagra,’ again and shrugged his shoulders. ‘Tarlui’s just one of the beggar people,’ he explained. ‘Well… their leader, sort of. Their wise man. He knows a thing or two, it’s true, but we can’t ask him in or we’d never get rid of him. Probably gone by now anyway. They all will be, poor blighters, if they’ve got any sense.’
Yes, but what if they weren’t, what if he wasn’t? The position was so dire that, like a pit-worker stranded down a shaft, I was ready to grab at anything that came my way, even a root, even a grass blade, even a spider’s thread. ‘Go and look for him, Tusky,’ I pleaded. ‘Before you jump in the river go and look for this Tarlui or whatever his name is. And if you find him, talk to him, tell him what is happening and see if he can’t come up with some suggestion.’
Tusky looked at me blankly. For a moment I thought he hadn’t followed what I was saying, perhaps hadn’t even heard. Then he shook himself and a few more tears squeezed out of his eyes and began to tumble down his face along the wide wet tracks already drawn. ‘Very well, Mistress Mara,’ he agreed in a tired voice, ‘but it won’t do any good.’
I felt suddenly different, I don’t know why. Hopeful, almost confident. ‘Don’t be such a raven, Tusky,’ I said, but not crossly, merely impatiently, to get him to make haste. ‘That’s something we can’t know until we’ve tried.’
(Chapter 2 will be posted Sunday 4th July 2010)
Sunday, 27 June 2010
Sunday, 20 June 2010
chapter 10
Morin in Salvan language means a mill, and deep down under the living quarters there was in fact a grinding apparatus for corn and spelt and other grainstuffs, powered by an underground watercourse. That night I could only hear a faint purring through my pillow as I dropped off to sleep again, but next morning in the eating room, which was one level lower, the sound was unmistakable, almost a roar.
Aunt Lulu, as I had been told to call her for short, said what with noise and low ceilings and lack of light there were days, particularly in the summer, when she thought the place would drive her crazy. She had lived there all her life so she should know, but to me it seemed a perfect home. I loved the clean earthy smell of it, the warmth, the comfort, the well-swept corridors with the bunches of herbs and roots and onions hanging on the walls. I loved the kitchens, where the cooks spoilt me and fed me titbits and told me about my grandmother and how beautiful she was and how she had taught them all their best recipes. ‘Didn’t want to get on the wrong side of her, though,’ they added with great admiration. ‘Oooh, no, no, no!’ I loved the schoolroom and all the funny children who gathered round to say hello and stare: woolly blondies, smooth-skinned darkies, long-eared lankies like my aunt, every sort of mixture of tall blond Fane and small dark furry Salvan that you can imagine.
Especially I loved my grandmother’s sitting room where she had spent the winters while the Salvans slept, and where the traces of her presence were most evident. I said at the beginning I never knew her directly until I read her book, but this is not quite true. Although she had been dead for three years and the room was now used partly for storage, her character was stamped on it as clearly as if it had been burned there with a brand. There were molehills in a corner, for instance, that she had never allowed to be destroyed because the scratchings of the moles kept her company; same thing for cobwebs of which there were festoons. There was a bird perch for the tame owls she kept as pets (that must have been slightly unnerving for the moles), and a hole in the ceiling through which they had used to come and go as they felt inclined – like cats in other houses, Odolghes remarked. There was her old sewing basket – dreadfully untidy, with all the needles missing and the threads rolled into a ball. There were her painting brushes in a jar, heads like teasels, handles chewed to pulp; her carpentry tools, bent and chipped and most of them unserviceable. From these and other signs it was her impatience that came over strongest: her impatience and her solitude and her courage in fighting against both. ‘Boil Nurse!’ she had carved on the tabletop that had served as her writing desk. And a little lower down: ‘No company is better than bad company.’ Only this she had altered various times, switching the No and the Bad until you could hardly tell which was the version she finally settled for. I imagine, cooped up for so many winters with the Nurse and the babies as sole wakeful companions, she was uncertain about it herself.
Aunt Lulu seemed to be suffering from the same problem, although not so severely because she was half Salvan and therefore of a calmer temper. When we had got our strength back and it was time for Odolghes and me to leave, she grew very sad and dreamy for a practical person like her and said, Oh how she wished she was coming with us, to a proper house above ground where daylight shone through the windows all year round. Life was so short, it seemed a crime to spend half of it dozing in the dark, and brothers and nieces like us were so few and so precious, and the Great Battle had been such a long time ago…
‘Then come, for the Sun God’s sake!’ Odolghes interrupted her, speaking sharply and staring into the distance. They had grown thick as thatch during the three days of our stay and I think he was just as upset about their parting as my aunt was, only he showed it in a different way. ‘Don’t just stand there snivelling, round up your people and come. There’s room for everyone in Mill Brook, I’ve already told you. Work too. And if it’s the Cajutes you’re worrying about, don’t: they live too far away and are too busy fighting the Ampezzani now to bother about a warrenload of Salvans and a bunch of intermingled Fanes. You’ll be every bit as safe as you are here, and a darn sight warmer and better fed.’
‘I know, Eaglet,’ my aunt said. It was funny to hear him called by his Fanish name; made him sound like a child. ‘We’ve been over all this before. And I’ve already given you my answer. I can’t, not while so many of the old ones are still alive. It wouldn’t be fair on them, they wouldn’t fit in, wouldn’t adapt to the noise and the bustle. Try to understand. I long to join you myself and so do the youngsters, but it’d be asking too much of the others, poor dears, to change their home and habits at their time of life.’
Odolghes blew through his lips and said that the noise question could easily be dealt with by stowing the Deep-sleepers away for the winter in packing cases in the cellars, the way he remembered his mother used to do with her Salvan companion, Sonia. But he said it without conviction: Aunt Lujanta had left this unsaid, but the older Salvans didn’t take to Miners much, nor the other way round, on account of those years of Alexa’s regency when the two tribes had been enemies. The first day some of them had even wrinkled up their noses at me: a rude way of showing me they didn’t like my smell.
So in the end Odolghes shrugged and gave up, and he and I left Morin de Salvans alone, on foot, with nothing to remind us of Lujanta except the food she gave us for our journey, a copper circlet for me that had belonged to my grandmother, and a few vague promises of a future life together in Mill Brook when the ‘old’ Salavans were dead. Aunt Lulu was getting on for being an old Salvan herself: I didn’t say so to Odolghes but I feared she might be dead too before she could set about keeping her word.
END OF PART ONE (beginning of part 2, LIDSANEL, coming up next sunday June 27th 2010)
Aunt Lulu, as I had been told to call her for short, said what with noise and low ceilings and lack of light there were days, particularly in the summer, when she thought the place would drive her crazy. She had lived there all her life so she should know, but to me it seemed a perfect home. I loved the clean earthy smell of it, the warmth, the comfort, the well-swept corridors with the bunches of herbs and roots and onions hanging on the walls. I loved the kitchens, where the cooks spoilt me and fed me titbits and told me about my grandmother and how beautiful she was and how she had taught them all their best recipes. ‘Didn’t want to get on the wrong side of her, though,’ they added with great admiration. ‘Oooh, no, no, no!’ I loved the schoolroom and all the funny children who gathered round to say hello and stare: woolly blondies, smooth-skinned darkies, long-eared lankies like my aunt, every sort of mixture of tall blond Fane and small dark furry Salvan that you can imagine.
Especially I loved my grandmother’s sitting room where she had spent the winters while the Salvans slept, and where the traces of her presence were most evident. I said at the beginning I never knew her directly until I read her book, but this is not quite true. Although she had been dead for three years and the room was now used partly for storage, her character was stamped on it as clearly as if it had been burned there with a brand. There were molehills in a corner, for instance, that she had never allowed to be destroyed because the scratchings of the moles kept her company; same thing for cobwebs of which there were festoons. There was a bird perch for the tame owls she kept as pets (that must have been slightly unnerving for the moles), and a hole in the ceiling through which they had used to come and go as they felt inclined – like cats in other houses, Odolghes remarked. There was her old sewing basket – dreadfully untidy, with all the needles missing and the threads rolled into a ball. There were her painting brushes in a jar, heads like teasels, handles chewed to pulp; her carpentry tools, bent and chipped and most of them unserviceable. From these and other signs it was her impatience that came over strongest: her impatience and her solitude and her courage in fighting against both. ‘Boil Nurse!’ she had carved on the tabletop that had served as her writing desk. And a little lower down: ‘No company is better than bad company.’ Only this she had altered various times, switching the No and the Bad until you could hardly tell which was the version she finally settled for. I imagine, cooped up for so many winters with the Nurse and the babies as sole wakeful companions, she was uncertain about it herself.
Aunt Lulu seemed to be suffering from the same problem, although not so severely because she was half Salvan and therefore of a calmer temper. When we had got our strength back and it was time for Odolghes and me to leave, she grew very sad and dreamy for a practical person like her and said, Oh how she wished she was coming with us, to a proper house above ground where daylight shone through the windows all year round. Life was so short, it seemed a crime to spend half of it dozing in the dark, and brothers and nieces like us were so few and so precious, and the Great Battle had been such a long time ago…
‘Then come, for the Sun God’s sake!’ Odolghes interrupted her, speaking sharply and staring into the distance. They had grown thick as thatch during the three days of our stay and I think he was just as upset about their parting as my aunt was, only he showed it in a different way. ‘Don’t just stand there snivelling, round up your people and come. There’s room for everyone in Mill Brook, I’ve already told you. Work too. And if it’s the Cajutes you’re worrying about, don’t: they live too far away and are too busy fighting the Ampezzani now to bother about a warrenload of Salvans and a bunch of intermingled Fanes. You’ll be every bit as safe as you are here, and a darn sight warmer and better fed.’
‘I know, Eaglet,’ my aunt said. It was funny to hear him called by his Fanish name; made him sound like a child. ‘We’ve been over all this before. And I’ve already given you my answer. I can’t, not while so many of the old ones are still alive. It wouldn’t be fair on them, they wouldn’t fit in, wouldn’t adapt to the noise and the bustle. Try to understand. I long to join you myself and so do the youngsters, but it’d be asking too much of the others, poor dears, to change their home and habits at their time of life.’
Odolghes blew through his lips and said that the noise question could easily be dealt with by stowing the Deep-sleepers away for the winter in packing cases in the cellars, the way he remembered his mother used to do with her Salvan companion, Sonia. But he said it without conviction: Aunt Lujanta had left this unsaid, but the older Salvans didn’t take to Miners much, nor the other way round, on account of those years of Alexa’s regency when the two tribes had been enemies. The first day some of them had even wrinkled up their noses at me: a rude way of showing me they didn’t like my smell.
So in the end Odolghes shrugged and gave up, and he and I left Morin de Salvans alone, on foot, with nothing to remind us of Lujanta except the food she gave us for our journey, a copper circlet for me that had belonged to my grandmother, and a few vague promises of a future life together in Mill Brook when the ‘old’ Salavans were dead. Aunt Lulu was getting on for being an old Salvan herself: I didn’t say so to Odolghes but I feared she might be dead too before she could set about keeping her word.
END OF PART ONE (beginning of part 2, LIDSANEL, coming up next sunday June 27th 2010)
Sunday, 13 June 2010
chapter 9
Yes, Odolghes was a good keeper of promises. When I woke up, the storm was over and I was lying, snug and dry, in a strange prickly bed that smelt of heather and rustled when I moved. I could hear Odolghes’ voice quite close by, speaking in an easy chatty tone, so I wasn’t scared, but the room was dark, and when I stretched out my hand it met with earth: earthen floor and earthen wall beside me and low earthen ceiling overhead. Under the bedcovers I was naked as a worm. I decided we must have died and returned to the belly of the Earth Goddess. Ah well, it was a good sight better than the rock.
I was so comfortable that I didn’t call out but lay quiet where I was. When I turned my head in the direction of Odolghes’ voice, something brushed against my face and I realized that the darkness was due to a curtain which shielded my bed from the rest of the room: I was lying, so to speak, in a cupboard, a recess carved out of the wall. Gently I lifted the curtain and looked out onto a still darkish but definitely bigger and brighter space – you could hardly call it a room – lit by a fire and by what I suppose served as an oil lamp but was in fact just a bowl of grease with a flame in the middle. On one side of the fire sat Odolghes on a heap of leather cushions, his legs crossed elegantly, his hand twiddling at his hair, the way it did when he was interested in something. Apart from his breeches he too was naked, and I thought this very odd because he was usually careful to cover his armless shoulder in the presence of strangers.
On the other side of the fire, her foot rocking at the greasebowl so that the flame wobbled, now lighting her features, now shading them, sat, not merely a stranger but one of the strangest strangers I had ever seen. A woman, I supposed she was. Quite old, very tall, very straight, with long pale hair the colour of hay, which she appeared to be in the process of combing, or perhaps drying over the flame. The comb, or brush or instrument she was holding, she passed from hand to free foot unconcernedly, using whichever was more convenient. Her toes and fingers were in fact of equal length, midway between what they are on a normal person, and the nails of both were long and curved and looked as if they would take an awful lot of cutting.
The only other truly unusual thing about her was her ears, which stuck out from under the hair like a horse’s from its mane and, like a horse’s, were long and pointed and furry; but the rest, by its very familiarity, was even stranger. Her voice when she spoke was a little higher maybe but otherwise identical to Odolghes’; her laugh when it came was just like his. I didn’t notice the eyes until later of course, which were dark and slanting and quite, quite different, but the brows and forehead were the same shape as his too, and so were the nose and chin and mouth. Except for the oddities I’ve mentioned she could have been his twin.
They seemed to be getting along together very well for two people who have only just met. If she was indeed the Earth Goddess, I reckoned we were in for a good stay. ‘Tell me more about her,’ Odolghes was asking eagerly. They were evidently discussing some friend they had in common. ‘What did she do all day in the wintertime? How did she keep herself amused?’
‘Oh, this and that,’ the woman said. ‘She scribbled a lot, she painted, she gave lessons. She wasn’t alone, you know, there was the Nurse and the five Fanish babies who escaped with her, and there were four other grownup Fanes who turned up later and stayed a while before they got bored and moved on – quite a little band. And then there was me: I used to keep her company often. I don’t sleep that deep in winter, you know, not like the rest of the tribe.’
‘Don’t you?’ Odolghes asked, leaning forward and lifting the curtain of her hair. He sounded very amused by this rather dull piece of information. ‘Neither do I. I always thought that meant…’ And then he laughed and didn’t finish.
‘Doesn’t mean anything,’ the woman said, tossing back her hair and laughing too. ‘We could be full, or we could be only half. What difference does it make? The important thing is, we’ve found each other.’
‘You found me,’ Odolghes corrected, ‘and very grateful I am that you did. You seem to be quite an expert in rescuing Fanes from desperate situations. But…’ And here he paused and his voice turned a little wistful, ‘I sometimes wonder… What about later when things quietened down? Didn’t any of you ever come to look for me? Didn’t she?’
I was beginning, slowly, to realize who this ‘she’ they were talking about was: it was Alexa, my grandmother, Odolghes’ mother. So she hadn’t been killed in the fall of Fànes after all, she had been rescued by this curious creature and had come to live with her in this curious place, well out of sight and reach of her enemies. Not such a bad idea.
‘Of course she did,’ the woman said firmly. ‘She never stopped. But it wasn’t easy: there were Cajute spies all over the place. Messengers to the Miners were sent out dozens of times but each time they had to turn back. And each time, while they were gone, the rest of us had to change our hiding place, just in case the messenger was caught and made to talk. No, it wasn’t easy, and it wasn’t very popular either. Then, to complicate matters, when at last one of our best scouts did get through to the Miners’ camp he found it empty and came back with the message undelivered and the news that the Miners had left for good and taken to the road like Wanderers. So? What could our mother do, poor woman? Just sit tight and go on hoping.’
Our mother? Our mother? Yes, of course, how could I have been so silly: this weird underground creature was not the Earth Goddess but my aunt. My Aunt Lujanta, the one who had been stolen from the cradle by an eagle when she was a baby. No wonder she looked so wild. And no wonder my grandmother settled down here and lived with her all those years: they weren’t just rescuer and rescued, they were mother and daughter.
‘It was rather touching really,’ the woman was now saying. ‘Every year, when the spring started, she used to herd us all out into the open and hold a special ceremony in memory of Fànes. She used to light a fire – very risky, but no one dared tell her so – and then circle round it throwing dried mistletoe and stuff onto the flames and chanting, ‘Spirit of Fànes, keep burning, keep burning in our hearts’. I was meant to play the part of an eagle and swoop out of one of the tunnels with my mouth filled with Schniappa, beating my arms like wings, and then spit the Schniappa onto the fire to make the flames flare up, but I felt such a fool I usually managed to persuade one of the children to do it instead.’
‘That was for me,’ Odolghes said rather proudly after a short silence. ‘The eagle stood for me, the Eagle Prince.’
‘Yes, well,’ the woman agreed. ‘Probably it did. But I still felt a fool. The last years luckily she didn’t feel up to it, so I rowed her over the lake instead in a boat, and she threw her mistletoe and whatnot into the water and did her chantings from there. I don’t think she believed in the magic, it was just a way of keeping in touch with the past.
‘When did she die?’ Odolghes asked after another silence.
The woman – Aunt Lujanta, that is – was braiding her hair now, going at it full speed, all twenty toes and fingers flying. She slowed down out of respect. ‘Only three winters ago,’ she said quietly. ‘You’d have had plenty of time to see her if only you’d known. What a shame – for both of you. She talked about you endlessly; I think she missed you more than she did Dolasilla.’
‘Did she?’ Odolghes sounded rather pleased at this news. I could understand the way he felt: my case was different, but I too liked to imagine that my mother, wherever she might be, was missing me and trying to get in touch.
Aunt Lujanta nodded, not briskly but like one who has given proper thought to the matter, and then went on, ‘Of course your marriage would have horrified her. She was always saying, ‘Let’s hope the Miners don’t play false and bind him to that hideous little…’
‘Sssh! Careful,’ Odolghes interrupted, and pointed to the bed where I was lying. ‘The child speaks Fanish, I taught her.’
My aunt must have noticed the raised curtain because she got to her feet and came over to the recess. I pretended I had just that moment woken up, but she wasn’t convinced. ‘Anyway,’ she said, winking at me so that I could see she was trying to undo the damage, ‘it worked out all right because this one’s a poppet. What’s your name, Eaglet’s daughter?’
I told her. Despite the bad beginning I decided I liked her already.
‘Well, Mara,’ she said, bending down over me and enveloping me in a smell that reminded me of dogs’ paws: warm, musty, friendly, not especially clean. ‘You had a narrow escape. Welcome to Morin de Salvans.’
(Chapter 10 coming up next Sunday, June 20th 2010 (If and only if my server works in the sticks where I'm off to)
I was so comfortable that I didn’t call out but lay quiet where I was. When I turned my head in the direction of Odolghes’ voice, something brushed against my face and I realized that the darkness was due to a curtain which shielded my bed from the rest of the room: I was lying, so to speak, in a cupboard, a recess carved out of the wall. Gently I lifted the curtain and looked out onto a still darkish but definitely bigger and brighter space – you could hardly call it a room – lit by a fire and by what I suppose served as an oil lamp but was in fact just a bowl of grease with a flame in the middle. On one side of the fire sat Odolghes on a heap of leather cushions, his legs crossed elegantly, his hand twiddling at his hair, the way it did when he was interested in something. Apart from his breeches he too was naked, and I thought this very odd because he was usually careful to cover his armless shoulder in the presence of strangers.
On the other side of the fire, her foot rocking at the greasebowl so that the flame wobbled, now lighting her features, now shading them, sat, not merely a stranger but one of the strangest strangers I had ever seen. A woman, I supposed she was. Quite old, very tall, very straight, with long pale hair the colour of hay, which she appeared to be in the process of combing, or perhaps drying over the flame. The comb, or brush or instrument she was holding, she passed from hand to free foot unconcernedly, using whichever was more convenient. Her toes and fingers were in fact of equal length, midway between what they are on a normal person, and the nails of both were long and curved and looked as if they would take an awful lot of cutting.
The only other truly unusual thing about her was her ears, which stuck out from under the hair like a horse’s from its mane and, like a horse’s, were long and pointed and furry; but the rest, by its very familiarity, was even stranger. Her voice when she spoke was a little higher maybe but otherwise identical to Odolghes’; her laugh when it came was just like his. I didn’t notice the eyes until later of course, which were dark and slanting and quite, quite different, but the brows and forehead were the same shape as his too, and so were the nose and chin and mouth. Except for the oddities I’ve mentioned she could have been his twin.
They seemed to be getting along together very well for two people who have only just met. If she was indeed the Earth Goddess, I reckoned we were in for a good stay. ‘Tell me more about her,’ Odolghes was asking eagerly. They were evidently discussing some friend they had in common. ‘What did she do all day in the wintertime? How did she keep herself amused?’
‘Oh, this and that,’ the woman said. ‘She scribbled a lot, she painted, she gave lessons. She wasn’t alone, you know, there was the Nurse and the five Fanish babies who escaped with her, and there were four other grownup Fanes who turned up later and stayed a while before they got bored and moved on – quite a little band. And then there was me: I used to keep her company often. I don’t sleep that deep in winter, you know, not like the rest of the tribe.’
‘Don’t you?’ Odolghes asked, leaning forward and lifting the curtain of her hair. He sounded very amused by this rather dull piece of information. ‘Neither do I. I always thought that meant…’ And then he laughed and didn’t finish.
‘Doesn’t mean anything,’ the woman said, tossing back her hair and laughing too. ‘We could be full, or we could be only half. What difference does it make? The important thing is, we’ve found each other.’
‘You found me,’ Odolghes corrected, ‘and very grateful I am that you did. You seem to be quite an expert in rescuing Fanes from desperate situations. But…’ And here he paused and his voice turned a little wistful, ‘I sometimes wonder… What about later when things quietened down? Didn’t any of you ever come to look for me? Didn’t she?’
I was beginning, slowly, to realize who this ‘she’ they were talking about was: it was Alexa, my grandmother, Odolghes’ mother. So she hadn’t been killed in the fall of Fànes after all, she had been rescued by this curious creature and had come to live with her in this curious place, well out of sight and reach of her enemies. Not such a bad idea.
‘Of course she did,’ the woman said firmly. ‘She never stopped. But it wasn’t easy: there were Cajute spies all over the place. Messengers to the Miners were sent out dozens of times but each time they had to turn back. And each time, while they were gone, the rest of us had to change our hiding place, just in case the messenger was caught and made to talk. No, it wasn’t easy, and it wasn’t very popular either. Then, to complicate matters, when at last one of our best scouts did get through to the Miners’ camp he found it empty and came back with the message undelivered and the news that the Miners had left for good and taken to the road like Wanderers. So? What could our mother do, poor woman? Just sit tight and go on hoping.’
Our mother? Our mother? Yes, of course, how could I have been so silly: this weird underground creature was not the Earth Goddess but my aunt. My Aunt Lujanta, the one who had been stolen from the cradle by an eagle when she was a baby. No wonder she looked so wild. And no wonder my grandmother settled down here and lived with her all those years: they weren’t just rescuer and rescued, they were mother and daughter.
‘It was rather touching really,’ the woman was now saying. ‘Every year, when the spring started, she used to herd us all out into the open and hold a special ceremony in memory of Fànes. She used to light a fire – very risky, but no one dared tell her so – and then circle round it throwing dried mistletoe and stuff onto the flames and chanting, ‘Spirit of Fànes, keep burning, keep burning in our hearts’. I was meant to play the part of an eagle and swoop out of one of the tunnels with my mouth filled with Schniappa, beating my arms like wings, and then spit the Schniappa onto the fire to make the flames flare up, but I felt such a fool I usually managed to persuade one of the children to do it instead.’
‘That was for me,’ Odolghes said rather proudly after a short silence. ‘The eagle stood for me, the Eagle Prince.’
‘Yes, well,’ the woman agreed. ‘Probably it did. But I still felt a fool. The last years luckily she didn’t feel up to it, so I rowed her over the lake instead in a boat, and she threw her mistletoe and whatnot into the water and did her chantings from there. I don’t think she believed in the magic, it was just a way of keeping in touch with the past.
‘When did she die?’ Odolghes asked after another silence.
The woman – Aunt Lujanta, that is – was braiding her hair now, going at it full speed, all twenty toes and fingers flying. She slowed down out of respect. ‘Only three winters ago,’ she said quietly. ‘You’d have had plenty of time to see her if only you’d known. What a shame – for both of you. She talked about you endlessly; I think she missed you more than she did Dolasilla.’
‘Did she?’ Odolghes sounded rather pleased at this news. I could understand the way he felt: my case was different, but I too liked to imagine that my mother, wherever she might be, was missing me and trying to get in touch.
Aunt Lujanta nodded, not briskly but like one who has given proper thought to the matter, and then went on, ‘Of course your marriage would have horrified her. She was always saying, ‘Let’s hope the Miners don’t play false and bind him to that hideous little…’
‘Sssh! Careful,’ Odolghes interrupted, and pointed to the bed where I was lying. ‘The child speaks Fanish, I taught her.’
My aunt must have noticed the raised curtain because she got to her feet and came over to the recess. I pretended I had just that moment woken up, but she wasn’t convinced. ‘Anyway,’ she said, winking at me so that I could see she was trying to undo the damage, ‘it worked out all right because this one’s a poppet. What’s your name, Eaglet’s daughter?’
I told her. Despite the bad beginning I decided I liked her already.
‘Well, Mara,’ she said, bending down over me and enveloping me in a smell that reminded me of dogs’ paws: warm, musty, friendly, not especially clean. ‘You had a narrow escape. Welcome to Morin de Salvans.’
(Chapter 10 coming up next Sunday, June 20th 2010 (If and only if my server works in the sticks where I'm off to)
Sunday, 6 June 2010
chapter 8
This morning as I sat scribbling I could hear someone singing the song that was written about Odolghes after his death. I suppose it is a good cheering song for an occasion like this, being all about building and achieving and winning through, but on me it didn’t have that effect, it just made me sad.
Because I miss him. And because, even though the song is one of those long ones with a list of deeds and virtues and achievements that seems to go on for ever, his actual period of leadership was all too short. Saba de Fek, the song calls him: Sword of Fire, his battle name. ‘Saba de Fek, the one-armed, the fox-brained, the bull-hearted, led us Miner people back to Aurona. Aurona of the glittering halls, home of our forbearers, palace of our dreams…’ And so on and so forth.
Well he did of course, it is perfectly true. After all the shouting that went on that night of the gold parting, he could hardly have one otherwise. But what the song fails to mention, perhaps because such a crestfallen thing does not fit very well to music, is how long we actually stayed there. Which was, if I remember rightly, one month and six days, and even that seemed far too long.
The home our elders had dreamed of, moped over, drooled over all these years and described to us younger ones as a kind of wonder-palace, encrusted with jewels and more splendid that the sun itself, turned out when we reached it to be nothing but a huge great empty cave, riddled with draughts and packed full of bats, situated on the top of one of the bleakest mountains of the entire range. There was no handy water source, no nearby wood for fuel gathering, precious little grazing either, and every single thing we needed, except for air of which there was far too much, had to be dragged up through the underground mountain pathways in the same way metal ore has to be dragged out of the earth: that is, with a great deal of bother and boneache and blisters all round. It was mining all over again: a double dose.
We stuck it for a while – chiefly, I think, because the place was so sacred in our lore that nobody dared say outright how dreadful it was – but when Odolghes called us together and announced that he was thinking of re-opening the smelt pits of Mill Brook and needed a few volunteers to accompany him to have a look around, there were so many takers and so much jostling and squabbling and shouting of ‘Bags I!’ and ‘Take me!’ and ‘Wait, I’m coming too!’ that our move was practically decided on the spot.
Mill Brook was not poetic like Aurona, it was not beautiful, not the subject of songs or dreams or yearnings, but it too was our home, or had been once. Our working home as opposed to our party home (just as there are working clothes and party clothes). And like working clothes always are, it was much more practical and comfortable. Especially after the rigours of Aurona. I have a great fondness for tents, from having been born in one, but of all the various places I have lived, I don’t think I have ever been so happy anywhere as I was in the wooden huts of Mill Brook in that first busy year of our settling in.
The smelt pits, when they started up again, made for a lot of grime and noise, and in the summer the heat was ferocious, but the rest of the time it was cosy, and the noise was company, and I kept a very clean house for Odolghes, and covered the food in the larder with muslin so that the grime couldn’t taint it, and put wool in my ears when I slept and made Odolghes do the same, and all in all we had a very good, very easy life.
Our parents being rich now, we younger ones had to do lessons, which I know some children consider terribly hard work, but after ore-crushing nothing seems tiring, and we sat through them happily – the longer the better – doing whatever we were told. Our teacher was called Bruno. Where Odolghes found him and how he came to hire him, we were never told and it seemed rude to ask, but Jet said she had heard her mother saying that he came straight from the market and had been bought, not hired. Which, if true, meant that he was ours for ever. Not such a bad bargain really because as long as no one bothered him with questions, which he hated, he was kind and patient and never chided us and was quite content to pass lesson times the same way we did: with a minimum of fuss.
On my eighth birthday Odolghes said I could have a holiday from lessons and choose whatever in the world I wanted as a birthday present, so I chose that we spend the day together, just the two of us, looking for my mother. It was not a tactful choice: Odolghes had recently begun paying court to a certain Friska, one of my mother’s cousins twice removed, and there was already talk of his remarriage - a search for her predecessor was not likely to go down well with his new fiancée. Nevertheless, Odolghes granted my request immediately, making no bones: the offer, after all, had been his, and he was a good keeper of promises.
We set off early, on two of our smart new horses, taking with us food for the entire day. The sun rose and then shone on us, warmer and warmer; the snow on the mountaintops went from pink to gold to white; the air was so clean it seemed to have been washed in ashes. I turned to Odolghes and smiled and he smiled back, and I knew he was thinking, like I was, of the other journey we had made together, and of how much our lives changed since then.
‘Well, birthday girl, and where shall we look?’ he asked, trying to seem serious but not really succeeding. I fear the new lady had pretty well cured him of Sommavida: I must admit, she was a good deal younger and better looking.
I shook my head, defeated before we had even begun. I wanted to say, Everywhere, but that was a tall order for a day, so I said, The place she’s most likely to be, leaving the choice with him.
This did sadden him a little, I think, because although we had made enquiries with all our customers and alerted the Wanderers and offered huge rewards, no news of my mother had ever come to us, not even of a sighting. ‘No, Mara,’ he said in a different voice, much older sounding. ‘Not the place she’s most likely to be, that’s not a good idea at all. No, I think we’ll try the one place we haven’t yet searched where she just possibly might me if she’s still alive.’
‘And where’s that?’
He gestured vaguely with a tilt of his head. ‘Up. Up, up on the high ground where the Salvans used to live. There are caves there, and wild goats, and berries and roots and things to live on. You never know, if the Salvans managed it…’
The Salvans were half animals according to Bruno. He made us draw one once and told us to put thick fur all over its body and a tail, like a marmot. My mother didn’t have that sort of covering; how could she survive two winters at that altitude, in a cave, eating berries? And why on earth should she want to when she had a perfectly good home to return to? All the same I could see Odolghes’ point: there was nowhere else above ground left to search. And the mountains did look enticing on a day like this.
So that was where we went: higher and higher into the mountains, past the lakes and the poppy fields and the summer grazing grounds, up and up until we reached the frost line beyond which the snow no longer melts, and could see the crest of Aurona below us, looking quite niggling and unimportant. Searching in such a vast and rugged area was impossible really, you’d have to be an eagle with an eagle’s eyes, but the further we rode the less this seemed to bother us, and in the end we stopped bothering altogether. We rode purely for the pleasure. When the sun reached its highest we got off and rested the horses and ate some of our food and drank some wine, which was another luxury we had started buying now, and I went looking under the snow for fallen stars, and Odolghes, who had drunk five time more wine than I had (I knew because I’d counted), lay down on his cloak on a dry patch under an overhanging rock and went to sleep.
I must have done much the same thing myself when I got tired of star hunting, for the next thing I remember is waking up to a clap of thunder and seeing Odolghes loping along the track just below where I was lying, waving his cloak and shouting like a herdsman. All sorts of rude Miner words, which at first I thought were meant for me for having strayed, but soon realized were aimed at the rumps of our two horses, galloping in the homeward direction in a cloud of powdered snow and fast disappearing over the ridge. ‘Too late!’ he called out when he saw me. ‘They’ve gone now, the nervy brutes. Should have tethered them. Forgot. Blast and Roast and Counterblast! Took my arm with them too: it was tied to the saddle.’
‘Don’t worry, Father, I called back. Even at this distance I could see he was in quite a state. ‘They’ll find their own way home, horses always do.’ But when I reached him on the track and looked back at where I’d come from I could see the real cause of his worry. The thunder clap was the signal of no ordinary light summer storm that come and shakes itself over you like a wet dog and the goes again: looming behind the mountaintop was a huge barrier of clouds the colour of slag. Even as we watched I could see it coming closer and feel the wind on which it rode.
‘It’s a bad one, isn’t it?’ I whispered. Next to u Fin du Ratt it was the thing we had been taught to fear most: not bears, not wolves, not forest fires or wraiths or even landslides, any of which you can dodge if you’re lucky and keep your wits about you, but being caught out on the mountaintops in a really heavy storm. It’s the cold, you see: unless you’re properly prepared there’s nothing you can do to fight it off. We’d lost several of our kinsfolk like that over the years: picked off by blizzards on their way to work or back again; and when we found them they had been crouched up in ball and frozen so solid we couldn’t unwind them, not even for their funerals.
Odolghes nodded and took my hand. ‘It’s a very bad one, picera,’ he said. ‘But there’s no running away from it without the horses. We’d better go back to the rock and take shelter before it breaks.’
His voice was calm but his movements weren’t. When we reached the rock he wrapped me up in his cloak and bundled me under the shelf of rock, together with the leftover food and wine flask. Then, clumsily, with his solitary hand, he began scooping up snow and packing it into lumps, working so fast he looked as if he had the Tanners’ Twitch, or whatever the disease is called.
Protection, an icehouse to hide in. We had been taught in the nursery how to build one of these, as a sort of game, but I’d never seen one built in earnest. I made to help him, but Odolghes pushed me back under the ledge again saying at all costs I must keep dry. After finishing a dozen or so lumps – just enough to build a low wall in front of our niche, nothing more – he had to stop and come and join me inside, because the wind was lashing so hard it threatened to drag him away. In his company I wasn’t frightened, or at least not yet. If you’ve got somewhere to shelter where the sleet can’t freeze you or the lightning frazzle you, and if you don’t lose patience and venture out too soon and get lost, the danger with storms is of the slow, creeping kind: it depends on how long they last and whether, to put it bluntly, they last longer than you do. We had some food left, we had wine, we had each other to cling to and Odolghes’ thick warm cloak to cover us: I reckoned – we both did – that we were good for quite a nice long while.
Our reckonings, however, were made without consulting the innkeeper, or whatever the saying is. And the innkeeper – or the skykeeper in this case – was the storm. It howled over us and round us, and inside our ears and mouths and nostrils, and under and through the cloak, for so long and with such force that it beat us almost senseless. Dark came and still there was no letting up. Light returned – a livid, soupy light only a few shades paler than the dark – and then faded again as a second night fell. I was so cold and wet and cramped I begged Odolghes to let us leave our niche and run – anywhere, just to feel my feet belonging to me again - but he said no, we were still better off where we were. He made me do pretend running, though, by waving my legs in the air and then clapping my hands until my fingers burned and I thought they would drop off, but this made me so tired that afterwards I fell asleep and woke up even colder.
Worst of all, the constant screeching and battering of the wind played on our nerves, so that instead of being affectionate and saying kind things to one another as we clung together, we grew rattier and rattier, me in particular. I blamed Odolghes for drinking so much wine, for nodding off, for not spotting the change in the weather when he should have done, for flapping at the horses instead of trying to calm them – for everything I could think of. He in return told me I was spoilt and difficult: I hadn’t really wanted to look for my mother at all, I had just wanted to get him away from Friska for a day because I was jealous. Well, I’d succeeded all right: if the storm didn’t stop soon it was goodbye Friska for ever, and goodbye everyone.
The storm did not stop, either soon or late: it went on and on and on until we lost count of the days. Our food ran out; we finished the wine and had to slake our thirst with snow. Eventually I stopped feeling thirsty and was pleased about this because it meant I wouldn’t have to pee any more: there was no worse moment of either day or night than when you had to take down your breeches and pee.
I still wasn’t frightened, I still trusted Odolghes to pull us through, even though he seemed a lot colder now and a lot lazier and spent most of the time asleep – like I did. But when I woke up from one of my dreams to find him in a really loving mood for a change, cradling me tight in his arms and planting kisses on my forehead, I knew things were getting very serious, and would have trembled if I hadn’t been trembling already from the cold.
‘Sssh, picera,’ he said when I tried to speak, and closed my lips with his own so that I could taste the ice on his whiskers. ‘Sleep now, sleep.’
‘But you said to fight against the drowsiness…’
He turned his head so that his cheek lay against my mouth, stopping it entirely. ‘I know, sweetheart, only now it’s different, now you needn’t fight any more. Let yourself sink into a nice deep sleep and when you wake up the storm will be over, I promise.’ And then (and this is the very last thing I remember of that particular day or night or whichever it was) he began singing one of his Fanish songs. The saddest one of all, the one about the little warrior princess whose luck runs out on her: ‘I sun na era der sfortunada…’
(Chapter 9 coming up next Sunday June 13th 2010)
Because I miss him. And because, even though the song is one of those long ones with a list of deeds and virtues and achievements that seems to go on for ever, his actual period of leadership was all too short. Saba de Fek, the song calls him: Sword of Fire, his battle name. ‘Saba de Fek, the one-armed, the fox-brained, the bull-hearted, led us Miner people back to Aurona. Aurona of the glittering halls, home of our forbearers, palace of our dreams…’ And so on and so forth.
Well he did of course, it is perfectly true. After all the shouting that went on that night of the gold parting, he could hardly have one otherwise. But what the song fails to mention, perhaps because such a crestfallen thing does not fit very well to music, is how long we actually stayed there. Which was, if I remember rightly, one month and six days, and even that seemed far too long.
The home our elders had dreamed of, moped over, drooled over all these years and described to us younger ones as a kind of wonder-palace, encrusted with jewels and more splendid that the sun itself, turned out when we reached it to be nothing but a huge great empty cave, riddled with draughts and packed full of bats, situated on the top of one of the bleakest mountains of the entire range. There was no handy water source, no nearby wood for fuel gathering, precious little grazing either, and every single thing we needed, except for air of which there was far too much, had to be dragged up through the underground mountain pathways in the same way metal ore has to be dragged out of the earth: that is, with a great deal of bother and boneache and blisters all round. It was mining all over again: a double dose.
We stuck it for a while – chiefly, I think, because the place was so sacred in our lore that nobody dared say outright how dreadful it was – but when Odolghes called us together and announced that he was thinking of re-opening the smelt pits of Mill Brook and needed a few volunteers to accompany him to have a look around, there were so many takers and so much jostling and squabbling and shouting of ‘Bags I!’ and ‘Take me!’ and ‘Wait, I’m coming too!’ that our move was practically decided on the spot.
Mill Brook was not poetic like Aurona, it was not beautiful, not the subject of songs or dreams or yearnings, but it too was our home, or had been once. Our working home as opposed to our party home (just as there are working clothes and party clothes). And like working clothes always are, it was much more practical and comfortable. Especially after the rigours of Aurona. I have a great fondness for tents, from having been born in one, but of all the various places I have lived, I don’t think I have ever been so happy anywhere as I was in the wooden huts of Mill Brook in that first busy year of our settling in.
The smelt pits, when they started up again, made for a lot of grime and noise, and in the summer the heat was ferocious, but the rest of the time it was cosy, and the noise was company, and I kept a very clean house for Odolghes, and covered the food in the larder with muslin so that the grime couldn’t taint it, and put wool in my ears when I slept and made Odolghes do the same, and all in all we had a very good, very easy life.
Our parents being rich now, we younger ones had to do lessons, which I know some children consider terribly hard work, but after ore-crushing nothing seems tiring, and we sat through them happily – the longer the better – doing whatever we were told. Our teacher was called Bruno. Where Odolghes found him and how he came to hire him, we were never told and it seemed rude to ask, but Jet said she had heard her mother saying that he came straight from the market and had been bought, not hired. Which, if true, meant that he was ours for ever. Not such a bad bargain really because as long as no one bothered him with questions, which he hated, he was kind and patient and never chided us and was quite content to pass lesson times the same way we did: with a minimum of fuss.
On my eighth birthday Odolghes said I could have a holiday from lessons and choose whatever in the world I wanted as a birthday present, so I chose that we spend the day together, just the two of us, looking for my mother. It was not a tactful choice: Odolghes had recently begun paying court to a certain Friska, one of my mother’s cousins twice removed, and there was already talk of his remarriage - a search for her predecessor was not likely to go down well with his new fiancée. Nevertheless, Odolghes granted my request immediately, making no bones: the offer, after all, had been his, and he was a good keeper of promises.
We set off early, on two of our smart new horses, taking with us food for the entire day. The sun rose and then shone on us, warmer and warmer; the snow on the mountaintops went from pink to gold to white; the air was so clean it seemed to have been washed in ashes. I turned to Odolghes and smiled and he smiled back, and I knew he was thinking, like I was, of the other journey we had made together, and of how much our lives changed since then.
‘Well, birthday girl, and where shall we look?’ he asked, trying to seem serious but not really succeeding. I fear the new lady had pretty well cured him of Sommavida: I must admit, she was a good deal younger and better looking.
I shook my head, defeated before we had even begun. I wanted to say, Everywhere, but that was a tall order for a day, so I said, The place she’s most likely to be, leaving the choice with him.
This did sadden him a little, I think, because although we had made enquiries with all our customers and alerted the Wanderers and offered huge rewards, no news of my mother had ever come to us, not even of a sighting. ‘No, Mara,’ he said in a different voice, much older sounding. ‘Not the place she’s most likely to be, that’s not a good idea at all. No, I think we’ll try the one place we haven’t yet searched where she just possibly might me if she’s still alive.’
‘And where’s that?’
He gestured vaguely with a tilt of his head. ‘Up. Up, up on the high ground where the Salvans used to live. There are caves there, and wild goats, and berries and roots and things to live on. You never know, if the Salvans managed it…’
The Salvans were half animals according to Bruno. He made us draw one once and told us to put thick fur all over its body and a tail, like a marmot. My mother didn’t have that sort of covering; how could she survive two winters at that altitude, in a cave, eating berries? And why on earth should she want to when she had a perfectly good home to return to? All the same I could see Odolghes’ point: there was nowhere else above ground left to search. And the mountains did look enticing on a day like this.
So that was where we went: higher and higher into the mountains, past the lakes and the poppy fields and the summer grazing grounds, up and up until we reached the frost line beyond which the snow no longer melts, and could see the crest of Aurona below us, looking quite niggling and unimportant. Searching in such a vast and rugged area was impossible really, you’d have to be an eagle with an eagle’s eyes, but the further we rode the less this seemed to bother us, and in the end we stopped bothering altogether. We rode purely for the pleasure. When the sun reached its highest we got off and rested the horses and ate some of our food and drank some wine, which was another luxury we had started buying now, and I went looking under the snow for fallen stars, and Odolghes, who had drunk five time more wine than I had (I knew because I’d counted), lay down on his cloak on a dry patch under an overhanging rock and went to sleep.
I must have done much the same thing myself when I got tired of star hunting, for the next thing I remember is waking up to a clap of thunder and seeing Odolghes loping along the track just below where I was lying, waving his cloak and shouting like a herdsman. All sorts of rude Miner words, which at first I thought were meant for me for having strayed, but soon realized were aimed at the rumps of our two horses, galloping in the homeward direction in a cloud of powdered snow and fast disappearing over the ridge. ‘Too late!’ he called out when he saw me. ‘They’ve gone now, the nervy brutes. Should have tethered them. Forgot. Blast and Roast and Counterblast! Took my arm with them too: it was tied to the saddle.’
‘Don’t worry, Father, I called back. Even at this distance I could see he was in quite a state. ‘They’ll find their own way home, horses always do.’ But when I reached him on the track and looked back at where I’d come from I could see the real cause of his worry. The thunder clap was the signal of no ordinary light summer storm that come and shakes itself over you like a wet dog and the goes again: looming behind the mountaintop was a huge barrier of clouds the colour of slag. Even as we watched I could see it coming closer and feel the wind on which it rode.
‘It’s a bad one, isn’t it?’ I whispered. Next to u Fin du Ratt it was the thing we had been taught to fear most: not bears, not wolves, not forest fires or wraiths or even landslides, any of which you can dodge if you’re lucky and keep your wits about you, but being caught out on the mountaintops in a really heavy storm. It’s the cold, you see: unless you’re properly prepared there’s nothing you can do to fight it off. We’d lost several of our kinsfolk like that over the years: picked off by blizzards on their way to work or back again; and when we found them they had been crouched up in ball and frozen so solid we couldn’t unwind them, not even for their funerals.
Odolghes nodded and took my hand. ‘It’s a very bad one, picera,’ he said. ‘But there’s no running away from it without the horses. We’d better go back to the rock and take shelter before it breaks.’
His voice was calm but his movements weren’t. When we reached the rock he wrapped me up in his cloak and bundled me under the shelf of rock, together with the leftover food and wine flask. Then, clumsily, with his solitary hand, he began scooping up snow and packing it into lumps, working so fast he looked as if he had the Tanners’ Twitch, or whatever the disease is called.
Protection, an icehouse to hide in. We had been taught in the nursery how to build one of these, as a sort of game, but I’d never seen one built in earnest. I made to help him, but Odolghes pushed me back under the ledge again saying at all costs I must keep dry. After finishing a dozen or so lumps – just enough to build a low wall in front of our niche, nothing more – he had to stop and come and join me inside, because the wind was lashing so hard it threatened to drag him away. In his company I wasn’t frightened, or at least not yet. If you’ve got somewhere to shelter where the sleet can’t freeze you or the lightning frazzle you, and if you don’t lose patience and venture out too soon and get lost, the danger with storms is of the slow, creeping kind: it depends on how long they last and whether, to put it bluntly, they last longer than you do. We had some food left, we had wine, we had each other to cling to and Odolghes’ thick warm cloak to cover us: I reckoned – we both did – that we were good for quite a nice long while.
Our reckonings, however, were made without consulting the innkeeper, or whatever the saying is. And the innkeeper – or the skykeeper in this case – was the storm. It howled over us and round us, and inside our ears and mouths and nostrils, and under and through the cloak, for so long and with such force that it beat us almost senseless. Dark came and still there was no letting up. Light returned – a livid, soupy light only a few shades paler than the dark – and then faded again as a second night fell. I was so cold and wet and cramped I begged Odolghes to let us leave our niche and run – anywhere, just to feel my feet belonging to me again - but he said no, we were still better off where we were. He made me do pretend running, though, by waving my legs in the air and then clapping my hands until my fingers burned and I thought they would drop off, but this made me so tired that afterwards I fell asleep and woke up even colder.
Worst of all, the constant screeching and battering of the wind played on our nerves, so that instead of being affectionate and saying kind things to one another as we clung together, we grew rattier and rattier, me in particular. I blamed Odolghes for drinking so much wine, for nodding off, for not spotting the change in the weather when he should have done, for flapping at the horses instead of trying to calm them – for everything I could think of. He in return told me I was spoilt and difficult: I hadn’t really wanted to look for my mother at all, I had just wanted to get him away from Friska for a day because I was jealous. Well, I’d succeeded all right: if the storm didn’t stop soon it was goodbye Friska for ever, and goodbye everyone.
The storm did not stop, either soon or late: it went on and on and on until we lost count of the days. Our food ran out; we finished the wine and had to slake our thirst with snow. Eventually I stopped feeling thirsty and was pleased about this because it meant I wouldn’t have to pee any more: there was no worse moment of either day or night than when you had to take down your breeches and pee.
I still wasn’t frightened, I still trusted Odolghes to pull us through, even though he seemed a lot colder now and a lot lazier and spent most of the time asleep – like I did. But when I woke up from one of my dreams to find him in a really loving mood for a change, cradling me tight in his arms and planting kisses on my forehead, I knew things were getting very serious, and would have trembled if I hadn’t been trembling already from the cold.
‘Sssh, picera,’ he said when I tried to speak, and closed my lips with his own so that I could taste the ice on his whiskers. ‘Sleep now, sleep.’
‘But you said to fight against the drowsiness…’
He turned his head so that his cheek lay against my mouth, stopping it entirely. ‘I know, sweetheart, only now it’s different, now you needn’t fight any more. Let yourself sink into a nice deep sleep and when you wake up the storm will be over, I promise.’ And then (and this is the very last thing I remember of that particular day or night or whichever it was) he began singing one of his Fanish songs. The saddest one of all, the one about the little warrior princess whose luck runs out on her: ‘I sun na era der sfortunada…’
(Chapter 9 coming up next Sunday June 13th 2010)
Sunday, 30 May 2010
chapter 7
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)
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, 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
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