I can’t remember exactly how long it was after granting his petition that I began to notice Tarlui had a son with him, not included in the request. And I can’t remember either how long it was before I began to notice the son – not just as one of Tarlui’s belongings like his medallion or his clasp-knife or the many bags and bundles and bottles that cluttered up his hut, lining it almost to the smoke-hole, but as a person in his own right.
Probably, as regards the first point, it was just under a year. This may have been because Tarlui had told the boy to lie low and not to mix with Miners until it was certain the Fever danger was past, or it may have been that the boy himself was shy and kept out of my way, or it may simply have been because I had other things to think about. Like trying to fulfil our outstanding contracts with only half our former workforce, and cadge new orders for the coming year when most of our clients were too scared of infection to come anywhere near us, and keep the books, and pay for goods, and settle disputes, and generally carry out all the umpteen boring tasks that now fell to my lot as leader. (And a leader, what was worse, without the aid of any advisor at all. Because when in due course I proposed making Tarlui my secretary – as a first, cautious step towards appointing him Counsellor in Tusky’s place, Tusky took such offence and stirred up such a shindig about ‘foreigners’ and ‘pale-eyes’ and ‘nosepokers’ and ‘bloodsuckers’ that I had to change my mind and withdraw the offer. And by then I was so cross with Tusky that I couldn’t work with him either, so in the end I had to keep my own counsel and be content, for copying and checking, with lazy Bruno, my former tutor.)
Anyway it can’t have been more than a year because I clearly recollect seeing the boy with the other children at the commemoration ceremony in honour of the Fever victims, exactly one year later, and feeling a stab of sympathy with him on account of the way he stuck out from the group, with his long bony legs and skimpy hand-me-down clothing and undressable hair, worse than a pony’s forelock. I imagined they had names for him already and wasn’t a bit surprised to discover that they did, and that he was know as Cafusc: a shepherd’s word, very coarse, meaning dark of pelt, and used for those brackish coloured sheep whose wool nobody wants and that are looked on as pretty well worthless, save for chops. If ever I spoke of him, which I suppose I might have done now and then, I think I probably called him that myself – his real name, with its flavour of Lists and Bouts and Combatants, being absurd in one so small and scruffy. How is little… Whatsit… um… Cafusc getting on, Tarlui? Is he growing used to Miner life? Is he working at his singing?
As regards the second point: my seeing him as an individual in his own right, I have no such convenient marker to aid me, but I reckon it was closer to five years than to one, and maybe even closer to seven than to five, and seem to remember that it came about in bits and pieces over a longish period of time – coinciding, I suppose, with his final, amazing burst of growth. Voice; eyes; a foot (yes, definitely a foot if not both: I always notice people’s feet); a sunburnt forearm; a twitch of the plait that he tied his hair in when he was working; a sudden glimpse of his shoulders, stripped bare for washing – separate items like those that gradually, barely denting my awareness, in the way you might hear a whinny one day and see a hoof print the next and a fleck of piebald amongst the trees the next and finally say to yourself, Ah, yes, there’s a horse somewhere about, must have been there for some while – that gradually came together to form the whole person. Although more than person, to tell the pure and unpolished truth, what they really came to form was Man, with a big bold capital M, as written on the milk buckets to stop them getting muddled with the others.
It was awful, it was so shaming. And yet it wasn’t, it was wonderful. I was in my early twenties by the time it came about – an oldish woman by Miner standards, getting on for granny age – and I’d never been courted by anybody or felt as if I wanted to be. The whole business of choosing a partner and fiddling around with them in the dark and then exchanging vows and leaving one household for another and starting a family and all that fuss was a complete mystery to me; I couldn’t think why people bothered. I presided over the marriages because it was my duty, and said all the right words, and handed out the rings to put on the newlyweds’ fingers and sprinkled gold dust over their beds and so forth and entered their names in the register in big curly letters, but the reasons for what I was doing, or, more to the point, for what they were doing, were an unsolved riddle in my mind.
Even when Jet fell in love – as she did, desperately, miserably, with our best splitter, Peres, who was already married – I wasn’t much the wiser. Every night for months on end I used to listen to her wails and try to sound sympathetic and give advice, but really, for all the sense it made to me, she might have been speaking Ampezzani-gabble.
‘Forget about him, silly. Set your cap at someone else who’s free.’
‘I can’t, I can’t. There isn’t anybody else!’
Which besides daft was simply false. The Fever had thinned our numbers maybe, but there were still plenty of spare males in the tribe for the picking, even for someone of Jet’s age. Half a dozen widowers at least, seeing that she liked them weathered, and even one or two tough old boots who’d never married and were always on the lookout, like Willy the Welder and Tusky himself. I would list their names for her, and she would shudder and wail all the harder. Peres! Peres! Peres was the only man in the world she wanted.
‘Then take him,’ I would advise, losing patience. ‘Take him as your lover and keep quiet about it.’
But this wasn’t much help to her either. She wanted that, of course she did, but she wanted other things as well.
‘Like what?’ On this head I was quite interested.
Oh, silly things, she explained, like wanting to take care of him and boil his soup and mend his mitts, and be there to say goodnight to him at the end of the day.
That sounded workable. ‘Then ask his wife. I don’t know about your hanging around in the evenings but I’m sure she’ll be willing to let you give a hand during the day with the cooking and darning.’
At this point Jet would usually break down altogether and accuse me of being unfeeling. Which of course is exactly what I was. Odolghes was so far the only man I had ever wanted to do things for in the way Jet described, but he had been my father and therefore did not count. Then there had been the boys, my little half brothers, but they had been babies and didn’t count either. Otherwise my closest experience to anything resembling what Jet described was my interest – and I’m not sure it was even that because he was dead boring when I got to speak to him – in a young Trusani horseman who used to come as an outrider with the wagon to collect orders, around the time the wall was being built. He was tall, taller than I was by a head at least, even out of the saddle, and despite his height he stood up straight, on widely planted feet as big as snow shoes. It may have been just this – his size and swagger – but I remember thinking him very fine, and running to the gateway, season after season, each time I heard wheels, in the hope of seeing him. And of seeing him see me, too, and stare at me in a way none of my fellow tribesmen ever did: appreciative, hungry, with a sort of smouldering, melty quality in the eye that I associated for some reason with gold parting – perhaps on account of the shiver it sent down my spine.
With Lidsanel all this changed in the space of a dozen or so heartbeats. And what heartbeats! As I said, I don’t remember much about the early flirty stages of our affair, because I was still in my cocoon or shell or husk or whatever it was that sealed me off so tightly from the world of lovers; but I remember clear as rock crystal the moment I emerged from it and knew, beyond doubt and beyond going back and beyond caring what the gossips might say about it, that this was love and that I was in it. Like everybody else (which was a relief: to know that I was normal and not, as I had heard Tusky call me behind my back, a blooming great she-mule), and at the same time like nobody else had ever been before or ever would be.
I was in bed and ill. I remember that too, indeed it would be difficult now to forget. Over the past year I had often been ill. Nothing terrible and sudden like the Brain Fever, but a creeping, nagging, lingering malaise without a name and without a place either, that would come and go and stop and start and rise and fall, as capricious as a mist. Sometimes it would be in my stomach, making me sick and putting me off my food; sometimes in my head, causing the most fearful aches behind my eyes. At other times it seemed to sink right down into my feet, which became all chapped and dark, quite like a Miner’s should be, only in my case the dark would not wash off; and at other times still – and these were the most frequent – it would seep everywhere and I would become tired and listless, and my hair would moult in handfuls, and my heartbeat would thud slower and slower, like the plod, plod, plod of an old pack-dog, until it seemed it must stop altogether.
Tarlui tended me, assisted as a rule by Jet, who was as clever as her mother used to be at measuring out all the powders and potions and stuff that Tarlui insisted I should take. (And clever at getting them down me too. Poor, zealous, well-meaning Jet, how hard she used to plead with me to swallow them!) But on this particular day she must have been resting or busy elsewhere, because Tarlui came into the sickroom accompanied not by her but by this unobtrusive son of his – Lidsanel, known as Cafusc – whom so far I had seen and not seen, in bits and bobs or altogether as maybe, and noticed and not noticed, but who already had the power, when he drew close to the bed, to send the old pack-dog rhythm of my heartbeat racing like a harrier’s.
He told me later he was convinced I was dying, or he never would have had the courage to behave the way he did, being so much younger and the son of a hireling; but I’m not sure this is quite true. My suspicion was, and still is, that he cheated a little, like I did myself, and used the illness as an excuse. As a kind of lovers’ cattle goad, if such a thing can be imagined, designed to chase us without further delay into each other’s arms.
Tarlui was already at work in the far corner of the hut with his weights and scales and spoons, preparing my medicine (or whatever I should call it), but apart from the tinkling of his instruments, which set up a treble to the low boom, boom, boom of my suddenly racing heart, I barely noticed him. I think he may have called out something to Lidsanel by way of instructions – something not very pleasant, something like, ‘Don’t just stand there loafing, boy. Make yourself useful. Put the bed to rights. Empty the squat-pail. Get her to sit up if you can.’ But if he did, Lidsanel didn’t appear to notice him either.
It was weird. So weird that if we’d had any sense we should have stopped to ask the reason. We were separate from one another: he standing by the bed, me lying on it; he male, me female; he young, me not so young; he healthy, me quite the reverse; but in some way it is hard to describe (I think from habit in terms of metal fusion, only it was even queerer and faster than that) we were already as united and indivisible as the two sides of Tarlui’s famous medal.
For what seemed ages we just stayed still in this position, staring at one another: a couple of sun-dazed owls. Stare, stare, stare, all else forgotten, on my side even breathing, until my chest lost patience and did it for me. We said nothing either, but messages seemed to course between us all the same: desire, love, need, astonishment – I don’t know what it was that they contained. ‘Don’t die, don’t leave me. Not now that things are just beginning.’ ‘Who talks of dying? Can’t you see how alive you make me feel?’ ‘What a lot of time we’ve wasted.’ ‘Never mind, time’s our slave, when we are together we can make it stop.’ ‘When we are together we will have other things to do than bother about time.’ ‘When we are together?’ ‘Yes, when we are together. Properly. Just the two of us and nothing in between.’ Then, as if to give me a foretaste of what he meant, Lidsanel bent down and took my hand, which was lying on the covers limp and white as a fish’s underside, and carried it to his mouth where he pressed it to his open lips so that I could feel the heat and wetness and the pressing of his tongue inside.
I also felt my hand change colour instantly as did my whole body, and in my embarrassment I remembered Tarlui. What was he doing? Was he watching us? Had he noticed what had happened between us, or was he still too busy with his mixtures?
He had noticed all right, I could see that the moment I turned my head in his direction and away from Lidsanel. He had noticed, and he was watching us with evident interest, his head cocked to one side and a funny smile on his face, musing and amused. ‘Ho, ho,’ he seemed to be saying to himself. ‘Ho, ho, so that’s the way it is. Well, well, well. My boy has found favour with the hefty Miner maiden, has he? Well, well, well.’
It was unusual for me to be able to read his thoughts in this way. It was unusual for anyone. Although he knew most of our folk inside out by now, from looking down our throats and into our ears and between our toes and places, the opposite did not hold true, and to us Miners he was still in many ways as much of a stranger as he had been when he first arrived. If we had parties, to celebrate a birth or a marriage or the clinching of a good contract or the like, he never came, so we never saw him drink or sing or do anything foolish or what you might call let his hair down at all. (His hair. More about that later.) If you asked him questions about his past, or about his origins, or even about his tastes in food or music – anything that went beyond the strict limits of business – he never answered them. It wasn’t that he refused to answer – he was far too polite for that – but he turned his politeness into a sort of shield with which to fend off the enquiry. ‘I like all the food that is served in Mill Brook, Lady Mara. I like all the music that is played. My home country? My youth? My childhood? Ah, I would not be bothering you with talk of such faraway things, not now when I have so many patients to attend to. Some other day perhaps…’ But that other day never came. His very face, with its fine drawn-back skin that had no give in it, and the thin, beardless mouth and pale-as-silver eyes, seemed made, like caskets are, for holding things in, hiding them from view. Thus I never knew either, not really, not then, whether he was content with his doctoring work or whether Tusky was right to be jealous of him, and all the while he was chafing with impatience, itching to be offered some other more important job and furious because it had been denied him.
And yet now, just for a moment, as I lay there awkwardly on the bed with my raised hand glued to his son’s mouth, the casket had opened and I had seen real interest on his face, and real, fast-moving thoughts behind it.
Or had I? No sooner was Tarlui aware of my movement than his head dropped promptly back over his pounding bowl, and when he looked up again, as he did almost immediately, leaving me just enough time to free my hand from Lidsanel’s clasp and place it demurely back on the covers, his face was smoothed again into a tactful, line-free blank. ‘And how is your Ladyship feeling today? Am I mistaken or is that a little more colour I see in your cheeks?’
I said as loudly as I could that I was feeling a lot better.
‘Good,’ he said, tilting his head as before and showing just the inkling of another smile. ‘Then perhaps it is time for us to pass to another mixture, a lighter one. In fact,’ and he set aside the mortar and gave it a little shove with his toe, upsetting it and spilling its contents on the floor, ‘we might try something quite different altogether. Yes, why not? Lidsanel!’
By my bedside I felt Lidsanel stiffen with resentment: despite having given him such a high-sounding name, Tarlui usually ordered him around like a scullery boy, and newly declared lovers are very anxious about dignity, I know I was. But the older man for once was gentle with him, almost respectful. ‘Lidsanel, my son, lend a hand to your old father, would you, in his work? Nip over to the dairy and see if the cowman can give you a bowl of milk for her Ladyship’s new potion. And mind it be fresh.’
‘A good boy,’ he said to me in a confidential voice when Lidsanel had gone, lowering his head to pillow level and peering at me closely with his keen medicine man’s eyes. ‘Handsome too, wouldn’t your Ladyship say? Or is that just a father’s partiality? Oh, I know by Miner standards a great cuckoo chick like him doesn’t cut much of a figure, but I think myself… well, that swag of hair, those thick dark eyelashes he takes from his mother, those long brown limbs, the muscular torso… My word! I was right, your Ladyship’s colour is definitely improving… Yes, I think myself they are points in his favour rather than defects. But I may be wrong. What is your Ladyship’s opinion?’
My Ladyship’s opinion was too intimate to be voiced. Now I knew exactly what Jet had been on about: mitts and soup wouldn’t have come top of my list perhaps, but I would have loved to do things for Lidsanel – anything, big or small, easy or difficult, to make his life nicer, give him pleasure. I lay outwardly still, inwardly bubbling like dross, until he came back with the milk, and then I think from weakness and excitement I must have fainted clean away.
And then have passed from swoon to sleep with no interruption, because the next thing I remember is waking up with the dark drops of an evening rainstorm seeping through a hole in the roofing and dripping onto my bedcovers, and feeling more comfortable and happy than I had felt in years.
On account of the change of ‘medicine’? Very likely on account of that as well. But mainly because a world than contained Lidsanel was no longer the drear and lonely place it had seemed to me without him, but a place in which everything, even rain, even leaks, seemed packed with promise.
(next chapter sunday july 18 2010)
Sunday, 11 July 2010
Sunday, 4 July 2010
chapter 2
If Tusky meant good in the sense of useful (and there’s no point measuring the other sort of good yet, not until I know for sure the final outcome), then he was wrong. Tarlui was still there all right, in his hut by the gate, and Tarlui came, and did more, much more than make suggestions.
My first sight of him was off-putting, indeed off-scaring. He was slight and bent and ragged and filthy looking and wore a mask over his face which left only the eyes showing. Strange, pale coloured eyes like those of the mixed-blood Fanes I had met at my Aunt Lujanta’s, but with darker lashes, darker brows. I thought he must have the bone-rot and covered his face for that reason, but when he heard my gasp he was quick to reassure me. It was protection, he said, a measure for keeping diseases out, not in. We must all start wearing masks now; would I please get the housekeeper to start tearing up some linen strips with no delay.
His voice was quiet, lilting, no edge to it at all. I wasn’t expecting to be given such a strange order at such short notice by a total stranger, and a beggar at that, but I found myself rushing to the linen chests to do as I was bid. We had no real housekeeper because Friska never trusted anyone but herself with housework, so I just grabbed an armful of cloths and carried them back to Tarlui like a well-trained hunting dog. If I’d had a tail I’d probably have wagged it to show willing.
‘Excellent, my Lady,’ he said, making me wonder for a moment who he was talking to, and began dividing the cloths into strips himself with the aid of a dainty little clasp-knife which he pulled out from somewhere under the rags, measuring each strip carefully so that all were exactly the same size.
Appearances can be misleading because, dirty though he appeared on the outside, the man had a deep, almost religious regard for cleanliness. The next thing he did, after lining everyone up and handing out the masks, was to issue each of us with a personal chunk of soap from the stores. This chunk, he instructed, was to be kept knotted in a handkerchief tied at the waist, so as to be always readily available, and must be used every time the owner’s hands were in the least bit grubby. Fingernails would not pose much of a problem because Miners scarcely had any, but those who were in the habit of keeping one long nail for head scratching and teeth picking and whatnot must cut it short immediately. And the same went for toes. Bedding must be aired daily: taken out into the yard and shaken and beaten; garments must be washed; every healthy person must bathe every single day in the river no matter how cold the water, breaking a hole in the ice if need be. Food must be washed too. Spitting must cease. Noses must be blown into handkerchiefs.
Oh, and a hundred other fussy little rules of this kind. I remember getting more and more fidgety and finally interrupting him: he was here for sick, I reminded him, not for the healthy. My father was lying on his bed in agony, so were his sons, so were dozens of my kinsfolk; surely lessons on nail clipping and nose blowing could come later?
Tarlui, I was soon to discover, set nearly as much store by politeness as he did cleanliness, but on this occasion he was downright rude. If the lessons came later, he said, almost barked, they would come too late. Did I want him to fight the disease or didn’t I? Because if I did, I must let him go about it his way. The sick? Forgive his bluntness but there was nothing to be done for the sick, save, as an extreme remedy, the boring of a hole into their skulls to take the pressure off. And since very few ever recovered from that treatment, the longer we could wait before resorting to it, the better. Now, if I would please order the return of the shift workers and anyone else who happened to be outside the settlement for whatever reason, he would go through the drill a second time for their benefit.
If there had been anyone else to turn to, anyone else with the shadow of an idea of what to do, even if it had been only an old Tchicuta woman with poultices, or an Aguana with a dowsing twig, I think I would have sent Tarlui packing after this speech. (Or tried to: given the scale of his preparations it would not have been easy.) But there was no one. Friska was with her children, and she was already feeling ill herself. Jet was ailing too. Tusky was hopeless in emergencies, and for all I knew had already carried out his threat and jumped into the river with his pockets full of slag. Not such a bad idea either, I was beginning to think. After all, what was this newcomer offering us? Nothing but soap and masks and scrubbing brushes. And now a suggestion so horrific it made me want to strike him. Oh, how glad I am I never allowed him to go near Odolghes or any of the others with his disgusting skull-saw. I shouldn’t really have let him into Odolghes’ chamber at all, with or without saw, but there was no knowing that at the time so it’s useless to blame myself. Luckily Tarlui kept his mask on, but even so I’m not sure that Odolghes didn’t… just for a moment… before his wits went entirely, that is…
But better not to think about that. Better not to think about anything connected to those dreadful last days of the Great Ravage, as it is now called in our ballads. At the time, we survivors plodded on with our everyday business, heads down like beasts at the treadmill, and this still seems to me the only way forward out of any fix, be it a mine accident or a wet harvest or simply, like the one that threatens me now, a whirlpool of horrors in the head. Let me just say that together with Odolghes and my stepmother and brothers the Fever carried away in all a hundred and forty six members of our tribe: slightly under half the total population. The elderly and the young were the worst affected, although about twenty victims of my own age group were stricken also, among them most of my old school mates. Only one sick person recovered, and that – thank the niggardly Goddess for a scrap of mercy – was Jet. She trailed her foot a bit afterwards but otherwise was quite her old self.
More than this – the facts, the numbers – I am not able to give. My grandmother in her book writes at length about her parents’ deaths: what noises they made and who heard them and who found them afterwards and in what positions, but she never loved them like I did mine, and never behaved badly towards them either. After the Friska business I had always meant to draw close to Odolghes again, confess I was jealous, ask his forgiveness for being so standoffish and cold and assure him that I had loved him always; but the Fever robbed me of my chance, and this is probably what causes my silence now. Regret. Sadness. Guilt sitting on my heart like garlic on the stomach, going neither up nor down.
And even if I could – force myself, I mean, to dig down into the muddy depths of memory where the pictures lie and bring them to the surface and clean them up and take a proper look at them and then set down what I see – it would make miserable reading. With Alexa it is different, she can sort of laugh and cry about things at the same time and make the person reading do the same, but I don’t have this gift, I have too much gloomy Miners’ blood in my veins. Better from everyone’s point of view therefore if I simply skip the medical details entirely, forget the funerals, and take up my story a fortnight or so later when the Fever has stolen its last victim and we have said the last prayers and felled the last tree, and are trying – without much success in my case – to pick up the fragments of our shattered world and stick them together again so that life can continue.
Here I am in the throne room. True daughter of the Floor-mop, I have never felt so limp, so wrung, so wretched. Not even in the final rages of the snowstorm did I feel as bad as this, because then there was Odolghes’ shoulder to lean on and hide my face in, and now there is no one’s. I am sitting by myself, hunkers, on the floor, staring at the empty throne, trying to accustom myself to the idea of having to occupy it and dreading the moment – next morning probably, when families will have to be re-grouped and questions of inheritance gone into and all sorts of tricky things like that – when I will have to do so for the first time in full view of the whole tribe. Or what is left of it. Odolghes never used the throne willingly either, and although he went to great pains to have it smartened up and regilded, that was just for show, and he much preferred sitting cross-legged on a simple low wooden stool. Must have been his musician’s training.
This morning Tusky, with no ceremony at all, just a quick shove and an ill-tempered mutter, ‘All yours now, kiddo,’ has passed on to me the feathered headdress, the magic stone in its little leather bag, and Odolghes’ unset golden crown. The full apparatus of Chieftainship. I know it isn’t time for frills but all the same I would have appreciated a gesture of some sort to mark the occasion of what I suppose was in effect my coronation, even if it had only been a clearing of his throat and an ‘Erm…’ before he spoke.
I am holding the headdress in my hand now: it feels like a dead crow. Miserably embarrassed even though there is no one here to see, I place it gingerly on my head and creep up to the throne to see my reflection in the smooth part on one of the legs. It looks like a dead crow. I look like an outsize female of uncertain age and race, neither girl nor woman, Miner nor Fane, pretty nor ugly, with a dead crow on her head. How under earth am I going to get people to take me seriously, accept me as their leader, listen to what I say? And what am I going to say? I have sat through dozens of meetings chaired by Odolghes, but now I can’t even remember how he opened the sessions. There is a rigmarole of some sort, full of g’s: Guide us Goddess, good as gold, Grant us… And there like a ninny I get stuck.
As I crouch there worrying and peering into the shiny metal surface, a tiny sickle-shaped image appears behind mine, like a black moon rising behind a tree, and then grows and stretches as whatever it is draws near. I whip round, expecting to see a wraith or something worse, but it is only Tarlui, curved to this shape by the metal of the throne leg. (That ‘only’ looks woefully out of place beside his name now, as it would beside ‘earthquake’ or ‘end of the world’, but stories have to be told in an orderly fashion, and that was the word I would have used then: ‘only’.) He makes a little bow and then straight away, no probing, no questions, dips into those mysteriously well-stocked garments of his and draws out a medallion on a chain, gold on one side, some other dark material on the other, and begins turning it over and over in his hand. ‘See?’ he says slowly. ‘Same medal, two faces. Now if you always looked on the shiny side you would think this was a very precious trinket I had here, no? Solid gold through and through. And if you always kept the dull side uppermost you’d think to the contrary it was just a worthless bit of old lead. Well, life’s much the same: there’s always a black side but there’s nothing to be gained by staring at it to the exclusion of the other. What I am saying, Lady Mara,’ he goes one still more slowly, bending closer so that I can no longer see the distracting swinging motion of the medal, only his dark-rimmed eyes with their pale, pale centres looking deep into mine, ‘what I am saying is, put the past behind you. Think only of the people who are left, not those who are gone. Think of the good times you had with your father, not the bad. Whenever your mind serves you up a helping of something sad, clamp a dish-cover on it and send it back to the kitchen, so to speak, and order something cheerful instead. It shouldn’t be difficult, not for a brave-hearted Miner princess like yourself.’
Now there is nothing particularly new or special about this advice, which when you look at it closely is merely a long way of saying, the way everyone does, Look on the bright side, but in my present state I find it so comforting I am moved almost to tears. I have learnt from Odolghes that a leader should never show weakness, but Tarlui seems to have seen so deep into me already that it hardly matters; and so, slowly at first, and then faster and faster until the words tumble out like stones from a chute, I confess to him all my troubles, all my fears. From the biggest, like my hating to give orders and not knowing the first thing about government, to the smallest, like forgetting my lines for tomorrow and feeling such a fright under all these feathers.
Tarlui listens in silence, smiling slightly and wagging his neat little ponytail of hair from side to side, and when I have finished he rummages in his clothes again and takes out his clasp-knife and does something to the headdress, nicking off a few feathers here and there and parting others. It is not much, but when I look at my reflection in the chair leg there is a mysterious difference: the cap, so unbecoming before, almost suits me. ‘There,’ he says, and from behind the cap the blade flicks forward and takes another snip. ‘There. Chickens have feathers but so do swans, it’s just a question of placing.’ Then he gently turns me round to face him, tells me to take a deep breath and to run through the ‘Goddess’ rhyme for him – as far as I can remember it, no bother if I can’t – just to give him an idea of how it goes. And to my surprise I recite it perfectly from start to finish.
‘See?’ he says again in that comforting, friendly way, tapping his finger on my forehead. ‘Your Ladyship needn’t worry. It’s all here. All here for when you need it.’
But I do worry, still, quite badly. ‘And what if it isn’t?’ I ask. ‘What if my head goes all empty like it did a while back?’
‘Ah,’ he replies easily. ‘In that case you have your advisor to fall back on. That’s what he’s there for.’
‘My advisor?’ My voice ends on a high, slightly uncertain note: I don’t think I have an advisor, I only wish I did.
But, ‘Yes,’ Tarlui confirms, ‘your advisor, your father’s Counsellor and your grandfather’s before him, the faithful and resolute Master Tusky. Who else? He’ll always be at hand for you to lean on in a crisis.’
Oh, for sure: Tusky. Who else indeed? So faithful he once attempted to thrust Odolghes aside and rule in his place. And as for resolution and support in a crisis – well, I might as well lean on a pile of puffballs. But before I can begin to explain as much to Tarlui, he taps his toes together, makes another little bow and departs, as rapidly and glidingly as he came.
I watch his retreat in the gilded metal, the same way I did his appearance, but I see differently this time: not a black moon or anything menacing like that, but the dwindling reflection of a small, trim, kindly man who has risked his life to help us and asked nothing in return. How hard and generously he has worked. How good he is at solving problems. Unlike Tusky, what a perfect Counsellor he would make.
Just imagine how pleased I am, therefore, when a few days later Tarlui approaches the throne at petition time, all meek and dejected, dressed in his travelling gear already, and begs to be allowed to stay on with us in Mill Brook, working in whatever capacity I see fit. Not only do I grant his request immediately but feel, more fool I, as if something really joyful has happened, like the coming of the swallows or a sudden burst of sunshine.
Tusky stands behind me grinding his teeth harder than a millwheel. But this only makes me smile the wider. Serve him right, I think, the jealous old fool.
(Part 2 chap 3 next sunday, july 11th 2010)
My first sight of him was off-putting, indeed off-scaring. He was slight and bent and ragged and filthy looking and wore a mask over his face which left only the eyes showing. Strange, pale coloured eyes like those of the mixed-blood Fanes I had met at my Aunt Lujanta’s, but with darker lashes, darker brows. I thought he must have the bone-rot and covered his face for that reason, but when he heard my gasp he was quick to reassure me. It was protection, he said, a measure for keeping diseases out, not in. We must all start wearing masks now; would I please get the housekeeper to start tearing up some linen strips with no delay.
His voice was quiet, lilting, no edge to it at all. I wasn’t expecting to be given such a strange order at such short notice by a total stranger, and a beggar at that, but I found myself rushing to the linen chests to do as I was bid. We had no real housekeeper because Friska never trusted anyone but herself with housework, so I just grabbed an armful of cloths and carried them back to Tarlui like a well-trained hunting dog. If I’d had a tail I’d probably have wagged it to show willing.
‘Excellent, my Lady,’ he said, making me wonder for a moment who he was talking to, and began dividing the cloths into strips himself with the aid of a dainty little clasp-knife which he pulled out from somewhere under the rags, measuring each strip carefully so that all were exactly the same size.
Appearances can be misleading because, dirty though he appeared on the outside, the man had a deep, almost religious regard for cleanliness. The next thing he did, after lining everyone up and handing out the masks, was to issue each of us with a personal chunk of soap from the stores. This chunk, he instructed, was to be kept knotted in a handkerchief tied at the waist, so as to be always readily available, and must be used every time the owner’s hands were in the least bit grubby. Fingernails would not pose much of a problem because Miners scarcely had any, but those who were in the habit of keeping one long nail for head scratching and teeth picking and whatnot must cut it short immediately. And the same went for toes. Bedding must be aired daily: taken out into the yard and shaken and beaten; garments must be washed; every healthy person must bathe every single day in the river no matter how cold the water, breaking a hole in the ice if need be. Food must be washed too. Spitting must cease. Noses must be blown into handkerchiefs.
Oh, and a hundred other fussy little rules of this kind. I remember getting more and more fidgety and finally interrupting him: he was here for sick, I reminded him, not for the healthy. My father was lying on his bed in agony, so were his sons, so were dozens of my kinsfolk; surely lessons on nail clipping and nose blowing could come later?
Tarlui, I was soon to discover, set nearly as much store by politeness as he did cleanliness, but on this occasion he was downright rude. If the lessons came later, he said, almost barked, they would come too late. Did I want him to fight the disease or didn’t I? Because if I did, I must let him go about it his way. The sick? Forgive his bluntness but there was nothing to be done for the sick, save, as an extreme remedy, the boring of a hole into their skulls to take the pressure off. And since very few ever recovered from that treatment, the longer we could wait before resorting to it, the better. Now, if I would please order the return of the shift workers and anyone else who happened to be outside the settlement for whatever reason, he would go through the drill a second time for their benefit.
If there had been anyone else to turn to, anyone else with the shadow of an idea of what to do, even if it had been only an old Tchicuta woman with poultices, or an Aguana with a dowsing twig, I think I would have sent Tarlui packing after this speech. (Or tried to: given the scale of his preparations it would not have been easy.) But there was no one. Friska was with her children, and she was already feeling ill herself. Jet was ailing too. Tusky was hopeless in emergencies, and for all I knew had already carried out his threat and jumped into the river with his pockets full of slag. Not such a bad idea either, I was beginning to think. After all, what was this newcomer offering us? Nothing but soap and masks and scrubbing brushes. And now a suggestion so horrific it made me want to strike him. Oh, how glad I am I never allowed him to go near Odolghes or any of the others with his disgusting skull-saw. I shouldn’t really have let him into Odolghes’ chamber at all, with or without saw, but there was no knowing that at the time so it’s useless to blame myself. Luckily Tarlui kept his mask on, but even so I’m not sure that Odolghes didn’t… just for a moment… before his wits went entirely, that is…
But better not to think about that. Better not to think about anything connected to those dreadful last days of the Great Ravage, as it is now called in our ballads. At the time, we survivors plodded on with our everyday business, heads down like beasts at the treadmill, and this still seems to me the only way forward out of any fix, be it a mine accident or a wet harvest or simply, like the one that threatens me now, a whirlpool of horrors in the head. Let me just say that together with Odolghes and my stepmother and brothers the Fever carried away in all a hundred and forty six members of our tribe: slightly under half the total population. The elderly and the young were the worst affected, although about twenty victims of my own age group were stricken also, among them most of my old school mates. Only one sick person recovered, and that – thank the niggardly Goddess for a scrap of mercy – was Jet. She trailed her foot a bit afterwards but otherwise was quite her old self.
More than this – the facts, the numbers – I am not able to give. My grandmother in her book writes at length about her parents’ deaths: what noises they made and who heard them and who found them afterwards and in what positions, but she never loved them like I did mine, and never behaved badly towards them either. After the Friska business I had always meant to draw close to Odolghes again, confess I was jealous, ask his forgiveness for being so standoffish and cold and assure him that I had loved him always; but the Fever robbed me of my chance, and this is probably what causes my silence now. Regret. Sadness. Guilt sitting on my heart like garlic on the stomach, going neither up nor down.
And even if I could – force myself, I mean, to dig down into the muddy depths of memory where the pictures lie and bring them to the surface and clean them up and take a proper look at them and then set down what I see – it would make miserable reading. With Alexa it is different, she can sort of laugh and cry about things at the same time and make the person reading do the same, but I don’t have this gift, I have too much gloomy Miners’ blood in my veins. Better from everyone’s point of view therefore if I simply skip the medical details entirely, forget the funerals, and take up my story a fortnight or so later when the Fever has stolen its last victim and we have said the last prayers and felled the last tree, and are trying – without much success in my case – to pick up the fragments of our shattered world and stick them together again so that life can continue.
Here I am in the throne room. True daughter of the Floor-mop, I have never felt so limp, so wrung, so wretched. Not even in the final rages of the snowstorm did I feel as bad as this, because then there was Odolghes’ shoulder to lean on and hide my face in, and now there is no one’s. I am sitting by myself, hunkers, on the floor, staring at the empty throne, trying to accustom myself to the idea of having to occupy it and dreading the moment – next morning probably, when families will have to be re-grouped and questions of inheritance gone into and all sorts of tricky things like that – when I will have to do so for the first time in full view of the whole tribe. Or what is left of it. Odolghes never used the throne willingly either, and although he went to great pains to have it smartened up and regilded, that was just for show, and he much preferred sitting cross-legged on a simple low wooden stool. Must have been his musician’s training.
This morning Tusky, with no ceremony at all, just a quick shove and an ill-tempered mutter, ‘All yours now, kiddo,’ has passed on to me the feathered headdress, the magic stone in its little leather bag, and Odolghes’ unset golden crown. The full apparatus of Chieftainship. I know it isn’t time for frills but all the same I would have appreciated a gesture of some sort to mark the occasion of what I suppose was in effect my coronation, even if it had only been a clearing of his throat and an ‘Erm…’ before he spoke.
I am holding the headdress in my hand now: it feels like a dead crow. Miserably embarrassed even though there is no one here to see, I place it gingerly on my head and creep up to the throne to see my reflection in the smooth part on one of the legs. It looks like a dead crow. I look like an outsize female of uncertain age and race, neither girl nor woman, Miner nor Fane, pretty nor ugly, with a dead crow on her head. How under earth am I going to get people to take me seriously, accept me as their leader, listen to what I say? And what am I going to say? I have sat through dozens of meetings chaired by Odolghes, but now I can’t even remember how he opened the sessions. There is a rigmarole of some sort, full of g’s: Guide us Goddess, good as gold, Grant us… And there like a ninny I get stuck.
As I crouch there worrying and peering into the shiny metal surface, a tiny sickle-shaped image appears behind mine, like a black moon rising behind a tree, and then grows and stretches as whatever it is draws near. I whip round, expecting to see a wraith or something worse, but it is only Tarlui, curved to this shape by the metal of the throne leg. (That ‘only’ looks woefully out of place beside his name now, as it would beside ‘earthquake’ or ‘end of the world’, but stories have to be told in an orderly fashion, and that was the word I would have used then: ‘only’.) He makes a little bow and then straight away, no probing, no questions, dips into those mysteriously well-stocked garments of his and draws out a medallion on a chain, gold on one side, some other dark material on the other, and begins turning it over and over in his hand. ‘See?’ he says slowly. ‘Same medal, two faces. Now if you always looked on the shiny side you would think this was a very precious trinket I had here, no? Solid gold through and through. And if you always kept the dull side uppermost you’d think to the contrary it was just a worthless bit of old lead. Well, life’s much the same: there’s always a black side but there’s nothing to be gained by staring at it to the exclusion of the other. What I am saying, Lady Mara,’ he goes one still more slowly, bending closer so that I can no longer see the distracting swinging motion of the medal, only his dark-rimmed eyes with their pale, pale centres looking deep into mine, ‘what I am saying is, put the past behind you. Think only of the people who are left, not those who are gone. Think of the good times you had with your father, not the bad. Whenever your mind serves you up a helping of something sad, clamp a dish-cover on it and send it back to the kitchen, so to speak, and order something cheerful instead. It shouldn’t be difficult, not for a brave-hearted Miner princess like yourself.’
Now there is nothing particularly new or special about this advice, which when you look at it closely is merely a long way of saying, the way everyone does, Look on the bright side, but in my present state I find it so comforting I am moved almost to tears. I have learnt from Odolghes that a leader should never show weakness, but Tarlui seems to have seen so deep into me already that it hardly matters; and so, slowly at first, and then faster and faster until the words tumble out like stones from a chute, I confess to him all my troubles, all my fears. From the biggest, like my hating to give orders and not knowing the first thing about government, to the smallest, like forgetting my lines for tomorrow and feeling such a fright under all these feathers.
Tarlui listens in silence, smiling slightly and wagging his neat little ponytail of hair from side to side, and when I have finished he rummages in his clothes again and takes out his clasp-knife and does something to the headdress, nicking off a few feathers here and there and parting others. It is not much, but when I look at my reflection in the chair leg there is a mysterious difference: the cap, so unbecoming before, almost suits me. ‘There,’ he says, and from behind the cap the blade flicks forward and takes another snip. ‘There. Chickens have feathers but so do swans, it’s just a question of placing.’ Then he gently turns me round to face him, tells me to take a deep breath and to run through the ‘Goddess’ rhyme for him – as far as I can remember it, no bother if I can’t – just to give him an idea of how it goes. And to my surprise I recite it perfectly from start to finish.
‘See?’ he says again in that comforting, friendly way, tapping his finger on my forehead. ‘Your Ladyship needn’t worry. It’s all here. All here for when you need it.’
But I do worry, still, quite badly. ‘And what if it isn’t?’ I ask. ‘What if my head goes all empty like it did a while back?’
‘Ah,’ he replies easily. ‘In that case you have your advisor to fall back on. That’s what he’s there for.’
‘My advisor?’ My voice ends on a high, slightly uncertain note: I don’t think I have an advisor, I only wish I did.
But, ‘Yes,’ Tarlui confirms, ‘your advisor, your father’s Counsellor and your grandfather’s before him, the faithful and resolute Master Tusky. Who else? He’ll always be at hand for you to lean on in a crisis.’
Oh, for sure: Tusky. Who else indeed? So faithful he once attempted to thrust Odolghes aside and rule in his place. And as for resolution and support in a crisis – well, I might as well lean on a pile of puffballs. But before I can begin to explain as much to Tarlui, he taps his toes together, makes another little bow and departs, as rapidly and glidingly as he came.
I watch his retreat in the gilded metal, the same way I did his appearance, but I see differently this time: not a black moon or anything menacing like that, but the dwindling reflection of a small, trim, kindly man who has risked his life to help us and asked nothing in return. How hard and generously he has worked. How good he is at solving problems. Unlike Tusky, what a perfect Counsellor he would make.
Just imagine how pleased I am, therefore, when a few days later Tarlui approaches the throne at petition time, all meek and dejected, dressed in his travelling gear already, and begs to be allowed to stay on with us in Mill Brook, working in whatever capacity I see fit. Not only do I grant his request immediately but feel, more fool I, as if something really joyful has happened, like the coming of the swallows or a sudden burst of sunshine.
Tusky stands behind me grinding his teeth harder than a millwheel. But this only makes me smile the wider. Serve him right, I think, the jealous old fool.
(Part 2 chap 3 next sunday, july 11th 2010)
Sunday, 27 June 2010
PART TWO: LIDSANEL
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)
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, 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)
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