It was evening. One of those beautiful warm evenings in early autumn when the sun seems to have lost its path and slipped back out of habit into its summer ways: burning, lingering, flooding the mountains with a bright pink light that streams off their flanks and reaches everywhere, even - just a flush of it – into the deepest crevices and valleys.
I remember this because I remember afterwards, when the sun set, how grey it was and how cold – despite the furnace. And I remember because of the Raietta and the way it sparkled in the last slanting rays, catching the light on one of its faces and tossing it off again from another in a shaft of rainbow colours, before it too, along with all the other stones, lost its glow.
If I could forgive Tarlui the actual wrongs he did (which I can’t and don’t think I ever shall be able to) I still couldn’t forgive the way he set about breaking the news to us: sitting down like that on the bench outside the forge where the chuffs perch in winter, in the dwindling patch of sunlight, and taking the bundle out of his sleeve, or wherever it was he was keeping it, and unwrapping the folds of material and shaking them free and letting the light from the jewel within suddenly blaze forth with its terrible message. Words, however cruel, would have been kinder. But words were unnecessary. We already knew what was inside the package: Lidsanel’s mother’s wedding present; her ‘trinket’, her dying gift to her baby son.
And when I saw the gift I recognized it under another name: the Raietta. It was the Raietta – the stone that my mother Sommavida had taken with her as bartering tender when she had left the camp. (Which meant… Or did it? Or did it mean nothing? Quick, pass on. Do as you do when the ice is cracking underfoot: jump, do not tarry or you will fall through one of the cracks and be lost for ever.) And when I saw the look on Tarlui’s face - a look of calm, amused and absolute triumph – I recognized him too. The various bit of information had been there all along, lying separate in my mind like so many shards: greed, gold, age, danger; magic stone, black moon, white, all white hair – more unusual in men than in horses. Now, suddenly, they came together to form a whole. I even remembered the name. ‘You’re Mulebones,’ I said in a voice that seemed to come from someone else standing way behind me: hushed, remote, almost dreamlike. ‘You’re not Tarlui at all, you’re my father’s tutor Mulebones. You’re Mulebones the traitor.’ Then, louder, seeing that the words had no effect on the man (if man he was) save to sharpen the curve of his placid, waxen smile, ‘What do you want from us, Mulebones?’
‘Oh, now!’ He said in the gentlest voice imaginable. ‘What a question! Nothing so very terrible, my Lady. Nothing that you will not be able to give. And be willing to give, unless I am much mistaken.’ Here he paused and twirled the stone in his hand so that the single multicoloured ray seemed to split into dozens, each one shedding a light brighter than the core of the sinking sun itself. ‘Yes, willing to give. I’m not sure about his Lordship here,’ and he tilted his head towards where Lidsanel was standing, giving me a wink as if he and I were accomplices and Lidsanel our dupe, ‘but you, Lady Mara, will already have begun to grasp the nature of the pretty little knot into which you have tied yourselves, you and your… What shall we call him? Husband? Yes, let us continue for a while to call him your husband. However, have no fear: your secret is safe with me. And I, in a manner of speaking, am safe with your secret. I think we will find a very comfortable way of putting it to rest on the one side and to fruit on the other. Rest, fruit. How neat that is. Do you follow me, or do I go too fast?’
No, I will never forgive his cruelty, never, never, never. He – Tarlui, Mulebones or whichever his name was – took such relish in my puzzlement; in watching my mind run, like a captured mouse that still figures it is free, from place to place, from thought to thought, only to end in the jaws of the inevitable conclusion that I hesitate, even now, to write down on paper. (And not only for reasons of pickles and discretion.) I know this because I watched him watching, and read the pleasure in his eyes, dazed though I was and milky bland though they were. My grandmother depicts him as cold, unfeeling, uninterested in human beings except as counters to be moved around on the board of his ambition, but I think she was mistaken. I think vapours lay coiled inside him instead: hot, poisonous vapours of hatred, hungry to break forth and destroy everything they touched.
Lidsanel’s figure had in the meantime become a blur to me. Mercifully, because I didn’t want to watch him blundering through the maze alongside me: my own course was painful enough as it was. ‘I don’t know what secret you mean,’ I finally managed to say, using as firm a voice as I could summon. ‘Lidsanel and I have no secrets. And why, pray, should you not refer to us as husband and wife? That is what we are, aren’t we?’
Only the last two words I added after a pause and in a different tone, and immediately wished I hadn’t. They made me feel even faster in Tarlui’s clutches. ‘I wonder,’ he said in reply, lifting his feet so that they stuck out before him, and tapping them together like a gleeful child. ‘Interesting point. Yes, I wonder. Let me see now: if a mother has a daughter, and then goes off and leaves her and has a son; and if daughter and son grow up separately, unaware of each other’s existence, and meet later on as strangers, or so they think; and if…’
A noise interrupted him, and I realised to my surprise that it was a kind of gurgle coming from my own throat. It was a ghastly noise but I seemed unable to stop it. I looked across at Lidsanel, suddenly desperate for contact, but already it was as if a chasm had opened up between us. His eyes stared straight into mine without seeing me at all. ‘Stop that,’ was all he said in a funny dull voice. Then, when at last I had stopped, he turned to Tarlui and in the same voice said, ‘What’s all this? Say it again, would you – that bit about the daughter and the son.’
‘No, don’t! I screamed. It wasn’t that I thought Lidsanel hadn’t understood: I just didn’t want to hear the words repeated. Because I already knew, you see, even through they came from the mouth of a traitor and a thief and a liar, that the thing they hinted at was true.
And so did Lidsanel. ‘Yes, do,’ he insisted. He sounded even stranger now, almost as if he was laughing. ‘Pay no heed to her, old man, do what I say instead. Go ahead and tell everything you’ve got to tell. I’m all ears. All big, big goblin ears.’ And he put his fingers to his ears and wobbled them up and down. I thought the shock must have sent him mad.
Tarlui too seemed, just for the space of a breath, to be a little taken aback by such odd behaviour but he soon recovered his poise. Addressing himself to Lidsanel now he repeated the words that had fetched the gurgle from my mouth. Only not in ‘if’ form this time but in ‘once upon a time’ form, as if they were part of a story. ‘Many years ago now,’ he said, ‘twenty four to be precise, a small dark lady of sloppy habits but the very highest rank gave birth to a little girl – well, quite a big girl really, she was, considering. Now, for reasons nobody ever told me, but which the Lady Mara here’ (a mocking bow in my direction) ‘might be able to supply, half a dozen or so years after the birth of their daughter this same lady suddenly left her husband and child – or perhaps it was the other way round and they left her – and took to roaming the woods like the poorest of Wanderers. Only,’ and he gave another spin to the Raietta to mark what he was saying, ‘with a little difference: namely that she wasn’t really poor at all but had with her, sewn into the lining of her waistband, one of the biggest and brightest and most valuable jewels that has ever been seen.
‘This lady also,’ he went on after a leisurely pause (he could have paused all night and still kept our attention and he knew it) ‘had something else under her waistband, something in her eyes even more precious that was to cause her a great deal of trouble in months to come. She had a child, another child, a boy this time: a large, heavy-boned baby boy, far too big for her to be delivered of him in the natural way that other babies take. Aie! Aie! Poor lady! What a fix! Her life, or the life of her child!’ And he paused again and smiled at Lidsanel, who to my amazement smiled back.
If turning your mouth into a blade shape and uncovering your teeth can be called a smile. ‘How did it get there, old man?’ he hissed softly at Tarlui through the teeth. ‘How did the child get there? Who put it there and when?’
Tarlui pretended to look nonplussed, but you could see it was just another way of spinning out the fun. ‘Who?’ he said. ‘When? How? What questions you do ask, my son. Anyone would think your parents had never told you…’ Then, still feigning, but this time with a different emphasis, he clapped a hand to his brow, the way players do but nobody else to my knowledge, and added hurriedly, ‘Ah, I see what it is. I’ve as good as said it. My son, eh? Your parents, eh? You want to know about your father – who he… whether he… Yes, naturally you do, naturally. How inconsiderate of me. Well, my son,’ and he repeated the term deliberately, it obviously tickled him so, ‘I can oblige you there in any manner of ways. You have only to say which one you would prefer. We can have the poor lonely straying Princess Sommavida taking up with almost anyone we like: a hunter, a shepherd, a pedlar, a hulking great Trusani soldier who only stayed long enough to pass the time of day. Or a medical man, yes, a medical man like myself, why not? What an enviable position to be in, I do declare: it’s not everyone who can choose their own father.’
Tarlui’s tinted eyelashes beat rapidly as he looked at Lidsanel and then away again. For a second time I had the feeling that something in Lidsanel’s bearing or behaviour had thrown his listener – slightly, very slightly - off balance. ‘What was that?’ he asked. ‘Ah, I see, you don’t like the thought of your mother flitting fancy-free through the valleys, forgetful of her Lord and husband? No, I suppose you wouldn’t. Well, then, there’s always the other option. But think hard, my son, before you pick it. A prince for a father is all very fine, but what would that make you and Lady Mara? Full brother and sister, that’s what. And what would that make of the child that is to be born? I will tell you, it would make it an outrage against nature, a monster, an abomination. Did you know that such infants, as a mark of their shame, are generally born with the head of an animal in place of a human one? Often a lizard’s, I don’t know why. Or else a pig’s, or a sheep’s, it depends. Did you know that they are sometimes born without a head at all? Oh, yes, they are. And did you know that in all cases they are sickly and diseased and suffer the most terrible pains all their short lives long on account of…’
How long this game would have continued it is hard to say, but I imagine Tarlui, like all practised tormentors, would have gone on racking his victims for as long as he dared without one of them actually tearing under the strain. (And here he may have miscalculated because Lidsanel did tear, perhaps had already torn.) If this was Tarlui’s plan, however, I spoiled things for him by reaching straight away the very worst conclusion. It took no reasoning or guesswork on my part: my memory did it for me. One moment I was there in the fading sunlight, all my attention on Tarlui’s chalky lips to catch what they were saying over the purr of the smithy ovens, and the next I was back in the camp with Odolghes on the evening we set off on our quest, watching my mother sink to her knees in the firelight and make over her belly that clutching gesture that had struck me as peculiar even then. Not the stomach ache, no, of course not, but the knowledge that she was carrying a second child. Odolghes’ child, my brother Lidsanel.
For some reason, when I cut short Tarlui’s filthy blatherings and told Lidsanel the truth, I felt as if I was bringing him good news, not bad. And as such he seemed to receive it. I reckon anything was preferable to him at that moment to being Tarlui’s son, and I reckon he was right. He gave a great sigh and then bent his neck from one side to the other and flexed his shoulders, as if a real weight like an ore sack or a load of wood had been lifted from them. (Or as if he had removed a metal arm. How could I have failed to recognize him all this time: at that instant he was so like Odolghes it could actually have been him, come back for his revenge.) I waited for him to speak – I longed for him to speak – but he said nothing. Plans of any kind always filled his head completely, leaving room for nothing else, and I realize now that that was what he was doing: planning, trying to create a little foothold of future for us – for me and the baby.
It’s sad that no more tenderness was ever to pass between the two of us again, but there it is. And it’s agonizing sometimes that so many blanks in the story were left unfilled, so that although I can piece together many parts without difficulty, other parts remain loose and jagged and always will. Tarlui was called in for the birth of Lidsanel, for example; he got that far with his account, and that far I believe he was telling the truth. But who called him? Who did my mother live with in the last months of her time? Where did she find shelter? What company did she keep? I tell myself that if only I knew, I could go and seek out whoever it was and put my questions to them instead. But it’s a vain hope: the answers lie buried in the depths of Tarlui’s carbon heart. Was the birth really as difficult as he made out? Was it really a matter of saving my mother’s life or the child’s? And if so, was it really and truly my mother who made the choice, or did Tarlui step in, the way he did on other occasions, and steer things in the direction he wanted. (By which I mean – though it hurts to say it to myself so starkly - did he kill her? Knowing how precious they were, did he kill her in order to steal from her the child and the Raietta? Or is his version true, and did she entrust him with both her treasures to take care of, of her own free will?)
I shall never know. Just as I shall never know either about the Fever, and whether Tarlui simply sat himself down outside our gates and waited – patiently, day after day, month after month – for the disease to break out of its own accord, or whether by some secret method only he was capable of using (brewing it out of those disgusting powders of his maybe, or uncorking it from one of his bottles) he actually caused it. That he tried to bring about my death that way, is one of the few things of which I am absolutely certain, but as news it’s of no interest to me any more, let alone help. All it tells me is, one, that Tarlui did indeed consider me about as important as a pot fowl, to be done away with as need arose; and two, that before the fatal day by my bedside when the other (far better, far surer) plan first began to form itself in his mind, he must have had the intention of setting Lidsanel on the throne in my place and using him as a puppet.
Which just shows what a strange thing cleverness is, and how someone can know all sorts of difficult things – like, exactly, mixing poisons and brewing up diseases and so forth – and yet not know the first thing about a person they have lived with for years and watched turning from a little, biddable child into a full-grown man with a mind and a will of his own. Tarlui evidently feared nothing – from either of us. If he had done so, not only would he have chosen a different place for our meeting but he would have taken some further precaution, constructed some trap, left a sealed packet with a third person, containing our dreadful secret: ‘To be Opened in the Event that an Accident Should Befall the Writer’. Something like that. It is what I would have done myself in his position, and I am not a vastly old magician of vast experience and cunning like he was.
Although, wait. Perhaps he did leave a message. Perhaps that was what he was trying to tell us with such urgency as Lidsanel bore down on him and swept him towards the entrance of the forge. I don’t know; it’s difficult to say now, it all happened so fast. And Lidsanel was so quick to muffle the voice, almost as if he didn’t trust himself, should he hear it, not to obey its commands or believe its lies. All I remember hearing, and that not very distinctly, was something to do with Fate and Punishment and our sins ‘Coming to Light’ unless Lidsanel freed Tarlui that instant. Which is the sort of thing a man in that position would have said anyway.
And then I myself was making such a racket, screaming with my mouth wide open one long, uninterrupted, Noooooooh!!!! Like my mother’s cry when Odolghes and I left her, only deeper, worse. I wasn’t certain yet what Lidsanel planned to do, but I knew it was something terrible, life-rending, from which there would be no turning away, no recovering, no going back. I could tell by the way he acted: deft but at the same time uncontrolled, if you know what I mean, as if his body was an empty carriage careering down a hillside: no brakes and no one driving. He leapt on Tarlui like a wildcat, fell on him like a fiend – laughing, shouting, roaring, you couldn’t really say which. He leapt on him and – just like Odolghes had done with Tusky over the business of the tree, although with more effort because Tarlui was bigger – hoisted his opponent into the air and twisted him sideways and placed him under his arm, pinning him so tight that Tarlui’s hands and feet could do nothing but claw and kick the empty air.
His free arm he then clamped over Tarlui’s face, covering the mouth entirely and pressing the neck back so that it looked as if it must snap. (Blocking on the instant, as I said, the flow of words, and with it any last chance Tarlui might have had of talking himself free.) Then with his burden he ran, light-footed, almost skipping, straight into the forge. There was only one furnace going at this time of day: the big one, stoked to bursting point to keep it burning through the night.
He screamed something at me in passing – probably that I was to help him open the oven door, or pass him some instrument that the Smelter used for this purpose – but I was screaming so hard myself I didn’t catch his meaning. Nor would it have made much difference if I had: it takes four men, wrapped up in wadding from head to foot, to shift aside the door of the main furnace.
I ran close on his heels but his fury seemed to give him wings, and by the time I entered the forge and discovered his whereabouts he had already accomplished what he had set out to do. Half accomplished, that is, for he was still clinging to the scorching surface of the furnace door with all his strength, and Tarlui – or that part of Tarlui I could still see and recognise – was still writhing.
I stood there, numb, helpless, watching it happen. I have a feeling I went on screaming, because my throat was sore for days afterwards, but I could be wrong: I could just have watched in silence and the soreness could have come from tears. Slowly, so slowly it seemed to take forever, Tarlui’s writhing turned to twitching and then stopped altogether. After the last twitch, so feeble it was just a tremor really, Lidsanel’s frame seemed to relax and his hold on the door to slacken, although by now I think he must have been past feeling. I hope so anyway. With a last scrap of willpower - that may not even have been that, merely his body adjusting itself to death – he shifted himself closer to the lethal surface and spread his arms across it in what looked like an embrace. And when I saw his head also, which so far had remained upright and defiant, roll against the door and stay there in apparent comfort, I too relaxed, knowing that it was over.
Not until the sharp smell of burning hair reached my nostrils did I stir myself, and then it was only to wander out into the open, calling vaguely – not for help, there was no question of that, but for assistance in recovering what was left of the bodies. Luckily, before anyone answered my call, I must have noticed the Raietta lying where it had fallen from Tarlui’s grasp in the struggle, and must have picked it up and put it away in my pouch together with the other stone – the iron-finding stone that I kept there always - because it was there that I found it, days later, when I finally shed my clothes. Its presence would have complicated the sad simple story of an accident, which was how I explained things to the rest of the tribe when they gathered round. Poor frail old Tarlui stumbling against the furnace by mistake, and brave young Lidsanel giving up his life in a vain attempt to save his father… It made a very moving tale.
So moving that no one thought to consider the details, like the severity of the burns and the curious lack of Tarlui’s footprints in the sandy floor. Nor to wonder at the depth of my despair. Sometimes I wish I had been called Zita, it would have made this type of tag more difficult to invent, but M’s are plentiful in Miner language and I now began to be known as Mara the Miserable. People praised my courage, but I don’t know that I could have gone on for long in that fashion: my monster child inside me, growing and growing, and my heart shrinking and shrinking for the want of Lidsanel and the horror of what had happened to our love. There was no one I could talk to, you see, no one at all.
Indeed had it not been for Aunt Lujanta I might not have managed. But, with her trick of appearing at exactly the right moment, she turned up one day, just like that, with a crowd of followers in tow and announced that she had come to live with us, true to the promise she had made to Odolghes at the time of their parting. She brought a plan with her too, which I think, even more than the novelty and the company, was what kept me going through the bleak and lonely months ahead. We were to return to Fànes. Miners, Salvans, Fanes, half-breeds and quarter-breeds all blended together like the ingredients of a pudding – we were to return to Fànes and start the rebuilding of our future homestead. Metal work would continue but new hands brought new skills and we would do other things as well for a living: carpentry, wood carving, dairy farming and the rearing and training of sled dogs, just to name the most important. Heedful of our mistakes in the past we would make gold and work gold, but we would sell the product afterwards, not hoard it in a chest, and the same went for jewels. We would make no war unless forced to do so at spear point, we would build no walls, we would carry no weapons. Settlers, travellers, strangers – all would be welcome provided they were clean and busy and healthy and (my condition: you can’t play too safe with wizards) did not dye their hair. Instead of Rock or Stronghold or Castle we would call it the Refuge, the Refuge of Fànes.
And it is from here, from the Refuge of Fànes, that I write these words. We moved in nearly a month ago now, on the third day of spring. Then I could see my toes still – just. This morning all I could see was the outline of a pair of little heels straining against the skin of my stomach as the child moves around inside. The moment is close; it is very, very close. In fact it is so close, and the child has gone so still of a sudden, and I am so scared and tired and heavy that I’m not sure I won’t put away my writing things for today and…
Oh, Spirit of Fànes that my grandmother called on in her exile, help me. I have no fire, no mistletoe, no Schniappa, no eagle’s wings, I don’t even know what words to use to invoke you, but help me, please. Help my lizard-headed baby. Help us all.
AFTERWORD
He is born. He is beautiful, healthy, whole. There is nothing wrong with him at all. No lizard’s face, no cleft tongue, no blemish whatsoever - although he is covered in wrinkles. But Aunt Lulu says all babies are and he will smooth out later. I’ve been shaking like a leaf ever since out of relief and happiness.
I don’t know what I shall call him yet: there is time; there is plenty of time.
This morning I make this last entry in my book before wrapping it up in rushes and burying it. Aunt Lujanta has already prepared the place. She went down before daybreak into one of the cellars and came up again, her fingernails rough and grubby, a smile on her face as wide as a fishpan. ‘Look what I’ve found,’ she said. ‘They must have been hidden there on purpose when the Fanes left. My mother must have done it. I thought the spot looked soft, that’s why I chose it. Now this, I should imagine,’ (shaking out a horrid matted object that rattled and gave off a cloud of sandy dust) ‘is her famous chamois-horn headdress. And this must be Dolasilla’s crown with the ruby the Miners sent as a gift.’ She examined it critically. ‘Hmm. It is, I must say, rather mingy for a royal present.’
She was about to add something else but I beat her to it. It was so very obvious. The Raietta. We must replace the ruby with the Raietta; put back the Raietta in the crown where it belonged. An old/new emblem for an old/new kingdom. Under its lucky beam Fànes would indeed live again. I fished out the famous stone from the bag where I had been keeping it all this while and passed it to Aunt Lujanta who said, Whew! and ‘Ciara mo!’ and held it up against my forehead.
‘Perfect,’ she said, meaning of course the stone. Then she looked closer. ‘But wait,’ she added. ‘What are those little dirty bits? Those scratchy lines that make that shadow on the wall? A jewel like this shouldn’t have flaws in it, surely?’ And she twisted the Raietta this way and that until it caught the full light from behind, and there, reflected on the wall, appeared the legend:
Odolghes ¬+ Sommavida
Lidsanel + Mara
The Child of Shame
Lidsanel’s and my brief and branchless family tree. Our sins ‘Coming to Light’ exactly as Tarlui had foretold. Only, fortunately, with only Aunt Lulu and myself to see the stain.
Aunt Lulu whistled and said, ‘Ciara mo’ again, this time more softly. ‘There’s malice for you,’ she said. ‘Stinking old bonebag, I hope he’s watching.’ Then she turned to me and took my hand and led me across the one-time courtyard, still strewn with odds and ends of baggage, and down a flight of rocky stairs into the cellars from which she had come. The candle she had used earlier for her exploring work was still there burning beside the pit she had dug. ‘Look, Mulebones!’ she cried. ‘Wherever you are, watch me, watch what I am doing!’ And with a quick flick of her wrist she threw the Raietta into the hole, spat after it contemptuously, and started filling in the hole with sand.
This gave me an idea. I reached into the bag at my waist and drew from it the other stone - more valuable still and the cause of far more trouble: even Odolghes had admitted that – and held it over the pit, waiting for Aunt Lulu’s approval before throwing it inside. I even made a little speech for her benefit, filled with the noble notions her plan had inspired in me: all races together, no more greed, no more strife, no more walls, just a village with an inn at its centre, open to all comers.
But she stopped me before I had finished, took the magic iron-finding stone from my hand and put it back in its place at my waist. ‘Nice idea,’ she said, smiling Odolghes’ smile, ‘if we were living in a story. In real life it would just be daft. We can’t go backwards, Mara, remember that. Difficult though it may be we must always go ahead.’
So that is where I hope we are directed – all of us, the new Fanes of the new Fànes, and our children and our children’s children, years without number. I hope. I sperun, i sperun tagn.
(And that's it for now! New story coming shortly - end of August or thereabouts. Have a good summer meanwhile, signed amanda)
Sunday 1 August 2010
Sunday 25 July 2010
part two - chapter five
We should have followed Lidsanel’s urge. We should have run there and then and never looked back. It was our only chance for a life together and we should have taken it.
Instead we stayed, and speeded up the preparations for our wedding. All the while keeping a close watch over Tarlui to make sure he wouldn’t spoil things for us by doing something shameful like stealing the wedding presents. It was absurd of us really, now I come to think of it. I was so sure that that was where the danger lay: in the marriage being hindered, postponed or in some way prevented from taking place. I was sure that that was where Tarlui’s revenge, if we should chance to provoke it, would be directed. The truth of the matter never occurred to me, but why should it have done? How could it? On the contrary, I began to think that Tarlui had been speaking the truth when he told Lidsanel he had no interest any more in thievery. He seemed so genuinely pleased about the wedding. And so helpful. So humble. If there was anything he could do to assist my Ladyship in these busy days? How about the sweetmeats? He had a delicious recipe for walnut cake. Might he also be allowed to pen a few lines of poetry to be read at the service? What if he were to give a hand with the lighting arrangements?
‘My son, alas, comes to you in the clothes he stands up in,’ he said, close to grovelling, on another occasion. ‘And even those are due, in part, to Your Ladyship’s bounty. His mother, poor woman, left him a little trinket on her deathbed, but she instructed me to give it to him after he was married, not before, and I think, if you do not mind, that we should respect her wishes.’
By all means, Tarlui, by all means. I was almost sorry now that I had thought such evil of him, and had to repeat to myself, ‘but he called me an old hen, an old hen’ in order to remember the reason. And as for fear – why, in his present state he seemed about as dangerous as an earthworm. On Lidsanel’s suggestion I laid a trap, wrapping in a cover a stone of the same size and shape as the magic stone and then leaving it, as if by mistake, right under Tarlui’s nose to see if he would pocket it when I was gone. But he didn’t so much as touch the thing. ‘Lady Mara,’ he called out before I was half way to the door, ‘there’s a little packet here I think you must have forgotten.’ And indicated it promptly, dutifully, with a tap of his forefinger.
Even the business of the mask turned out to have an innocent explanation that made you feel sorry for him rather than otherwise. It turned out that Tarlui was old, and what crime was there in that? On the night before the wedding Lidsanel and I were not supposed to see each other, that being the tradition for betrothed couples, but shortly after I had gone to bed he came to fetch me, saying to come quickly: Tarlui was up to his monthly trick behind the curtain, and if one of us could manage to hoist the other onto the roof we might be able to find out what it was he was doing, simply by taking a look down the smoke hole.
Only we soon discovered that looking down the smoke hole was not a thing to be done simply. We didn’t want to be seen, for one thing, and for another we didn’t want to be heard. Particularly not by Tarlui. Lidsanel made several attempts to heave himself up to roof level using my clasped hands as a stirrup, but he was far too noisy, and so heavy that the rafters, which were only cane, threatened to snap under his weight. So then it was my turn. I shot up easily enough, almost too fast for comfort, but once up I found it impossible to move any further, the slope being too steep and the reeds of the roofing too tightly packed for my fingers to get a grip on. Eventually Lidsanel realised where the problem lay and went to get a broom and then a ladder to stand on, and by planting the broom under my feet and pushing hard managed to ease me slowly up the rise until my head was on a level with the smoke hole.
From the hole a few wisps of smoke were still coming out, so I had to hold my breath and force my eyes to stay open while I poked my head rapidly through the opening, hoping that Tarlui would not be looking upwards at this precise moment. As soon as I had seen enough I was then to signal to Lidsanel with three kicks on the broom head to let me down, but the scene that met my eyes was so intriguing that I kept on looking.
There was no need to worry about Tarlui seeing me, no matter how long I stared. His attention was quite elsewhere. He was crouched on the floor of the hut in front of a basin of foul looking, brownish black liquid to which he appeared to be paying homage or confiding secrets, so deeply and closely did he bow down before it. Opposite him, on the far side of the basin, was propped a plate of metal, highly burnished, flanked by several lamps that winked and glittered in the shiny surface of the liquid.
My first thought was that I had surprised him making offering to some private God: he had never shown much respect for out Earth Goddess, so perhaps he had a religion of his own that no one was supposed to know about, not even Lidsanel? But then I realised that it was something much less uplifting: he was washing his hair. Dipping his head into the basin, rubbing the black liquid into his scalp and admiring the result as reflected in the metal. No, not washing, dirtying. No, not dirtying either, dyeing. He was dyeing his hair – to exactly the same colour as before. And why should he want to do that?
Despite the smoke I continued to watch, fascinated, for some time before giving Lidsanel the signal. Noticing two extra things: one, that Tarlui was concentrating more on colouring the roots of his hair than the ends, and two, that he daubed some of the liquid on his eyebrows and eyelashes as well, and was very particular afterwards to wipe away the stain from his skin. Which, incidentally – the skin, I mean – was different from usual now that the ponytail was untied and the hair hung loose: it was saggier, more wrinkled. More yellowish too, though that may only have been due to the effect of the lamps.
‘He’s old,’ I whispered to Lidsanel when I was back on the ground again, having come to this conclusion during my descent. ‘He’s really, really old. He must be. I remember my father telling me once about a person he had known – a magician, I think he was, or perhaps a teacher – so old that his hair had turned completely white. Well, I think that’s what has happened to Tarlui: I think his hair has gone white, and he’s ashamed to wear it that way so he’s dyeing it dark again. You needn’t worry, that’s all he’s doing in there behind the curtain: colouring over the growth of his white hair. For the wedding, I should imagine. So as to look his best.’
Lidsanel seemed disappointed by this news: I think he’d been hoping for us to discover something terrible that would have enabled him to disown Tarlui as a father and cast him off for ever. ‘His best,’ he said, curling his lip in a way that didn’t become him at all. ‘For me he’d look his best from the back, walking out of Mill Brook for good and all, pushing his belongings on a barrow.’
It was a sight neither of us was ever destined to see. Tarlui’s departure was close, already written on the face of the coming moon, had we but known it, but it was not scheduled to happen in such a homely fashion – through a gate, carrying his baggage. Fate had devised for him quite another exit.
But I am getting ahead of myself again in my anxiety to be through. I must tell things as they happened. First there was the wedding, and a very fine wedding it was too. None of the events in my life so far had been marked by pomp or ceremony of any kind. No coming-into-the-world party because I was a girl. No welcome home party because my grandfather had just died. No coming to womanhood party on account of Friska being jealous, just a garnet brooch from Odolghes on the quiet, the colour of the blood I had begun to shed. No coronation party either because of the Fever. The wedding made up for all these missed occasions. Miners seldom if ever dance; not, as the rumour goes, because our feet aren’t up to it, but because we are taught as children that all that jumping and stomping is disrespectful to the Earth Goddess. That night, by common consent, we made an exception and danced until we fell down dizzy. Our craftsmen had made lanterns for us out of wrought iron and precious stones (small wonder Tarlui was so keen to help out with the lighting arrangements), and the shafts of light from these lanterns played over the tables of food and the surface of the dancing floor and the faces of the dancers, giving the impression that we had been invaded by a cloud of multicoloured fireflies. It was like being in Aurora, but the dream Aurona, not the real place. Squabbles were forgotten, weariness was cast off with the shoes, and the entire tribe, with me and Lidsanel in its midst, ate and drank and sang and danced, stamping and jumping for all we were worth, until the great fireball of the next day’s sun appeared in the sky, making our jewel lights look suddenly pale and tawdry and bringing the party to an end.
Most married couples are given a period of pampering, if circumstances allow it, to help them start their life together under the right star. A hut of their own, no sharing; extra large food rations and delicacies such as nuts, sweets, raisins with every meal; light work in the day time, no night work at all, and no housework either. It is known as the Honey Month – a sort of collective wedding gift from the whole tribe. My duties as Chief, however, couldn’t be slid onto other shoulders the same way as mining sacks, and for Lidsanel and me everyday life resumed immediately, the morning after the wedding. And in a sense I am glad about this because otherwise I would never have known what everyday life together with him was like: there would have been no time. Barely a month later, you see, I was already sure of something I had suspected for some time, namely that I was expecting a baby. And a month and four days later I was…
But, no, wait a moment, I’m overreaching again. Loath as I am to do so I must go back to a month and three and a half days later, when we have just announced the good news about the baby to the whole tribe in an assembly, and afterwards Tarlui, in quality of future grandfather, comes to the forge to congratulate Lidsanel and me in private on the happy event. (At least this is what we think he has in mind: his insistence on such an out of the way meeting place has already set us wondering.) Earlier on I managed to spare the reader the details of a tragedy, and spare myself too, but this time I’m afraid they are part of the story and will have to be told.
Deep, deep breath, then, before I go on.
(Next chapter next sunday August 1st 2010)
Instead we stayed, and speeded up the preparations for our wedding. All the while keeping a close watch over Tarlui to make sure he wouldn’t spoil things for us by doing something shameful like stealing the wedding presents. It was absurd of us really, now I come to think of it. I was so sure that that was where the danger lay: in the marriage being hindered, postponed or in some way prevented from taking place. I was sure that that was where Tarlui’s revenge, if we should chance to provoke it, would be directed. The truth of the matter never occurred to me, but why should it have done? How could it? On the contrary, I began to think that Tarlui had been speaking the truth when he told Lidsanel he had no interest any more in thievery. He seemed so genuinely pleased about the wedding. And so helpful. So humble. If there was anything he could do to assist my Ladyship in these busy days? How about the sweetmeats? He had a delicious recipe for walnut cake. Might he also be allowed to pen a few lines of poetry to be read at the service? What if he were to give a hand with the lighting arrangements?
‘My son, alas, comes to you in the clothes he stands up in,’ he said, close to grovelling, on another occasion. ‘And even those are due, in part, to Your Ladyship’s bounty. His mother, poor woman, left him a little trinket on her deathbed, but she instructed me to give it to him after he was married, not before, and I think, if you do not mind, that we should respect her wishes.’
By all means, Tarlui, by all means. I was almost sorry now that I had thought such evil of him, and had to repeat to myself, ‘but he called me an old hen, an old hen’ in order to remember the reason. And as for fear – why, in his present state he seemed about as dangerous as an earthworm. On Lidsanel’s suggestion I laid a trap, wrapping in a cover a stone of the same size and shape as the magic stone and then leaving it, as if by mistake, right under Tarlui’s nose to see if he would pocket it when I was gone. But he didn’t so much as touch the thing. ‘Lady Mara,’ he called out before I was half way to the door, ‘there’s a little packet here I think you must have forgotten.’ And indicated it promptly, dutifully, with a tap of his forefinger.
Even the business of the mask turned out to have an innocent explanation that made you feel sorry for him rather than otherwise. It turned out that Tarlui was old, and what crime was there in that? On the night before the wedding Lidsanel and I were not supposed to see each other, that being the tradition for betrothed couples, but shortly after I had gone to bed he came to fetch me, saying to come quickly: Tarlui was up to his monthly trick behind the curtain, and if one of us could manage to hoist the other onto the roof we might be able to find out what it was he was doing, simply by taking a look down the smoke hole.
Only we soon discovered that looking down the smoke hole was not a thing to be done simply. We didn’t want to be seen, for one thing, and for another we didn’t want to be heard. Particularly not by Tarlui. Lidsanel made several attempts to heave himself up to roof level using my clasped hands as a stirrup, but he was far too noisy, and so heavy that the rafters, which were only cane, threatened to snap under his weight. So then it was my turn. I shot up easily enough, almost too fast for comfort, but once up I found it impossible to move any further, the slope being too steep and the reeds of the roofing too tightly packed for my fingers to get a grip on. Eventually Lidsanel realised where the problem lay and went to get a broom and then a ladder to stand on, and by planting the broom under my feet and pushing hard managed to ease me slowly up the rise until my head was on a level with the smoke hole.
From the hole a few wisps of smoke were still coming out, so I had to hold my breath and force my eyes to stay open while I poked my head rapidly through the opening, hoping that Tarlui would not be looking upwards at this precise moment. As soon as I had seen enough I was then to signal to Lidsanel with three kicks on the broom head to let me down, but the scene that met my eyes was so intriguing that I kept on looking.
There was no need to worry about Tarlui seeing me, no matter how long I stared. His attention was quite elsewhere. He was crouched on the floor of the hut in front of a basin of foul looking, brownish black liquid to which he appeared to be paying homage or confiding secrets, so deeply and closely did he bow down before it. Opposite him, on the far side of the basin, was propped a plate of metal, highly burnished, flanked by several lamps that winked and glittered in the shiny surface of the liquid.
My first thought was that I had surprised him making offering to some private God: he had never shown much respect for out Earth Goddess, so perhaps he had a religion of his own that no one was supposed to know about, not even Lidsanel? But then I realised that it was something much less uplifting: he was washing his hair. Dipping his head into the basin, rubbing the black liquid into his scalp and admiring the result as reflected in the metal. No, not washing, dirtying. No, not dirtying either, dyeing. He was dyeing his hair – to exactly the same colour as before. And why should he want to do that?
Despite the smoke I continued to watch, fascinated, for some time before giving Lidsanel the signal. Noticing two extra things: one, that Tarlui was concentrating more on colouring the roots of his hair than the ends, and two, that he daubed some of the liquid on his eyebrows and eyelashes as well, and was very particular afterwards to wipe away the stain from his skin. Which, incidentally – the skin, I mean – was different from usual now that the ponytail was untied and the hair hung loose: it was saggier, more wrinkled. More yellowish too, though that may only have been due to the effect of the lamps.
‘He’s old,’ I whispered to Lidsanel when I was back on the ground again, having come to this conclusion during my descent. ‘He’s really, really old. He must be. I remember my father telling me once about a person he had known – a magician, I think he was, or perhaps a teacher – so old that his hair had turned completely white. Well, I think that’s what has happened to Tarlui: I think his hair has gone white, and he’s ashamed to wear it that way so he’s dyeing it dark again. You needn’t worry, that’s all he’s doing in there behind the curtain: colouring over the growth of his white hair. For the wedding, I should imagine. So as to look his best.’
Lidsanel seemed disappointed by this news: I think he’d been hoping for us to discover something terrible that would have enabled him to disown Tarlui as a father and cast him off for ever. ‘His best,’ he said, curling his lip in a way that didn’t become him at all. ‘For me he’d look his best from the back, walking out of Mill Brook for good and all, pushing his belongings on a barrow.’
It was a sight neither of us was ever destined to see. Tarlui’s departure was close, already written on the face of the coming moon, had we but known it, but it was not scheduled to happen in such a homely fashion – through a gate, carrying his baggage. Fate had devised for him quite another exit.
But I am getting ahead of myself again in my anxiety to be through. I must tell things as they happened. First there was the wedding, and a very fine wedding it was too. None of the events in my life so far had been marked by pomp or ceremony of any kind. No coming-into-the-world party because I was a girl. No welcome home party because my grandfather had just died. No coming to womanhood party on account of Friska being jealous, just a garnet brooch from Odolghes on the quiet, the colour of the blood I had begun to shed. No coronation party either because of the Fever. The wedding made up for all these missed occasions. Miners seldom if ever dance; not, as the rumour goes, because our feet aren’t up to it, but because we are taught as children that all that jumping and stomping is disrespectful to the Earth Goddess. That night, by common consent, we made an exception and danced until we fell down dizzy. Our craftsmen had made lanterns for us out of wrought iron and precious stones (small wonder Tarlui was so keen to help out with the lighting arrangements), and the shafts of light from these lanterns played over the tables of food and the surface of the dancing floor and the faces of the dancers, giving the impression that we had been invaded by a cloud of multicoloured fireflies. It was like being in Aurora, but the dream Aurona, not the real place. Squabbles were forgotten, weariness was cast off with the shoes, and the entire tribe, with me and Lidsanel in its midst, ate and drank and sang and danced, stamping and jumping for all we were worth, until the great fireball of the next day’s sun appeared in the sky, making our jewel lights look suddenly pale and tawdry and bringing the party to an end.
Most married couples are given a period of pampering, if circumstances allow it, to help them start their life together under the right star. A hut of their own, no sharing; extra large food rations and delicacies such as nuts, sweets, raisins with every meal; light work in the day time, no night work at all, and no housework either. It is known as the Honey Month – a sort of collective wedding gift from the whole tribe. My duties as Chief, however, couldn’t be slid onto other shoulders the same way as mining sacks, and for Lidsanel and me everyday life resumed immediately, the morning after the wedding. And in a sense I am glad about this because otherwise I would never have known what everyday life together with him was like: there would have been no time. Barely a month later, you see, I was already sure of something I had suspected for some time, namely that I was expecting a baby. And a month and four days later I was…
But, no, wait a moment, I’m overreaching again. Loath as I am to do so I must go back to a month and three and a half days later, when we have just announced the good news about the baby to the whole tribe in an assembly, and afterwards Tarlui, in quality of future grandfather, comes to the forge to congratulate Lidsanel and me in private on the happy event. (At least this is what we think he has in mind: his insistence on such an out of the way meeting place has already set us wondering.) Earlier on I managed to spare the reader the details of a tragedy, and spare myself too, but this time I’m afraid they are part of the story and will have to be told.
Deep, deep breath, then, before I go on.
(Next chapter next sunday August 1st 2010)
Sunday 18 July 2010
midword and chapter 4
MIDWORD
Last night I don’t know what came over me. Whether it was my longing for Lidsanel growing worse again now that I have begun to write about him, or worry about the future as the dreaded day grows closer and closer, or a bit of both, but when Aunt Lujanta came to say goodnight to me I went all to pieces and fell on her neck and told her. Everything. Every single thing.
Can you imagine anything feebler? Holding out all these months, when the wounds were really fresh and painful, and then, just as the pain had begun to ease a little and the scars to heal over, letting go and caving in like a trampled mole-hole. It makes me want to bite my fists.
She took the news very calmly – although the calmness may have applied to her outside only. All the way through the story she hardly moved, but I noticed a slight twitching of her ears towards the end, which came from either emotion or an itch, and I suspect the former. When I had finished she asked me simply, without any comment, if I had told anyone else. And when I said I hadn’t she looked relieved and said, ‘Good. Good girl. The fewer the better. Just in case we have to… you know…’
I knew exactly: my secret was safe in her hands, but her hands were tough and workmanlike and would deal with things if necessary in a tough and workmanlike way. This is probably why I found myself arguing so passionately in favour of finishing my written story and not destroying it afterwards, the way Aunt Lujanta insisted I should: I was defending the survival of something more than just a pile of papers.
‘No good keeping our mouths shut if you’re going to put it all down in a book,’ she pointed out, unmoved by my appeal. ‘Books are like pickles, they keep. And anyone can dip into them at any time.’
‘But what if we hide the book,’ I pleaded. ‘Hide it properly, somewhere safe, so it remains hidden for ages, the way I intended when I started writing. There’s history, you know, inside these covers. There isn’t just any old made up story, there’s facts, there’s knowledge. If I’d had my grandmother Alexa’s book to dip into when I felt like it, I almost certainly wouldn’t be in the plight I’m in now. Think of that turning of the medal… almost the very same words: ‘Look, Highness, on one side the head of a man, and on the other the image of a she-wolf. Two different faces but only the one medal.’ Why, I’d have known in a trice; I’d have recognised him; I’d have been able to defend myself.’
The argument was sound but I think it was the magic word ‘History’ that did the trick: like all Salvans Aunt Lulu is impressed to the marrow by anything that smacks of learning. ‘Very well, picera,’ she said after a longish think (overlooking the fact that I am hardly picera any more). ‘I suppose there’s no harm in your finishing the last few chapters, not now you’ve got so far. But remember to keep the manuscript locked away when you’re not working on it. And remember, when the time comes,’ and she turned away, trying to make the words sound careless so as not to scare me, ‘remember to tell me where you put the key.’
So, having saved at least one thing that is dear to me, at least for the time being, here I go with the next chapter.
CHAPTER FOUR
Lidsanel. Lidsanel was tall and strong and quite the most beautiful person I have ever seen. Or animal too for that matter. Or plant. Or stone. (Except perhaps for the Raietta, which is truly breathtaking when held against the light.) He was kind as well, and thoughtful, and could say all sorts of interesting things once he felt at ease with the person he was talking to. But I have to admit in all fairness that he was not very quick at catching meanings or passing from one subject to another, and had in fact gained the reputation among the rest of the tribe of being thick as a peat clod.
However, he and I suited one another to perfection: quick people fluster me, they always did. And like a pair of dray dogs or horses that are shown off to more than double the advantage when they are well matched (and who better matched than we?), we seemed to thrive in each other’s company: me taking on some of Lidsanel’s health and strength and gloss, and he becoming more confident, more talkative, and carrying his head higher and growing brisker over fiddly things like using the counting frame and tying knots.
So after a while, instead of tuning aside and whispering as they did to begin with, tapping their foreheads and making other signs I won’t mention, people began smiling in an open, friendly fashion when they saw us together. Smiling and nodding and calling out crude but well-meant remarks such as, ‘Cuddling time at last, eh, Mara!’ and, ‘Hiya, Cafusc! Mind the cobwebs!’ and, ‘Big filly needs a big rider!’ It was their way of saying that they approved the match.
Those were happy times, so happy that nothing can really blight them for me in hindsight or make me wish them unlived. Nothing? No, nothing. The memory of them, like an ember-pan in a winter bed, burns a patch of warmth inside me even today. I got stronger and stronger and my illness got weaker and weaker until it just trickled away and disappeared altogether. My hair grew thick again, my headaches stopped, my appetite came back. Every morning (as if the sandbag was behind me now, so to speak, knocking me forward) I would leave my bed with a bounce, I was so eager to begin the day. No matter what it held. Bookwork, bargaining, listening to grumbles – all the things I had so dreaded before held no fears for me now. I enjoyed everything, because everything took place either in Lidsanel’s presence (in which case we were together and I had nothing more to ask for), or else in his absence (in which case I could look forward to our being together soon). Between these alternatives there was simply no space for sadness or worry of any kind.
And yet worry eventually came, and from quite an unexpected quarter. As the time for our wedding drew near I began to notice a change in Lidsanel that I just could not for the life of me understand. He who was candour itself, whose cobalt blue eyes I could peer into as if gazing into a mountain lake and see nothing but clearness, clearness all the way, gradually became – I could never say cold or shifty, but sort of reserved with me, evasive. He never spoke much, but now he hardly spoke at all. And when he did it was to utter sour, impatient things like, ‘Leave off, Mara,’ or, ‘Let me alone, I’m not in the vein,’ or, ‘What do you mean, what’s wrong? Nothing’s wrong. Everything’s as smooth as a hedgehog’s ruddy hindpiece.’ Even his posture changed: he began stooping again and hanging his head, looking for preference at the ground.
At first I was hurt and drew back a little on my own account, thinking or at any rate fearing that he no longer loved me. Then, when I saw that his reserve belonged only to the daytime, and that at night he sought me out more fiercely than ever before and clung to me like a burr and moaned strange choking sounds into the back of my neck, I thought, odd though it seemed, it might be the other way round: that it was he who doubted my love.
In actual fact, as I discovered after much questioning (unearthing things is after all a Miners’ speciality), it had nothing to do with love at all. It concerned Tarlui and had to do with dislike, distrust, disloyalty and, perhaps heaviest of all for an openhearted person like Lidsanel to bear, with shame. In Lidsanel’s telling, the story was long and complicated because he kept going backwards and forwards in time and then grinding to a halt and having to be coaxed on again, but I think I can make quick work of it. The kernel of the matter was simply this: when Lidsanel and Tarlui first came to camp outside out gate all those many years ago, it had been in order to steal our gold from us. They had come as thieves. They had always, Lidsanel said, been thieves, as far back as he could remember. That is, Tarlui had been organizer thief and teacher thief, and he, Lidsanel, being smaller and nimbler, had been the actual snitcher.
And please, I was not to gape at him like that. He had seen no harm in it then; on the contrary, it had been his duty and Tarlui had used to beat the daylights out of him every time he failed to perform it. Which in Mill Brook luckily hadn’t happened often because stealing was so easy: only once had he gone back to Tarlui empty-handed, and that had been when for want of strength he had failed to break open the lock on the chest that contained the gold.
This pilfering life of theirs had gone on quite a while, right up to the completion of the walls and the posting of the guards, after which it had become too risky. I would probably remember some of the things that went missing. (No probably about it. My snake bracelet that Odolghes gave me. All those bantams. Jet’s pretty agate ring.) Then had come the Fever outbreak; he and Tarlui had left their shack and come to live inside the walls; and suddenly, without explanation, he had started receiving beatings for the opposite reason: slash, slash across the eyes with a switch every time he nicked something. So he had stopped stealing and had joined the other children at their lessons instead, and then gone on to be a worker, and in time had almost forgotten that he’d ever been a thief or a thief’s son. But he had never forgotten the beatings.
‘I grew to hate him, you see,’ Lidsanel confessed at this point, speaking in a harsh, bitter voice I barely recognized. ‘And it is a terrible, fateful thing to hate your own father. I hate him still. I hate his skin and I hate his innards, and I hate belonging to him and owing him obedience. I almost hate myself for being his son.’
I didn’t want to look shocked by this revelation, but I was. To tell the truth I hardly knew which shocked me more: the stealing in the past and Tarlui’s cruelty, or Lidsanel’s outburst now. For an instant the image flashed across my mind of a doll Jet and I had found lying in the woods when we were children. It was a beautiful doll, all made of wool, with a red woollen dress and long black looped-up skeins of hair, but when we picked it up and turned it over we discovered in the nether side, to our disgust, a nest of naked baby mice. On that occasion I had screamed and thrown the doll into the bushes: now, with so much more to lose, I knew I must be more careful. Gently I asked Lidsanel if he didn’t think he was being a bit childish with all this talk of hatred. The things he spoke of had taken place many years ago now, at a time when his father was probably hard put to find enough food to keep them both alive. Hence the stealing and hence the bursts of evil temper. Hadn’t Tarlui changed since he’d settled in Mill Brook and become our doctor? Surely he had, and surely he could be forgiven? And as for belonging – once we were married Lidsanel would belong to no one any more, except possibly me, and would owe no one any obedience. ‘You will soon be free of you father altogether,’ I pointed out. ‘In fact, as my husband you will be above him, and you can give him orders rather than the other way round.’
I ended on a laugh, but Lidsanel’s voice when he answered was still bitterly sad. ‘Oh Mara,’ he said. ‘Free of him? Me give him orders? Oh Mara mine, you have no idea. You say he has changed. I thought so too. But he hasn’t, he is still a thief, and still rotten as carrion inside. And please,’ he added, bitterer still, ‘don’t keep calling him my father; his name is Tarlui.’
The way he spoke almost scared me, and the choice of word did too: carrion. ‘How can you know these things with such certainty?’ I asked.
‘Because…’ He put his head in his hands, and with a gesture that filled me with sudden and unexplained tenderness began tapping it, quite hard, first on one side and then on the other, as if the words needed dislodging before they could leave his mouth. ‘Because… Because he told me so. Because he thought I was still a thief too, and he told me so. That day, you remember, when you were so ill, and I kissed your hand and we sort of… you know… for the first time…’
I knew the day he meant all right. ‘Go on.’
‘Well, afterwards…’ He hesitated again, let go his head and clutched urgently at one of my hands instead. ‘I swear, Mara, I hadn’t said anything to make him think I felt that way. You must believe me. Promise you believe me.’
I believed him; that was not the trouble. ‘I promise.’
Relief seemed to loosen his voice, because the words came out fast now. ‘Well, afterwards, as we were walking back to our hut, he suddenly prodded me in the ribs with that bony elbow of his and laughed out loud and said how clever I was under all my brawn, and how he’d always known I’d come in useful sooner or later, and how right he’d been to give me the benefit of the doubt. ‘It’s an old hen makes the best broth, eh?’ he said. And then he made a clucking noise. ‘Well, we’ll boil this one together nice and slowly till we get all the juice out of her, eh, Lidsanel? All the precious golden juice.’ That is what he said.’
I swallowed and was silent, grappling with the meaning of the words long after they had been spoken. This was worse than the doll with the mouse nest; it was worse than I could ever have imagined. No wonder Lidsanel had been so strange of late. No wonder he couldn’t look me in the eye. His own father still planning to steal our gold from us – from friends, from people who had taken him in and given him work and fed him and housed him for all these years. Such deviousness hardly bore thinking about. And I who had appointed the man as our doctor and had even thought of making him my private counsellor… Brrh! Vanity I suppose, but it was his calling me an ‘old hen’ that hurt the most. ‘And you?’ I asked Lidsanel at last, hardly daring to trust my voice, which indeed came out in a funny gulp. ‘What did you say?’
He looked straight at me and, thank goodness, his eyes were clear now. ‘I laughed too,’ he said simply, turning a russet tinge about the cheekbones. ‘I thought he was just being… you know, the way people are with lovers. I didn’t catch his meaning properly, not until a month or so ago when he suddenly came forward with this little bag in his hand and asked me if I would please go through your clothes the next time you and I were together and find out where you kept the Miners’ magic stone, and then pop it in the bag and bring it back to him without breathing a word. He said it’d make a good start, a nice little golden nest egg for breakfast.’
Oh sacred spiders down my spine! Tarlui was an outsider; he wasn’t supposed to know anything about the stone. How had he found out about it? Who had told him? And what did he want it for when he wasn’t a Miner? Who did he want it for? For the first and I think only time Lidsanel’s slowness got on my nerves. ‘So then what did you do?’ I snapped at him. ‘Laugh again?’
His face was russet all over now but he still didn’t blink or look away, even when he shook his head in denial. ‘Then I told him,’ he said. ‘I told him to shut his evil mouth, and that I loved you and you loved me and we were getting married for that reason and that reason only, so there. And if he ever so much as mentioned stealing again, or gold, or hens or eggs or broth or broilers or anything of the kind, I would take this stone he was so keen to get his hands on and ram the wretched thing down his throat until he choked on it.’
This was better. ‘And what did he say to that?’
Lidsanel laughed, inasmuch as he made a dry snorting noise. ‘What could he say? He backed down of course. Said I’d misunderstood him, that he’d only been joking, that he’d known all along my feelings for you were serious, and he’d only been having his little tease; in reality he was proud as a pigeon to learn that a son of his was to become the husband of such a fine, high-born lady as yourself. What use was gold to him anyway, he said, now that he was a doctor? Just as long as he had a tiny medicinal lump of the stuff to rub on sties. And gabble, gabble, on like that, trying to convince me. But he was lying, Mara. He’d made a mistake – it was he who had misunderstood me, not the other way round – and he was trying to lie his way out of the muddle. Trying to smooth over the crack; put his mask back in place before I noticed.
His mask? Oh, no! I thought of the taut white skin of Tarlui’s forehead and the difficulty I had always had in knowing what was going on behind it. So that was it: he wore a mask, he covered his face with a mask.
‘Not a real mask, silly,’ Lidsanel said. And then he stopped and looked at me with a strange baffled expression. ‘No, no, it can’t be,’ he went on, shaking his head. ‘No. What am I thinking? No, it’s impossible. Impossible.’
What was impossible? What? What? I could have no peace until Lidsanel had explained.
‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘It’s just that ever since I’ve shared a hut with Tarlui I’ve noticed that – oh, what would it be? – roughly once every new moon, perhaps a bit more often, he curtains off his side of the hut so that I can’t see what’s going on and fiddles around behind the curtain with his bottles and phials and things until far into the night. What he’s doing I have no idea, but I can hear him stirring things and mixing and rubbing, and I’ve always had a feeling he’s altering his appearance in some way. Because he looks sort of different afterwards. Different and yet the same, if you know what I mean. So when you mentioned masks…’
Oh dear. I was getting more and more nervous. ‘But didn’t you ever look behind the curtain?’ I asked.
‘I tried,’ Lidsanel said. ‘Once, when I was little. Just a peep. But he saw me and threw some stinging liquid in my eyes. It blinded me for three whole days. I never tried again.’
I don’t know why, when the episode had taken place so long ago, but I felt panic rising in my throat – in waves, the way sick does. I leant forward and pressed myself against Lidsanel, closing his arms about me with my own. I tried to calm myself with reason, telling myself that if Tarlui had wanted to bring harm to the Miners he would have acted differently; he would never have saved us from the Fever, for a start, nor agreed to become our doctor, nor treated our ills, nor dressed our wounds, nor cured me from my last illness, just to mention a few of the good things he had done. But reason was powerless, and the waves kept on coming.
We stood like that for some time, wrapped round each other, not speaking. ‘And the business about stealing the stone?’ I asked after a while in a whisper. ‘Did Tarlui realize you didn’t believe him when he said it was just a joke? Did you tell him so? Did you let your disbelief show?’
Lidsanel hugged me tighter. ‘I’m not that stupid,’ he said. ‘Leastways I’m clever enough to go on looking stupid when stupid’s the best thing to look. No, I don’t think he noticed, in fact I’m sure he didn’t. Why, what were you thinking?’
I was thinking all sorts of things. First, that I ought to tell Tusky, or Bruno, or someone else trustworthy, that we had a thief in our midst nosing around after the stone. Second, that if I did tell anyone, no matter how trustworthy, Lidsanel and I could no longer marry, and this I could not bear. Third, that for this reason Lidsanel and I would do well to deal with this matter alone, just the two of us. And fourth that in order to do this we must find out all we could about Tarlui’s intentions. We must discover, that is, whether he still intended to go ahead and steal the stone now that he had no assistant to help him. And if he did, as Lidsanel thought was almost certain, we must discover in what way and when, and how to stop him. And we must also discover, in so far as this was possible, if we did stop him what he would do to us in revenge. What he would do and what he could do.
Lidsanel was gloomy on this last point. ‘His worst,’ he said. ‘He’ll do his worst. If we interfere with his plans you can bet the stone and the crown and every speck of gold in the store he’ll interfere with ours.’
I was sure Lidsanel was right about this but I was equally sure, once I had thought it out carefully, that the worst Tarlui could do (apart from stopping the marriage, which we must avoid at all costs by bringing forward the date) would be to reveal to the rest of the tribe Lidsanel’s past as a thief – this being, so I foolishly thought, our only guilty secret and our only weak spot. Should this happen, I would have to step down from the throne and hand the chieftainship over to Tusky. Who had longed for it always and would be delighted. ‘And then you and I,’ I pointed out to Lidsanel, ‘would be free to live like ordinary people. We could either go on living here or else, if the Miners didn’t want us any more, we could take to the woods with a couple of packs on our backs like I did once with my father. We could go anywhere, live anywhere. That’s the worst thing that can happen, to my mind, and it wouldn’t be too bad, would it?’
‘Oh Mara,’ Lidsanel said again in that sad, beaten voice. ‘Oh Mara, if only it were so.’ Then, with a sudden change, a sudden brightening, ‘I know. Why don’t we go now while we still have the chance? Quick, I beg of you. No plans, no packs. Let’s leave everything behind us and just take to the woods and run.’
CHAPTER FOUR
Lidsanel. Lidsanel was tall and strong and quite the most beautiful person I have ever seen. Or animal too for that matter. Or plant. Or stone. (Except perhaps for the Raietta, which is truly breathtaking when held against the light.) He was kind as well, and thoughtful, and could say all sorts of interesting things once he felt at ease with the person he was talking to. But I have to admit in all fairness that he was not very quick at catching meanings or passing from one subject to another, and had in fact gained the reputation among the rest of the tribe of being thick as a peat clod.
However, he and I suited one another to perfection: quick people fluster me, they always did. And like a pair of dray dogs or horses that are shown off to more than double the advantage when they are well matched (and who better matched than we?), we seemed to thrive in each other’s company: me taking on some of Lidsanel’s health and strength and gloss, and he becoming more confident, more talkative, and carrying his head higher and growing brisker over fiddly things like using the counting frame and tying knots.
So after a while, instead of tuning aside and whispering as they did to begin with, tapping their foreheads and making other signs I won’t mention, people began smiling in an open, friendly fashion when they saw us together. Smiling and nodding and calling out crude but well-meant remarks such as, ‘Cuddling time at last, eh, Mara!’ and, ‘Hiya, Cafusc! Mind the cobwebs!’ and, ‘Big filly needs a big rider!’ It was their way of saying that they approved the match.
Those were happy times, so happy that nothing can really blight them for me in hindsight or make me wish them unlived. Nothing? No, nothing. The memory of them, like an ember-pan in a winter bed, burns a patch of warmth inside me even today. I got stronger and stronger and my illness got weaker and weaker until it just trickled away and disappeared altogether. My hair grew thick again, my headaches stopped, my appetite came back. Every morning (as if the sandbag was behind me now, so to speak, knocking me forward) I would leave my bed with a bounce, I was so eager to begin the day. No matter what it held. Bookwork, bargaining, listening to grumbles – all the things I had so dreaded before held no fears for me now. I enjoyed everything, because everything took place either in Lidsanel’s presence (in which case we were together and I had nothing more to ask for), or else in his absence (in which case I could look forward to our being together soon). Between these alternatives there was simply no space for sadness or worry of any kind.
And yet worry eventually came, and from quite an unexpected quarter. As the time for our wedding drew near I began to notice a change in Lidsanel that I just could not for the life of me understand. He who was candour itself, whose cobalt blue eyes I could peer into as if gazing into a mountain lake and see nothing but clearness, clearness all the way, gradually became – I could never say cold or shifty, but sort of reserved with me, evasive. He never spoke much, but now he hardly spoke at all. And when he did it was to utter sour, impatient things like, ‘Leave off, Mara,’ or, ‘Let me alone, I’m not in the vein,’ or, ‘What do you mean, what’s wrong? Nothing’s wrong. Everything’s as smooth as a hedgehog’s ruddy hindpiece.’ Even his posture changed: he began stooping again and hanging his head, looking for preference at the ground.
At first I was hurt and drew back a little on my own account, thinking or at any rate fearing that he no longer loved me. Then, when I saw that his reserve belonged only to the daytime, and that at night he sought me out more fiercely than ever before and clung to me like a burr and moaned strange choking sounds into the back of my neck, I thought, odd though it seemed, it might be the other way round: that it was he who doubted my love.
In actual fact, as I discovered after much questioning (unearthing things is after all a Miners’ speciality), it had nothing to do with love at all. It concerned Tarlui and had to do with dislike, distrust, disloyalty and, perhaps heaviest of all for an openhearted person like Lidsanel to bear, with shame. In Lidsanel’s telling, the story was long and complicated because he kept going backwards and forwards in time and then grinding to a halt and having to be coaxed on again, but I think I can make quick work of it. The kernel of the matter was simply this: when Lidsanel and Tarlui first came to camp outside out gate all those many years ago, it had been in order to steal our gold from us. They had come as thieves. They had always, Lidsanel said, been thieves, as far back as he could remember. That is, Tarlui had been organizer thief and teacher thief, and he, Lidsanel, being smaller and nimbler, had been the actual snitcher.
And please, I was not to gape at him like that. He had seen no harm in it then; on the contrary, it had been his duty and Tarlui had used to beat the daylights out of him every time he failed to perform it. Which in Mill Brook luckily hadn’t happened often because stealing was so easy: only once had he gone back to Tarlui empty-handed, and that had been when for want of strength he had failed to break open the lock on the chest that contained the gold.
This pilfering life of theirs had gone on quite a while, right up to the completion of the walls and the posting of the guards, after which it had become too risky. I would probably remember some of the things that went missing. (No probably about it. My snake bracelet that Odolghes gave me. All those bantams. Jet’s pretty agate ring.) Then had come the Fever outbreak; he and Tarlui had left their shack and come to live inside the walls; and suddenly, without explanation, he had started receiving beatings for the opposite reason: slash, slash across the eyes with a switch every time he nicked something. So he had stopped stealing and had joined the other children at their lessons instead, and then gone on to be a worker, and in time had almost forgotten that he’d ever been a thief or a thief’s son. But he had never forgotten the beatings.
‘I grew to hate him, you see,’ Lidsanel confessed at this point, speaking in a harsh, bitter voice I barely recognized. ‘And it is a terrible, fateful thing to hate your own father. I hate him still. I hate his skin and I hate his innards, and I hate belonging to him and owing him obedience. I almost hate myself for being his son.’
I didn’t want to look shocked by this revelation, but I was. To tell the truth I hardly knew which shocked me more: the stealing in the past and Tarlui’s cruelty, or Lidsanel’s outburst now. For an instant the image flashed across my mind of a doll Jet and I had found lying in the woods when we were children. It was a beautiful doll, all made of wool, with a red woollen dress and long black looped-up skeins of hair, but when we picked it up and turned it over we discovered in the nether side, to our disgust, a nest of naked baby mice. On that occasion I had screamed and thrown the doll into the bushes: now, with so much more to lose, I knew I must be more careful. Gently I asked Lidsanel if he didn’t think he was being a bit childish with all this talk of hatred. The things he spoke of had taken place many years ago now, at a time when his father was probably hard put to find enough food to keep them both alive. Hence the stealing and hence the bursts of evil temper. Hadn’t Tarlui changed since he’d settled in Mill Brook and become our doctor? Surely he had, and surely he could be forgiven? And as for belonging – once we were married Lidsanel would belong to no one any more, except possibly me, and would owe no one any obedience. ‘You will soon be free of you father altogether,’ I pointed out. ‘In fact, as my husband you will be above him, and you can give him orders rather than the other way round.’
I ended on a laugh, but Lidsanel’s voice when he answered was still bitterly sad. ‘Oh Mara,’ he said. ‘Free of him? Me give him orders? Oh Mara mine, you have no idea. You say he has changed. I thought so too. But he hasn’t, he is still a thief, and still rotten as carrion inside. And please,’ he added, bitterer still, ‘don’t keep calling him my father; his name is Tarlui.’
The way he spoke almost scared me, and the choice of word did too: carrion. ‘How can you know these things with such certainty?’ I asked.
‘Because…’ He put his head in his hands, and with a gesture that filled me with sudden and unexplained tenderness began tapping it, quite hard, first on one side and then on the other, as if the words needed dislodging before they could leave his mouth. ‘Because… Because he told me so. Because he thought I was still a thief too, and he told me so. That day, you remember, when you were so ill, and I kissed your hand and we sort of… you know… for the first time…’
I knew the day he meant all right. ‘Go on.’
‘Well, afterwards…’ He hesitated again, let go his head and clutched urgently at one of my hands instead. ‘I swear, Mara, I hadn’t said anything to make him think I felt that way. You must believe me. Promise you believe me.’
I believed him; that was not the trouble. ‘I promise.’
Relief seemed to loosen his voice, because the words came out fast now. ‘Well, afterwards, as we were walking back to our hut, he suddenly prodded me in the ribs with that bony elbow of his and laughed out loud and said how clever I was under all my brawn, and how he’d always known I’d come in useful sooner or later, and how right he’d been to give me the benefit of the doubt. ‘It’s an old hen makes the best broth, eh?’ he said. And then he made a clucking noise. ‘Well, we’ll boil this one together nice and slowly till we get all the juice out of her, eh, Lidsanel? All the precious golden juice.’ That is what he said.’
I swallowed and was silent, grappling with the meaning of the words long after they had been spoken. This was worse than the doll with the mouse nest; it was worse than I could ever have imagined. No wonder Lidsanel had been so strange of late. No wonder he couldn’t look me in the eye. His own father still planning to steal our gold from us – from friends, from people who had taken him in and given him work and fed him and housed him for all these years. Such deviousness hardly bore thinking about. And I who had appointed the man as our doctor and had even thought of making him my private counsellor… Brrh! Vanity I suppose, but it was his calling me an ‘old hen’ that hurt the most. ‘And you?’ I asked Lidsanel at last, hardly daring to trust my voice, which indeed came out in a funny gulp. ‘What did you say?’
He looked straight at me and, thank goodness, his eyes were clear now. ‘I laughed too,’ he said simply, turning a russet tinge about the cheekbones. ‘I thought he was just being… you know, the way people are with lovers. I didn’t catch his meaning properly, not until a month or so ago when he suddenly came forward with this little bag in his hand and asked me if I would please go through your clothes the next time you and I were together and find out where you kept the Miners’ magic stone, and then pop it in the bag and bring it back to him without breathing a word. He said it’d make a good start, a nice little golden nest egg for breakfast.’
Oh sacred spiders down my spine! Tarlui was an outsider; he wasn’t supposed to know anything about the stone. How had he found out about it? Who had told him? And what did he want it for when he wasn’t a Miner? Who did he want it for? For the first and I think only time Lidsanel’s slowness got on my nerves. ‘So then what did you do?’ I snapped at him. ‘Laugh again?’
His face was russet all over now but he still didn’t blink or look away, even when he shook his head in denial. ‘Then I told him,’ he said. ‘I told him to shut his evil mouth, and that I loved you and you loved me and we were getting married for that reason and that reason only, so there. And if he ever so much as mentioned stealing again, or gold, or hens or eggs or broth or broilers or anything of the kind, I would take this stone he was so keen to get his hands on and ram the wretched thing down his throat until he choked on it.’
This was better. ‘And what did he say to that?’
Lidsanel laughed, inasmuch as he made a dry snorting noise. ‘What could he say? He backed down of course. Said I’d misunderstood him, that he’d only been joking, that he’d known all along my feelings for you were serious, and he’d only been having his little tease; in reality he was proud as a pigeon to learn that a son of his was to become the husband of such a fine, high-born lady as yourself. What use was gold to him anyway, he said, now that he was a doctor? Just as long as he had a tiny medicinal lump of the stuff to rub on sties. And gabble, gabble, on like that, trying to convince me. But he was lying, Mara. He’d made a mistake – it was he who had misunderstood me, not the other way round – and he was trying to lie his way out of the muddle. Trying to smooth over the crack; put his mask back in place before I noticed.
His mask? Oh, no! I thought of the taut white skin of Tarlui’s forehead and the difficulty I had always had in knowing what was going on behind it. So that was it: he wore a mask, he covered his face with a mask.
‘Not a real mask, silly,’ Lidsanel said. And then he stopped and looked at me with a strange baffled expression. ‘No, no, it can’t be,’ he went on, shaking his head. ‘No. What am I thinking? No, it’s impossible. Impossible.’
What was impossible? What? What? I could have no peace until Lidsanel had explained.
‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘It’s just that ever since I’ve shared a hut with Tarlui I’ve noticed that – oh, what would it be? – roughly once every new moon, perhaps a bit more often, he curtains off his side of the hut so that I can’t see what’s going on and fiddles around behind the curtain with his bottles and phials and things until far into the night. What he’s doing I have no idea, but I can hear him stirring things and mixing and rubbing, and I’ve always had a feeling he’s altering his appearance in some way. Because he looks sort of different afterwards. Different and yet the same, if you know what I mean. So when you mentioned masks…’
Oh dear. I was getting more and more nervous. ‘But didn’t you ever look behind the curtain?’ I asked.
‘I tried,’ Lidsanel said. ‘Once, when I was little. Just a peep. But he saw me and threw some stinging liquid in my eyes. It blinded me for three whole days. I never tried again.’
I don’t know why, when the episode had taken place so long ago, but I felt panic rising in my throat – in waves, the way sick does. I leant forward and pressed myself against Lidsanel, closing his arms about me with my own. I tried to calm myself with reason, telling myself that if Tarlui had wanted to bring harm to the Miners he would have acted differently; he would never have saved us from the Fever, for a start, nor agreed to become our doctor, nor treated our ills, nor dressed our wounds, nor cured me from my last illness, just to mention a few of the good things he had done. But reason was powerless, and the waves kept on coming.
We stood like that for some time, wrapped round each other, not speaking. ‘And the business about stealing the stone?’ I asked after a while in a whisper. ‘Did Tarlui realize you didn’t believe him when he said it was just a joke? Did you tell him so? Did you let your disbelief show?’
Lidsanel hugged me tighter. ‘I’m not that stupid,’ he said. ‘Leastways I’m clever enough to go on looking stupid when stupid’s the best thing to look. No, I don’t think he noticed, in fact I’m sure he didn’t. Why, what were you thinking?’
I was thinking all sorts of things. First, that I ought to tell Tusky, or Bruno, or someone else trustworthy, that we had a thief in our midst nosing around after the stone. Second, that if I did tell anyone, no matter how trustworthy, Lidsanel and I could no longer marry, and this I could not bear. Third, that for this reason Lidsanel and I would do well to deal with this matter alone, just the two of us. And fourth that in order to do this we must find out all we could about Tarlui’s intentions. We must discover, that is, whether he still intended to go ahead and steal the stone now that he had no assistant to help him. And if he did, as Lidsanel thought was almost certain, we must discover in what way and when, and how to stop him. And we must also discover, in so far as this was possible, if we did stop him what he would do to us in revenge. What he would do and what he could do.
Lidsanel was gloomy on this last point. ‘His worst,’ he said. ‘He’ll do his worst. If we interfere with his plans you can bet the stone and the crown and every speck of gold in the store he’ll interfere with ours.’
I was sure Lidsanel was right about this but I was equally sure, once I had thought it out carefully, that the worst Tarlui could do (apart from stopping the marriage, which we must avoid at all costs by bringing forward the date) would be to reveal to the rest of the tribe Lidsanel’s past as a thief – this being, so I foolishly thought, our only guilty secret and our only weak spot. Should this happen, I would have to step down from the throne and hand the chieftainship over to Tusky. Who had longed for it always and would be delighted. ‘And then you and I,’ I pointed out to Lidsanel, ‘would be free to live like ordinary people. We could either go on living here or else, if the Miners didn’t want us any more, we could take to the woods with a couple of packs on our backs like I did once with my father. We could go anywhere, live anywhere. That’s the worst thing that can happen, to my mind, and it wouldn’t be too bad, would it?’
‘Oh Mara,’ Lidsanel said again in that sad, beaten voice. ‘Oh Mara, if only it were so.’ Then, with a sudden change, a sudden brightening, ‘I know. Why don’t we go now while we still have the chance? Quick, I beg of you. No plans, no packs. Let’s leave everything behind us and just take to the woods and run.’
(Chapter 5 coming up next sunday, 25 july 2010)
Last night I don’t know what came over me. Whether it was my longing for Lidsanel growing worse again now that I have begun to write about him, or worry about the future as the dreaded day grows closer and closer, or a bit of both, but when Aunt Lujanta came to say goodnight to me I went all to pieces and fell on her neck and told her. Everything. Every single thing.
Can you imagine anything feebler? Holding out all these months, when the wounds were really fresh and painful, and then, just as the pain had begun to ease a little and the scars to heal over, letting go and caving in like a trampled mole-hole. It makes me want to bite my fists.
She took the news very calmly – although the calmness may have applied to her outside only. All the way through the story she hardly moved, but I noticed a slight twitching of her ears towards the end, which came from either emotion or an itch, and I suspect the former. When I had finished she asked me simply, without any comment, if I had told anyone else. And when I said I hadn’t she looked relieved and said, ‘Good. Good girl. The fewer the better. Just in case we have to… you know…’
I knew exactly: my secret was safe in her hands, but her hands were tough and workmanlike and would deal with things if necessary in a tough and workmanlike way. This is probably why I found myself arguing so passionately in favour of finishing my written story and not destroying it afterwards, the way Aunt Lujanta insisted I should: I was defending the survival of something more than just a pile of papers.
‘No good keeping our mouths shut if you’re going to put it all down in a book,’ she pointed out, unmoved by my appeal. ‘Books are like pickles, they keep. And anyone can dip into them at any time.’
‘But what if we hide the book,’ I pleaded. ‘Hide it properly, somewhere safe, so it remains hidden for ages, the way I intended when I started writing. There’s history, you know, inside these covers. There isn’t just any old made up story, there’s facts, there’s knowledge. If I’d had my grandmother Alexa’s book to dip into when I felt like it, I almost certainly wouldn’t be in the plight I’m in now. Think of that turning of the medal… almost the very same words: ‘Look, Highness, on one side the head of a man, and on the other the image of a she-wolf. Two different faces but only the one medal.’ Why, I’d have known in a trice; I’d have recognised him; I’d have been able to defend myself.’
The argument was sound but I think it was the magic word ‘History’ that did the trick: like all Salvans Aunt Lulu is impressed to the marrow by anything that smacks of learning. ‘Very well, picera,’ she said after a longish think (overlooking the fact that I am hardly picera any more). ‘I suppose there’s no harm in your finishing the last few chapters, not now you’ve got so far. But remember to keep the manuscript locked away when you’re not working on it. And remember, when the time comes,’ and she turned away, trying to make the words sound careless so as not to scare me, ‘remember to tell me where you put the key.’
So, having saved at least one thing that is dear to me, at least for the time being, here I go with the next chapter.
CHAPTER FOUR
Lidsanel. Lidsanel was tall and strong and quite the most beautiful person I have ever seen. Or animal too for that matter. Or plant. Or stone. (Except perhaps for the Raietta, which is truly breathtaking when held against the light.) He was kind as well, and thoughtful, and could say all sorts of interesting things once he felt at ease with the person he was talking to. But I have to admit in all fairness that he was not very quick at catching meanings or passing from one subject to another, and had in fact gained the reputation among the rest of the tribe of being thick as a peat clod.
However, he and I suited one another to perfection: quick people fluster me, they always did. And like a pair of dray dogs or horses that are shown off to more than double the advantage when they are well matched (and who better matched than we?), we seemed to thrive in each other’s company: me taking on some of Lidsanel’s health and strength and gloss, and he becoming more confident, more talkative, and carrying his head higher and growing brisker over fiddly things like using the counting frame and tying knots.
So after a while, instead of tuning aside and whispering as they did to begin with, tapping their foreheads and making other signs I won’t mention, people began smiling in an open, friendly fashion when they saw us together. Smiling and nodding and calling out crude but well-meant remarks such as, ‘Cuddling time at last, eh, Mara!’ and, ‘Hiya, Cafusc! Mind the cobwebs!’ and, ‘Big filly needs a big rider!’ It was their way of saying that they approved the match.
Those were happy times, so happy that nothing can really blight them for me in hindsight or make me wish them unlived. Nothing? No, nothing. The memory of them, like an ember-pan in a winter bed, burns a patch of warmth inside me even today. I got stronger and stronger and my illness got weaker and weaker until it just trickled away and disappeared altogether. My hair grew thick again, my headaches stopped, my appetite came back. Every morning (as if the sandbag was behind me now, so to speak, knocking me forward) I would leave my bed with a bounce, I was so eager to begin the day. No matter what it held. Bookwork, bargaining, listening to grumbles – all the things I had so dreaded before held no fears for me now. I enjoyed everything, because everything took place either in Lidsanel’s presence (in which case we were together and I had nothing more to ask for), or else in his absence (in which case I could look forward to our being together soon). Between these alternatives there was simply no space for sadness or worry of any kind.
And yet worry eventually came, and from quite an unexpected quarter. As the time for our wedding drew near I began to notice a change in Lidsanel that I just could not for the life of me understand. He who was candour itself, whose cobalt blue eyes I could peer into as if gazing into a mountain lake and see nothing but clearness, clearness all the way, gradually became – I could never say cold or shifty, but sort of reserved with me, evasive. He never spoke much, but now he hardly spoke at all. And when he did it was to utter sour, impatient things like, ‘Leave off, Mara,’ or, ‘Let me alone, I’m not in the vein,’ or, ‘What do you mean, what’s wrong? Nothing’s wrong. Everything’s as smooth as a hedgehog’s ruddy hindpiece.’ Even his posture changed: he began stooping again and hanging his head, looking for preference at the ground.
At first I was hurt and drew back a little on my own account, thinking or at any rate fearing that he no longer loved me. Then, when I saw that his reserve belonged only to the daytime, and that at night he sought me out more fiercely than ever before and clung to me like a burr and moaned strange choking sounds into the back of my neck, I thought, odd though it seemed, it might be the other way round: that it was he who doubted my love.
In actual fact, as I discovered after much questioning (unearthing things is after all a Miners’ speciality), it had nothing to do with love at all. It concerned Tarlui and had to do with dislike, distrust, disloyalty and, perhaps heaviest of all for an openhearted person like Lidsanel to bear, with shame. In Lidsanel’s telling, the story was long and complicated because he kept going backwards and forwards in time and then grinding to a halt and having to be coaxed on again, but I think I can make quick work of it. The kernel of the matter was simply this: when Lidsanel and Tarlui first came to camp outside out gate all those many years ago, it had been in order to steal our gold from us. They had come as thieves. They had always, Lidsanel said, been thieves, as far back as he could remember. That is, Tarlui had been organizer thief and teacher thief, and he, Lidsanel, being smaller and nimbler, had been the actual snitcher.
And please, I was not to gape at him like that. He had seen no harm in it then; on the contrary, it had been his duty and Tarlui had used to beat the daylights out of him every time he failed to perform it. Which in Mill Brook luckily hadn’t happened often because stealing was so easy: only once had he gone back to Tarlui empty-handed, and that had been when for want of strength he had failed to break open the lock on the chest that contained the gold.
This pilfering life of theirs had gone on quite a while, right up to the completion of the walls and the posting of the guards, after which it had become too risky. I would probably remember some of the things that went missing. (No probably about it. My snake bracelet that Odolghes gave me. All those bantams. Jet’s pretty agate ring.) Then had come the Fever outbreak; he and Tarlui had left their shack and come to live inside the walls; and suddenly, without explanation, he had started receiving beatings for the opposite reason: slash, slash across the eyes with a switch every time he nicked something. So he had stopped stealing and had joined the other children at their lessons instead, and then gone on to be a worker, and in time had almost forgotten that he’d ever been a thief or a thief’s son. But he had never forgotten the beatings.
‘I grew to hate him, you see,’ Lidsanel confessed at this point, speaking in a harsh, bitter voice I barely recognized. ‘And it is a terrible, fateful thing to hate your own father. I hate him still. I hate his skin and I hate his innards, and I hate belonging to him and owing him obedience. I almost hate myself for being his son.’
I didn’t want to look shocked by this revelation, but I was. To tell the truth I hardly knew which shocked me more: the stealing in the past and Tarlui’s cruelty, or Lidsanel’s outburst now. For an instant the image flashed across my mind of a doll Jet and I had found lying in the woods when we were children. It was a beautiful doll, all made of wool, with a red woollen dress and long black looped-up skeins of hair, but when we picked it up and turned it over we discovered in the nether side, to our disgust, a nest of naked baby mice. On that occasion I had screamed and thrown the doll into the bushes: now, with so much more to lose, I knew I must be more careful. Gently I asked Lidsanel if he didn’t think he was being a bit childish with all this talk of hatred. The things he spoke of had taken place many years ago now, at a time when his father was probably hard put to find enough food to keep them both alive. Hence the stealing and hence the bursts of evil temper. Hadn’t Tarlui changed since he’d settled in Mill Brook and become our doctor? Surely he had, and surely he could be forgiven? And as for belonging – once we were married Lidsanel would belong to no one any more, except possibly me, and would owe no one any obedience. ‘You will soon be free of you father altogether,’ I pointed out. ‘In fact, as my husband you will be above him, and you can give him orders rather than the other way round.’
I ended on a laugh, but Lidsanel’s voice when he answered was still bitterly sad. ‘Oh Mara,’ he said. ‘Free of him? Me give him orders? Oh Mara mine, you have no idea. You say he has changed. I thought so too. But he hasn’t, he is still a thief, and still rotten as carrion inside. And please,’ he added, bitterer still, ‘don’t keep calling him my father; his name is Tarlui.’
The way he spoke almost scared me, and the choice of word did too: carrion. ‘How can you know these things with such certainty?’ I asked.
‘Because…’ He put his head in his hands, and with a gesture that filled me with sudden and unexplained tenderness began tapping it, quite hard, first on one side and then on the other, as if the words needed dislodging before they could leave his mouth. ‘Because… Because he told me so. Because he thought I was still a thief too, and he told me so. That day, you remember, when you were so ill, and I kissed your hand and we sort of… you know… for the first time…’
I knew the day he meant all right. ‘Go on.’
‘Well, afterwards…’ He hesitated again, let go his head and clutched urgently at one of my hands instead. ‘I swear, Mara, I hadn’t said anything to make him think I felt that way. You must believe me. Promise you believe me.’
I believed him; that was not the trouble. ‘I promise.’
Relief seemed to loosen his voice, because the words came out fast now. ‘Well, afterwards, as we were walking back to our hut, he suddenly prodded me in the ribs with that bony elbow of his and laughed out loud and said how clever I was under all my brawn, and how he’d always known I’d come in useful sooner or later, and how right he’d been to give me the benefit of the doubt. ‘It’s an old hen makes the best broth, eh?’ he said. And then he made a clucking noise. ‘Well, we’ll boil this one together nice and slowly till we get all the juice out of her, eh, Lidsanel? All the precious golden juice.’ That is what he said.’
I swallowed and was silent, grappling with the meaning of the words long after they had been spoken. This was worse than the doll with the mouse nest; it was worse than I could ever have imagined. No wonder Lidsanel had been so strange of late. No wonder he couldn’t look me in the eye. His own father still planning to steal our gold from us – from friends, from people who had taken him in and given him work and fed him and housed him for all these years. Such deviousness hardly bore thinking about. And I who had appointed the man as our doctor and had even thought of making him my private counsellor… Brrh! Vanity I suppose, but it was his calling me an ‘old hen’ that hurt the most. ‘And you?’ I asked Lidsanel at last, hardly daring to trust my voice, which indeed came out in a funny gulp. ‘What did you say?’
He looked straight at me and, thank goodness, his eyes were clear now. ‘I laughed too,’ he said simply, turning a russet tinge about the cheekbones. ‘I thought he was just being… you know, the way people are with lovers. I didn’t catch his meaning properly, not until a month or so ago when he suddenly came forward with this little bag in his hand and asked me if I would please go through your clothes the next time you and I were together and find out where you kept the Miners’ magic stone, and then pop it in the bag and bring it back to him without breathing a word. He said it’d make a good start, a nice little golden nest egg for breakfast.’
Oh sacred spiders down my spine! Tarlui was an outsider; he wasn’t supposed to know anything about the stone. How had he found out about it? Who had told him? And what did he want it for when he wasn’t a Miner? Who did he want it for? For the first and I think only time Lidsanel’s slowness got on my nerves. ‘So then what did you do?’ I snapped at him. ‘Laugh again?’
His face was russet all over now but he still didn’t blink or look away, even when he shook his head in denial. ‘Then I told him,’ he said. ‘I told him to shut his evil mouth, and that I loved you and you loved me and we were getting married for that reason and that reason only, so there. And if he ever so much as mentioned stealing again, or gold, or hens or eggs or broth or broilers or anything of the kind, I would take this stone he was so keen to get his hands on and ram the wretched thing down his throat until he choked on it.’
This was better. ‘And what did he say to that?’
Lidsanel laughed, inasmuch as he made a dry snorting noise. ‘What could he say? He backed down of course. Said I’d misunderstood him, that he’d only been joking, that he’d known all along my feelings for you were serious, and he’d only been having his little tease; in reality he was proud as a pigeon to learn that a son of his was to become the husband of such a fine, high-born lady as yourself. What use was gold to him anyway, he said, now that he was a doctor? Just as long as he had a tiny medicinal lump of the stuff to rub on sties. And gabble, gabble, on like that, trying to convince me. But he was lying, Mara. He’d made a mistake – it was he who had misunderstood me, not the other way round – and he was trying to lie his way out of the muddle. Trying to smooth over the crack; put his mask back in place before I noticed.
His mask? Oh, no! I thought of the taut white skin of Tarlui’s forehead and the difficulty I had always had in knowing what was going on behind it. So that was it: he wore a mask, he covered his face with a mask.
‘Not a real mask, silly,’ Lidsanel said. And then he stopped and looked at me with a strange baffled expression. ‘No, no, it can’t be,’ he went on, shaking his head. ‘No. What am I thinking? No, it’s impossible. Impossible.’
What was impossible? What? What? I could have no peace until Lidsanel had explained.
‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘It’s just that ever since I’ve shared a hut with Tarlui I’ve noticed that – oh, what would it be? – roughly once every new moon, perhaps a bit more often, he curtains off his side of the hut so that I can’t see what’s going on and fiddles around behind the curtain with his bottles and phials and things until far into the night. What he’s doing I have no idea, but I can hear him stirring things and mixing and rubbing, and I’ve always had a feeling he’s altering his appearance in some way. Because he looks sort of different afterwards. Different and yet the same, if you know what I mean. So when you mentioned masks…’
Oh dear. I was getting more and more nervous. ‘But didn’t you ever look behind the curtain?’ I asked.
‘I tried,’ Lidsanel said. ‘Once, when I was little. Just a peep. But he saw me and threw some stinging liquid in my eyes. It blinded me for three whole days. I never tried again.’
I don’t know why, when the episode had taken place so long ago, but I felt panic rising in my throat – in waves, the way sick does. I leant forward and pressed myself against Lidsanel, closing his arms about me with my own. I tried to calm myself with reason, telling myself that if Tarlui had wanted to bring harm to the Miners he would have acted differently; he would never have saved us from the Fever, for a start, nor agreed to become our doctor, nor treated our ills, nor dressed our wounds, nor cured me from my last illness, just to mention a few of the good things he had done. But reason was powerless, and the waves kept on coming.
We stood like that for some time, wrapped round each other, not speaking. ‘And the business about stealing the stone?’ I asked after a while in a whisper. ‘Did Tarlui realize you didn’t believe him when he said it was just a joke? Did you tell him so? Did you let your disbelief show?’
Lidsanel hugged me tighter. ‘I’m not that stupid,’ he said. ‘Leastways I’m clever enough to go on looking stupid when stupid’s the best thing to look. No, I don’t think he noticed, in fact I’m sure he didn’t. Why, what were you thinking?’
I was thinking all sorts of things. First, that I ought to tell Tusky, or Bruno, or someone else trustworthy, that we had a thief in our midst nosing around after the stone. Second, that if I did tell anyone, no matter how trustworthy, Lidsanel and I could no longer marry, and this I could not bear. Third, that for this reason Lidsanel and I would do well to deal with this matter alone, just the two of us. And fourth that in order to do this we must find out all we could about Tarlui’s intentions. We must discover, that is, whether he still intended to go ahead and steal the stone now that he had no assistant to help him. And if he did, as Lidsanel thought was almost certain, we must discover in what way and when, and how to stop him. And we must also discover, in so far as this was possible, if we did stop him what he would do to us in revenge. What he would do and what he could do.
Lidsanel was gloomy on this last point. ‘His worst,’ he said. ‘He’ll do his worst. If we interfere with his plans you can bet the stone and the crown and every speck of gold in the store he’ll interfere with ours.’
I was sure Lidsanel was right about this but I was equally sure, once I had thought it out carefully, that the worst Tarlui could do (apart from stopping the marriage, which we must avoid at all costs by bringing forward the date) would be to reveal to the rest of the tribe Lidsanel’s past as a thief – this being, so I foolishly thought, our only guilty secret and our only weak spot. Should this happen, I would have to step down from the throne and hand the chieftainship over to Tusky. Who had longed for it always and would be delighted. ‘And then you and I,’ I pointed out to Lidsanel, ‘would be free to live like ordinary people. We could either go on living here or else, if the Miners didn’t want us any more, we could take to the woods with a couple of packs on our backs like I did once with my father. We could go anywhere, live anywhere. That’s the worst thing that can happen, to my mind, and it wouldn’t be too bad, would it?’
‘Oh Mara,’ Lidsanel said again in that sad, beaten voice. ‘Oh Mara, if only it were so.’ Then, with a sudden change, a sudden brightening, ‘I know. Why don’t we go now while we still have the chance? Quick, I beg of you. No plans, no packs. Let’s leave everything behind us and just take to the woods and run.’
CHAPTER FOUR
Lidsanel. Lidsanel was tall and strong and quite the most beautiful person I have ever seen. Or animal too for that matter. Or plant. Or stone. (Except perhaps for the Raietta, which is truly breathtaking when held against the light.) He was kind as well, and thoughtful, and could say all sorts of interesting things once he felt at ease with the person he was talking to. But I have to admit in all fairness that he was not very quick at catching meanings or passing from one subject to another, and had in fact gained the reputation among the rest of the tribe of being thick as a peat clod.
However, he and I suited one another to perfection: quick people fluster me, they always did. And like a pair of dray dogs or horses that are shown off to more than double the advantage when they are well matched (and who better matched than we?), we seemed to thrive in each other’s company: me taking on some of Lidsanel’s health and strength and gloss, and he becoming more confident, more talkative, and carrying his head higher and growing brisker over fiddly things like using the counting frame and tying knots.
So after a while, instead of tuning aside and whispering as they did to begin with, tapping their foreheads and making other signs I won’t mention, people began smiling in an open, friendly fashion when they saw us together. Smiling and nodding and calling out crude but well-meant remarks such as, ‘Cuddling time at last, eh, Mara!’ and, ‘Hiya, Cafusc! Mind the cobwebs!’ and, ‘Big filly needs a big rider!’ It was their way of saying that they approved the match.
Those were happy times, so happy that nothing can really blight them for me in hindsight or make me wish them unlived. Nothing? No, nothing. The memory of them, like an ember-pan in a winter bed, burns a patch of warmth inside me even today. I got stronger and stronger and my illness got weaker and weaker until it just trickled away and disappeared altogether. My hair grew thick again, my headaches stopped, my appetite came back. Every morning (as if the sandbag was behind me now, so to speak, knocking me forward) I would leave my bed with a bounce, I was so eager to begin the day. No matter what it held. Bookwork, bargaining, listening to grumbles – all the things I had so dreaded before held no fears for me now. I enjoyed everything, because everything took place either in Lidsanel’s presence (in which case we were together and I had nothing more to ask for), or else in his absence (in which case I could look forward to our being together soon). Between these alternatives there was simply no space for sadness or worry of any kind.
And yet worry eventually came, and from quite an unexpected quarter. As the time for our wedding drew near I began to notice a change in Lidsanel that I just could not for the life of me understand. He who was candour itself, whose cobalt blue eyes I could peer into as if gazing into a mountain lake and see nothing but clearness, clearness all the way, gradually became – I could never say cold or shifty, but sort of reserved with me, evasive. He never spoke much, but now he hardly spoke at all. And when he did it was to utter sour, impatient things like, ‘Leave off, Mara,’ or, ‘Let me alone, I’m not in the vein,’ or, ‘What do you mean, what’s wrong? Nothing’s wrong. Everything’s as smooth as a hedgehog’s ruddy hindpiece.’ Even his posture changed: he began stooping again and hanging his head, looking for preference at the ground.
At first I was hurt and drew back a little on my own account, thinking or at any rate fearing that he no longer loved me. Then, when I saw that his reserve belonged only to the daytime, and that at night he sought me out more fiercely than ever before and clung to me like a burr and moaned strange choking sounds into the back of my neck, I thought, odd though it seemed, it might be the other way round: that it was he who doubted my love.
In actual fact, as I discovered after much questioning (unearthing things is after all a Miners’ speciality), it had nothing to do with love at all. It concerned Tarlui and had to do with dislike, distrust, disloyalty and, perhaps heaviest of all for an openhearted person like Lidsanel to bear, with shame. In Lidsanel’s telling, the story was long and complicated because he kept going backwards and forwards in time and then grinding to a halt and having to be coaxed on again, but I think I can make quick work of it. The kernel of the matter was simply this: when Lidsanel and Tarlui first came to camp outside out gate all those many years ago, it had been in order to steal our gold from us. They had come as thieves. They had always, Lidsanel said, been thieves, as far back as he could remember. That is, Tarlui had been organizer thief and teacher thief, and he, Lidsanel, being smaller and nimbler, had been the actual snitcher.
And please, I was not to gape at him like that. He had seen no harm in it then; on the contrary, it had been his duty and Tarlui had used to beat the daylights out of him every time he failed to perform it. Which in Mill Brook luckily hadn’t happened often because stealing was so easy: only once had he gone back to Tarlui empty-handed, and that had been when for want of strength he had failed to break open the lock on the chest that contained the gold.
This pilfering life of theirs had gone on quite a while, right up to the completion of the walls and the posting of the guards, after which it had become too risky. I would probably remember some of the things that went missing. (No probably about it. My snake bracelet that Odolghes gave me. All those bantams. Jet’s pretty agate ring.) Then had come the Fever outbreak; he and Tarlui had left their shack and come to live inside the walls; and suddenly, without explanation, he had started receiving beatings for the opposite reason: slash, slash across the eyes with a switch every time he nicked something. So he had stopped stealing and had joined the other children at their lessons instead, and then gone on to be a worker, and in time had almost forgotten that he’d ever been a thief or a thief’s son. But he had never forgotten the beatings.
‘I grew to hate him, you see,’ Lidsanel confessed at this point, speaking in a harsh, bitter voice I barely recognized. ‘And it is a terrible, fateful thing to hate your own father. I hate him still. I hate his skin and I hate his innards, and I hate belonging to him and owing him obedience. I almost hate myself for being his son.’
I didn’t want to look shocked by this revelation, but I was. To tell the truth I hardly knew which shocked me more: the stealing in the past and Tarlui’s cruelty, or Lidsanel’s outburst now. For an instant the image flashed across my mind of a doll Jet and I had found lying in the woods when we were children. It was a beautiful doll, all made of wool, with a red woollen dress and long black looped-up skeins of hair, but when we picked it up and turned it over we discovered in the nether side, to our disgust, a nest of naked baby mice. On that occasion I had screamed and thrown the doll into the bushes: now, with so much more to lose, I knew I must be more careful. Gently I asked Lidsanel if he didn’t think he was being a bit childish with all this talk of hatred. The things he spoke of had taken place many years ago now, at a time when his father was probably hard put to find enough food to keep them both alive. Hence the stealing and hence the bursts of evil temper. Hadn’t Tarlui changed since he’d settled in Mill Brook and become our doctor? Surely he had, and surely he could be forgiven? And as for belonging – once we were married Lidsanel would belong to no one any more, except possibly me, and would owe no one any obedience. ‘You will soon be free of you father altogether,’ I pointed out. ‘In fact, as my husband you will be above him, and you can give him orders rather than the other way round.’
I ended on a laugh, but Lidsanel’s voice when he answered was still bitterly sad. ‘Oh Mara,’ he said. ‘Free of him? Me give him orders? Oh Mara mine, you have no idea. You say he has changed. I thought so too. But he hasn’t, he is still a thief, and still rotten as carrion inside. And please,’ he added, bitterer still, ‘don’t keep calling him my father; his name is Tarlui.’
The way he spoke almost scared me, and the choice of word did too: carrion. ‘How can you know these things with such certainty?’ I asked.
‘Because…’ He put his head in his hands, and with a gesture that filled me with sudden and unexplained tenderness began tapping it, quite hard, first on one side and then on the other, as if the words needed dislodging before they could leave his mouth. ‘Because… Because he told me so. Because he thought I was still a thief too, and he told me so. That day, you remember, when you were so ill, and I kissed your hand and we sort of… you know… for the first time…’
I knew the day he meant all right. ‘Go on.’
‘Well, afterwards…’ He hesitated again, let go his head and clutched urgently at one of my hands instead. ‘I swear, Mara, I hadn’t said anything to make him think I felt that way. You must believe me. Promise you believe me.’
I believed him; that was not the trouble. ‘I promise.’
Relief seemed to loosen his voice, because the words came out fast now. ‘Well, afterwards, as we were walking back to our hut, he suddenly prodded me in the ribs with that bony elbow of his and laughed out loud and said how clever I was under all my brawn, and how he’d always known I’d come in useful sooner or later, and how right he’d been to give me the benefit of the doubt. ‘It’s an old hen makes the best broth, eh?’ he said. And then he made a clucking noise. ‘Well, we’ll boil this one together nice and slowly till we get all the juice out of her, eh, Lidsanel? All the precious golden juice.’ That is what he said.’
I swallowed and was silent, grappling with the meaning of the words long after they had been spoken. This was worse than the doll with the mouse nest; it was worse than I could ever have imagined. No wonder Lidsanel had been so strange of late. No wonder he couldn’t look me in the eye. His own father still planning to steal our gold from us – from friends, from people who had taken him in and given him work and fed him and housed him for all these years. Such deviousness hardly bore thinking about. And I who had appointed the man as our doctor and had even thought of making him my private counsellor… Brrh! Vanity I suppose, but it was his calling me an ‘old hen’ that hurt the most. ‘And you?’ I asked Lidsanel at last, hardly daring to trust my voice, which indeed came out in a funny gulp. ‘What did you say?’
He looked straight at me and, thank goodness, his eyes were clear now. ‘I laughed too,’ he said simply, turning a russet tinge about the cheekbones. ‘I thought he was just being… you know, the way people are with lovers. I didn’t catch his meaning properly, not until a month or so ago when he suddenly came forward with this little bag in his hand and asked me if I would please go through your clothes the next time you and I were together and find out where you kept the Miners’ magic stone, and then pop it in the bag and bring it back to him without breathing a word. He said it’d make a good start, a nice little golden nest egg for breakfast.’
Oh sacred spiders down my spine! Tarlui was an outsider; he wasn’t supposed to know anything about the stone. How had he found out about it? Who had told him? And what did he want it for when he wasn’t a Miner? Who did he want it for? For the first and I think only time Lidsanel’s slowness got on my nerves. ‘So then what did you do?’ I snapped at him. ‘Laugh again?’
His face was russet all over now but he still didn’t blink or look away, even when he shook his head in denial. ‘Then I told him,’ he said. ‘I told him to shut his evil mouth, and that I loved you and you loved me and we were getting married for that reason and that reason only, so there. And if he ever so much as mentioned stealing again, or gold, or hens or eggs or broth or broilers or anything of the kind, I would take this stone he was so keen to get his hands on and ram the wretched thing down his throat until he choked on it.’
This was better. ‘And what did he say to that?’
Lidsanel laughed, inasmuch as he made a dry snorting noise. ‘What could he say? He backed down of course. Said I’d misunderstood him, that he’d only been joking, that he’d known all along my feelings for you were serious, and he’d only been having his little tease; in reality he was proud as a pigeon to learn that a son of his was to become the husband of such a fine, high-born lady as yourself. What use was gold to him anyway, he said, now that he was a doctor? Just as long as he had a tiny medicinal lump of the stuff to rub on sties. And gabble, gabble, on like that, trying to convince me. But he was lying, Mara. He’d made a mistake – it was he who had misunderstood me, not the other way round – and he was trying to lie his way out of the muddle. Trying to smooth over the crack; put his mask back in place before I noticed.
His mask? Oh, no! I thought of the taut white skin of Tarlui’s forehead and the difficulty I had always had in knowing what was going on behind it. So that was it: he wore a mask, he covered his face with a mask.
‘Not a real mask, silly,’ Lidsanel said. And then he stopped and looked at me with a strange baffled expression. ‘No, no, it can’t be,’ he went on, shaking his head. ‘No. What am I thinking? No, it’s impossible. Impossible.’
What was impossible? What? What? I could have no peace until Lidsanel had explained.
‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘It’s just that ever since I’ve shared a hut with Tarlui I’ve noticed that – oh, what would it be? – roughly once every new moon, perhaps a bit more often, he curtains off his side of the hut so that I can’t see what’s going on and fiddles around behind the curtain with his bottles and phials and things until far into the night. What he’s doing I have no idea, but I can hear him stirring things and mixing and rubbing, and I’ve always had a feeling he’s altering his appearance in some way. Because he looks sort of different afterwards. Different and yet the same, if you know what I mean. So when you mentioned masks…’
Oh dear. I was getting more and more nervous. ‘But didn’t you ever look behind the curtain?’ I asked.
‘I tried,’ Lidsanel said. ‘Once, when I was little. Just a peep. But he saw me and threw some stinging liquid in my eyes. It blinded me for three whole days. I never tried again.’
I don’t know why, when the episode had taken place so long ago, but I felt panic rising in my throat – in waves, the way sick does. I leant forward and pressed myself against Lidsanel, closing his arms about me with my own. I tried to calm myself with reason, telling myself that if Tarlui had wanted to bring harm to the Miners he would have acted differently; he would never have saved us from the Fever, for a start, nor agreed to become our doctor, nor treated our ills, nor dressed our wounds, nor cured me from my last illness, just to mention a few of the good things he had done. But reason was powerless, and the waves kept on coming.
We stood like that for some time, wrapped round each other, not speaking. ‘And the business about stealing the stone?’ I asked after a while in a whisper. ‘Did Tarlui realize you didn’t believe him when he said it was just a joke? Did you tell him so? Did you let your disbelief show?’
Lidsanel hugged me tighter. ‘I’m not that stupid,’ he said. ‘Leastways I’m clever enough to go on looking stupid when stupid’s the best thing to look. No, I don’t think he noticed, in fact I’m sure he didn’t. Why, what were you thinking?’
I was thinking all sorts of things. First, that I ought to tell Tusky, or Bruno, or someone else trustworthy, that we had a thief in our midst nosing around after the stone. Second, that if I did tell anyone, no matter how trustworthy, Lidsanel and I could no longer marry, and this I could not bear. Third, that for this reason Lidsanel and I would do well to deal with this matter alone, just the two of us. And fourth that in order to do this we must find out all we could about Tarlui’s intentions. We must discover, that is, whether he still intended to go ahead and steal the stone now that he had no assistant to help him. And if he did, as Lidsanel thought was almost certain, we must discover in what way and when, and how to stop him. And we must also discover, in so far as this was possible, if we did stop him what he would do to us in revenge. What he would do and what he could do.
Lidsanel was gloomy on this last point. ‘His worst,’ he said. ‘He’ll do his worst. If we interfere with his plans you can bet the stone and the crown and every speck of gold in the store he’ll interfere with ours.’
I was sure Lidsanel was right about this but I was equally sure, once I had thought it out carefully, that the worst Tarlui could do (apart from stopping the marriage, which we must avoid at all costs by bringing forward the date) would be to reveal to the rest of the tribe Lidsanel’s past as a thief – this being, so I foolishly thought, our only guilty secret and our only weak spot. Should this happen, I would have to step down from the throne and hand the chieftainship over to Tusky. Who had longed for it always and would be delighted. ‘And then you and I,’ I pointed out to Lidsanel, ‘would be free to live like ordinary people. We could either go on living here or else, if the Miners didn’t want us any more, we could take to the woods with a couple of packs on our backs like I did once with my father. We could go anywhere, live anywhere. That’s the worst thing that can happen, to my mind, and it wouldn’t be too bad, would it?’
‘Oh Mara,’ Lidsanel said again in that sad, beaten voice. ‘Oh Mara, if only it were so.’ Then, with a sudden change, a sudden brightening, ‘I know. Why don’t we go now while we still have the chance? Quick, I beg of you. No plans, no packs. Let’s leave everything behind us and just take to the woods and run.’
(Chapter 5 coming up next sunday, 25 july 2010)
Sunday 11 July 2010
chapter 3
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)
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)
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