Yes, Odolghes was a good keeper of promises. When I woke up, the storm was over and I was lying, snug and dry, in a strange prickly bed that smelt of heather and rustled when I moved. I could hear Odolghes’ voice quite close by, speaking in an easy chatty tone, so I wasn’t scared, but the room was dark, and when I stretched out my hand it met with earth: earthen floor and earthen wall beside me and low earthen ceiling overhead. Under the bedcovers I was naked as a worm. I decided we must have died and returned to the belly of the Earth Goddess. Ah well, it was a good sight better than the rock.
I was so comfortable that I didn’t call out but lay quiet where I was. When I turned my head in the direction of Odolghes’ voice, something brushed against my face and I realized that the darkness was due to a curtain which shielded my bed from the rest of the room: I was lying, so to speak, in a cupboard, a recess carved out of the wall. Gently I lifted the curtain and looked out onto a still darkish but definitely bigger and brighter space – you could hardly call it a room – lit by a fire and by what I suppose served as an oil lamp but was in fact just a bowl of grease with a flame in the middle. On one side of the fire sat Odolghes on a heap of leather cushions, his legs crossed elegantly, his hand twiddling at his hair, the way it did when he was interested in something. Apart from his breeches he too was naked, and I thought this very odd because he was usually careful to cover his armless shoulder in the presence of strangers.
On the other side of the fire, her foot rocking at the greasebowl so that the flame wobbled, now lighting her features, now shading them, sat, not merely a stranger but one of the strangest strangers I had ever seen. A woman, I supposed she was. Quite old, very tall, very straight, with long pale hair the colour of hay, which she appeared to be in the process of combing, or perhaps drying over the flame. The comb, or brush or instrument she was holding, she passed from hand to free foot unconcernedly, using whichever was more convenient. Her toes and fingers were in fact of equal length, midway between what they are on a normal person, and the nails of both were long and curved and looked as if they would take an awful lot of cutting.
The only other truly unusual thing about her was her ears, which stuck out from under the hair like a horse’s from its mane and, like a horse’s, were long and pointed and furry; but the rest, by its very familiarity, was even stranger. Her voice when she spoke was a little higher maybe but otherwise identical to Odolghes’; her laugh when it came was just like his. I didn’t notice the eyes until later of course, which were dark and slanting and quite, quite different, but the brows and forehead were the same shape as his too, and so were the nose and chin and mouth. Except for the oddities I’ve mentioned she could have been his twin.
They seemed to be getting along together very well for two people who have only just met. If she was indeed the Earth Goddess, I reckoned we were in for a good stay. ‘Tell me more about her,’ Odolghes was asking eagerly. They were evidently discussing some friend they had in common. ‘What did she do all day in the wintertime? How did she keep herself amused?’
‘Oh, this and that,’ the woman said. ‘She scribbled a lot, she painted, she gave lessons. She wasn’t alone, you know, there was the Nurse and the five Fanish babies who escaped with her, and there were four other grownup Fanes who turned up later and stayed a while before they got bored and moved on – quite a little band. And then there was me: I used to keep her company often. I don’t sleep that deep in winter, you know, not like the rest of the tribe.’
‘Don’t you?’ Odolghes asked, leaning forward and lifting the curtain of her hair. He sounded very amused by this rather dull piece of information. ‘Neither do I. I always thought that meant…’ And then he laughed and didn’t finish.
‘Doesn’t mean anything,’ the woman said, tossing back her hair and laughing too. ‘We could be full, or we could be only half. What difference does it make? The important thing is, we’ve found each other.’
‘You found me,’ Odolghes corrected, ‘and very grateful I am that you did. You seem to be quite an expert in rescuing Fanes from desperate situations. But…’ And here he paused and his voice turned a little wistful, ‘I sometimes wonder… What about later when things quietened down? Didn’t any of you ever come to look for me? Didn’t she?’
I was beginning, slowly, to realize who this ‘she’ they were talking about was: it was Alexa, my grandmother, Odolghes’ mother. So she hadn’t been killed in the fall of Fànes after all, she had been rescued by this curious creature and had come to live with her in this curious place, well out of sight and reach of her enemies. Not such a bad idea.
‘Of course she did,’ the woman said firmly. ‘She never stopped. But it wasn’t easy: there were Cajute spies all over the place. Messengers to the Miners were sent out dozens of times but each time they had to turn back. And each time, while they were gone, the rest of us had to change our hiding place, just in case the messenger was caught and made to talk. No, it wasn’t easy, and it wasn’t very popular either. Then, to complicate matters, when at last one of our best scouts did get through to the Miners’ camp he found it empty and came back with the message undelivered and the news that the Miners had left for good and taken to the road like Wanderers. So? What could our mother do, poor woman? Just sit tight and go on hoping.’
Our mother? Our mother? Yes, of course, how could I have been so silly: this weird underground creature was not the Earth Goddess but my aunt. My Aunt Lujanta, the one who had been stolen from the cradle by an eagle when she was a baby. No wonder she looked so wild. And no wonder my grandmother settled down here and lived with her all those years: they weren’t just rescuer and rescued, they were mother and daughter.
‘It was rather touching really,’ the woman was now saying. ‘Every year, when the spring started, she used to herd us all out into the open and hold a special ceremony in memory of Fànes. She used to light a fire – very risky, but no one dared tell her so – and then circle round it throwing dried mistletoe and stuff onto the flames and chanting, ‘Spirit of Fànes, keep burning, keep burning in our hearts’. I was meant to play the part of an eagle and swoop out of one of the tunnels with my mouth filled with Schniappa, beating my arms like wings, and then spit the Schniappa onto the fire to make the flames flare up, but I felt such a fool I usually managed to persuade one of the children to do it instead.’
‘That was for me,’ Odolghes said rather proudly after a short silence. ‘The eagle stood for me, the Eagle Prince.’
‘Yes, well,’ the woman agreed. ‘Probably it did. But I still felt a fool. The last years luckily she didn’t feel up to it, so I rowed her over the lake instead in a boat, and she threw her mistletoe and whatnot into the water and did her chantings from there. I don’t think she believed in the magic, it was just a way of keeping in touch with the past.
‘When did she die?’ Odolghes asked after another silence.
The woman – Aunt Lujanta, that is – was braiding her hair now, going at it full speed, all twenty toes and fingers flying. She slowed down out of respect. ‘Only three winters ago,’ she said quietly. ‘You’d have had plenty of time to see her if only you’d known. What a shame – for both of you. She talked about you endlessly; I think she missed you more than she did Dolasilla.’
‘Did she?’ Odolghes sounded rather pleased at this news. I could understand the way he felt: my case was different, but I too liked to imagine that my mother, wherever she might be, was missing me and trying to get in touch.
Aunt Lujanta nodded, not briskly but like one who has given proper thought to the matter, and then went on, ‘Of course your marriage would have horrified her. She was always saying, ‘Let’s hope the Miners don’t play false and bind him to that hideous little…’
‘Sssh! Careful,’ Odolghes interrupted, and pointed to the bed where I was lying. ‘The child speaks Fanish, I taught her.’
My aunt must have noticed the raised curtain because she got to her feet and came over to the recess. I pretended I had just that moment woken up, but she wasn’t convinced. ‘Anyway,’ she said, winking at me so that I could see she was trying to undo the damage, ‘it worked out all right because this one’s a poppet. What’s your name, Eaglet’s daughter?’
I told her. Despite the bad beginning I decided I liked her already.
‘Well, Mara,’ she said, bending down over me and enveloping me in a smell that reminded me of dogs’ paws: warm, musty, friendly, not especially clean. ‘You had a narrow escape. Welcome to Morin de Salvans.’
(Chapter 10 coming up next Sunday, June 20th 2010 (If and only if my server works in the sticks where I'm off to)
Sunday, 13 June 2010
Sunday, 6 June 2010
chapter 8
This morning as I sat scribbling I could hear someone singing the song that was written about Odolghes after his death. I suppose it is a good cheering song for an occasion like this, being all about building and achieving and winning through, but on me it didn’t have that effect, it just made me sad.
Because I miss him. And because, even though the song is one of those long ones with a list of deeds and virtues and achievements that seems to go on for ever, his actual period of leadership was all too short. Saba de Fek, the song calls him: Sword of Fire, his battle name. ‘Saba de Fek, the one-armed, the fox-brained, the bull-hearted, led us Miner people back to Aurona. Aurona of the glittering halls, home of our forbearers, palace of our dreams…’ And so on and so forth.
Well he did of course, it is perfectly true. After all the shouting that went on that night of the gold parting, he could hardly have one otherwise. But what the song fails to mention, perhaps because such a crestfallen thing does not fit very well to music, is how long we actually stayed there. Which was, if I remember rightly, one month and six days, and even that seemed far too long.
The home our elders had dreamed of, moped over, drooled over all these years and described to us younger ones as a kind of wonder-palace, encrusted with jewels and more splendid that the sun itself, turned out when we reached it to be nothing but a huge great empty cave, riddled with draughts and packed full of bats, situated on the top of one of the bleakest mountains of the entire range. There was no handy water source, no nearby wood for fuel gathering, precious little grazing either, and every single thing we needed, except for air of which there was far too much, had to be dragged up through the underground mountain pathways in the same way metal ore has to be dragged out of the earth: that is, with a great deal of bother and boneache and blisters all round. It was mining all over again: a double dose.
We stuck it for a while – chiefly, I think, because the place was so sacred in our lore that nobody dared say outright how dreadful it was – but when Odolghes called us together and announced that he was thinking of re-opening the smelt pits of Mill Brook and needed a few volunteers to accompany him to have a look around, there were so many takers and so much jostling and squabbling and shouting of ‘Bags I!’ and ‘Take me!’ and ‘Wait, I’m coming too!’ that our move was practically decided on the spot.
Mill Brook was not poetic like Aurona, it was not beautiful, not the subject of songs or dreams or yearnings, but it too was our home, or had been once. Our working home as opposed to our party home (just as there are working clothes and party clothes). And like working clothes always are, it was much more practical and comfortable. Especially after the rigours of Aurona. I have a great fondness for tents, from having been born in one, but of all the various places I have lived, I don’t think I have ever been so happy anywhere as I was in the wooden huts of Mill Brook in that first busy year of our settling in.
The smelt pits, when they started up again, made for a lot of grime and noise, and in the summer the heat was ferocious, but the rest of the time it was cosy, and the noise was company, and I kept a very clean house for Odolghes, and covered the food in the larder with muslin so that the grime couldn’t taint it, and put wool in my ears when I slept and made Odolghes do the same, and all in all we had a very good, very easy life.
Our parents being rich now, we younger ones had to do lessons, which I know some children consider terribly hard work, but after ore-crushing nothing seems tiring, and we sat through them happily – the longer the better – doing whatever we were told. Our teacher was called Bruno. Where Odolghes found him and how he came to hire him, we were never told and it seemed rude to ask, but Jet said she had heard her mother saying that he came straight from the market and had been bought, not hired. Which, if true, meant that he was ours for ever. Not such a bad bargain really because as long as no one bothered him with questions, which he hated, he was kind and patient and never chided us and was quite content to pass lesson times the same way we did: with a minimum of fuss.
On my eighth birthday Odolghes said I could have a holiday from lessons and choose whatever in the world I wanted as a birthday present, so I chose that we spend the day together, just the two of us, looking for my mother. It was not a tactful choice: Odolghes had recently begun paying court to a certain Friska, one of my mother’s cousins twice removed, and there was already talk of his remarriage - a search for her predecessor was not likely to go down well with his new fiancée. Nevertheless, Odolghes granted my request immediately, making no bones: the offer, after all, had been his, and he was a good keeper of promises.
We set off early, on two of our smart new horses, taking with us food for the entire day. The sun rose and then shone on us, warmer and warmer; the snow on the mountaintops went from pink to gold to white; the air was so clean it seemed to have been washed in ashes. I turned to Odolghes and smiled and he smiled back, and I knew he was thinking, like I was, of the other journey we had made together, and of how much our lives changed since then.
‘Well, birthday girl, and where shall we look?’ he asked, trying to seem serious but not really succeeding. I fear the new lady had pretty well cured him of Sommavida: I must admit, she was a good deal younger and better looking.
I shook my head, defeated before we had even begun. I wanted to say, Everywhere, but that was a tall order for a day, so I said, The place she’s most likely to be, leaving the choice with him.
This did sadden him a little, I think, because although we had made enquiries with all our customers and alerted the Wanderers and offered huge rewards, no news of my mother had ever come to us, not even of a sighting. ‘No, Mara,’ he said in a different voice, much older sounding. ‘Not the place she’s most likely to be, that’s not a good idea at all. No, I think we’ll try the one place we haven’t yet searched where she just possibly might me if she’s still alive.’
‘And where’s that?’
He gestured vaguely with a tilt of his head. ‘Up. Up, up on the high ground where the Salvans used to live. There are caves there, and wild goats, and berries and roots and things to live on. You never know, if the Salvans managed it…’
The Salvans were half animals according to Bruno. He made us draw one once and told us to put thick fur all over its body and a tail, like a marmot. My mother didn’t have that sort of covering; how could she survive two winters at that altitude, in a cave, eating berries? And why on earth should she want to when she had a perfectly good home to return to? All the same I could see Odolghes’ point: there was nowhere else above ground left to search. And the mountains did look enticing on a day like this.
So that was where we went: higher and higher into the mountains, past the lakes and the poppy fields and the summer grazing grounds, up and up until we reached the frost line beyond which the snow no longer melts, and could see the crest of Aurona below us, looking quite niggling and unimportant. Searching in such a vast and rugged area was impossible really, you’d have to be an eagle with an eagle’s eyes, but the further we rode the less this seemed to bother us, and in the end we stopped bothering altogether. We rode purely for the pleasure. When the sun reached its highest we got off and rested the horses and ate some of our food and drank some wine, which was another luxury we had started buying now, and I went looking under the snow for fallen stars, and Odolghes, who had drunk five time more wine than I had (I knew because I’d counted), lay down on his cloak on a dry patch under an overhanging rock and went to sleep.
I must have done much the same thing myself when I got tired of star hunting, for the next thing I remember is waking up to a clap of thunder and seeing Odolghes loping along the track just below where I was lying, waving his cloak and shouting like a herdsman. All sorts of rude Miner words, which at first I thought were meant for me for having strayed, but soon realized were aimed at the rumps of our two horses, galloping in the homeward direction in a cloud of powdered snow and fast disappearing over the ridge. ‘Too late!’ he called out when he saw me. ‘They’ve gone now, the nervy brutes. Should have tethered them. Forgot. Blast and Roast and Counterblast! Took my arm with them too: it was tied to the saddle.’
‘Don’t worry, Father, I called back. Even at this distance I could see he was in quite a state. ‘They’ll find their own way home, horses always do.’ But when I reached him on the track and looked back at where I’d come from I could see the real cause of his worry. The thunder clap was the signal of no ordinary light summer storm that come and shakes itself over you like a wet dog and the goes again: looming behind the mountaintop was a huge barrier of clouds the colour of slag. Even as we watched I could see it coming closer and feel the wind on which it rode.
‘It’s a bad one, isn’t it?’ I whispered. Next to u Fin du Ratt it was the thing we had been taught to fear most: not bears, not wolves, not forest fires or wraiths or even landslides, any of which you can dodge if you’re lucky and keep your wits about you, but being caught out on the mountaintops in a really heavy storm. It’s the cold, you see: unless you’re properly prepared there’s nothing you can do to fight it off. We’d lost several of our kinsfolk like that over the years: picked off by blizzards on their way to work or back again; and when we found them they had been crouched up in ball and frozen so solid we couldn’t unwind them, not even for their funerals.
Odolghes nodded and took my hand. ‘It’s a very bad one, picera,’ he said. ‘But there’s no running away from it without the horses. We’d better go back to the rock and take shelter before it breaks.’
His voice was calm but his movements weren’t. When we reached the rock he wrapped me up in his cloak and bundled me under the shelf of rock, together with the leftover food and wine flask. Then, clumsily, with his solitary hand, he began scooping up snow and packing it into lumps, working so fast he looked as if he had the Tanners’ Twitch, or whatever the disease is called.
Protection, an icehouse to hide in. We had been taught in the nursery how to build one of these, as a sort of game, but I’d never seen one built in earnest. I made to help him, but Odolghes pushed me back under the ledge again saying at all costs I must keep dry. After finishing a dozen or so lumps – just enough to build a low wall in front of our niche, nothing more – he had to stop and come and join me inside, because the wind was lashing so hard it threatened to drag him away. In his company I wasn’t frightened, or at least not yet. If you’ve got somewhere to shelter where the sleet can’t freeze you or the lightning frazzle you, and if you don’t lose patience and venture out too soon and get lost, the danger with storms is of the slow, creeping kind: it depends on how long they last and whether, to put it bluntly, they last longer than you do. We had some food left, we had wine, we had each other to cling to and Odolghes’ thick warm cloak to cover us: I reckoned – we both did – that we were good for quite a nice long while.
Our reckonings, however, were made without consulting the innkeeper, or whatever the saying is. And the innkeeper – or the skykeeper in this case – was the storm. It howled over us and round us, and inside our ears and mouths and nostrils, and under and through the cloak, for so long and with such force that it beat us almost senseless. Dark came and still there was no letting up. Light returned – a livid, soupy light only a few shades paler than the dark – and then faded again as a second night fell. I was so cold and wet and cramped I begged Odolghes to let us leave our niche and run – anywhere, just to feel my feet belonging to me again - but he said no, we were still better off where we were. He made me do pretend running, though, by waving my legs in the air and then clapping my hands until my fingers burned and I thought they would drop off, but this made me so tired that afterwards I fell asleep and woke up even colder.
Worst of all, the constant screeching and battering of the wind played on our nerves, so that instead of being affectionate and saying kind things to one another as we clung together, we grew rattier and rattier, me in particular. I blamed Odolghes for drinking so much wine, for nodding off, for not spotting the change in the weather when he should have done, for flapping at the horses instead of trying to calm them – for everything I could think of. He in return told me I was spoilt and difficult: I hadn’t really wanted to look for my mother at all, I had just wanted to get him away from Friska for a day because I was jealous. Well, I’d succeeded all right: if the storm didn’t stop soon it was goodbye Friska for ever, and goodbye everyone.
The storm did not stop, either soon or late: it went on and on and on until we lost count of the days. Our food ran out; we finished the wine and had to slake our thirst with snow. Eventually I stopped feeling thirsty and was pleased about this because it meant I wouldn’t have to pee any more: there was no worse moment of either day or night than when you had to take down your breeches and pee.
I still wasn’t frightened, I still trusted Odolghes to pull us through, even though he seemed a lot colder now and a lot lazier and spent most of the time asleep – like I did. But when I woke up from one of my dreams to find him in a really loving mood for a change, cradling me tight in his arms and planting kisses on my forehead, I knew things were getting very serious, and would have trembled if I hadn’t been trembling already from the cold.
‘Sssh, picera,’ he said when I tried to speak, and closed my lips with his own so that I could taste the ice on his whiskers. ‘Sleep now, sleep.’
‘But you said to fight against the drowsiness…’
He turned his head so that his cheek lay against my mouth, stopping it entirely. ‘I know, sweetheart, only now it’s different, now you needn’t fight any more. Let yourself sink into a nice deep sleep and when you wake up the storm will be over, I promise.’ And then (and this is the very last thing I remember of that particular day or night or whichever it was) he began singing one of his Fanish songs. The saddest one of all, the one about the little warrior princess whose luck runs out on her: ‘I sun na era der sfortunada…’
(Chapter 9 coming up next Sunday June 13th 2010)
Because I miss him. And because, even though the song is one of those long ones with a list of deeds and virtues and achievements that seems to go on for ever, his actual period of leadership was all too short. Saba de Fek, the song calls him: Sword of Fire, his battle name. ‘Saba de Fek, the one-armed, the fox-brained, the bull-hearted, led us Miner people back to Aurona. Aurona of the glittering halls, home of our forbearers, palace of our dreams…’ And so on and so forth.
Well he did of course, it is perfectly true. After all the shouting that went on that night of the gold parting, he could hardly have one otherwise. But what the song fails to mention, perhaps because such a crestfallen thing does not fit very well to music, is how long we actually stayed there. Which was, if I remember rightly, one month and six days, and even that seemed far too long.
The home our elders had dreamed of, moped over, drooled over all these years and described to us younger ones as a kind of wonder-palace, encrusted with jewels and more splendid that the sun itself, turned out when we reached it to be nothing but a huge great empty cave, riddled with draughts and packed full of bats, situated on the top of one of the bleakest mountains of the entire range. There was no handy water source, no nearby wood for fuel gathering, precious little grazing either, and every single thing we needed, except for air of which there was far too much, had to be dragged up through the underground mountain pathways in the same way metal ore has to be dragged out of the earth: that is, with a great deal of bother and boneache and blisters all round. It was mining all over again: a double dose.
We stuck it for a while – chiefly, I think, because the place was so sacred in our lore that nobody dared say outright how dreadful it was – but when Odolghes called us together and announced that he was thinking of re-opening the smelt pits of Mill Brook and needed a few volunteers to accompany him to have a look around, there were so many takers and so much jostling and squabbling and shouting of ‘Bags I!’ and ‘Take me!’ and ‘Wait, I’m coming too!’ that our move was practically decided on the spot.
Mill Brook was not poetic like Aurona, it was not beautiful, not the subject of songs or dreams or yearnings, but it too was our home, or had been once. Our working home as opposed to our party home (just as there are working clothes and party clothes). And like working clothes always are, it was much more practical and comfortable. Especially after the rigours of Aurona. I have a great fondness for tents, from having been born in one, but of all the various places I have lived, I don’t think I have ever been so happy anywhere as I was in the wooden huts of Mill Brook in that first busy year of our settling in.
The smelt pits, when they started up again, made for a lot of grime and noise, and in the summer the heat was ferocious, but the rest of the time it was cosy, and the noise was company, and I kept a very clean house for Odolghes, and covered the food in the larder with muslin so that the grime couldn’t taint it, and put wool in my ears when I slept and made Odolghes do the same, and all in all we had a very good, very easy life.
Our parents being rich now, we younger ones had to do lessons, which I know some children consider terribly hard work, but after ore-crushing nothing seems tiring, and we sat through them happily – the longer the better – doing whatever we were told. Our teacher was called Bruno. Where Odolghes found him and how he came to hire him, we were never told and it seemed rude to ask, but Jet said she had heard her mother saying that he came straight from the market and had been bought, not hired. Which, if true, meant that he was ours for ever. Not such a bad bargain really because as long as no one bothered him with questions, which he hated, he was kind and patient and never chided us and was quite content to pass lesson times the same way we did: with a minimum of fuss.
On my eighth birthday Odolghes said I could have a holiday from lessons and choose whatever in the world I wanted as a birthday present, so I chose that we spend the day together, just the two of us, looking for my mother. It was not a tactful choice: Odolghes had recently begun paying court to a certain Friska, one of my mother’s cousins twice removed, and there was already talk of his remarriage - a search for her predecessor was not likely to go down well with his new fiancée. Nevertheless, Odolghes granted my request immediately, making no bones: the offer, after all, had been his, and he was a good keeper of promises.
We set off early, on two of our smart new horses, taking with us food for the entire day. The sun rose and then shone on us, warmer and warmer; the snow on the mountaintops went from pink to gold to white; the air was so clean it seemed to have been washed in ashes. I turned to Odolghes and smiled and he smiled back, and I knew he was thinking, like I was, of the other journey we had made together, and of how much our lives changed since then.
‘Well, birthday girl, and where shall we look?’ he asked, trying to seem serious but not really succeeding. I fear the new lady had pretty well cured him of Sommavida: I must admit, she was a good deal younger and better looking.
I shook my head, defeated before we had even begun. I wanted to say, Everywhere, but that was a tall order for a day, so I said, The place she’s most likely to be, leaving the choice with him.
This did sadden him a little, I think, because although we had made enquiries with all our customers and alerted the Wanderers and offered huge rewards, no news of my mother had ever come to us, not even of a sighting. ‘No, Mara,’ he said in a different voice, much older sounding. ‘Not the place she’s most likely to be, that’s not a good idea at all. No, I think we’ll try the one place we haven’t yet searched where she just possibly might me if she’s still alive.’
‘And where’s that?’
He gestured vaguely with a tilt of his head. ‘Up. Up, up on the high ground where the Salvans used to live. There are caves there, and wild goats, and berries and roots and things to live on. You never know, if the Salvans managed it…’
The Salvans were half animals according to Bruno. He made us draw one once and told us to put thick fur all over its body and a tail, like a marmot. My mother didn’t have that sort of covering; how could she survive two winters at that altitude, in a cave, eating berries? And why on earth should she want to when she had a perfectly good home to return to? All the same I could see Odolghes’ point: there was nowhere else above ground left to search. And the mountains did look enticing on a day like this.
So that was where we went: higher and higher into the mountains, past the lakes and the poppy fields and the summer grazing grounds, up and up until we reached the frost line beyond which the snow no longer melts, and could see the crest of Aurona below us, looking quite niggling and unimportant. Searching in such a vast and rugged area was impossible really, you’d have to be an eagle with an eagle’s eyes, but the further we rode the less this seemed to bother us, and in the end we stopped bothering altogether. We rode purely for the pleasure. When the sun reached its highest we got off and rested the horses and ate some of our food and drank some wine, which was another luxury we had started buying now, and I went looking under the snow for fallen stars, and Odolghes, who had drunk five time more wine than I had (I knew because I’d counted), lay down on his cloak on a dry patch under an overhanging rock and went to sleep.
I must have done much the same thing myself when I got tired of star hunting, for the next thing I remember is waking up to a clap of thunder and seeing Odolghes loping along the track just below where I was lying, waving his cloak and shouting like a herdsman. All sorts of rude Miner words, which at first I thought were meant for me for having strayed, but soon realized were aimed at the rumps of our two horses, galloping in the homeward direction in a cloud of powdered snow and fast disappearing over the ridge. ‘Too late!’ he called out when he saw me. ‘They’ve gone now, the nervy brutes. Should have tethered them. Forgot. Blast and Roast and Counterblast! Took my arm with them too: it was tied to the saddle.’
‘Don’t worry, Father, I called back. Even at this distance I could see he was in quite a state. ‘They’ll find their own way home, horses always do.’ But when I reached him on the track and looked back at where I’d come from I could see the real cause of his worry. The thunder clap was the signal of no ordinary light summer storm that come and shakes itself over you like a wet dog and the goes again: looming behind the mountaintop was a huge barrier of clouds the colour of slag. Even as we watched I could see it coming closer and feel the wind on which it rode.
‘It’s a bad one, isn’t it?’ I whispered. Next to u Fin du Ratt it was the thing we had been taught to fear most: not bears, not wolves, not forest fires or wraiths or even landslides, any of which you can dodge if you’re lucky and keep your wits about you, but being caught out on the mountaintops in a really heavy storm. It’s the cold, you see: unless you’re properly prepared there’s nothing you can do to fight it off. We’d lost several of our kinsfolk like that over the years: picked off by blizzards on their way to work or back again; and when we found them they had been crouched up in ball and frozen so solid we couldn’t unwind them, not even for their funerals.
Odolghes nodded and took my hand. ‘It’s a very bad one, picera,’ he said. ‘But there’s no running away from it without the horses. We’d better go back to the rock and take shelter before it breaks.’
His voice was calm but his movements weren’t. When we reached the rock he wrapped me up in his cloak and bundled me under the shelf of rock, together with the leftover food and wine flask. Then, clumsily, with his solitary hand, he began scooping up snow and packing it into lumps, working so fast he looked as if he had the Tanners’ Twitch, or whatever the disease is called.
Protection, an icehouse to hide in. We had been taught in the nursery how to build one of these, as a sort of game, but I’d never seen one built in earnest. I made to help him, but Odolghes pushed me back under the ledge again saying at all costs I must keep dry. After finishing a dozen or so lumps – just enough to build a low wall in front of our niche, nothing more – he had to stop and come and join me inside, because the wind was lashing so hard it threatened to drag him away. In his company I wasn’t frightened, or at least not yet. If you’ve got somewhere to shelter where the sleet can’t freeze you or the lightning frazzle you, and if you don’t lose patience and venture out too soon and get lost, the danger with storms is of the slow, creeping kind: it depends on how long they last and whether, to put it bluntly, they last longer than you do. We had some food left, we had wine, we had each other to cling to and Odolghes’ thick warm cloak to cover us: I reckoned – we both did – that we were good for quite a nice long while.
Our reckonings, however, were made without consulting the innkeeper, or whatever the saying is. And the innkeeper – or the skykeeper in this case – was the storm. It howled over us and round us, and inside our ears and mouths and nostrils, and under and through the cloak, for so long and with such force that it beat us almost senseless. Dark came and still there was no letting up. Light returned – a livid, soupy light only a few shades paler than the dark – and then faded again as a second night fell. I was so cold and wet and cramped I begged Odolghes to let us leave our niche and run – anywhere, just to feel my feet belonging to me again - but he said no, we were still better off where we were. He made me do pretend running, though, by waving my legs in the air and then clapping my hands until my fingers burned and I thought they would drop off, but this made me so tired that afterwards I fell asleep and woke up even colder.
Worst of all, the constant screeching and battering of the wind played on our nerves, so that instead of being affectionate and saying kind things to one another as we clung together, we grew rattier and rattier, me in particular. I blamed Odolghes for drinking so much wine, for nodding off, for not spotting the change in the weather when he should have done, for flapping at the horses instead of trying to calm them – for everything I could think of. He in return told me I was spoilt and difficult: I hadn’t really wanted to look for my mother at all, I had just wanted to get him away from Friska for a day because I was jealous. Well, I’d succeeded all right: if the storm didn’t stop soon it was goodbye Friska for ever, and goodbye everyone.
The storm did not stop, either soon or late: it went on and on and on until we lost count of the days. Our food ran out; we finished the wine and had to slake our thirst with snow. Eventually I stopped feeling thirsty and was pleased about this because it meant I wouldn’t have to pee any more: there was no worse moment of either day or night than when you had to take down your breeches and pee.
I still wasn’t frightened, I still trusted Odolghes to pull us through, even though he seemed a lot colder now and a lot lazier and spent most of the time asleep – like I did. But when I woke up from one of my dreams to find him in a really loving mood for a change, cradling me tight in his arms and planting kisses on my forehead, I knew things were getting very serious, and would have trembled if I hadn’t been trembling already from the cold.
‘Sssh, picera,’ he said when I tried to speak, and closed my lips with his own so that I could taste the ice on his whiskers. ‘Sleep now, sleep.’
‘But you said to fight against the drowsiness…’
He turned his head so that his cheek lay against my mouth, stopping it entirely. ‘I know, sweetheart, only now it’s different, now you needn’t fight any more. Let yourself sink into a nice deep sleep and when you wake up the storm will be over, I promise.’ And then (and this is the very last thing I remember of that particular day or night or whichever it was) he began singing one of his Fanish songs. The saddest one of all, the one about the little warrior princess whose luck runs out on her: ‘I sun na era der sfortunada…’
(Chapter 9 coming up next Sunday June 13th 2010)
Sunday, 30 May 2010
chapter 7
Odolghes had promised that once we had what he called some proper organization, the small grey stone we had gone to such pains to retrieve could be turned into unlimited quantities of gold. Meaning that it would make us rich again. It seemed a puzzling and far-fetched claim when I first heard it, and even now, when I understand what Odolghes meant by organization and have seem the claim fulfilled beyond his boldest dreams, some of the puzzle still remains as regards the actual way the transformation came about.
It happened swiftly, yet in such tiny steps we were hardly aware of taking them. The stone, you see, didn’t alter our work much, not as far as methods go, but it helped us to carry it out far more efficiently in far less time. If we had an order of, say, two cartloads of iron ore, which was the usual amount customers wanted, we could now deliver in a fortnight instead of the three or four months it had taken us before when we had no pointers to guide us but our eyes and noses. This meant, to begin with, merely that we could take on more work. Which we did, job after job, so that in terms of health and comfort we were worse off than ever before: tireder, hungrier, grimier and with such sore feet that when the evenings came round some of us – particularly the crushers like me and the other children – could scarcely hobble.
Another month, another fortnight even, of such punishing effort and Odolghes might have had a rebellion on his hands. Or hand. Our people were intrigued by him, were lured by the promises he made, but the old habit of mockery had left its trace and they weren’t quite prepared to follow him yet, not the way they had followed my grandfather before the toothache – right or wrong, thick or thin. A state of affairs which Tusky, sapping away like a mole - a dig here, a tunnel there – was quick to exploit. I caught him more than once spreading grumbles, calling Odolghes ‘the half-man’ and accusing him, on account of his disability, of doing only half the amount of work. ‘Yet he eats twice as much as you and me,’ he went on each time, giving his listener a double prod in the belly so that the reckoning would be clear. ‘And he is twice as big. Remember we used to call him Cuckoo-pate? Well, that’s what he is: a cuckoo, a great idle cuckoo in our nest, growing fat while we little birds slave to do his bidding. Where’s all the gold he promised us, eh? Where’s the food? Where’s the perks?’
Still inside the stone, would have been Odolghes’s answer. Work, have faith, have patience, and you will see. And luckily, before Tusky’s grumbles had any real effect, see we did. With all the work offers, the Miners who had left began to come back. First in drips, then in a trickle, then in a steady flow – at least two families a day. They came back thin as sticks, and in filthy tempers, but more workers meant shorter shifts, and we gradually found ourselves with time for other sorts of jobs which hadn’t been done in a long, long while, like rubbish carting and de-fleaing the dogs and mending clothes. The camp began to look smarter as a result, so did we. Perhaps this gave us confidence, bargaining power, because we began to up our prices and be a little bit choosier about the contracts we accepted. I can remember the first time Odolghes actually turned down a customer, hunching up his unlevel shoulders and striding away from the man – I think he was a Trusani – telling him we wouldn’t even dig for wurzels on those terms. And I remember too how the man, after a moment’s surprise, began hurrying after Odolghes, insisting and coaxing and offering higher and higher payment, almost with every step. It was strange, like seeing an almsgiver and a beggar suddenly change places, or a mouse suddenly begin to eat the cat that has caught it.
I have been rich and then poor, and happy and then sad, enough times to know that the two highs and the two lows don’t necessarily go together, but the period that now began for us brought a kind of upward thrust of its own which it was difficult to resist. I felt like a noodle in a pot: obliged to come to the surface by the force of the bubbles. Even the thought of my mother, which troubled me often, especially at nights, couldn’t keep me down for long. And the same went for Odolghes and indeed all of us, with the sole exception of Tusky, who continued to grumble even where there was next to nothing to grumble about.
Every day brought improvements of some kind to our lives. New tastes, new smells, new feelings – all of them nice. The taste of butter on our corn-cobs, for example, that since babyhood we had gnawed on dry, butter being too precious a remedy against metal poisoning to waste on children. The smell of soap, that we could now afford to buy again off the Wanderers (thus doing away with a lot of other smells I won’t list). The feel of warm beds and full stomachs and proper fitting breeches with no holes in them to let the weather through. The still more foreign feeling, on a rest day, of wanting to get up and do things instead of just lying still and dozing. And most thrilling of all – to the older people anyway, who seemed to prize it more highly than butter or soap or clothes or bounce – the sight of an empty tub we had used to keep nuts in, slowly filling up with more and more lumps of finest, purest gold, just like Odolghes had promised.
The making of this gold went on at night, amid such buzz and excitement that any outsider watching would have thought it was a game and not at all the hard, skinblistering work that in fact it was. What was called the ‘parting’ of the gold from the baser metals had not been performed in the camp since the beginning of the Great War, and there was consequently a whole new generation of Miners who had only heard talk about it, never seen it done, and to whom the idea of learning this secret skill and putting it at last into practise was like the coming true of a dream.
We children were not supposed to take any part in the proceedings at all (for safety reasons: what you don’t know you can’t tell), but on the night the first parting was due to take place the atmosphere in the camp was so tense, and the young Miners so eager to get started, and the old Miners so busy looking out old bits of equipment and preparing new ones and grinding bones and pounding ashes and whatever else it was they had to do, that nobody paid much attention to us, and under cover of darkness a small group of us was able to creep up behind the shed where the work was going on and crouch down outside and watch – the whole procedure, almost from beginning to end. We saw quite well, too, because the walls of the shed were full of holes to let the heat out and there were many more holes than we had eyes.
It made a fascinating sight. In the middle of the shed a smelting furnace had been set – one of the little round open-air ones that were used on digs for ore testing, but much fatter and squatter, with extra reinforcements at the base, and drain spouts coming out of the sides. Called tap holes to be correct. It must have been lit much earlier because its lid was already glowing; and in the light cast by the glow, the faces of those present in the shed could be seen to be glowing on their own account with a mixture of heat and sweat and keen expectancy. Some of them looked close to melting. That, incidentally, was another reason why we youngsters were kept away: our skins would not have withstood the blast.
To one side of the furnace, just out of scalding range, all the special long instruments for smelting were set out in a huge sand-filled tank, ready for the Master Smelter to grab at as needed: rods, rakes, rabbles, rammers, ladles, crowbars, tapping-bars, chipping-bars and many other bars – some so peculiar that they had no real names, only nicknames, like Nobby and Hookie and Little Scratcher. They were planted upright, in a special order, heads down and handles uppermost, and put me in mind of the prickles of a porcupine. The Smelter must have had a wonderful memory to pick the right prickle each time, because with their tops hidden they all looked exactly alike.
A little further off on the opposite side lay the fireproof vessels – dipping pots, crucibles, cupels and whatnots – again carefully arranged by shape and size so that the Smelter’s assistant could pass them over to him in a trice. And beyond these, in tidy piles of varying height – the lower closer, the higher farther – were heaped all the different materials used for the parting, each one marked with a little coloured flag planted at its base: white for salt, yellow for sulphur, green for beech ash, red for bonemeal, black for lead powder. A sieve, a pair of scales and a measuring mug completed the set-up, plus naturally the measurer in person: Jet’s mother, who had the only really trustworthy pair of eyes in the entire camp.
The arrangement looked finicky, and sounds more finicky still, but once the work started in earnest you could see there was a reason to be tidy. Any muddle, any delay, any tripping over a crucible, or passing the wrong amount of whatever it was, and the whole process might have been wrecked. It was that precise, that touch-and-go. Added to which, the furnace itself needed tending constantly. But this was done from the back, by the stokers, so as not to interfere with the rest.
‘She’s not breathing right!’ the Chief Smelter would shout at them, when his expert ear picked up some tiny variation in the furnace’s roar. Or else, ‘She’s caking up! She’s clogging! She’s running too hot! To cool! She’s dying on us! She’s choking!’ And the stokers, after bandaging up their heads and dunking them in water (which they had to do each time afresh or their brains would have broiled), would gather round the stoke-hole and open it up and begin fanning or feeding or raking or blowing or smothering or whatever it was needed doing to put things right.
It shows my ignorance, but what with the noise and the bustle, and the water-carriers coming and going, and the full round furnace sitting there at the centre of things, puffing and wheezing while everyone else hovered around it in a high state of excitement waiting to see what would come out, the scene reminded me of the Queen of the Cajutes’ lying-in. So much so that when at last the Smelter reached for his tapping-bar and began, one by one and with extreme caution, to ease open the tap holes coaxing, ‘There we are now, sweetheart. Gently does it, outcha come, outcha come,’ I expected the gold to issue forth like a baby does, ready made and shining.
Instead of which, all that trickled into the dipping pots placed beneath the taps was some dirty black dross, lumpy and scummy, which was quenched at once by the water carriers, and then glanced at briefly by the Smelter and tossed onto a cake pile in the corner and forgotten.
The Smelter didn’t seem too displeased with this result, though, and neither did the other Miners, since they went on working just as hard and cheerfully as before, but most of my companions felt the disappointment and, one by one, yawning and stretching and rubbing at their eyes, they left their spy holes and nipped off back to bed. ‘Parting!’ I heard one of them mutter. ‘Farting’s what I’d call it. Didn’t see no gold, just muck and bubbles.’
In the end only Jet and I remained at our posts, and after we had watched the same disappointing process several times over with no change in it at all, except that the cakes of dross got slightly smaller and paler with each tapping, we too were about to call it a night and take ourselves off to bed, when suddenly the Smelter fished out from the sand-tank a crowbar in place of his tapping bar and began thumping it endwise on the ground to gain attention. ‘Time’s ripe!’ he announced. ‘The dross is off and our beauty should be in there now, clean as saltlick. No crowding round, please…’ (In their excitement some of the onlookers had already surged forward towards the centre of the shed). ‘No scuffling, no sneezing neither, last thing we want is dust. Everyone keep nice and still – that’s it, that’s it – while I just life the cover here…’
And so saying he fitted the head of the crowbar into the ring on top of the furnace lid, placed a tall metal pole underneath the staff, and with a loud grunt, almost a groan, levered the lid into the air and swung it sideways, revealing the raw, red belly of the furnace with at its centre a small round dish containing a ball of something so fierce and bright it made the rest of the fire seem almost colourless in comparison.
‘There she is!’ he shouted. ‘There’s the button, bless her scorching heart! Whadderyersay, Miners?’
I had never heard gold referred to as a button before, but that in fact is the proper metal worker’s term for it. I suppose, by giving it such a homely name, they think they can control it better.
The light from the furnace fire lit my kinsfolk’s faces in a strange way, casting heavy shadows and making them look ugly, even those few that weren’t. ‘We say Oyoyoy!’ they screamed. ‘We say Oyoyoyoyoyoyoy!’
‘And whadderwewant, eh?’ the Smelter asked, slightly condescending, as if he was the teacher and everyone else his pupils.
‘More! We want more!’
‘That’s right. And when we got it, whadderwedo with it?’
There came a brief puzzled silence, during which I too wondered what the Smelter was angling for by way of reply. What do you do with a great deal of gold? You can’t eat it; you can’t wear it – not much of it anyway; it doesn’t keep the cold out; it doesn’t really, when you come to think of it, serve any useful purpose at all.
‘We put it in the tub,’ came an uncertain voice from the back.
‘Yeah! Grubagrub grub, we put it in the tub!’ the others joined in.
But this was still not what the Smelter was after. ‘And then?’ he urged. ‘And then? Where do we put the tub to keep it safe, eh? Where did out grandparents keep their gold, and their grandfathers before them? Think, you blockheads! They kept it in Au… in Au…’
‘In ore stacks?’ came the same voice as before.
‘In orchards?’ came another.
‘I know!’ squeaked Jet at my elbow before I could stop her. ‘In Aurona! They kept it in Aurona!’
Silly Jet, but it didn’t really matter because the last word was snatched out of her mouth almost before she had finished saying it and taken up by the entire assembly and shouted for so long that we had plenty of time to run back to our beds without being discovered. From where we could still hear it, booming out into the night like a stag’s love cry. Or, noisier, like the roar of an avalanche as it hits the tree line. ‘Au-rona! Au-rona! Au-rona! Au-rona!’
Next morning a crown was presented to Odolghes for him to wear on special occasions. The smiths had made it from the button overnight: a thick ring of beaten gold with an empty space in the front for the setting of the famous Raietta stone. He never wore it, however. First because he said he was not a King but a Chief and preferred the old feathered headdress, and second because when the casket containing the Raietta was opened there was found to be no stone inside, simply a note from my mother saying, Sorry, but for her journey she needed something valuable and easy to carry, and this bauble was just the job.
(Chapter 8 coming up next sunday, 6th june 2010)
It happened swiftly, yet in such tiny steps we were hardly aware of taking them. The stone, you see, didn’t alter our work much, not as far as methods go, but it helped us to carry it out far more efficiently in far less time. If we had an order of, say, two cartloads of iron ore, which was the usual amount customers wanted, we could now deliver in a fortnight instead of the three or four months it had taken us before when we had no pointers to guide us but our eyes and noses. This meant, to begin with, merely that we could take on more work. Which we did, job after job, so that in terms of health and comfort we were worse off than ever before: tireder, hungrier, grimier and with such sore feet that when the evenings came round some of us – particularly the crushers like me and the other children – could scarcely hobble.
Another month, another fortnight even, of such punishing effort and Odolghes might have had a rebellion on his hands. Or hand. Our people were intrigued by him, were lured by the promises he made, but the old habit of mockery had left its trace and they weren’t quite prepared to follow him yet, not the way they had followed my grandfather before the toothache – right or wrong, thick or thin. A state of affairs which Tusky, sapping away like a mole - a dig here, a tunnel there – was quick to exploit. I caught him more than once spreading grumbles, calling Odolghes ‘the half-man’ and accusing him, on account of his disability, of doing only half the amount of work. ‘Yet he eats twice as much as you and me,’ he went on each time, giving his listener a double prod in the belly so that the reckoning would be clear. ‘And he is twice as big. Remember we used to call him Cuckoo-pate? Well, that’s what he is: a cuckoo, a great idle cuckoo in our nest, growing fat while we little birds slave to do his bidding. Where’s all the gold he promised us, eh? Where’s the food? Where’s the perks?’
Still inside the stone, would have been Odolghes’s answer. Work, have faith, have patience, and you will see. And luckily, before Tusky’s grumbles had any real effect, see we did. With all the work offers, the Miners who had left began to come back. First in drips, then in a trickle, then in a steady flow – at least two families a day. They came back thin as sticks, and in filthy tempers, but more workers meant shorter shifts, and we gradually found ourselves with time for other sorts of jobs which hadn’t been done in a long, long while, like rubbish carting and de-fleaing the dogs and mending clothes. The camp began to look smarter as a result, so did we. Perhaps this gave us confidence, bargaining power, because we began to up our prices and be a little bit choosier about the contracts we accepted. I can remember the first time Odolghes actually turned down a customer, hunching up his unlevel shoulders and striding away from the man – I think he was a Trusani – telling him we wouldn’t even dig for wurzels on those terms. And I remember too how the man, after a moment’s surprise, began hurrying after Odolghes, insisting and coaxing and offering higher and higher payment, almost with every step. It was strange, like seeing an almsgiver and a beggar suddenly change places, or a mouse suddenly begin to eat the cat that has caught it.
I have been rich and then poor, and happy and then sad, enough times to know that the two highs and the two lows don’t necessarily go together, but the period that now began for us brought a kind of upward thrust of its own which it was difficult to resist. I felt like a noodle in a pot: obliged to come to the surface by the force of the bubbles. Even the thought of my mother, which troubled me often, especially at nights, couldn’t keep me down for long. And the same went for Odolghes and indeed all of us, with the sole exception of Tusky, who continued to grumble even where there was next to nothing to grumble about.
Every day brought improvements of some kind to our lives. New tastes, new smells, new feelings – all of them nice. The taste of butter on our corn-cobs, for example, that since babyhood we had gnawed on dry, butter being too precious a remedy against metal poisoning to waste on children. The smell of soap, that we could now afford to buy again off the Wanderers (thus doing away with a lot of other smells I won’t list). The feel of warm beds and full stomachs and proper fitting breeches with no holes in them to let the weather through. The still more foreign feeling, on a rest day, of wanting to get up and do things instead of just lying still and dozing. And most thrilling of all – to the older people anyway, who seemed to prize it more highly than butter or soap or clothes or bounce – the sight of an empty tub we had used to keep nuts in, slowly filling up with more and more lumps of finest, purest gold, just like Odolghes had promised.
The making of this gold went on at night, amid such buzz and excitement that any outsider watching would have thought it was a game and not at all the hard, skinblistering work that in fact it was. What was called the ‘parting’ of the gold from the baser metals had not been performed in the camp since the beginning of the Great War, and there was consequently a whole new generation of Miners who had only heard talk about it, never seen it done, and to whom the idea of learning this secret skill and putting it at last into practise was like the coming true of a dream.
We children were not supposed to take any part in the proceedings at all (for safety reasons: what you don’t know you can’t tell), but on the night the first parting was due to take place the atmosphere in the camp was so tense, and the young Miners so eager to get started, and the old Miners so busy looking out old bits of equipment and preparing new ones and grinding bones and pounding ashes and whatever else it was they had to do, that nobody paid much attention to us, and under cover of darkness a small group of us was able to creep up behind the shed where the work was going on and crouch down outside and watch – the whole procedure, almost from beginning to end. We saw quite well, too, because the walls of the shed were full of holes to let the heat out and there were many more holes than we had eyes.
It made a fascinating sight. In the middle of the shed a smelting furnace had been set – one of the little round open-air ones that were used on digs for ore testing, but much fatter and squatter, with extra reinforcements at the base, and drain spouts coming out of the sides. Called tap holes to be correct. It must have been lit much earlier because its lid was already glowing; and in the light cast by the glow, the faces of those present in the shed could be seen to be glowing on their own account with a mixture of heat and sweat and keen expectancy. Some of them looked close to melting. That, incidentally, was another reason why we youngsters were kept away: our skins would not have withstood the blast.
To one side of the furnace, just out of scalding range, all the special long instruments for smelting were set out in a huge sand-filled tank, ready for the Master Smelter to grab at as needed: rods, rakes, rabbles, rammers, ladles, crowbars, tapping-bars, chipping-bars and many other bars – some so peculiar that they had no real names, only nicknames, like Nobby and Hookie and Little Scratcher. They were planted upright, in a special order, heads down and handles uppermost, and put me in mind of the prickles of a porcupine. The Smelter must have had a wonderful memory to pick the right prickle each time, because with their tops hidden they all looked exactly alike.
A little further off on the opposite side lay the fireproof vessels – dipping pots, crucibles, cupels and whatnots – again carefully arranged by shape and size so that the Smelter’s assistant could pass them over to him in a trice. And beyond these, in tidy piles of varying height – the lower closer, the higher farther – were heaped all the different materials used for the parting, each one marked with a little coloured flag planted at its base: white for salt, yellow for sulphur, green for beech ash, red for bonemeal, black for lead powder. A sieve, a pair of scales and a measuring mug completed the set-up, plus naturally the measurer in person: Jet’s mother, who had the only really trustworthy pair of eyes in the entire camp.
The arrangement looked finicky, and sounds more finicky still, but once the work started in earnest you could see there was a reason to be tidy. Any muddle, any delay, any tripping over a crucible, or passing the wrong amount of whatever it was, and the whole process might have been wrecked. It was that precise, that touch-and-go. Added to which, the furnace itself needed tending constantly. But this was done from the back, by the stokers, so as not to interfere with the rest.
‘She’s not breathing right!’ the Chief Smelter would shout at them, when his expert ear picked up some tiny variation in the furnace’s roar. Or else, ‘She’s caking up! She’s clogging! She’s running too hot! To cool! She’s dying on us! She’s choking!’ And the stokers, after bandaging up their heads and dunking them in water (which they had to do each time afresh or their brains would have broiled), would gather round the stoke-hole and open it up and begin fanning or feeding or raking or blowing or smothering or whatever it was needed doing to put things right.
It shows my ignorance, but what with the noise and the bustle, and the water-carriers coming and going, and the full round furnace sitting there at the centre of things, puffing and wheezing while everyone else hovered around it in a high state of excitement waiting to see what would come out, the scene reminded me of the Queen of the Cajutes’ lying-in. So much so that when at last the Smelter reached for his tapping-bar and began, one by one and with extreme caution, to ease open the tap holes coaxing, ‘There we are now, sweetheart. Gently does it, outcha come, outcha come,’ I expected the gold to issue forth like a baby does, ready made and shining.
Instead of which, all that trickled into the dipping pots placed beneath the taps was some dirty black dross, lumpy and scummy, which was quenched at once by the water carriers, and then glanced at briefly by the Smelter and tossed onto a cake pile in the corner and forgotten.
The Smelter didn’t seem too displeased with this result, though, and neither did the other Miners, since they went on working just as hard and cheerfully as before, but most of my companions felt the disappointment and, one by one, yawning and stretching and rubbing at their eyes, they left their spy holes and nipped off back to bed. ‘Parting!’ I heard one of them mutter. ‘Farting’s what I’d call it. Didn’t see no gold, just muck and bubbles.’
In the end only Jet and I remained at our posts, and after we had watched the same disappointing process several times over with no change in it at all, except that the cakes of dross got slightly smaller and paler with each tapping, we too were about to call it a night and take ourselves off to bed, when suddenly the Smelter fished out from the sand-tank a crowbar in place of his tapping bar and began thumping it endwise on the ground to gain attention. ‘Time’s ripe!’ he announced. ‘The dross is off and our beauty should be in there now, clean as saltlick. No crowding round, please…’ (In their excitement some of the onlookers had already surged forward towards the centre of the shed). ‘No scuffling, no sneezing neither, last thing we want is dust. Everyone keep nice and still – that’s it, that’s it – while I just life the cover here…’
And so saying he fitted the head of the crowbar into the ring on top of the furnace lid, placed a tall metal pole underneath the staff, and with a loud grunt, almost a groan, levered the lid into the air and swung it sideways, revealing the raw, red belly of the furnace with at its centre a small round dish containing a ball of something so fierce and bright it made the rest of the fire seem almost colourless in comparison.
‘There she is!’ he shouted. ‘There’s the button, bless her scorching heart! Whadderyersay, Miners?’
I had never heard gold referred to as a button before, but that in fact is the proper metal worker’s term for it. I suppose, by giving it such a homely name, they think they can control it better.
The light from the furnace fire lit my kinsfolk’s faces in a strange way, casting heavy shadows and making them look ugly, even those few that weren’t. ‘We say Oyoyoy!’ they screamed. ‘We say Oyoyoyoyoyoyoy!’
‘And whadderwewant, eh?’ the Smelter asked, slightly condescending, as if he was the teacher and everyone else his pupils.
‘More! We want more!’
‘That’s right. And when we got it, whadderwedo with it?’
There came a brief puzzled silence, during which I too wondered what the Smelter was angling for by way of reply. What do you do with a great deal of gold? You can’t eat it; you can’t wear it – not much of it anyway; it doesn’t keep the cold out; it doesn’t really, when you come to think of it, serve any useful purpose at all.
‘We put it in the tub,’ came an uncertain voice from the back.
‘Yeah! Grubagrub grub, we put it in the tub!’ the others joined in.
But this was still not what the Smelter was after. ‘And then?’ he urged. ‘And then? Where do we put the tub to keep it safe, eh? Where did out grandparents keep their gold, and their grandfathers before them? Think, you blockheads! They kept it in Au… in Au…’
‘In ore stacks?’ came the same voice as before.
‘In orchards?’ came another.
‘I know!’ squeaked Jet at my elbow before I could stop her. ‘In Aurona! They kept it in Aurona!’
Silly Jet, but it didn’t really matter because the last word was snatched out of her mouth almost before she had finished saying it and taken up by the entire assembly and shouted for so long that we had plenty of time to run back to our beds without being discovered. From where we could still hear it, booming out into the night like a stag’s love cry. Or, noisier, like the roar of an avalanche as it hits the tree line. ‘Au-rona! Au-rona! Au-rona! Au-rona!’
Next morning a crown was presented to Odolghes for him to wear on special occasions. The smiths had made it from the button overnight: a thick ring of beaten gold with an empty space in the front for the setting of the famous Raietta stone. He never wore it, however. First because he said he was not a King but a Chief and preferred the old feathered headdress, and second because when the casket containing the Raietta was opened there was found to be no stone inside, simply a note from my mother saying, Sorry, but for her journey she needed something valuable and easy to carry, and this bauble was just the job.
(Chapter 8 coming up next sunday, 6th june 2010)
Sunday, 23 May 2010
chapter 6
Magic stone back in Miners’ hands again, Odolghes and me swept into the camp in triumph, my mother there to welcome us, my grandfather too, everyone anxious to hear our story – I had expected our homecoming to be one of the happiest moments of my life. Instead it was one of the saddest.
There hardly was a camp to speak of any more. We had been away -what could it have been? It seemed a lifetime to me but probably wasn’t more than half a year, if that, and in this space of time our former home had seen terrible changes. Most of them linked to our departure, too, which made it all the sadder when we found out about them.
The first thing I noticed was the tents. Before – well, I had never really counted them but there must have been close on a hundred. Now there were less than half that number. Thirty-nine to be exact. Before, too, each tent had been carefully looked after: cleaned, mended, neatly pegged out, with in most cases a goat outside on a tether and a little patch of vegetables, just beyond reach of the goat. Makeshift maybe and always ready for a new move, but ours had been a proper village in its way. Now it was like a Wanderer’s squat: everything, from the roaming, hungry-looking dogs, to the sagging grubby tents, to the scarred patches of earth where other tents had been planted and now were gone, spoke of abandon and neglect. Save for one area, in the centre, where a huge pine tree grew, and this spot was crowded with people, milling about untidily without direction, the way bees do when they have lost their queen.
Odolghes and I walked right into their midst almost unnoticed, and when we were noticed you might have thought we were ghosts, from the silence that fell and the stares we were given. Old Tusky, my grandfather’s bailiff and chief advisor, was the first to find his voice. Brushing Odolghes aside with a, ‘Huh! You! Fine time to show your face!’ he came towards me and took me, quite roughly, not at all in his usual friendly manner, by the elbow. ‘So,’ he said, ‘you’re back. Our young mongrel princess is back. He brought you back. Well, better late than never, I suppose. At least you’ll have time to see him before he goes.’
See who? And why was Tusky wearing my grandfather’s helmet with the blackcock feathers on it?
‘She’s back, folks,’ he announced to the gathering of ditherers around the tree, making no mention of my father.
Several of my old playfellows were there among the crowd: Spino, Franci, Agnes, Agnes’s sister Jet, but they gave no sign of recognition and waved no waves. ‘So we see,’ said one woman, a relative of my mother’s, almost an aunt, speaking very flatly. ‘So we see,’ another echoed, just as flat. They seemed resentful, almost hostile, and very soon I was made to understand why: in the shadow of the tree, so thick and dark that it took time for your eyes to pierce it, my grandfather lay dead and awaiting burial. Dead of a poisoned tooth as immediate cause, but since the toothache had come upon him when he was out combing the valleys in search of my mother, and since my mother, true to her word, had left the camp not long after Odolghes and I had embarked on our adventure and had not been heard of since, I was partly held responsible. Although it was Odolghes, of course, who was blamed the more.
And in part to punish me, they told me these thing all in a rush, just as I have set them down here, so it was some moments before I could sort out the bad from the worst, and longer still before I could fully take them in. Missing? How could my mother, who had always been there when I needed her, be missing? Where had she gone to? Why? Why hadn’t she waited for our return? When would she be back? Would she ever be back? Oh cruel, cruel world – how could I live in it without a mother? How could I live, not knowing where she was or what had become of her? And dead? How could my grandfather be dead? Of a toothache too? He had so few teeth, and the ones he had were so crumbly – how could a tooth have killed him?
At this point, in my strange rusty voice, I let out a wail of such misery that my kinsfolk relented and began crowding round, behaving in a much kinder fashion and saying much kinder things intended to cheer me up. There, there, I wasn’t to take on so. It was my mother’s fault as much as anyone’s. She wouldn’t listen, wouldn’t reason. Always had been like that: a hothead, proud as a hawk. Flouncing out of the camp the way she had done, without a word, just because for once she had been crossed – why, it was a shocking way to behave. She ought to have told her father where she was headed, and then he wouldn’t have caught his death going to look for her. And he ought to have wrapped up warmer, and worn his hat, and come back the moment the tooth started playing up. Stubborn old man, rest his bones. And as for the others – the ones who had lost heart and moved off already – they ought to have had more faith, more patience. True, the old Chief had lingered, and work had become very scarce and food scarcer in the meantime, but at the very least they ought to have waited for the funeral.
In the face of so many disasters, our finding of the stone seemed a slight achievement, hardly worth mentioning. And in fact Odolghes didn’t mention it, not yet. Tactfully, discreetly, he remained on the fringe of the assembly where Tusky’s push had sent him, waiting for things to calm down and tempers to settle and for everyone to go back to doing what they’d been doing when we had interrupted them.
Which was not, as it had seemed to me at first sight, dithering without purpose, but chopping down the pine tree as a token of honour to my grandfather. A sacrifice of something grand and noble that would strike the ground with force, to warn the Earth Goddess that a person of consequence was on their way.
The funeral catafalque being so close to the trunk, it was of course important that the tree should fall in the opposite direction, or the ceremony would have been a shambles. And to this end, ropes had been tied to the branches for everyone to pull on at a given signal. When all the bad news had been broken, therefore, and they had nothing left to tell and no more comfort to offer except a few more Never mind’s and She’ll be back soon’s and pats on the head, my kinsfolk went back to their task. Two to the saw, already deep in the base of the trunk, and the rest to the guide ropes.
Tusky, puffed up with importance, placed himself alone on the danger side, acting as overseer. Or underseer, considering that he was looking upwards, towards the crown of the tree. ‘Steady!’ he ordered everyone, sounding anything but steady himself. ‘No tugs yet, or you’ll trap the saw. Plenty of time, plenty of time. No panicking, it’s all going as it should.’
Was it though? Tree felling is a very delicate business. I remembered that my grandfather had used to have rope-holders on all sides, not just one, to check any swing the trunk might make in the wrong direction. Did Tusky really know what he was up to?
As if in answer there was a sudden creaking noise; the pine tilted right over my grandfather’s casket in a kind of bow and stayed there swaying, and the two sawyers shot from their posts like rabbits, leaving the saw twanging in the cleft. Everyone dropped their rope ends and began shouting at once. This side! That side! Hold it! Run for it! Save the Chief! Leave the Chief, he’s dead already! Too late! Gerraway, gerraway! Back! Back! Back! It was like being down a mineshaft when the danger gong is sounded.
Tusky, his face and indeed all his visible skin parts the colour of a ripe plum, tried to make himself heard above the din but in vain: his orders just added more noise. Then the treetop did another little series of bobs, settling each time lower, and in the sudden hush that greeted this development I saw Odoghes come forward quietly and begin picking up the discarded cords and handing them out again, one by one, telling each holder what to do and where to stand. In no time at all it looked as if he would have everything safe and right again, but Tusky, whose voice could now be heard very clearly, must have spotted a different kind of danger: a personal one, to his authority. Strutting, clucking, and indeed looking just like the bird whose feathers he was wearing, he hurried over to Odolghes and gave him another hefty shove. ‘Out of the way, Moon Eyes!’ he ordered. ‘Out of the way! This is no time for fiddling. This is men’s work, this is. Stand clear and let us get on with the job, there’s a good fellow.’
I half expected Odolghes to obey without murmur, and half expected him to do just the opposite: tower over Tusky and roar at him that he was not a good fellow, that his obeying days were over and that he was Chief of the Miners now. But he did neither. Like a large animal bothered by a gnat he simply lifted his good arm and swatted out at the bailiff, sending him flying one way and the helmet the other, and went on handing out ropes and giving instructions until he had got everyone placed exactly where he wanted them.
By the time Tusky had overcome his surprise and collected the headdress and jammed it on his head again, the tree was already well under control and leaning in the reverse direction, ready for the ceremonial drop. The rope holders’ eyes, out of habit, swivelled towards him and away from Odolghes. Perhaps, even now, it was from their old deputy leader that they ought to await the final command? Or not?
Tusky was quick to spot his chance, and at the top of his voice began calling out the farewell count with which the new leader salutes the old and sends him on his journey: ‘Ten: message from the world of men. Nine: hear the falling of the pine. Eight: hear the knocking at…’
But Odolghes seemed to have been expecting this ploy, and instead of trying to silence the little man or shout him down he merely crossed over to where he was standing, picked him up, tucked him under his arm and began to count with him. The next two couplets came out a bit confused, losing much of their solemnity in the process, but by the time the count reached, ‘Four: grant him rest for evermore’, Tusky had given up his struggles and Odolghes was in full and undisputed charge of the ceremony.
And indeed of everything else. It is often hard to put a finger on a moment in time and say, It was now that such a thing happened, or first began to happen: like winds or currents, events are never usually that clear-cut. But in the case of Odolghes’ leadership of our tribe, I think it can be traced back, without any fear of error, to that very instant. Exactly and precisely from the ‘Four’ onwards. At ‘Ten’ his claim was still dubious, at ‘Eight’ it looked to be overthrown, by ‘Six’ it had crawled back again and hung wobbling in the balance, but on the ‘Four’ he was in effect, without anyone realising it yet, not even himself, the new Chief of the Miners.
I didn’t realise either, no, not then, but I remember standing there watching my father conduct the opening stages of the burial service, and feeling suddenly, in the midst of all my uncertainty, a great sense of safety. I suppose because for the first time I had seen his strength put to use, and seen others see it too. Three:’ his loud, calm voice rang out, unchallenged by Tusky’s (which had dried up completely now: it is difficult to give convincing commands from under someone else’s armpit). ‘Set his soul for ever free. Two: Earth Goddess, we pray to you. One:’ and with a lift of the chin he signalled to the rope holders to let go their cables, so that his last words were almost lost in the crash that followed, as the pine fell dead on target, harming no one, landing just where it should. ‘Welcome back your Miner son.’ And then, with his musician’s sense of timing, while everyone was standing there in perfect silence listening to the echoes of the crash, he clinched the matter of leadership for good by fishing under his cloak for the magic stone and holding it up high for all to see.
(Chapter 7 next sunday, May 30th 2010)
There hardly was a camp to speak of any more. We had been away -what could it have been? It seemed a lifetime to me but probably wasn’t more than half a year, if that, and in this space of time our former home had seen terrible changes. Most of them linked to our departure, too, which made it all the sadder when we found out about them.
The first thing I noticed was the tents. Before – well, I had never really counted them but there must have been close on a hundred. Now there were less than half that number. Thirty-nine to be exact. Before, too, each tent had been carefully looked after: cleaned, mended, neatly pegged out, with in most cases a goat outside on a tether and a little patch of vegetables, just beyond reach of the goat. Makeshift maybe and always ready for a new move, but ours had been a proper village in its way. Now it was like a Wanderer’s squat: everything, from the roaming, hungry-looking dogs, to the sagging grubby tents, to the scarred patches of earth where other tents had been planted and now were gone, spoke of abandon and neglect. Save for one area, in the centre, where a huge pine tree grew, and this spot was crowded with people, milling about untidily without direction, the way bees do when they have lost their queen.
Odolghes and I walked right into their midst almost unnoticed, and when we were noticed you might have thought we were ghosts, from the silence that fell and the stares we were given. Old Tusky, my grandfather’s bailiff and chief advisor, was the first to find his voice. Brushing Odolghes aside with a, ‘Huh! You! Fine time to show your face!’ he came towards me and took me, quite roughly, not at all in his usual friendly manner, by the elbow. ‘So,’ he said, ‘you’re back. Our young mongrel princess is back. He brought you back. Well, better late than never, I suppose. At least you’ll have time to see him before he goes.’
See who? And why was Tusky wearing my grandfather’s helmet with the blackcock feathers on it?
‘She’s back, folks,’ he announced to the gathering of ditherers around the tree, making no mention of my father.
Several of my old playfellows were there among the crowd: Spino, Franci, Agnes, Agnes’s sister Jet, but they gave no sign of recognition and waved no waves. ‘So we see,’ said one woman, a relative of my mother’s, almost an aunt, speaking very flatly. ‘So we see,’ another echoed, just as flat. They seemed resentful, almost hostile, and very soon I was made to understand why: in the shadow of the tree, so thick and dark that it took time for your eyes to pierce it, my grandfather lay dead and awaiting burial. Dead of a poisoned tooth as immediate cause, but since the toothache had come upon him when he was out combing the valleys in search of my mother, and since my mother, true to her word, had left the camp not long after Odolghes and I had embarked on our adventure and had not been heard of since, I was partly held responsible. Although it was Odolghes, of course, who was blamed the more.
And in part to punish me, they told me these thing all in a rush, just as I have set them down here, so it was some moments before I could sort out the bad from the worst, and longer still before I could fully take them in. Missing? How could my mother, who had always been there when I needed her, be missing? Where had she gone to? Why? Why hadn’t she waited for our return? When would she be back? Would she ever be back? Oh cruel, cruel world – how could I live in it without a mother? How could I live, not knowing where she was or what had become of her? And dead? How could my grandfather be dead? Of a toothache too? He had so few teeth, and the ones he had were so crumbly – how could a tooth have killed him?
At this point, in my strange rusty voice, I let out a wail of such misery that my kinsfolk relented and began crowding round, behaving in a much kinder fashion and saying much kinder things intended to cheer me up. There, there, I wasn’t to take on so. It was my mother’s fault as much as anyone’s. She wouldn’t listen, wouldn’t reason. Always had been like that: a hothead, proud as a hawk. Flouncing out of the camp the way she had done, without a word, just because for once she had been crossed – why, it was a shocking way to behave. She ought to have told her father where she was headed, and then he wouldn’t have caught his death going to look for her. And he ought to have wrapped up warmer, and worn his hat, and come back the moment the tooth started playing up. Stubborn old man, rest his bones. And as for the others – the ones who had lost heart and moved off already – they ought to have had more faith, more patience. True, the old Chief had lingered, and work had become very scarce and food scarcer in the meantime, but at the very least they ought to have waited for the funeral.
In the face of so many disasters, our finding of the stone seemed a slight achievement, hardly worth mentioning. And in fact Odolghes didn’t mention it, not yet. Tactfully, discreetly, he remained on the fringe of the assembly where Tusky’s push had sent him, waiting for things to calm down and tempers to settle and for everyone to go back to doing what they’d been doing when we had interrupted them.
Which was not, as it had seemed to me at first sight, dithering without purpose, but chopping down the pine tree as a token of honour to my grandfather. A sacrifice of something grand and noble that would strike the ground with force, to warn the Earth Goddess that a person of consequence was on their way.
The funeral catafalque being so close to the trunk, it was of course important that the tree should fall in the opposite direction, or the ceremony would have been a shambles. And to this end, ropes had been tied to the branches for everyone to pull on at a given signal. When all the bad news had been broken, therefore, and they had nothing left to tell and no more comfort to offer except a few more Never mind’s and She’ll be back soon’s and pats on the head, my kinsfolk went back to their task. Two to the saw, already deep in the base of the trunk, and the rest to the guide ropes.
Tusky, puffed up with importance, placed himself alone on the danger side, acting as overseer. Or underseer, considering that he was looking upwards, towards the crown of the tree. ‘Steady!’ he ordered everyone, sounding anything but steady himself. ‘No tugs yet, or you’ll trap the saw. Plenty of time, plenty of time. No panicking, it’s all going as it should.’
Was it though? Tree felling is a very delicate business. I remembered that my grandfather had used to have rope-holders on all sides, not just one, to check any swing the trunk might make in the wrong direction. Did Tusky really know what he was up to?
As if in answer there was a sudden creaking noise; the pine tilted right over my grandfather’s casket in a kind of bow and stayed there swaying, and the two sawyers shot from their posts like rabbits, leaving the saw twanging in the cleft. Everyone dropped their rope ends and began shouting at once. This side! That side! Hold it! Run for it! Save the Chief! Leave the Chief, he’s dead already! Too late! Gerraway, gerraway! Back! Back! Back! It was like being down a mineshaft when the danger gong is sounded.
Tusky, his face and indeed all his visible skin parts the colour of a ripe plum, tried to make himself heard above the din but in vain: his orders just added more noise. Then the treetop did another little series of bobs, settling each time lower, and in the sudden hush that greeted this development I saw Odoghes come forward quietly and begin picking up the discarded cords and handing them out again, one by one, telling each holder what to do and where to stand. In no time at all it looked as if he would have everything safe and right again, but Tusky, whose voice could now be heard very clearly, must have spotted a different kind of danger: a personal one, to his authority. Strutting, clucking, and indeed looking just like the bird whose feathers he was wearing, he hurried over to Odolghes and gave him another hefty shove. ‘Out of the way, Moon Eyes!’ he ordered. ‘Out of the way! This is no time for fiddling. This is men’s work, this is. Stand clear and let us get on with the job, there’s a good fellow.’
I half expected Odolghes to obey without murmur, and half expected him to do just the opposite: tower over Tusky and roar at him that he was not a good fellow, that his obeying days were over and that he was Chief of the Miners now. But he did neither. Like a large animal bothered by a gnat he simply lifted his good arm and swatted out at the bailiff, sending him flying one way and the helmet the other, and went on handing out ropes and giving instructions until he had got everyone placed exactly where he wanted them.
By the time Tusky had overcome his surprise and collected the headdress and jammed it on his head again, the tree was already well under control and leaning in the reverse direction, ready for the ceremonial drop. The rope holders’ eyes, out of habit, swivelled towards him and away from Odolghes. Perhaps, even now, it was from their old deputy leader that they ought to await the final command? Or not?
Tusky was quick to spot his chance, and at the top of his voice began calling out the farewell count with which the new leader salutes the old and sends him on his journey: ‘Ten: message from the world of men. Nine: hear the falling of the pine. Eight: hear the knocking at…’
But Odolghes seemed to have been expecting this ploy, and instead of trying to silence the little man or shout him down he merely crossed over to where he was standing, picked him up, tucked him under his arm and began to count with him. The next two couplets came out a bit confused, losing much of their solemnity in the process, but by the time the count reached, ‘Four: grant him rest for evermore’, Tusky had given up his struggles and Odolghes was in full and undisputed charge of the ceremony.
And indeed of everything else. It is often hard to put a finger on a moment in time and say, It was now that such a thing happened, or first began to happen: like winds or currents, events are never usually that clear-cut. But in the case of Odolghes’ leadership of our tribe, I think it can be traced back, without any fear of error, to that very instant. Exactly and precisely from the ‘Four’ onwards. At ‘Ten’ his claim was still dubious, at ‘Eight’ it looked to be overthrown, by ‘Six’ it had crawled back again and hung wobbling in the balance, but on the ‘Four’ he was in effect, without anyone realising it yet, not even himself, the new Chief of the Miners.
I didn’t realise either, no, not then, but I remember standing there watching my father conduct the opening stages of the burial service, and feeling suddenly, in the midst of all my uncertainty, a great sense of safety. I suppose because for the first time I had seen his strength put to use, and seen others see it too. Three:’ his loud, calm voice rang out, unchallenged by Tusky’s (which had dried up completely now: it is difficult to give convincing commands from under someone else’s armpit). ‘Set his soul for ever free. Two: Earth Goddess, we pray to you. One:’ and with a lift of the chin he signalled to the rope holders to let go their cables, so that his last words were almost lost in the crash that followed, as the pine fell dead on target, harming no one, landing just where it should. ‘Welcome back your Miner son.’ And then, with his musician’s sense of timing, while everyone was standing there in perfect silence listening to the echoes of the crash, he clinched the matter of leadership for good by fishing under his cloak for the magic stone and holding it up high for all to see.
(Chapter 7 next sunday, May 30th 2010)
Monday, 17 May 2010
chapter 5
At first Odolghes tried to be angry with me for what I had done, but he was so pleased with the findings he couldn’t keep a cross enough face. ‘You’re sure, aren’t you,’ he kept asking, uncreasing his frown each time in his eagerness, ‘those weren’t just breadcrumbs in those pouches?’
Yes, I was sure. Bits of metal fuzz were still lodged under my nails. Take a look if he needed convincing. Besides, no one, surely, no matter how greedy, had a secret pouch specially sewn into all their dresses for keeping bread in.
The brow smoothed altogether and the eyes underneath sparkled like azure chips. I loved the colour of his eyes; mine are just an ordinary brown. ‘Then our job’s as good as done. All we’ve got to do is to winkle the stone out of the dress the Queen is wearing and make off with it as fast as we can. Simple.’
‘With the stone, Father, or the dress?’
Odolghes didn’t think this was funny. Nor did I really because the problem that faced us was enormous. It was quickly said, Winkle the stone out of the Queen’s pocket, but to do it, to actually stand there and winkle it, that was another matter. We had agreed at the start that the Cajutes’ habit of seldom changing their clothes was their affair, but now, suddenly and most inconveniently, it had become ours.
I had the bright idea, seeing how the other ladies had reacted, of getting Odolghes to tell the Queen he’d seen a mouse run up her skirt, in the hope she’d go berserk and strip all her clothes off on the spot, or at least the bits of clothes we were interested in, but it didn’t work very well when he tried to put it into practice. ‘A mouse?’ was all she said incuriously, lifting her eyes from her weaving as if they were tied to the warp and yawning straight into his face. ‘Whereabouts, pray?’
‘There, Majesty!’ Odolghes cried, pointing to where the Queen’s waist should have been if she’d had one. We had agreed beforehand it was best to aim high. ‘Right up there! With respect, I can see it moving, I can see the bulge!’
Thwack! she went with they shuttle on the place he had indicated. ‘Bet you don’t see it moving now.’ And without more ado went back to her loom. No, undressing the Queen, unnerving the Queen, or even unsettling the Queen by so much as a whisker twitch was no easy task.
Luckily, though, nature was on our side, since there is one thing you can’t very well do with all your clothes on, no matter how unparticular you are, and that is have a baby. I don’t know whether the whack had anything to do with it, or whether her time was up anyway, but only a short while after this incident the Queen went into labour, giving us what both Odolghes and I realized immediately was likely to be our only chance, if we were not to wait for the next royal farrowing. Briskly for a change she took to her bed; the dress was – at long last – removed and stuffed into a clothes-basket on the landing, and in the hurry and flurry of the birth, with all the ladies rushing backwards and forwards carrying things and tripping over one another and sloshing water and swearing in a most unladylike manner, I was able to sit on the landing unnoticed, in the lee of the basket, and winkle at my leisure.
Over what to do afterwards, Odolghes and I had had our first real quarrel since we were in partnership, and I have to admit that this time he showed more sense than I did. I was for stealing and running: making off down the underground passage with our prize, overcoming the guard at the other end, preferably with a swipe of Odolghes’s hard metal arm, and then footing it as fast as we could through the mine tunnels and out into the open country. But Odolghes said this was madness and that I needed my head trepanning. What we must do, he insisted, was to keep our nerve and sit tight and make sure nobody connected us with the missing stone, either now or later. Missing stone, mind you, not stolen. Because when I did my winkling I was to make a hole in the pocket of the dress so that it would look as if the stone had simply fallen through it by mischance, plop, somewhere onto the ground. Then, once we had the stone safely in our possession, we would hide it in an unfindable place (what place? Why, in a stony place of course, you ninny: up on the ramparts, in the middle of a pile of sling stones) and wait until all the fuss died down before collecting it and making our departure. Departure, mind you again, not escape. For we would run nowhere, we would just grow more and more slipshod with our singing, and repeat ourselves over and over, until the Cajutes grew so tired of us they would chuck us out themselves and send us on our way.
Odolghes’s plan had its dangers: ‘chucking’ was not the sort of thing the Cajutes were likely to do in a tender fashion, and their boredom would probably be just as nasty as their rage - to us on the receiving end. It also had the drawback – almost unbearable to me, who was getting very homesick by now and longing for my mother – of being slow. However I had to admit in the end it was better than mine, that was no sort of plan at all, and the moment I felt the stone slip through the broken seam and into my grasp I closed my hand over it in triumph, wiggled quietly out of the bustle, unseen, and obediently took it straight to the agreed hiding place on the ramparts.
Once I had found a suitable hole for it, though, on the side of one of the heaps of stones, and fitted it into place, a worrying thought struck me. Would we be able to find it again when we wanted it? Would anyone? A little darker maybe, a little rougher to the touch, but it looked like all the others. (Indeed to be quite honest I was already having slight difficulty picking it out. Was it this one? No, silly, it was the other one, next door, the one that was still warm from my hand.) I looked around for a marker but found nothing, not even a twig or a leaf, so I just had to be content with rubbing my foot on the face of the stone in the hope the smell would linger, and numbering the stone’s position: seventh pile ahead as you emerged from the stairwell, eighth layer left-hand side from top of pile, fourteenth stone from left-hand corner, twelfth (not counting a tiny one which was out of line) from the right.
These numbers I muttered to myself all the way back to our hut and then repeated them to Odolghes, who, not being very strong on memory, engraved them on his iron arm with the tip of a knife. Once he’d done that, see, he explained, whistling while he scraped away, we were in the cow’s belly. Meaning that we were sitting comfortably as regards the stone. Stones didn’t move and numbers didn’t lie, and when we needed our precious pebble, there it would be, in that exact position.
Cow’s belly? Well, all I can say is our cow must have had the collywobbles for all the comfort its belly gave. The rest of our stay with the Cajutes, waiting and indeed working for our dismissal, was so grim and wearisome I hardly like to record it. Odolghes was right and nobody thought of linking us to the disappearance of the famous iron-stone, let alone blaming us, but tempers were so soured by the loss that we came in for a good share of punishment all the same. And that was before we began muffing our songs.
Together with the other serving people we were made to crawl on hands and knees criss-cross all over the castle grounds, picking up whatever stones we found there and putting them into a special basket for the Queen to examine. This search, all the drearier to us who knew that it was useless, lasted for three whole days. (Which sounds nothing, but just you try it.) Then we were taken to the mines, along the underground passage trodden by the Queen, and made to repeat the same procedure: up and down every corridor, in and out of every nook. My breeches had holes in the knees by the end of the second day, and after that it was the knees themselves. I kept begging Odolghes to change his mind and let us escape from this drudgery, especially now we had learnt the way out but, although he paled when he saw my sores and carried me on his back from then on to stop them worsening, he wouldn’t listen. ‘We have put up with a great deal, picera,’ he said (picera meant little one, or loved one, in Fanish and was a name he had never called me by before), ‘we must grit our teeth and put up with a teeny bit more.’
Only it wasn’t a teeny bit, it was a lot. Having fed and housed us for so long, the Cajutes were unwilling to let us go, no matter how slack our performance. If we played worse they would treat us worse, this seemed to be their reasoning: they would take away our mattress, skimp our food, deny us rest and get their outlay back that way. Dud dogs that didn’t do their work on the hunting field were given kicks and cornhusks; dud musicians would fare the same.
Odolghes stole food for me when he could, and gave me his when he couldn’t, and tried to shield me from all the cruellest insults and hardest kicks, but by the time the winter weather started to set in I could see from the way he looked at me, and especially from the way he felt my knobbly wrist bones and listened to my night time coughing, that he was changing his mind about escape. In fact we had already begun to plan our route, or at least to talk about it at night to keep our spirits up, when suddenly, almost magically, a stray flute player turned up at the gate, rather like we had done ourselves all those months ago, and in the space of a pot-boil – the time it took for the flute player to get the Queen’s new baby off to sleep – we found ourselves dismissed.
With such harshness, too, as you can imagine, and such a shower of Scram’s! and Good Riddance’s! and Clear out, caterwaulers! from the soldiers who came to deliver the news, that we scarcely had time to do the most important thing of all, namely to go and fetch the stone from its hiding place before we left.
Luckily we were given a few moments alone for the packing of our belongings and the cleaning of the hut: it must have been needed for the flute player. So while Odolghes, deliberately slowly and clumsily, was doing just this, I clambered up to the ramparts as fast as I could and made straight for pile no. 7 where the stone was hidden.
Or should have been, according to my calculations. But when I reached the spot, instead of searching or counting, I just crumpled up in despair and began to cry. It wasn’t a question of numbers or smells or remembering or not remembering: the pile was quite a different shape. For some reason – perhaps because it had collapsed in the rain, or the stones had been used for bird shooting, or maybe for no reason at all, just evil luck – it had been completely rearranged. Although disarranged is the better word. Before, it had been tall and square-based and the stones had been in layers; now it was a mound shaped like a pudding, with the stones jumbled about any old where.
Through my tears I sniffed the contours of the pile, trying to pick up a trace. Half-heartedly at first, then with no heart in my search at all. The stones smelt of wet and nothing else; the one I wanted might be right in the middle or might not be there at all.
I was still sitting there, snivelling rather than sniffing, when Odolghes emerged from the stairway, wild-eyed and out of breath. ‘Got it?’ he puffed, running towards me with his funny lopsided run. ‘Give it here! We’ve got to go now. The guards will be back in a shake to hoof us out. There’s one on my tail already.’
So then I told him what had happened and waited to see how he would take it: whether he would be cross with me or the Earth Goddess or with himself, or whether he would just be sad.
He wasn’t any of these, he was wonderful. He sat down beside me and took me in his arm and said, Too bad and, Who cared, and to stop crying because anyway, stone or no stone, we were free now, and perhaps it was better so. The magic stone had caused such trouble in the past: perhaps it was better lost, with no one to claim it but the soil. And so saying he hoisted up his false arm, which felt no pain, and swung it hard against the pile, as much as to say, ‘There, take that! Go your way, stone, we can do very well without you!’
A moment later, mind you, he seemed to change his mind and began scrabbling urgently at the heap with his good arm, picking out several stones at random and asking me, ‘Is this the one? Is this the one? Is it this? Could it be this? Or this?’ But he had to stop quickly and shove them back in again, as the guard who had been following him appeared in the stairway and began scanning the ramparts to see where we were.
Having spotted us, he came towards us threateningly, walking crab-wise, hand on sword hilt. What was this shifty Senger couple up to? Couldn’t trust them a spit span. But as he drew nearer he relaxed and allowed himself a superior kind of smile. Whynen, he said to Odolghes, pointing at me and then tapping his cheeks just under his eyes to indicate tears. (As if we didn’t know what whining meant.) The kidden was whynen, didn’t want to leave, didn’t want to lose its bread, that’s why it had come up here to hide. Ha! Too late now for whynen. Should have done its job better and then it could have stayed. Pouss! March! Both of us! Foui! At the doppel!
Still barking out commands he chivvied us down the long twisting staircase and out into the courtyard, where the rolled up bundle of our belongings was already waiting for us, spattered with what looked like raindrops. Only it wasn’t raining so I’m afraid it was something else. On top of the bundle lay the zither.
To more taunts from the bystanders we picked up our gear and, eyes screwed up against any more drops of whatever it was, we walked across the courtyard, through the narrow, unwelcoming threshold, and began to cross the drawbridge, towards freedom and the outside world.
The Cajutes were taking their precautions though. Halfway across the bridge another pair of guards stopped us, felt us all over with probing fingers the way they had done on our arrival, made us turn out our pockets, splay our legs, open our mouths, raise our arms, brocken one excepted, and, on finding nothing, told us with very bad grace to leave our bundle and continue without it. I looked pleadingly at Odolghes - the things inside were nearly all mine, and there was food for the journey as well – but he shrugged and made sign to do as the guards said.
‘Zitter too!’ they ordered. And without even waiting for it to be properly unstrapped, the more senior of the pair dragged the zither from around Odolghes’s neck and threw it on the ground, where he trampled on it like a child in a temper until it was only splinters.
So it was with completely empty hands and empty pockets and empty stomachs and empty everythings that Odolghes and I finally made our getaway from the Cajutes’ fortress. No clothes except the ones we wore, no food, no pay, no means of earning any without our instrument. No toothpicks either, unless you count zither fragments, some of which I had picked up as a keepsake: it was such lovely wood. And, saddest of all when you think how hard we’d worked for it and all the risks we had run, no Miners’ stone.
Or so we thought. Right up to the moment when Odolghes decided we were far enough away from the castle for him to remove his arm, which was chafing more than usual. And then, clinging to the lower part of the arm, near where the wrist was, quite as if it were a living thing with a mind and a will and a strength of its own, we found it.
Magic? Yes, but not as magic as you might think. Nor as we thought ourselves in our first rush of amazement. Later, when we put our heads together, we worked it out and did some trials to prove it. The stone could find iron, you see, but by the same token iron could find the stone. Not at any great distance - the range was about a thumbnail’s breadth - but placed within that range the two materials, iron and stone, would seek each other out and strain to come together, quivering like the noses of two truffle hounds. It was fascinating to watch, and rather frightening when you consider that neither nose was alive.
So when Odolghes had struck out at the pile like that with his imitation arm, that is what must have happened: by incredible good luck he must have touched the stone, or at any rate come very close to touching it, and strain and quiver and seek and reach, the invisible pull had done the rest. Another long hungry journey lay ahead of us now, but this time we felt so light inside we sped across the mountains like chamois. I didn’t talk much because my voice had gone rusty from lack of exercise, but Odolghes sang at the top of his, and now and again he tossed the arm in the air, with the stone still sticking to it fast, and looked at me as he caught it again, and together we laughed and laughed.
(Chapter 6 next sunday, may 23rd 2010
Yes, I was sure. Bits of metal fuzz were still lodged under my nails. Take a look if he needed convincing. Besides, no one, surely, no matter how greedy, had a secret pouch specially sewn into all their dresses for keeping bread in.
The brow smoothed altogether and the eyes underneath sparkled like azure chips. I loved the colour of his eyes; mine are just an ordinary brown. ‘Then our job’s as good as done. All we’ve got to do is to winkle the stone out of the dress the Queen is wearing and make off with it as fast as we can. Simple.’
‘With the stone, Father, or the dress?’
Odolghes didn’t think this was funny. Nor did I really because the problem that faced us was enormous. It was quickly said, Winkle the stone out of the Queen’s pocket, but to do it, to actually stand there and winkle it, that was another matter. We had agreed at the start that the Cajutes’ habit of seldom changing their clothes was their affair, but now, suddenly and most inconveniently, it had become ours.
I had the bright idea, seeing how the other ladies had reacted, of getting Odolghes to tell the Queen he’d seen a mouse run up her skirt, in the hope she’d go berserk and strip all her clothes off on the spot, or at least the bits of clothes we were interested in, but it didn’t work very well when he tried to put it into practice. ‘A mouse?’ was all she said incuriously, lifting her eyes from her weaving as if they were tied to the warp and yawning straight into his face. ‘Whereabouts, pray?’
‘There, Majesty!’ Odolghes cried, pointing to where the Queen’s waist should have been if she’d had one. We had agreed beforehand it was best to aim high. ‘Right up there! With respect, I can see it moving, I can see the bulge!’
Thwack! she went with they shuttle on the place he had indicated. ‘Bet you don’t see it moving now.’ And without more ado went back to her loom. No, undressing the Queen, unnerving the Queen, or even unsettling the Queen by so much as a whisker twitch was no easy task.
Luckily, though, nature was on our side, since there is one thing you can’t very well do with all your clothes on, no matter how unparticular you are, and that is have a baby. I don’t know whether the whack had anything to do with it, or whether her time was up anyway, but only a short while after this incident the Queen went into labour, giving us what both Odolghes and I realized immediately was likely to be our only chance, if we were not to wait for the next royal farrowing. Briskly for a change she took to her bed; the dress was – at long last – removed and stuffed into a clothes-basket on the landing, and in the hurry and flurry of the birth, with all the ladies rushing backwards and forwards carrying things and tripping over one another and sloshing water and swearing in a most unladylike manner, I was able to sit on the landing unnoticed, in the lee of the basket, and winkle at my leisure.
Over what to do afterwards, Odolghes and I had had our first real quarrel since we were in partnership, and I have to admit that this time he showed more sense than I did. I was for stealing and running: making off down the underground passage with our prize, overcoming the guard at the other end, preferably with a swipe of Odolghes’s hard metal arm, and then footing it as fast as we could through the mine tunnels and out into the open country. But Odolghes said this was madness and that I needed my head trepanning. What we must do, he insisted, was to keep our nerve and sit tight and make sure nobody connected us with the missing stone, either now or later. Missing stone, mind you, not stolen. Because when I did my winkling I was to make a hole in the pocket of the dress so that it would look as if the stone had simply fallen through it by mischance, plop, somewhere onto the ground. Then, once we had the stone safely in our possession, we would hide it in an unfindable place (what place? Why, in a stony place of course, you ninny: up on the ramparts, in the middle of a pile of sling stones) and wait until all the fuss died down before collecting it and making our departure. Departure, mind you again, not escape. For we would run nowhere, we would just grow more and more slipshod with our singing, and repeat ourselves over and over, until the Cajutes grew so tired of us they would chuck us out themselves and send us on our way.
Odolghes’s plan had its dangers: ‘chucking’ was not the sort of thing the Cajutes were likely to do in a tender fashion, and their boredom would probably be just as nasty as their rage - to us on the receiving end. It also had the drawback – almost unbearable to me, who was getting very homesick by now and longing for my mother – of being slow. However I had to admit in the end it was better than mine, that was no sort of plan at all, and the moment I felt the stone slip through the broken seam and into my grasp I closed my hand over it in triumph, wiggled quietly out of the bustle, unseen, and obediently took it straight to the agreed hiding place on the ramparts.
Once I had found a suitable hole for it, though, on the side of one of the heaps of stones, and fitted it into place, a worrying thought struck me. Would we be able to find it again when we wanted it? Would anyone? A little darker maybe, a little rougher to the touch, but it looked like all the others. (Indeed to be quite honest I was already having slight difficulty picking it out. Was it this one? No, silly, it was the other one, next door, the one that was still warm from my hand.) I looked around for a marker but found nothing, not even a twig or a leaf, so I just had to be content with rubbing my foot on the face of the stone in the hope the smell would linger, and numbering the stone’s position: seventh pile ahead as you emerged from the stairwell, eighth layer left-hand side from top of pile, fourteenth stone from left-hand corner, twelfth (not counting a tiny one which was out of line) from the right.
These numbers I muttered to myself all the way back to our hut and then repeated them to Odolghes, who, not being very strong on memory, engraved them on his iron arm with the tip of a knife. Once he’d done that, see, he explained, whistling while he scraped away, we were in the cow’s belly. Meaning that we were sitting comfortably as regards the stone. Stones didn’t move and numbers didn’t lie, and when we needed our precious pebble, there it would be, in that exact position.
Cow’s belly? Well, all I can say is our cow must have had the collywobbles for all the comfort its belly gave. The rest of our stay with the Cajutes, waiting and indeed working for our dismissal, was so grim and wearisome I hardly like to record it. Odolghes was right and nobody thought of linking us to the disappearance of the famous iron-stone, let alone blaming us, but tempers were so soured by the loss that we came in for a good share of punishment all the same. And that was before we began muffing our songs.
Together with the other serving people we were made to crawl on hands and knees criss-cross all over the castle grounds, picking up whatever stones we found there and putting them into a special basket for the Queen to examine. This search, all the drearier to us who knew that it was useless, lasted for three whole days. (Which sounds nothing, but just you try it.) Then we were taken to the mines, along the underground passage trodden by the Queen, and made to repeat the same procedure: up and down every corridor, in and out of every nook. My breeches had holes in the knees by the end of the second day, and after that it was the knees themselves. I kept begging Odolghes to change his mind and let us escape from this drudgery, especially now we had learnt the way out but, although he paled when he saw my sores and carried me on his back from then on to stop them worsening, he wouldn’t listen. ‘We have put up with a great deal, picera,’ he said (picera meant little one, or loved one, in Fanish and was a name he had never called me by before), ‘we must grit our teeth and put up with a teeny bit more.’
Only it wasn’t a teeny bit, it was a lot. Having fed and housed us for so long, the Cajutes were unwilling to let us go, no matter how slack our performance. If we played worse they would treat us worse, this seemed to be their reasoning: they would take away our mattress, skimp our food, deny us rest and get their outlay back that way. Dud dogs that didn’t do their work on the hunting field were given kicks and cornhusks; dud musicians would fare the same.
Odolghes stole food for me when he could, and gave me his when he couldn’t, and tried to shield me from all the cruellest insults and hardest kicks, but by the time the winter weather started to set in I could see from the way he looked at me, and especially from the way he felt my knobbly wrist bones and listened to my night time coughing, that he was changing his mind about escape. In fact we had already begun to plan our route, or at least to talk about it at night to keep our spirits up, when suddenly, almost magically, a stray flute player turned up at the gate, rather like we had done ourselves all those months ago, and in the space of a pot-boil – the time it took for the flute player to get the Queen’s new baby off to sleep – we found ourselves dismissed.
With such harshness, too, as you can imagine, and such a shower of Scram’s! and Good Riddance’s! and Clear out, caterwaulers! from the soldiers who came to deliver the news, that we scarcely had time to do the most important thing of all, namely to go and fetch the stone from its hiding place before we left.
Luckily we were given a few moments alone for the packing of our belongings and the cleaning of the hut: it must have been needed for the flute player. So while Odolghes, deliberately slowly and clumsily, was doing just this, I clambered up to the ramparts as fast as I could and made straight for pile no. 7 where the stone was hidden.
Or should have been, according to my calculations. But when I reached the spot, instead of searching or counting, I just crumpled up in despair and began to cry. It wasn’t a question of numbers or smells or remembering or not remembering: the pile was quite a different shape. For some reason – perhaps because it had collapsed in the rain, or the stones had been used for bird shooting, or maybe for no reason at all, just evil luck – it had been completely rearranged. Although disarranged is the better word. Before, it had been tall and square-based and the stones had been in layers; now it was a mound shaped like a pudding, with the stones jumbled about any old where.
Through my tears I sniffed the contours of the pile, trying to pick up a trace. Half-heartedly at first, then with no heart in my search at all. The stones smelt of wet and nothing else; the one I wanted might be right in the middle or might not be there at all.
I was still sitting there, snivelling rather than sniffing, when Odolghes emerged from the stairway, wild-eyed and out of breath. ‘Got it?’ he puffed, running towards me with his funny lopsided run. ‘Give it here! We’ve got to go now. The guards will be back in a shake to hoof us out. There’s one on my tail already.’
So then I told him what had happened and waited to see how he would take it: whether he would be cross with me or the Earth Goddess or with himself, or whether he would just be sad.
He wasn’t any of these, he was wonderful. He sat down beside me and took me in his arm and said, Too bad and, Who cared, and to stop crying because anyway, stone or no stone, we were free now, and perhaps it was better so. The magic stone had caused such trouble in the past: perhaps it was better lost, with no one to claim it but the soil. And so saying he hoisted up his false arm, which felt no pain, and swung it hard against the pile, as much as to say, ‘There, take that! Go your way, stone, we can do very well without you!’
A moment later, mind you, he seemed to change his mind and began scrabbling urgently at the heap with his good arm, picking out several stones at random and asking me, ‘Is this the one? Is this the one? Is it this? Could it be this? Or this?’ But he had to stop quickly and shove them back in again, as the guard who had been following him appeared in the stairway and began scanning the ramparts to see where we were.
Having spotted us, he came towards us threateningly, walking crab-wise, hand on sword hilt. What was this shifty Senger couple up to? Couldn’t trust them a spit span. But as he drew nearer he relaxed and allowed himself a superior kind of smile. Whynen, he said to Odolghes, pointing at me and then tapping his cheeks just under his eyes to indicate tears. (As if we didn’t know what whining meant.) The kidden was whynen, didn’t want to leave, didn’t want to lose its bread, that’s why it had come up here to hide. Ha! Too late now for whynen. Should have done its job better and then it could have stayed. Pouss! March! Both of us! Foui! At the doppel!
Still barking out commands he chivvied us down the long twisting staircase and out into the courtyard, where the rolled up bundle of our belongings was already waiting for us, spattered with what looked like raindrops. Only it wasn’t raining so I’m afraid it was something else. On top of the bundle lay the zither.
To more taunts from the bystanders we picked up our gear and, eyes screwed up against any more drops of whatever it was, we walked across the courtyard, through the narrow, unwelcoming threshold, and began to cross the drawbridge, towards freedom and the outside world.
The Cajutes were taking their precautions though. Halfway across the bridge another pair of guards stopped us, felt us all over with probing fingers the way they had done on our arrival, made us turn out our pockets, splay our legs, open our mouths, raise our arms, brocken one excepted, and, on finding nothing, told us with very bad grace to leave our bundle and continue without it. I looked pleadingly at Odolghes - the things inside were nearly all mine, and there was food for the journey as well – but he shrugged and made sign to do as the guards said.
‘Zitter too!’ they ordered. And without even waiting for it to be properly unstrapped, the more senior of the pair dragged the zither from around Odolghes’s neck and threw it on the ground, where he trampled on it like a child in a temper until it was only splinters.
So it was with completely empty hands and empty pockets and empty stomachs and empty everythings that Odolghes and I finally made our getaway from the Cajutes’ fortress. No clothes except the ones we wore, no food, no pay, no means of earning any without our instrument. No toothpicks either, unless you count zither fragments, some of which I had picked up as a keepsake: it was such lovely wood. And, saddest of all when you think how hard we’d worked for it and all the risks we had run, no Miners’ stone.
Or so we thought. Right up to the moment when Odolghes decided we were far enough away from the castle for him to remove his arm, which was chafing more than usual. And then, clinging to the lower part of the arm, near where the wrist was, quite as if it were a living thing with a mind and a will and a strength of its own, we found it.
Magic? Yes, but not as magic as you might think. Nor as we thought ourselves in our first rush of amazement. Later, when we put our heads together, we worked it out and did some trials to prove it. The stone could find iron, you see, but by the same token iron could find the stone. Not at any great distance - the range was about a thumbnail’s breadth - but placed within that range the two materials, iron and stone, would seek each other out and strain to come together, quivering like the noses of two truffle hounds. It was fascinating to watch, and rather frightening when you consider that neither nose was alive.
So when Odolghes had struck out at the pile like that with his imitation arm, that is what must have happened: by incredible good luck he must have touched the stone, or at any rate come very close to touching it, and strain and quiver and seek and reach, the invisible pull had done the rest. Another long hungry journey lay ahead of us now, but this time we felt so light inside we sped across the mountains like chamois. I didn’t talk much because my voice had gone rusty from lack of exercise, but Odolghes sang at the top of his, and now and again he tossed the arm in the air, with the stone still sticking to it fast, and looked at me as he caught it again, and together we laughed and laughed.
(Chapter 6 next sunday, may 23rd 2010
Sunday, 9 May 2010
chapter 4
The ‘Guesters’ were Latrones: three of them, two men and a woman. Youngish, gawky, dressed like scarecrows - all rags and fray-ends and bits of twine. The woman stared at me and Odolghes when we came in and I was afraid for a moment she might have recognised us from the winter we had spent working in their mines, but it wasn’t that, she was just eyeing our clothes with envy. Think of being envious of my bulgy breeches.
It was the first of several visits from neighbouring tribesfolk, and since the Cajutes were very proud of having some kind of entertainment to offer and show off about, Odolghes and I were now kept very busy. After the Latrones we played for Peleghetes, Trusani, Lastojeres and for a group of noisy Ampezzani who talked in gibberish to each other all the way through, greatly annoying the King. I felt very sorry now for the birds we Miners took down the earth with us in cages, because that was what I felt like: a caged-up song bird. My fingers were starting to peel from all the playing, and Odolghes’ voice was getting hoarse.
(I felt quite sorry for the Ampezzani too, because after they had left the chamber, the King turned to the Chief Counsellor and made a slitting motion across his throat with his finger and said, ‘Schlagen!’ and the Chief Counsellor motioned back and nodded. Stiff punishment, just for not appreciating music.)
It seemed like ages before we were able to go back to our quest again, but when we did we learnt a lot. We learned, for example, that the iron works were situated close to the castle but not inside the walls, and that they were reached by an underground passage whose entrance lay in the scruffiest and remotest corner of the castle, close beside the sheep pens. We worked this out for ourselves, without so much as setting a foot down the passageway, on account of the metal dust that wafted out of the entrance and settled on the sheep’s legs and bellies, turning them black. We discovered, from seeing some children sneak into the passage laughing and then shoot out again holding their backsides and not laughing any more, that the entrance was guarded on the far side and that no casual visitors were allowed in.
The deliveries of metal puzzled us for a while because we never seemed to see or hear carts of any kind coming up the hill, but one day when we were exploring the tower in the same far-off area, trying to get a bird’s eye view of the forge and outbuildings, we felt a kind of rumble under our feet and the mystery was solved: the underground tunnel continued in the other direction as well, right down to the bottom of the hill, and it was through this unseen pathway that the carts passed on their way to the forge.
Odolghes looked very pleased about this discovery and I couldn’t think why until he explained it to me. I thought it meant the mines must be miles away from the castle. But ‘Just the opposite,’ he said. ‘It means they’re close, right under our silly noses. Why should the Cajutes go to all the bother of digging an underground passage for the iron to come through? It’s not as if they had anyone to hide it from. If it came from far afield it would come openly, along the road. No, they’re working the veins in this very hillside, and it’s in this very hillside, somewhere, in someone’s bag or someone’s pocket or in some secret place that only the person who uses it knows about, that the magic stone is kept.’
So at last we could set about our main quest. Who was it that used the magic stone or was allowed to use it, and where did they keep it when it wasn’t in use? I thought it would most likely be entrusted to the head metal scout, or else to the master smith or someone like that with a high-up job in the armoury process, but Odolghes disagreed. ‘Use your muffin, Mara, I mean Vanna,’ he said. Vanna was the new name he was supposed to call me by but he kept on forgetting. ‘It’s not the sort of thing you leave to a worker, not even a head worker. You know who used to use it in the old days when it belonged to your kinsmen? Your great grandfather in person. The other Miners knew about it and what it looked like, but he was the only one with the right to use it. My mother saw him at it, several times. He used to wait until the scouts thought they had found a good thick vein, or a good place for the diggers to start their chipping, and then he’d go down and check it for them, spreading his cloak around him like a tent so that nobody but he could see the actual way the stone performed its magic. That’s how secret it was.’
‘So you think the King is the one to watch out for, eh, Father?’ That would make things difficult. The King was hardly ever to be seen in the castle except at suppertime, and by then he was usually dribbling drunk and halfway under the table.
‘The King,’ Odolghes said, ‘or the Chief Counsellor, or the Commander of the Guard. One of these three, I should say for choice. We’ll have to keep our eyes skinned to find out which. It shouldn’t be too difficult. Whoever it is is bound to be using the passage fairly frequently, every time a metal check is needed, so all we have to do is to stay as close to the entrance as we can, as often as we can, and keep watch.’
‘And keep count.’
‘Of course, and keep count.’ I’m not sure Odolghes like me telling him what to do all the time, it may have reminded him of my mother. ‘And keep our mouths shut, dumb girl,’ he added rather tartly.
So that was what we did. Every moment we were not working we spent sitting in the far-off area by the sheep pens, trying to look natural, as if we were there because we liked the sheep and felt at home among them, but in fact observing all the comings and goings through the underground passage.
In the course of the next fortnight we saw the King go down there and out again twice, the Commander of the Guard fourteen times, once a day exactly, the Chief Counsellor twice, with the King, so that didn’t help much, not for drawing differences. And once, just once, we saw the Queen do so, all on her own, without any of her usual attendants.
Odolghes wouldn’t pay heed to me at first. For some reason (probably to do with Sommavida again and the way she bossed him) I don’t think he wanted the guardian of the stone to be a woman. But I was sure from the moment I set eyes on her that it was the Queen, the person we were looking for. She was hugely fat for one thing, and she was expecting another baby on top of it: what was she doing visiting the iron works in that condition? Certainly not in order to fit herself out with armour. And what was she doing there alone? She was never alone; always with a fluttery group of older ladies round her, winding her wool for her and straightening out her skirts and brushing away the flies and doing things she could perfectly well have done for herself. ‘Here, you Majesty, There your Majetsy, Let me, your Majesty, Oh, let me, let me.’
‘She could just be nosey,’ Odolghes said shortly, dismissing the matter. He was plumping for the Commander and his count of fourteen.
But the Queen wasn’t nosey, she was about the most droopy and lethargic member of the whole Court, and that was saying something. Odolghes hadn’t observed her properly like I had; hadn’t seen the way she huffed and puffed and trailed her fat swollen feet as she waddled down the opening of the passage, kicking up the iron-dust. She wasn’t making the trip out of curiosity or pleasure: she was going because she had to, because it was her duty.
Of course I might have been wrong: her purpose might have been quite different. But a hunch is a hunch, and my hunch was so strong that I decided to follow it up - without saying anything to Odolghes who would only have fussed about my safety. Next morning I told him I had a pain in my middle, and stayed put on the mattress while he went back to our lookout post to continue the watch over the passage. When he was gone, I got up, put on my shoes, thought better of it and put on my bed socks again, and slowly, cautiously, stopping every now and then in the shadow of the walls to make sure nobody was paying attention to me, made my way towards the large round tower where the large round Queen’s apartments were.
I had no intention really of doing anything except look, the way Odolghes recommended. (Even if I was secretly getting a bit fed up with all this caution and longed for us to be doing something more adventurous.) I reckoned either that the Queen herself would be there breakfasting, or whatever she did at this time in the morning, or else that the place would be full of her attendants, smartening things up in her absence. However, when I reached the doorway and peered inside, all was emptiness and silence, save for a boy pushing a grey rag about the floor with his foot. He stood with his back to me, so I couldn’t resist padding a little way up the staircase, just to see what went on on the floor above. I suppose it was risky, even foolhardy, but it didn’t seem so at the time, it seemed the obvious thing to do.
The stairs were wet under my socks: the boy had already wiped them. Good, that meant he wouldn’t be coming up again in a hurry. The upstairs floor, when I reached it, was dampish too. It didn’t take me long to find the Queen’s bedroom because there was only the one round room occupying all the space. It was divided into four by curtains, but the Queen’s bit was easy to recognize on account of it being much bigger and with a much wider bed. Who slept in the other sections? The little Princesses, I imagined, and the Queen’s ladies.
And perhaps the Queen’s dogs. The smell from the bedclothes was so strong it made me want to sneeze, and I put my finger under my nose just in time to stop a snorter. If I was caught downstairs I could bluff my way out of it – me being mute, the Cajutes all thought I was half-witted as well – but up here was a different matter. In next to no time I would find myself out on my ear and dangling from one of the spikes.
I drew the curtains of the Queen’s compartment together, screening myself from the rest of the room, and began looking around. Not searching for anything in particular – you couldn’t hope to search in such a higglepiggle – but just curious to see the way she lived. There was a metal pot beside the pillow. What was that for? To drink out of? Ugh! No, it was for piddling in! Just imagine keeping a piddling-pot right under your nose while you sleep. My mother would have had a fit. And what was that beside it, all covered with brownish spots? It looked like a lynx fur but, oh, no, it wasn’t a lynx fur, it wasn’t a lynx fur at all. And all those chests? What were they in aid of when the Queen and the Princesses so seldom changed their clothes?
Gingerly I opened the lid of the largest one and began examining its contents: they were clothes, they were dresses, dozens of them, all different stuffs and colours. I had never seen so many dresses before belonging to one single person. They must be part of the Queen’s dowry: outfits for a lifetime. Some of them were lovely too, with ornaments sewn on the front: corals, beads, feathers, all sorts of pretty, dangly things.
One by one, I began taking the dresses out of the chest to have a closer look at them, and laying them on the bed. From my gropings I could feel there was something else in the chest underneath, something different, harder, lumpier: maybe shoes, maybe jewels. All Miners are fascinated by jewels and I was no exception. Just as I was getting down to the interesting part, though, I heard a noise of feet on the stairway, and then voices – women’s voices. It was the Queen, or the Queen’s ladies, or both, coming back from breakfast. Help! I must cover up my traces before they found me.
Hastily I started packing the dresses back in the chest, but for some reason, perhaps because I didn’t fold them properly, they wouldn’t fit. Still more hastily, close to panic now, I yanked them out again and stuffed them under the bed, upsetting the contents of the metal pot as I did so and splashing some of the hems. Would anyone notice? I doubted it. They would notice the empty chest, though, if anyone chanced to open it. So instead of crawling under the bed with the dresses, as had been my plan, I snatched up a few of the ones that had lain on top and jumped into the chest with them, covering myself entirely (or so I hoped), then pulled shut the lid and began praying as hard as I could to the Earth Goddess to watch over me. Not that she is a very reliable deity, but she is supposed to protect Miners in tight spots, on account of all the service we do her with our digging.
I was only just in time. The footsteps were inside the room now – more than one set of them, stompity, clompity, stomp - and from my muffled position I heard a swishing noise as the curtains were swept aside, and then a groan and a creaking sound, horribly close to my ears, as someone of considerable weight plumped themselves down right on the chest where I was hidden. The Queen?
‘Fatty’s slopped her night-pot again,’ said a voice. Or something of this kind: many words of the Cajutes’ language were still strange to me but I could nearly always pick up the gist. ‘Dirty swinchen. Lazy hen.’
No, it was not the Queen. And yes, whoever it was had noticed the spillage.
‘All the better,’ said another voice, and there came a great thud as its owner flopped down on what I presumed from the sound of it was the Queen’s mattress. ‘Less work for us.’
‘Gerrup, you ninny!’ came a third voice, an older sounding one. ‘Off the bed. She’ll have you skinned if she finds you there.’ But the order was given without much drive, and shortly afterwards there was another, lighter flop and a murmur of, ‘Move over, then, make room for a littl’un,’ as the older speaker joined her colleague on the mattress.
After this there was silence, at first welcome, but then, as it began to be riven by grunts and one or two actual snores, rather worrying. I could foresee the chest, which had been my refuge, turning into a death-snare. I tried to move the lid a titch to let some air in, but it was useless, you might as well try to move aside a mountain. It is the Miners’ nightmare to be buried alive under a heavy weight; the stories I was told as a tiny child were always full of it: villains being crushed by landslides, heroes wiggling their way out of underground prisons. We call it the Mouse’s End – ‘u Fin du Ratt’ – and now it looked as if I might be going to suffer it myself. Oh, Earth Goddess, I pleaded silently, hear me! Do something, I beg of you! Save me from such a fate!
The Earth Goddess gave no sign – trust her. So to take my mind off things I began feeling around with my fingers, trying to identify the objects underneath me in the bottom of the chest. As I thought, they were mostly trinkets and jewellery, and very uncomfortable too if you had to lie on them for any length of time. I began cautiously to shift the sharpest objects to one side, out of spiking distance. If I could still bother about that, it struck me that suffocation was not yet a problem: air must be getting in somehow even if I couldn’t see from where. This calmed me down a bit, and from the jewellery I passed to the dresses, which were easier to get at, being on top. What sort of fastenings did they have? How well were they sewn? Did they have any pockets? And if so, was there anything interesting inside?
Timewise, I suppose, it must have been round about now that I made my great discovery, but what with the fright and the kafuffle its significance didn’t sink in till later, when I was telling Odolghes all about it in the safety of our hut. I remember coming across the three identical little secret pouches, sewn into each dress at exactly the same spot, and remember probing my fingers into them by turn and feeling the same prickly, gritty substance inside that clung to my fingertips and slid under my nails, but I think that was as far as I got.
I must have made a noise, you see, or made some sudden movement. Large posteriors are probably more sensitive than we give them credit for. Anyway, one moment I was lying there in total darkness, fiddling around with these pocket arrangements and their contents of grainy powder, drawing my conclusions or not as may be, and the next moment a bright shaft of light shot down the side of the chest as the lid was taken off.
I still couldn’t see anything but material: the dresses luckily covered me completely, but I could hear much more clearly than before. And what I heard made my scalp prickle. My hiding place had been discovered and I was being ordered, in the plainest possible terms, to leave it. ‘Yaar! Gotcha! Come on out, you little varmint! I know you’re there, I heard you scratching around!’
I was about to obey – it seemed I had no choice – but then the voices of the other two ladies, aroused from their slumbers, started to join in, and I decided to stay where I was.
‘Wàswara?’ they shrieked together. ‘Wàswaraaa?!’ And I heard the bedboards creak as they leaped off the mattress to their feet. Was it a snake? Was it a rat? Let it be, Hedjar, for the sake of gravy! Don’t go prodding around or the wretched thing would bolt and then they wouldn’t know where it was. Better in the chest than running loose around the room. Ugger! Shugger! Eeeyak! Horrors! I have never heard such a fuss over a small wild animal, which was fortunately what they thought I was. These ladies should have taken a turn down the mines.
‘I think it’s a rat, not a snake,’ the Hedjar woman said, her voice fading a little as she backed away. She was evidently braver than the other two, but not that brave. ‘A big one. Un grosser. I’ll show it, the cheeky beast, scrabbling about right under my you-know-what!’ And through the folds of the dress that covered me I saw the point of something – maybe a stick, maybe the tip of a shoe – make a light dent in the material and then a heavier one.
One toe’s breadth deeper and I really would have been done for, but the fright of the woman’s two companions must have been catching. Either that or else they must have bounded towards her and grabbed her, because amidst a noise of crashing and flapping and struggling, the stick or shoe or whatever it was suddenly withdrawn, and the next thing I heard was the sound of all six of their feet clattering across the room and down the stairway to safety.
So the end of the mouse is not always a bad one, not when there are stout-hearted warrior ladies like that around. Quickly, before anyone else arrived on the scene, I climbed out of the chest, piled all the dresses back into it any old how – the mouse would take the blame for the untidiness – and slipped across the room and down the stairs the way I had come in. Past the boy, past the three women, who were still there shouting orders at him, and out into the open unnoticed. I must say, I was glad to see the sky.
(Chapter 5 coming up next Sunday, 16 May 2010)
It was the first of several visits from neighbouring tribesfolk, and since the Cajutes were very proud of having some kind of entertainment to offer and show off about, Odolghes and I were now kept very busy. After the Latrones we played for Peleghetes, Trusani, Lastojeres and for a group of noisy Ampezzani who talked in gibberish to each other all the way through, greatly annoying the King. I felt very sorry now for the birds we Miners took down the earth with us in cages, because that was what I felt like: a caged-up song bird. My fingers were starting to peel from all the playing, and Odolghes’ voice was getting hoarse.
(I felt quite sorry for the Ampezzani too, because after they had left the chamber, the King turned to the Chief Counsellor and made a slitting motion across his throat with his finger and said, ‘Schlagen!’ and the Chief Counsellor motioned back and nodded. Stiff punishment, just for not appreciating music.)
It seemed like ages before we were able to go back to our quest again, but when we did we learnt a lot. We learned, for example, that the iron works were situated close to the castle but not inside the walls, and that they were reached by an underground passage whose entrance lay in the scruffiest and remotest corner of the castle, close beside the sheep pens. We worked this out for ourselves, without so much as setting a foot down the passageway, on account of the metal dust that wafted out of the entrance and settled on the sheep’s legs and bellies, turning them black. We discovered, from seeing some children sneak into the passage laughing and then shoot out again holding their backsides and not laughing any more, that the entrance was guarded on the far side and that no casual visitors were allowed in.
The deliveries of metal puzzled us for a while because we never seemed to see or hear carts of any kind coming up the hill, but one day when we were exploring the tower in the same far-off area, trying to get a bird’s eye view of the forge and outbuildings, we felt a kind of rumble under our feet and the mystery was solved: the underground tunnel continued in the other direction as well, right down to the bottom of the hill, and it was through this unseen pathway that the carts passed on their way to the forge.
Odolghes looked very pleased about this discovery and I couldn’t think why until he explained it to me. I thought it meant the mines must be miles away from the castle. But ‘Just the opposite,’ he said. ‘It means they’re close, right under our silly noses. Why should the Cajutes go to all the bother of digging an underground passage for the iron to come through? It’s not as if they had anyone to hide it from. If it came from far afield it would come openly, along the road. No, they’re working the veins in this very hillside, and it’s in this very hillside, somewhere, in someone’s bag or someone’s pocket or in some secret place that only the person who uses it knows about, that the magic stone is kept.’
So at last we could set about our main quest. Who was it that used the magic stone or was allowed to use it, and where did they keep it when it wasn’t in use? I thought it would most likely be entrusted to the head metal scout, or else to the master smith or someone like that with a high-up job in the armoury process, but Odolghes disagreed. ‘Use your muffin, Mara, I mean Vanna,’ he said. Vanna was the new name he was supposed to call me by but he kept on forgetting. ‘It’s not the sort of thing you leave to a worker, not even a head worker. You know who used to use it in the old days when it belonged to your kinsmen? Your great grandfather in person. The other Miners knew about it and what it looked like, but he was the only one with the right to use it. My mother saw him at it, several times. He used to wait until the scouts thought they had found a good thick vein, or a good place for the diggers to start their chipping, and then he’d go down and check it for them, spreading his cloak around him like a tent so that nobody but he could see the actual way the stone performed its magic. That’s how secret it was.’
‘So you think the King is the one to watch out for, eh, Father?’ That would make things difficult. The King was hardly ever to be seen in the castle except at suppertime, and by then he was usually dribbling drunk and halfway under the table.
‘The King,’ Odolghes said, ‘or the Chief Counsellor, or the Commander of the Guard. One of these three, I should say for choice. We’ll have to keep our eyes skinned to find out which. It shouldn’t be too difficult. Whoever it is is bound to be using the passage fairly frequently, every time a metal check is needed, so all we have to do is to stay as close to the entrance as we can, as often as we can, and keep watch.’
‘And keep count.’
‘Of course, and keep count.’ I’m not sure Odolghes like me telling him what to do all the time, it may have reminded him of my mother. ‘And keep our mouths shut, dumb girl,’ he added rather tartly.
So that was what we did. Every moment we were not working we spent sitting in the far-off area by the sheep pens, trying to look natural, as if we were there because we liked the sheep and felt at home among them, but in fact observing all the comings and goings through the underground passage.
In the course of the next fortnight we saw the King go down there and out again twice, the Commander of the Guard fourteen times, once a day exactly, the Chief Counsellor twice, with the King, so that didn’t help much, not for drawing differences. And once, just once, we saw the Queen do so, all on her own, without any of her usual attendants.
Odolghes wouldn’t pay heed to me at first. For some reason (probably to do with Sommavida again and the way she bossed him) I don’t think he wanted the guardian of the stone to be a woman. But I was sure from the moment I set eyes on her that it was the Queen, the person we were looking for. She was hugely fat for one thing, and she was expecting another baby on top of it: what was she doing visiting the iron works in that condition? Certainly not in order to fit herself out with armour. And what was she doing there alone? She was never alone; always with a fluttery group of older ladies round her, winding her wool for her and straightening out her skirts and brushing away the flies and doing things she could perfectly well have done for herself. ‘Here, you Majesty, There your Majetsy, Let me, your Majesty, Oh, let me, let me.’
‘She could just be nosey,’ Odolghes said shortly, dismissing the matter. He was plumping for the Commander and his count of fourteen.
But the Queen wasn’t nosey, she was about the most droopy and lethargic member of the whole Court, and that was saying something. Odolghes hadn’t observed her properly like I had; hadn’t seen the way she huffed and puffed and trailed her fat swollen feet as she waddled down the opening of the passage, kicking up the iron-dust. She wasn’t making the trip out of curiosity or pleasure: she was going because she had to, because it was her duty.
Of course I might have been wrong: her purpose might have been quite different. But a hunch is a hunch, and my hunch was so strong that I decided to follow it up - without saying anything to Odolghes who would only have fussed about my safety. Next morning I told him I had a pain in my middle, and stayed put on the mattress while he went back to our lookout post to continue the watch over the passage. When he was gone, I got up, put on my shoes, thought better of it and put on my bed socks again, and slowly, cautiously, stopping every now and then in the shadow of the walls to make sure nobody was paying attention to me, made my way towards the large round tower where the large round Queen’s apartments were.
I had no intention really of doing anything except look, the way Odolghes recommended. (Even if I was secretly getting a bit fed up with all this caution and longed for us to be doing something more adventurous.) I reckoned either that the Queen herself would be there breakfasting, or whatever she did at this time in the morning, or else that the place would be full of her attendants, smartening things up in her absence. However, when I reached the doorway and peered inside, all was emptiness and silence, save for a boy pushing a grey rag about the floor with his foot. He stood with his back to me, so I couldn’t resist padding a little way up the staircase, just to see what went on on the floor above. I suppose it was risky, even foolhardy, but it didn’t seem so at the time, it seemed the obvious thing to do.
The stairs were wet under my socks: the boy had already wiped them. Good, that meant he wouldn’t be coming up again in a hurry. The upstairs floor, when I reached it, was dampish too. It didn’t take me long to find the Queen’s bedroom because there was only the one round room occupying all the space. It was divided into four by curtains, but the Queen’s bit was easy to recognize on account of it being much bigger and with a much wider bed. Who slept in the other sections? The little Princesses, I imagined, and the Queen’s ladies.
And perhaps the Queen’s dogs. The smell from the bedclothes was so strong it made me want to sneeze, and I put my finger under my nose just in time to stop a snorter. If I was caught downstairs I could bluff my way out of it – me being mute, the Cajutes all thought I was half-witted as well – but up here was a different matter. In next to no time I would find myself out on my ear and dangling from one of the spikes.
I drew the curtains of the Queen’s compartment together, screening myself from the rest of the room, and began looking around. Not searching for anything in particular – you couldn’t hope to search in such a higglepiggle – but just curious to see the way she lived. There was a metal pot beside the pillow. What was that for? To drink out of? Ugh! No, it was for piddling in! Just imagine keeping a piddling-pot right under your nose while you sleep. My mother would have had a fit. And what was that beside it, all covered with brownish spots? It looked like a lynx fur but, oh, no, it wasn’t a lynx fur, it wasn’t a lynx fur at all. And all those chests? What were they in aid of when the Queen and the Princesses so seldom changed their clothes?
Gingerly I opened the lid of the largest one and began examining its contents: they were clothes, they were dresses, dozens of them, all different stuffs and colours. I had never seen so many dresses before belonging to one single person. They must be part of the Queen’s dowry: outfits for a lifetime. Some of them were lovely too, with ornaments sewn on the front: corals, beads, feathers, all sorts of pretty, dangly things.
One by one, I began taking the dresses out of the chest to have a closer look at them, and laying them on the bed. From my gropings I could feel there was something else in the chest underneath, something different, harder, lumpier: maybe shoes, maybe jewels. All Miners are fascinated by jewels and I was no exception. Just as I was getting down to the interesting part, though, I heard a noise of feet on the stairway, and then voices – women’s voices. It was the Queen, or the Queen’s ladies, or both, coming back from breakfast. Help! I must cover up my traces before they found me.
Hastily I started packing the dresses back in the chest, but for some reason, perhaps because I didn’t fold them properly, they wouldn’t fit. Still more hastily, close to panic now, I yanked them out again and stuffed them under the bed, upsetting the contents of the metal pot as I did so and splashing some of the hems. Would anyone notice? I doubted it. They would notice the empty chest, though, if anyone chanced to open it. So instead of crawling under the bed with the dresses, as had been my plan, I snatched up a few of the ones that had lain on top and jumped into the chest with them, covering myself entirely (or so I hoped), then pulled shut the lid and began praying as hard as I could to the Earth Goddess to watch over me. Not that she is a very reliable deity, but she is supposed to protect Miners in tight spots, on account of all the service we do her with our digging.
I was only just in time. The footsteps were inside the room now – more than one set of them, stompity, clompity, stomp - and from my muffled position I heard a swishing noise as the curtains were swept aside, and then a groan and a creaking sound, horribly close to my ears, as someone of considerable weight plumped themselves down right on the chest where I was hidden. The Queen?
‘Fatty’s slopped her night-pot again,’ said a voice. Or something of this kind: many words of the Cajutes’ language were still strange to me but I could nearly always pick up the gist. ‘Dirty swinchen. Lazy hen.’
No, it was not the Queen. And yes, whoever it was had noticed the spillage.
‘All the better,’ said another voice, and there came a great thud as its owner flopped down on what I presumed from the sound of it was the Queen’s mattress. ‘Less work for us.’
‘Gerrup, you ninny!’ came a third voice, an older sounding one. ‘Off the bed. She’ll have you skinned if she finds you there.’ But the order was given without much drive, and shortly afterwards there was another, lighter flop and a murmur of, ‘Move over, then, make room for a littl’un,’ as the older speaker joined her colleague on the mattress.
After this there was silence, at first welcome, but then, as it began to be riven by grunts and one or two actual snores, rather worrying. I could foresee the chest, which had been my refuge, turning into a death-snare. I tried to move the lid a titch to let some air in, but it was useless, you might as well try to move aside a mountain. It is the Miners’ nightmare to be buried alive under a heavy weight; the stories I was told as a tiny child were always full of it: villains being crushed by landslides, heroes wiggling their way out of underground prisons. We call it the Mouse’s End – ‘u Fin du Ratt’ – and now it looked as if I might be going to suffer it myself. Oh, Earth Goddess, I pleaded silently, hear me! Do something, I beg of you! Save me from such a fate!
The Earth Goddess gave no sign – trust her. So to take my mind off things I began feeling around with my fingers, trying to identify the objects underneath me in the bottom of the chest. As I thought, they were mostly trinkets and jewellery, and very uncomfortable too if you had to lie on them for any length of time. I began cautiously to shift the sharpest objects to one side, out of spiking distance. If I could still bother about that, it struck me that suffocation was not yet a problem: air must be getting in somehow even if I couldn’t see from where. This calmed me down a bit, and from the jewellery I passed to the dresses, which were easier to get at, being on top. What sort of fastenings did they have? How well were they sewn? Did they have any pockets? And if so, was there anything interesting inside?
Timewise, I suppose, it must have been round about now that I made my great discovery, but what with the fright and the kafuffle its significance didn’t sink in till later, when I was telling Odolghes all about it in the safety of our hut. I remember coming across the three identical little secret pouches, sewn into each dress at exactly the same spot, and remember probing my fingers into them by turn and feeling the same prickly, gritty substance inside that clung to my fingertips and slid under my nails, but I think that was as far as I got.
I must have made a noise, you see, or made some sudden movement. Large posteriors are probably more sensitive than we give them credit for. Anyway, one moment I was lying there in total darkness, fiddling around with these pocket arrangements and their contents of grainy powder, drawing my conclusions or not as may be, and the next moment a bright shaft of light shot down the side of the chest as the lid was taken off.
I still couldn’t see anything but material: the dresses luckily covered me completely, but I could hear much more clearly than before. And what I heard made my scalp prickle. My hiding place had been discovered and I was being ordered, in the plainest possible terms, to leave it. ‘Yaar! Gotcha! Come on out, you little varmint! I know you’re there, I heard you scratching around!’
I was about to obey – it seemed I had no choice – but then the voices of the other two ladies, aroused from their slumbers, started to join in, and I decided to stay where I was.
‘Wàswara?’ they shrieked together. ‘Wàswaraaa?!’ And I heard the bedboards creak as they leaped off the mattress to their feet. Was it a snake? Was it a rat? Let it be, Hedjar, for the sake of gravy! Don’t go prodding around or the wretched thing would bolt and then they wouldn’t know where it was. Better in the chest than running loose around the room. Ugger! Shugger! Eeeyak! Horrors! I have never heard such a fuss over a small wild animal, which was fortunately what they thought I was. These ladies should have taken a turn down the mines.
‘I think it’s a rat, not a snake,’ the Hedjar woman said, her voice fading a little as she backed away. She was evidently braver than the other two, but not that brave. ‘A big one. Un grosser. I’ll show it, the cheeky beast, scrabbling about right under my you-know-what!’ And through the folds of the dress that covered me I saw the point of something – maybe a stick, maybe the tip of a shoe – make a light dent in the material and then a heavier one.
One toe’s breadth deeper and I really would have been done for, but the fright of the woman’s two companions must have been catching. Either that or else they must have bounded towards her and grabbed her, because amidst a noise of crashing and flapping and struggling, the stick or shoe or whatever it was suddenly withdrawn, and the next thing I heard was the sound of all six of their feet clattering across the room and down the stairway to safety.
So the end of the mouse is not always a bad one, not when there are stout-hearted warrior ladies like that around. Quickly, before anyone else arrived on the scene, I climbed out of the chest, piled all the dresses back into it any old how – the mouse would take the blame for the untidiness – and slipped across the room and down the stairs the way I had come in. Past the boy, past the three women, who were still there shouting orders at him, and out into the open unnoticed. I must say, I was glad to see the sky.
(Chapter 5 coming up next Sunday, 16 May 2010)
Wednesday, 5 May 2010
chapter 3
At first, far from making up for lost time, we lost still more of it: I had no more idea the Odolghes did where the Cajutes’ stronghold lay, and we stumbled around the mountains for another whole day and night, getting tireder and tireder and hungrier and hungrier, before we finally met up with some shepherds who put us on the right track. And even then the way was so long it was almost sundown when we came out of the shadows of the last valley and caught sight of the castle on a pink-lit hill before us.
I had never seen a real castle at close range before, except once, in winter, when we did some mining work for the Latrones. Who are a shabby sort of tribe anyway, and keep their livestock indoors with them and live much the same easy-going, muck-and-manger life.
The home of the Cajutes was altogether different. It was a huge stone dwelling in the shape of a slightly wonky necklace, covering the entire hilltop, with high walls running all the way round and towers let into them at intervals, like beads. On top of the walls were wooden spikes, thick as bullocks’ shinbones, pointing outwards in an unfriendly fashion, and on top of the towers were piles of just as unfriendly looking stones. Like a well made necklace, too, at first sight you could hardly see where the opening was, but as my father and I drew nearer we caught sight of a narrow black slit at the base of one of the towers, which we imagined, for want of any other hole to choose from, must be the entrance.
‘How do the horses get in without being squashed?’ I whispered to Odolghes, scarcely moving my lips. We were still too far away for anyone to see us but I reckoned it was best to be careful.
‘Hang the horses!’ he said crossly, so I realised he was a bit jumpier than he let on. ‘How do we get in without being squashed? There are sentinels posted on every blasted tower. Look, you can see the points of their helmets sticking up behind the crenels.’
I couldn’t see anything, but then my eyes aren’t very good, never were. Mole eyes as Alexa called them. Maybe it’d have helped if I’d known what crenels were. ‘Wave your zither at them, Father,’ I suggested. ‘Start up some music so they know we’re not dangerous.’
Odolghes nodded and unstrapped the zither and passed it on to me. We were dangerous, he said in a tough voice meant to reassure both of us; we were dangerous as wolves if only the Cajutes knew it. ‘And you start up the music, Bossy Breeches. That’s what you’re here for.’
So, my fingers trembling a little, I began playing a few strummy bits on the zither, and Odolghes, rather too loudly to sound comfortable, began singing one of his back-to-front songs, and in this way we approached the castle, right up to the door, without any trouble at all, not even a stone in our faces.
The Cajutes must have been keener on music than we’d dared hope, and starved of it too, because there was a whole crowd of them waiting inside the narrow doorway to meet us, eyes popping and mouths gaping and feet jiggling up and down in the rudiments of a clumsy dance. Not at all the ferocious welcome we had feared from the spikes.
But not a kind welcome either, more of a greedy sniffing at something appetizing that had come their way. Their language was quite similar to ours really, though they spoke it with a funny accent, so I was able to pick up some of their words straight away. Speelers, they gabbled to one another excitedly, Sengers (meaning singers). Guk at en (look at them) – un mon end un kidden. (That was me, the kidden.) Wofon kommen en? Wàswara wollen en? Was it safe (their word was ‘sikker’, like our ‘secure’) to let us in?
Although maybe I am wrong and they were talking about sicker in the sense of disease, because they drew back a bit now and made signs at us to open our mouths and undo our clothing at the neck and bare our chests at them, and didn’t in fact let us past the door until they had looked us all over like livestock at a fair. It was a good thing they didn’t touch as well as look, or they might easily have discovered the iron arm, and with it Odolghes’ identity, but all they did when they noticed it hanging lifeless by his side was to point to it and say, ‘Brocken?’ To which Odolghes replied, ‘Brocken’, and that was it.
And the music, they wanted to know? The kidden would play the music? Yes, the mon would sing and the kidden would play the music. The kidden wouldn’t sing because the kidden’s voice was brocken like the mon’s arm, but the kidden would play the music.
If the outside of the castle was grand, the inside knocked me speechless (really speechless, not just pretending) by its finery and the number of things it contained. There were rooms for everything: for cooking in, for eating in, for sleeping in, even for dawdling around and talking in, the way most of the high rank Cajutes seemed to do most of the time. The rooms weren’t just empty shelters either, like our Miners’ tents, there were cupboards in them to keep things in – bundled away, out of sight – and tables to put things on, and hooks to hang things on, and shelves for stacking and chairs for sitting and hammocks for reclining and little low footstools for propping up the feet: every sort of contraption for making life comfortable.
Odolghes seemed to take all this splendour in his stride and told me, later that night when we were safe in our sleeping quarters near the kennels, that Fànes had been grander still, grander that I could ever imagine, with embroidered hangings on the walls and copper candlesticks and cushions stuffed with feathers to rest your backside on, and fancy things like that. But whether this was true or he was just boasting, to me our new surroundings were quite magnificent enough.
I wish I could say the same for the Cajutes themselves, only I can’t; I find it hard to say anything nice about them at all. That first evening at their court I was too tired and hungry and worried about playing properly to notice much about them; all I remember is a line of wobbly faces staring down at Odolghes and me from behind the grease-lamps on the high table, tilting this way and that as the diners listened to our music, and later on a jumble of legs and skirts and feet and corns, very close to us, as all of them – eaters and servers and cooks and children – took to the floor in a wild after-supper stampede. Next day, however, I began to pick out details and to realise that, for all their riches, we had indeed entered the homestead of a very rough and savage lot of people. It showed in various things: in the way they groomed their hair, for example, or the way they didn’t groom it but twisted it up in a fat-smeared topknot and left it there, never more to disturb save for poking in a bodkin now and again to still the itching. Men, women, even children, even babies, it made no difference, all sported the same greasy, wispy knobble. It showed in the way they wore their clothes, which, fine though they were, they seldom changed, not even to go to bed. And it showed in the beds themselves: feathered and pungent as the earths of foxes and, like them, full of scraps of left-over food for the occupant to chew on at night, or else breakfast on without bothering to leave the bed.
Because, gracious, they were an idle lot for a warrior race. Miners aren’t that famous for their cleanliness, I know, but at least we have a reason for being dirty, and at least we try to get the worst of the grime off. These people, no, they seemed to glory in it. I saw one of the women change her baby’s dress once (it must have got too small for the child to wear), and, I swear, the discarded dress, instead of flopping to the ground, stood straight up like a tent, it was so stiff with ugg.
‘A nos ne san valel nia,’ as the Fanes say, according to Odolghes who had taken to speaking to me in his own language now when we were alone. No business of ours. But it wasn’t just the dirt, or the smells, or the way they peed (and worse) wherever they happened to be standing, or the way they kept the blood on their hands after hunting and licked at it, and messy things like that, it was the sullenness of their characters that really made them so unpleasant to live with and work for. They rarely smiled; their eyes rarely lit up, either with interest or with anything else. Even when they danced there was something dull about them, something heavy and plodding and ox-like that prevented them from having what I call fun.
Odolghes and I had feared questions, but after the first quizzing on our arrival they didn’t ask us any. We were there to serve them music when they felt like it, not to speak to or bother about. What we did for the rest of the time didn’t concern them, any more than it concerned them what the dogs did in the kennels next door when they were not wanted for hunting.
We were the ones anxious for information. Whereabouts were the Cajutes’ metal works now that they did their own excavating and forging? Were they inside the castle precincts or somewhere outside? Where did they store their metal? Where did it come from? Who brought it to the works, and when, and how often? Until we knew the answers to these questions our search for the magic stone couldn’t even begin. And both of us, I think, were becoming more and more eager with every passing day not only to begin it but to end it as soon as possible.
Lacking the language and not wanting to draw a shred of attention to ourselves, not even from the castle cats, we started by just looking. Roaming around the various courtyards, pretending to practise our songs, and looking for all we were worth. Music was hardly ever called for in the daytime except when there was a hunting party setting off or the Queen felt whimsy, so we were usually free to go where we liked. Nobody seemed to mind us, nobody seemed to care. Sometimes one of the guards - probably an officer, only they were all so crusty it was difficult to tell - would prod his scabbard into my father’s stomach and grunt, ‘Seng!’ at him, and we would have to do as we were bid and seng; but usually they just let us go on our way without comment, chewing on whatever plant it was they chewed all day long and scratching their mail-clad backs against the wall.
One or two of the smaller children sometimes showed a bit more interest, staring at me with my zither and pointing and making hopeful ‘Brrm’ noises, but usually its mother clapped it on the head to silence it and hauled it away. Not angrily, just forcefully, the way you would haul a hay bale.
‘They’re so slack we could steal anything from them,’ I whispered to Odolghes after our first stroll, which had taken us to the bakery and the dairy but no further. Free to roam we might be, but we wanted things to stay that way.
He shook his head and told me not to count on it. They were confident, he said, they had nothing to fear, and why should they? There was no other tribe could match their strength, not while they’d got the stone to find their metal for them.
Mmmn, I agreed, only half convinced, but what if they didn’t have the stone? Odolghes seemed so sure they must, but what if this Mulebones character or whatever his name was had kept it for himself? Sold the secret of the iron making but kept the stone for future use? That’s what a really clever person would have done, surely? And by all accounts Mulebones was the cleverest man alive.
Odolghes shrugged his shoulders and winced: the arm didn’t fit very well and often bothered him. Seeing that we were alone in our hut and unlikely to be needed till evening he began unstrapping it, but then thought better and let it be. ‘Alive…’ he said slowly, as if weighing the word inside his head or testing it out in some way. ‘Hmm, alive. Now that’s one thing he can’t be. You may be right about the stone, my sweet: it is just possible Mulebones hung on to it, or tried to, although I think it very unlikely, knowing how greedy he was for the gold. But that he’s still alive, no, that’s out of the question. His hair was white already when I knew him. All of it.’
White? All white hair? That was more unusual in people than in horses; I didn’t think I had ever seen anyone with all white hair. Streaky, yes, like my grandfather’s, but not all over white. I was very relieved I’d never have to meet such a man, although for some reason he fascinated me, this Mulebones, and I wanted to know more about him. ‘If he’s dead like you say,’ I insisted, ‘then where’s all the gold got to? What did he do with it? Who did he leave it to?’
My father forgot his arm and shrugged again, and winced again. ‘That,’ he said, ‘is something we’ll probably never know, but we won’t let it bother us either. Once we have the stone, and some proper organisation, we can turn it into as much gold as we like.’
Could we, I wondered? How? But I didn’t have time to ask because at that very instant a young Cajute soldier barged into the hut without warning and clicked his fingers at us and said we were wanted in the great hall, on account of there being ‘Guesters’.
How wise Odolghes had been to keep his arm on. I promised myself to follow his example and play safe always. I had seen the spikes on the wall at close range now and noticed some very nasty bits and pieces clinging to them, not unlike the pumpkins of Alexa’s description.
(Chapter 4 coming up next Monday, May 10 2010)
I had never seen a real castle at close range before, except once, in winter, when we did some mining work for the Latrones. Who are a shabby sort of tribe anyway, and keep their livestock indoors with them and live much the same easy-going, muck-and-manger life.
The home of the Cajutes was altogether different. It was a huge stone dwelling in the shape of a slightly wonky necklace, covering the entire hilltop, with high walls running all the way round and towers let into them at intervals, like beads. On top of the walls were wooden spikes, thick as bullocks’ shinbones, pointing outwards in an unfriendly fashion, and on top of the towers were piles of just as unfriendly looking stones. Like a well made necklace, too, at first sight you could hardly see where the opening was, but as my father and I drew nearer we caught sight of a narrow black slit at the base of one of the towers, which we imagined, for want of any other hole to choose from, must be the entrance.
‘How do the horses get in without being squashed?’ I whispered to Odolghes, scarcely moving my lips. We were still too far away for anyone to see us but I reckoned it was best to be careful.
‘Hang the horses!’ he said crossly, so I realised he was a bit jumpier than he let on. ‘How do we get in without being squashed? There are sentinels posted on every blasted tower. Look, you can see the points of their helmets sticking up behind the crenels.’
I couldn’t see anything, but then my eyes aren’t very good, never were. Mole eyes as Alexa called them. Maybe it’d have helped if I’d known what crenels were. ‘Wave your zither at them, Father,’ I suggested. ‘Start up some music so they know we’re not dangerous.’
Odolghes nodded and unstrapped the zither and passed it on to me. We were dangerous, he said in a tough voice meant to reassure both of us; we were dangerous as wolves if only the Cajutes knew it. ‘And you start up the music, Bossy Breeches. That’s what you’re here for.’
So, my fingers trembling a little, I began playing a few strummy bits on the zither, and Odolghes, rather too loudly to sound comfortable, began singing one of his back-to-front songs, and in this way we approached the castle, right up to the door, without any trouble at all, not even a stone in our faces.
The Cajutes must have been keener on music than we’d dared hope, and starved of it too, because there was a whole crowd of them waiting inside the narrow doorway to meet us, eyes popping and mouths gaping and feet jiggling up and down in the rudiments of a clumsy dance. Not at all the ferocious welcome we had feared from the spikes.
But not a kind welcome either, more of a greedy sniffing at something appetizing that had come their way. Their language was quite similar to ours really, though they spoke it with a funny accent, so I was able to pick up some of their words straight away. Speelers, they gabbled to one another excitedly, Sengers (meaning singers). Guk at en (look at them) – un mon end un kidden. (That was me, the kidden.) Wofon kommen en? Wàswara wollen en? Was it safe (their word was ‘sikker’, like our ‘secure’) to let us in?
Although maybe I am wrong and they were talking about sicker in the sense of disease, because they drew back a bit now and made signs at us to open our mouths and undo our clothing at the neck and bare our chests at them, and didn’t in fact let us past the door until they had looked us all over like livestock at a fair. It was a good thing they didn’t touch as well as look, or they might easily have discovered the iron arm, and with it Odolghes’ identity, but all they did when they noticed it hanging lifeless by his side was to point to it and say, ‘Brocken?’ To which Odolghes replied, ‘Brocken’, and that was it.
And the music, they wanted to know? The kidden would play the music? Yes, the mon would sing and the kidden would play the music. The kidden wouldn’t sing because the kidden’s voice was brocken like the mon’s arm, but the kidden would play the music.
If the outside of the castle was grand, the inside knocked me speechless (really speechless, not just pretending) by its finery and the number of things it contained. There were rooms for everything: for cooking in, for eating in, for sleeping in, even for dawdling around and talking in, the way most of the high rank Cajutes seemed to do most of the time. The rooms weren’t just empty shelters either, like our Miners’ tents, there were cupboards in them to keep things in – bundled away, out of sight – and tables to put things on, and hooks to hang things on, and shelves for stacking and chairs for sitting and hammocks for reclining and little low footstools for propping up the feet: every sort of contraption for making life comfortable.
Odolghes seemed to take all this splendour in his stride and told me, later that night when we were safe in our sleeping quarters near the kennels, that Fànes had been grander still, grander that I could ever imagine, with embroidered hangings on the walls and copper candlesticks and cushions stuffed with feathers to rest your backside on, and fancy things like that. But whether this was true or he was just boasting, to me our new surroundings were quite magnificent enough.
I wish I could say the same for the Cajutes themselves, only I can’t; I find it hard to say anything nice about them at all. That first evening at their court I was too tired and hungry and worried about playing properly to notice much about them; all I remember is a line of wobbly faces staring down at Odolghes and me from behind the grease-lamps on the high table, tilting this way and that as the diners listened to our music, and later on a jumble of legs and skirts and feet and corns, very close to us, as all of them – eaters and servers and cooks and children – took to the floor in a wild after-supper stampede. Next day, however, I began to pick out details and to realise that, for all their riches, we had indeed entered the homestead of a very rough and savage lot of people. It showed in various things: in the way they groomed their hair, for example, or the way they didn’t groom it but twisted it up in a fat-smeared topknot and left it there, never more to disturb save for poking in a bodkin now and again to still the itching. Men, women, even children, even babies, it made no difference, all sported the same greasy, wispy knobble. It showed in the way they wore their clothes, which, fine though they were, they seldom changed, not even to go to bed. And it showed in the beds themselves: feathered and pungent as the earths of foxes and, like them, full of scraps of left-over food for the occupant to chew on at night, or else breakfast on without bothering to leave the bed.
Because, gracious, they were an idle lot for a warrior race. Miners aren’t that famous for their cleanliness, I know, but at least we have a reason for being dirty, and at least we try to get the worst of the grime off. These people, no, they seemed to glory in it. I saw one of the women change her baby’s dress once (it must have got too small for the child to wear), and, I swear, the discarded dress, instead of flopping to the ground, stood straight up like a tent, it was so stiff with ugg.
‘A nos ne san valel nia,’ as the Fanes say, according to Odolghes who had taken to speaking to me in his own language now when we were alone. No business of ours. But it wasn’t just the dirt, or the smells, or the way they peed (and worse) wherever they happened to be standing, or the way they kept the blood on their hands after hunting and licked at it, and messy things like that, it was the sullenness of their characters that really made them so unpleasant to live with and work for. They rarely smiled; their eyes rarely lit up, either with interest or with anything else. Even when they danced there was something dull about them, something heavy and plodding and ox-like that prevented them from having what I call fun.
Odolghes and I had feared questions, but after the first quizzing on our arrival they didn’t ask us any. We were there to serve them music when they felt like it, not to speak to or bother about. What we did for the rest of the time didn’t concern them, any more than it concerned them what the dogs did in the kennels next door when they were not wanted for hunting.
We were the ones anxious for information. Whereabouts were the Cajutes’ metal works now that they did their own excavating and forging? Were they inside the castle precincts or somewhere outside? Where did they store their metal? Where did it come from? Who brought it to the works, and when, and how often? Until we knew the answers to these questions our search for the magic stone couldn’t even begin. And both of us, I think, were becoming more and more eager with every passing day not only to begin it but to end it as soon as possible.
Lacking the language and not wanting to draw a shred of attention to ourselves, not even from the castle cats, we started by just looking. Roaming around the various courtyards, pretending to practise our songs, and looking for all we were worth. Music was hardly ever called for in the daytime except when there was a hunting party setting off or the Queen felt whimsy, so we were usually free to go where we liked. Nobody seemed to mind us, nobody seemed to care. Sometimes one of the guards - probably an officer, only they were all so crusty it was difficult to tell - would prod his scabbard into my father’s stomach and grunt, ‘Seng!’ at him, and we would have to do as we were bid and seng; but usually they just let us go on our way without comment, chewing on whatever plant it was they chewed all day long and scratching their mail-clad backs against the wall.
One or two of the smaller children sometimes showed a bit more interest, staring at me with my zither and pointing and making hopeful ‘Brrm’ noises, but usually its mother clapped it on the head to silence it and hauled it away. Not angrily, just forcefully, the way you would haul a hay bale.
‘They’re so slack we could steal anything from them,’ I whispered to Odolghes after our first stroll, which had taken us to the bakery and the dairy but no further. Free to roam we might be, but we wanted things to stay that way.
He shook his head and told me not to count on it. They were confident, he said, they had nothing to fear, and why should they? There was no other tribe could match their strength, not while they’d got the stone to find their metal for them.
Mmmn, I agreed, only half convinced, but what if they didn’t have the stone? Odolghes seemed so sure they must, but what if this Mulebones character or whatever his name was had kept it for himself? Sold the secret of the iron making but kept the stone for future use? That’s what a really clever person would have done, surely? And by all accounts Mulebones was the cleverest man alive.
Odolghes shrugged his shoulders and winced: the arm didn’t fit very well and often bothered him. Seeing that we were alone in our hut and unlikely to be needed till evening he began unstrapping it, but then thought better and let it be. ‘Alive…’ he said slowly, as if weighing the word inside his head or testing it out in some way. ‘Hmm, alive. Now that’s one thing he can’t be. You may be right about the stone, my sweet: it is just possible Mulebones hung on to it, or tried to, although I think it very unlikely, knowing how greedy he was for the gold. But that he’s still alive, no, that’s out of the question. His hair was white already when I knew him. All of it.’
White? All white hair? That was more unusual in people than in horses; I didn’t think I had ever seen anyone with all white hair. Streaky, yes, like my grandfather’s, but not all over white. I was very relieved I’d never have to meet such a man, although for some reason he fascinated me, this Mulebones, and I wanted to know more about him. ‘If he’s dead like you say,’ I insisted, ‘then where’s all the gold got to? What did he do with it? Who did he leave it to?’
My father forgot his arm and shrugged again, and winced again. ‘That,’ he said, ‘is something we’ll probably never know, but we won’t let it bother us either. Once we have the stone, and some proper organisation, we can turn it into as much gold as we like.’
Could we, I wondered? How? But I didn’t have time to ask because at that very instant a young Cajute soldier barged into the hut without warning and clicked his fingers at us and said we were wanted in the great hall, on account of there being ‘Guesters’.
How wise Odolghes had been to keep his arm on. I promised myself to follow his example and play safe always. I had seen the spikes on the wall at close range now and noticed some very nasty bits and pieces clinging to them, not unlike the pumpkins of Alexa’s description.
(Chapter 4 coming up next Monday, May 10 2010)
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