The Gift of Stones

11

‘WE ALL SLEPT well enough. The dog was reassuring and the baby far too weak and underfed to do much else but suck and doze. I spent the morning on the marshes by the shore. There was no hurry to get home — by ‘home’ (so far) I mean the village, not the smoky hut. And there was samphire in abundance, a little past its best, but a favourite of the woman and a gift from me.

When I returned there was a single horseman waiting in the grass beyond the hut. The woman with her baby and the dog was talking to him. He gave her something which hung still and then began to flap. A chicken, upside down and twined up at its feet. She walked towards me and my gift of samphire. “Please help,” she said. She handed me the chicken and the child and made me hold the dog back by its neck. “It won’t take long,” she said.

I stood and watched and she rejoined the horseman. He dismounted and they walked into the longer grass. I watched her as she took her belted smock by the hem and pulled it high and off above her head. She stood there, thin and naked once again, the horseman’s hands upon her waist. With her good eyes she turned and watched me watching her. “Go inside,” she called. “Can’t you kill a chicken?” I did not move. They lay down on the earth. This time it was the horseman who pulled a screen of grass to block my view’.