The Gift of Stones

26

‘IT WAS THE END of summer when she died (my father said). Who knows exactly when?

In those days when she lived so diligently beside the hill my life was what it always was. So there you see me once again upon the shore, running toes along the sand. What else was there to do before the nighttime came? My days of “simply filled my chest with air and took off down the coast” were gone. I was not well. I was a thwarted man. The song I sang was this: How sad is he who has no wife. His seed is trapped. It turns to poison in his loins. His blood runs hot and burns. It dries his body and he leads a pale and angry life.

Move on, I’d tell myself. Forget this Doe. She’s lost — though quite how lost I did not guess. I was throbbing for her still. In the bony swelling of my severed arm. And elsewhere too — though I had a ready palliative for that. The cure for my arm was death. And until then, it seemed, I had to live with pain. The flint-cut bone, its covering of skin so tucked and tightly drawn, was now, as I grew older, softening and turning bad. The stump was red except where blisters formed or punctured so that pus could drain and dry. See here. My arm. This is no tale. If I wanted to invent misfortune for myself I’d not invent this arm or what occurred to Doe. I’d suffer the bad luck that mends. I’d not be me.

Watch out, you say. We know his tricks. He’s milking us like cows. He thinks we’ll sympathize with all his sins because his arm is bad. You’re right, you’re right. But I’m only telling what occurred, and my story takes its shape from what has happened to my arm. With two arms I’d be knapping and too dull and chalky to tell tales. With two arms I’d not have taken off along the coast, or killed the goose, or brought the woman and her girl back home. An arrow ruled my world; it made me what I am.

What kind of man is that? I must presume I am the vengeful sort. I’ve said before that malice and my elbow stump are twins. When Doe made clear that she rejected me I did not wish her well. I wanted her to see that she would suffer on her own, that I was the only straw for her to catch. I offered her gifts of food. But she was in no mood for me. She feared my tongue. She feared, I think, that I might talk about the horsemen on the heath and what she did for them and what they paid.

She clearly did not fear the tongues of those few men who courted her. She was the sweetest lamb with them. I’d watched her from afar. I’d seen the way she’d block their paths and rouse them with her smiles. I’d followed her and cousin to the hill and watched her test her charms on him. A waste of time. That blushing cousin was no use. His blood sped to his face — and nowhere else. And yet. Somehow. She’d trapped him. And herself. He’d ended up the sheepish devotee of Doe. She’d ended up a devotee of stone.

At times I wished I had less time. The hours that I passed, alone, were hours free to concentrate on pain. I saw the strength the stoneys had in focusing all day on flint. Each mallet blow, each flake, each bellow breath, each sticky cough which tried and failed to lift the chalk dust from their lungs would cut their worries short. They did not seem to mope. Was I the only one to see that, all around, the world was tumbling, spinning, wild? The bats were flying in the sun, the butterflies at night. You only had to briefly lift your head above your parapet of stones to see that where the village ended mayhem ruled and danced.

I expect you smile and brighten in expectation of some fantasy of mine. You’re weary of those tales in which the ship lands on the beach and unloads women, perfume, plagues or sailors hunting for the sun. You’ve heard each variation of the way my arm was lost; the women and the beasts, the drunk and hungry traveller who mistook it for a chicken, the cruel and giant gull. You’re tired of the talking goose, the magic dog, the travelling stench, the boy who had the gift of flames. You’re ready for some freshly fashioned tale. The thought of mayhem dancing gives you hope. Instead, all hope ends here.

Again it starts with what I took to be a ship. One night the wind was coming off the land and sweeping out to sea. For once the rooks were flying over water and the waves, at dusk, were tossing back their heads and hair and fleeing from the beach. The sea, so used to going with the wind, had reared in anger at the way its mate had turned. It was in turmoil, like a grey and boiling pot of gruel. The wind, instead of calling, “Home, go home,” was singing, “Back, keep back.” The land, so tired of all the pounding it endured, was turning on the sea.

Of course, the stoneys went inside and packed the unprotected land side of their homes with wads of moss or peat to keep away the draughts. I walked up to the avalanche of stones and wood that Doe had built herself. I thought the wind would turn her home into a fall of rocks and take her and her daughter, too, in a tumbling tour of village, beach and sea. I stood outside and called, “Doe, Doe, sweet Doe. It’s me.” I dare not call too loud despite the wind. My errand was too shy.

At last, when she had offered no reply, I pushed aside the flapping gate-screen to their home. I sensed the bodies lying there. Doe’s tense and wakeful breaths. The quaver of the sleeping girl. The wrestling of the wind and walls.

“It’s me,” I said again, though, in that light, me might have been one of a dozen men.

“What is it, then?” she asked.

“Are you all right?”

“Of course.”

“It’s windy out.”

“We’re used to wind.”

I went outside and propped my back against the dry, land wind. I heard but could not see the sea. Yet there were yellow lights. It seemed as if there were three stars which had taken refuge in the shallow water just offshore. They seemed to bob and shift. These were the kind of lights to make a story bob and shift as well. They were the lights of ghosts or lightning fish or baby stars which hatched from surf; they were the early lights of windswept dawn or the spitting embers of the dusk, if that is what I chose.

But what I choose now is to tell the truth. Those lights — turned frantic in the bay — were sailors bringing in their boat and doing what they could with burning brands to find a passage free of rocks. Their ship was stray, exhausted, blown off-course by storms. You hold your breath to hear the tale of how I met the sailors on the beach. You’ve heard that one before, though not in wind and not at night. But here my tale is done. They sheltered from the wind. And in the morning they had gone. I did not fill my lungs with air and take off down the coast. Which coast? Which way?

A few days later, with the wind and sea now reconciled, I saw three sails far out. And, in the afternoon, two more. All of them were heading for the coast beyond the place where Doe had had her hut. I was reminded of those days when the geese came in, first singly, then in skeins. These ships were just as buoyant, and as stately, as the birds. Why was there mayhem in my mind?

Here is the paradox of ships. Our hearts should lift at sails, because they show that every tumult of the seas is weaker than the will of sailors. A ship is order, symmetry. Its line is straight, its purpose clear; it has no moods. Yet my heart sank when I saw ships in such numbers, in such rhythmic unison, heading for the shore. It felt as if an older symmetry had been betrayed, the symmetry of tides and waves, and of a horizon shimmering and dimpled for the passage of the sun, not sails. Those ships caused me alarm. They made me fear that wads of moss were not enough to keep the world at bay.

What next? The rooks again. They rose like gnats above the waving masts of trees in the forests beyond the hill. Something on the ground had frightened them, was frightening them each day. And then the fires, though distant, seemed to burn too thickly. The smoke was heavy, grey, long-lived. The sea-borne chaos had come ashore and was setting villages alight. What other meanings could there be to the sequence of the ships, the rooks, the fires?

What would you have done if you were me? Run up and tell the stoneys, Look, the smoke is thick, the rooks are high, they’re not there now but there were ships upon the sea, your world is coming to an end? Would that have caused alarm? It would have caused, instead, delight. They would have sent for me at night and asked me to repeat it all while they relaxed and ate. And if I made them step outside and look beyond the hill at smoke and rooks? What then? They’d only marvel at the power of my tongue. The ritual of our trade was this — I did not tell the truth. They looked to me for comfort not for gloom.

Of course, a man must eat and food for me was earned by talk. I did invent for them another breed of tales in which a fleet of ships with crews, half rook, half man, had come to land. They lived on fire. Flames were their meat. Their drink was smoke. Or else (for children) a tribe of giants had come ashore and in their haste to devastate the land had knocked a rook’s egg from its nest. The story was the rook’s revenge. The moral was the power of the weak. Or else the men that came ashore were armed with weapons that were gleaming in the oddest way. The stones that made them were as light as leaves; their arrows sped like swallows. Compared, our arrows were like pigeons, plump and clumsy in the air.

This last was not a favourite tale. The stoneys and the merchants were aware that trade in flint was bad. The marketplace was not the bustle it had been. There were fewer horsemen passing through with enticing goods to trade for arms. Although the farmers still arrived to barter what they grew for what we made, there were old trading friends who seemed to disappear.

Who dared discuss this, openly, aloud? Not anyone I knew. They only whispered that perhaps there was a plague, a war, some floods, which kept the trade away. They did not doubt that life — despite its passing oddities — would go their way quite soon. This was the lesson they had learned whenever trade had slackened in the past: the outside world was never free from stone. There was no sickling of the corn, no scraping hides, no fishing, hunting, wars, no cutting flesh, no knives, no fires, except for stone and stoneys. Without the stoneys men would have to fight with sticks. And what would women use to cut the cord when children came? Their teeth? What next? Were people just as mean as wolves?

And so the merchants waited, unconcerned. They had stocks. They did not barter with the stoneys for more tools. They’d wait — and, maybe, falling trade would prove to their advantage in a while. They’d pay the stoneys less for flints while demand was low. And when demand increased again? Only a fool expects largesse in trade.

What of the stoneys? It was clear that for a while their flints could not be sold in quite the numbers that they’d hoped. They used the time they saved on making tools by mending walls or building beds or finishing those thousand tasks that had built up, like dust, around the house. If anything, a mite unnerved, they worked a little harder than before. They were like bats. They had to flap and fly. If they put down upon the ground for rest, they knew they’d never fly again.

So, to the point. What do I know of Doe? One thing’s for sure, her sled was not at work. The stoneys were not making tools. There was no merchant with the will to say More Stone and for his will to set the villagers to work and for the villagers to despatch Doe for sleds of flint. Where there’s no work then people starve. Doe and her daughter were the first to learn. They searched for rabbits, berries, nuts. But there were none. The villagers lived where they lived because the hill was full of stone, not because the soil was rich or the undergrowth a busy universe of untrapped, unpicked food.

I could not invent for you a better recipe for mischief — the world haywire with ships and fires; the woman, hungry, desperate; the men, denied their stone, with time and minor tasks upon their hands. It does not take a minstrel to make that story rhyme. It only needed Doe to put her hand upon the arm of some shy stoney passing by, or for some man, emboldened by the bony weakness of poor Doe, to touch her buttocks or her waist, for what I’d witnessed on the heath to happen in our village, too. I’ve said before, I spied on her. Why not? I only dreamed that I might save her or the girl from falling rocks, or wind, or wolves. So watching her was just my way of mounting guard. Yet it was not rocks or wind or wolves that made me want to run clear from my hiding place and save her from herself. It was my eldest cousin, the slow and cheerful one. She took him to the bracken and returned with apples and with cheese. He walked off by himself, more stooped and thoughtful than he had been when Doe had met him on the path.

I watched her other times with other men. She did not starve. And once there was a bonus. She found mushrooms near the spot where she and one young man had lain. She shared them with the girl that night, while I awaited dawn, as cold, unloved and venomous as viper’s dew.

I was a man made hollow. I cannot tell if it was rage or love or lunacy that sent me running at first light through the village to the shore and then along the coast in search of samphire for my Doe. We’d let the flesh embrace; we’d watch the stems whine and bubble in the fire like spit in love. My stem, her flesh, our love. That was my thought as, arm in pain, I ran and ran along the path that took me to the heath.

You know the route. I’ll not detail the landmarks that are old friends to us. The samphire was moist and smooth, and flourishing, unpicked, where once the geese had died. There were no signs of huts upon the heath. There were no rooks or ships or fires. There was just the samphire and the juicy rocks and wind. I picked her fill. Me filling her was all I had in mind. I marvelled at my speed and skill, and at the luck which brought me through the bracken, over rocks, without a sprain or scratch.

I reached the village at the end of evening with a little owl-light, dim and looming on the land. I went straight to her home. I called out, “Rabbit, Rabbit, Doe,” and held the samphire high above my head — a challenge — in my one and only hand. This was no gift. I’d come to pay. But she had gone. Her daughter ran to me as if I were the only one to trust. She hung on to my waist. Her tale was this — that Doe had gone off with a man at noon. She still had not returned.’