The Gift of Stones

8

‘THE SEA VIEWED from the clifftop is a world that’s upside down. Its gulls have backs. You’re looking down on wind. The shallows, from above, are flat and patterned, green with arcs of white where the water runs to phlegm. My ship threw up an arc of its own phlegm as it dipped and bounced before the wind. I bounced and dipped myself. We were a pair. At times the ship sank out of sight, lost in the trenches of the water. More often it was I who dropped from sight. The clifftop path was cut by wolves and goats. It made no sense. At times it ran, ankle-deep, as straight as sunlight across thickets of winkle-berries. My one hand dipped and picked. I breakfasted on fruit. But then, when ferns and brambles were dominant, and low flat trees with antlers of greying lichen on their sheltered barks, the goats and packs of wolves split up. Their paths ran out. I did the best I could, but made mistakes. I finished up on rocky promontories where going on meant sprouting wings. I found good downward paths to silent coves which offered no escape except by going back. I fell from rocks. I cut my shins. At least I wasn’t lost. No one that I knew from my village had been this far before, but getting back would not be hard. I’d trampled down a path. Any fool could turn about and follow clifftops home.

Already, in my mind, I knew the story I could tell that night — that I had tracked the ship until it turned across the wind and came ashore. Then what? I’d see. My only certainty was that if I blundered on I’d greet the sailors on some beach. It was a certainty that did not falter when the wind began to quicken, the sky turned toadstool-grey, and the arcs of phlegm upon the sea shore curled to spit against the beach. I hurried on. I hurried on, despite the undulations of the path, despite the growing distance of the sail. People on their own do foolish things. They don’t know when to stop. They don’t know how. Now you understand why people live in villages, sniffing at their neighbours’ cooking and their conversations. They fear themselves and what would happen if the leash were cut and they were all alone.

Of course, you’ve guessed. A boy, half man, can’t race a ship. I dropped into a valley where a stream spread out amongst the tumbled boulders of a beach and then climbed through mallows, brambles, bracken, moss until the sea was wide again. The ship had gone. I waited for the trenches in the water to surface, rise and flatten, and for the distant sail to signal in the wind. But all I saw were black waterhuggers flying singly for their ledges and the brows of seals as they came inshore for shelter and for rest. There was just a chance, I thought, that sailors were like seals, that when the winds blew hard and the sky grew dark they turned their own brows to the land and sought the safety of a beach. Perhaps there was a spot ahead where ships could put ashore. I should have turned myself and sought the safety — and indifference — of my uncle’s huts. I walked a few steps back towards our village. It was no good. The wind — now armed with flints of rain — was in my face. I turned my back against the wind. I carried on. I ran.

The landscape changed. It was not cliffs and coves. Low heathland swept gently to the shore where thrift and black-tufted lichens lived side by side on rocks with barnacles and limpets. There were clumps of seablite, flourishing on spray. There was arrow grass and milkwort. All the herbs and medicines and dye plants that we saw bunched and dried and up for barter in the marketplace were in abundance here. It made sense to gather some on the journey home and offer it as evidence that I could earn my keep. At last I could admit that I would not reach the ship. The coastline was in view for quite a distance. There were no sails. I collected seablite for its purple fleshy leaves. Good for stews and dyeing wool. It is not easy to harvest plants whose roots are tough enough to withstand wind and sea when you have one arm and everything is wet. You tug too hard and slip and damage what you pick. I soon gave up. I’d go home empty-handed but with purpled fingers.

It was when I sought some shelter from the rain that I noticed all the rocks. I found a place beneath an overhang of heath which was still dry and protected from the wind. I sat there, looking out to sea, uncertain what to do. And then I saw the colour of the stone. Juice-red like elderberry stain. I’d not seen that before. Arrowheads and knives in red would cause a stir. I’d bring my uncle here and my six cousins. We’d carry rocks back home.

I chose a piece about hand-sized and wedged it between my feet, its upper, rounder face well clear. I did not expect to make a tool. I simply thought that I would test the blades and edges at its core. I hit it with a stone of equal weight and size and colour. One blow. Both stones — the one in my left hand, the one between my feet — broke open and apart. They crumbled like a fist of clay. It felt as if I’d brought two drinking pots together. All I had was shards, none bigger than my thumbnail. I tried it once again, with different stones. More shards. More random piles of stone.

I cannot say how foolish and how alarmed I felt, sat there, seduced away from a little food and warmth by one lost ship, my one hand red from seablite, the sea shore red with stone. I had encountered there a rock unknown to all my neighbours. A stone so soft — I soon would learn — that the sea could break it up. A stone so soft it couldn’t crack a skull. Was this some illness, some disease? Imagine if the illness spread, if it made its way along the coast to infiltrate the flint pits on the heath. A picture came into my mind which left me smiling and breathless with its implications. Leaf’s youngest daughter was carrying a heated stone, a juicered stone, across the workshop. She placed it on her father’s anvil on his knees and, spacing her legs for a firmer stance, held the stone in place. Leaf positioned his sharpened antler tine upon the stone, his hands as steady as his eye, and struck it with a wooden mallet, certain of his craft, and grateful for the chance to work on something new.’