The Cremation Fields, 2500 BC

Floating downstream, away from me, it’s like a big white hand, dragging its fingers through frog-colored water, tufts of black hair growing there between them. ‘Do you go as far south as Bridge-in-Valley? We may walk together there for safety,’ says she.

She is traveling to her father, who is dying, and she tells me that he is a cunning-man who comes one Summer long ago up track from Bridge-in-Valley, past the Great North Woods, far as the land’s edge, where the cold gray sea begins. He makes his children on a woman there, both boy and girl. Takes boy away with him and leaves the girl behind. All the long Winters pass. She does not see her father. He does not see her. Now he is dying.

‘Bridge-in-Valley?’ comes back my reply. ‘Yes, that is in my way. There is a short path by the river we may take, if you walk after me.’

About her neck, she wears blue fancy-beads. Now it is almost out of sight, no bigger than a clot of spawn that slides away across the river’s smooth green belly, swollen with the rain. It tangles in a willow’s trailing scalp, moves on and leaves me taking off my wraps between the rushes, whispering like willage girls. ‘How do you like my fancy-beads?’ says she, and tells me how up track and past the Great North Woods the men make ore-fires on the shore. The sea-grass dries in long black strips upon the slippy rocks, then burns within a furnace hole of sand, above of which another chamber lies. Here is the ore, and smelted copper runs as quick as blood down sand-cuts into casting troughs. The juices of the burning grass are mixed with sand that turns to one smooth lump about the fire. The copper makes it blue, and young girls chip it into beads.

‘Now, where is this short path?’ she says.

‘Not far,’ comes my reply. ‘Not far.’ Lifting my elbows up above my head to pull away this stained old shirt, the wetness on my hands runs down my arms, as quick as smelted copper, in between my breasts. Washing it off, crouched at the river’s edge, brown clouds uncurl into the slopping green about my waist. ‘Your father does not know you, leaves you as a baby with your mother and does not come back. Why does he send for you now he is dying?’

Here she turns her head towards me, setting all her beads to chime, and tells me that her father, as a cunning-man, has many hides of land and wealth besides. It may be that her brother, lost to her from birth, is dead; or that he quarrels with the old, sick man. It may be that her father, with no son to share his wealth, is thinking that it should be passed to her.

About us, rain is sizzling on the leaves. We near the river’s edge. Drying myself with dead leaves, splintering, crackling, stuck in flakes upon the wet and duck-bumped skin. Amid the black-stained tangle of my rags, a prickling glint of bronze that snags the eye.

Reach down. My fingers, closing on the wooden hand-hold, turn a cold, flat metal tooth against the light.

And wipe it with sharp rushes, blade on blade. ‘Oh no,’ says she. ‘Oh no, don’t. Don’t do that.’

‘What is your name?’

‘Usin! My name is Usin. Oh, let go. Let go and don’t do any more.’

‘What is the old man’s name?’

‘What do you want with him? You cannot make me say!’

The ear. The thumb. Birds scatter up from reeds to sky in flapping, blind alarm.

‘Olun! Olun, that is my father’s name. Oh. Oh, these things you do. Oh, that it comes like this with me.’

‘Hush. That is all. Be quiet now.’

Later, stripping off its clothes and dragging it. The dull, deep splash, and my surprise to find the rain no longer falling. Everything is born to die. There are no spirit-women in the trees. There are no gods below the dirt. They look so pretty, blue on my brown throat as puddles on a path. Her boots alone are not a fit for me but must be folded in my bag, heavy enough without them. Why, it tips me over on one side to carry it, making my way back through the sting-weeds and the dog-flower up towards the track.

Barefoot, then, south to Bridge-in-Valley. Nothing here to look at but the way before me, at my poor cold feet upon it, such as is my usual view of things. Mud, thick as ox-cream, quickly paints me yellow to my knees. Wading through ash, among the highland mountains as a child. The gray fields all about, the oxen lumbering breast deep through dust. A darkness is upon the world, where is day come and brings no light. The sun is rare and strange. Vein-colored skies at close of day. Piercing in blanket cloud, green shafts illuminate the skeletons of trees, spines split and ribs snapped off, bleached, twisting from the powder-dunes.

Our crops are buried. Nothing grows, and pale, slow clouds rise at our every step. Ash streaked in copper hair, the children’s faces white with it, its bitterness in all our food. Our animals go blind, their eyes like blood, the sighted center part become a dull gray caul, as with a skin of fat upon raw meat.

We leave our homes, our settlements, a great crowd near as many as when people gather in to raise the stones. Beyond the woods, they say, there lies an old straight track to guide us, now there are no stars. Among the cinders, blind birds peck and scream. We travel south, some of us walking still. The track is wider, coming up by way of valley’s edge. How many dead men’s feet does it demand to make it so? It is a fury and misery to think of being one day in my grave and yet this track still here. Its deep ruts, older than our great-fathers. Its flood pools, all the frightening straightness of its line, still here. Still here.

It rises steep before me, firm beneath my tread, and yet the walking’s hard. Sharp pebbles cut my feet, the mud upon them drying to a sun-split hide. Shifting my bag from one hand to other, muttering, telling myself to leave the track atop this hill and walk upon soft grass about the rim, so as to come down upon Bridge-in-Valley from the east.

The day’s light starts to wane, and soon the ditches by the track are speckled brilliant green with fire maggots. Song of bats. Call of a night-eyed bird. My footfalls, slapping in the dusk. Somewhere downstream it rushes through the dark ahead of me, not swollen yet, but without color. Snails upon its thighs. Face down, unblinking, sees the river-bottom slipping by below, each stone, each minnow-bitten weed. Cracked shells, and clever, branching lines that unseen currents leave upon the slow, smooth bed. The dead eyes, missing nothing. East, along the rim. Between my toes cool grass, wet grass, and finally, below me, fires in the valley dark. A ring of sullen lights, too few to be a willage. What, then? Setting down my bag and straddling a toppled log, my eyes fix on the fire lights until they come more clear.

The view is of a hilltop, further down the valley’s eastern slope. A circle given shape by low and broken walls of dirt is risen there, another much alike but smaller set within, and inside that a smaller circle yet. This center ring is dark, a hole. The fires, a handfull only, burn within the greater round beyond, some of them little more than embers, almost gone.

The brightest has a gathering of people stood about it. Trapped beneath their heels, stretched shadows shy back from the flames, yet do not jump or dance. What are they burning there, so still by night?

My rest upon this log gives me new strength, and once more taking up my bag seems less a task. Stand up. Walk downhill in among black stumps where all the trees are burned away. Below the ring-topped hill, downwind of it, come women’s voices, calling, tangled with the smoke.

No. No, not calling, but a lower noise that has less sense to it.

At foot of hill, the ground becomes a bog, yet there’s a raised path running south across the valley floor to where the night above the treeline glows dull red, a cooling metal that betrays the willage fires below. A long walk, from the look of it, but that will give me time to think of all there is to do, and say, and be. Usin. The sound of it is plain and easy in the saying. Usin, Olun’s daughter. Name like an abandoned shell, a husk. The living creature once concealed within is gone. The name lies empty, hollow and disused. It waits for hermit crabs to crawl inside and try it on.

Usin. Deserted name. Mine now. Ahead, the path crawls through the weeds into the willage, there to die. Along its length the signs and droppings of this place are strewn, lit one side red by its approaching fires: a broken basin, gray and pricked with spots; a mitten; blunted flints; a little man-in-kind made out of chicken bones.

The settlement is big, half bounded by a ring of blackthorn, heaped into a wall. Its roundhouse squats there at the center, hulking giant, a necklace made from torches strung about its shoulders, dark above the huts that sprawl against its smoking flanks like sucking-pups.

Stopping to make a piss some way yet from the willage’s north gate, it is my luck to note while crouching in mid flow a torso garden set beside my path. Fixed through, and hung from stakes. No limbs nor head. No doubt they are the last remains of cheats and thieves hung out in warning, heavy flags of meat. It is a common practice now, along the track.

There are as many stakes as legs upon a dog, and all but one have women on. No. No, the one this end may be another man, seen closer to. As eaten by the weather and the wild swine as they are, it’s hard to know. This one has bright red hair about his sex, and this the needle-picture of a snake marked on one breast, her other gone.

Wiping my gill with grass, and pulling Usin’s breeks up high about my waist, there’s not a thing to do but journey on, towards the walls of thorn, sharp black against the fires contained within. A frightful nest, filled not with eggs but embers, smoldering in the night. Bridge-in-the-Valley. Stupid name. There’s valley all about yet not a bridge in sight. My wager is the willeins in this settlement don’t call it by that name at all. My wager is they call their place ‘The Willage’, as do all the other dull-wits in their dull-wit settlements along the track. ‘Why, life be good here in the Willage, be it not old girl?’ ‘Aye, may it be, but it is better in a place up north they call the Willage, where my mother has her people.’ ‘Well, the Willage is a good place if you’re wanting oxen, but if you want pigs you’re better going to the Willage.’ ‘We must let my brother settle this. He does not live in either place, but in a settlement down south. It has a queer and outland sounding name that’s gone from my recall, and yet it may be “Willage”, come to think.’ ‘You do not hear of many names like that!’

Across the sea and by the world’s end, where the black men are, there’s settlements with different names in different tongues, and all of them mean willage. There are willages upon the moon, those rings of huts that may be seen when it is full.

My names are better, made up from the spites and griefs these stale and stinking little pest holes put upon me in my travelings: Beast-Bugger Down and Little Midden. Squint-Eyed-in-the-Bog. Shank Sister Hill and Fat Ass Fields.

Bridge-in-the-Valley? No. This place is worth a better calling. Fool-’Em-in-the-Fen, with luck.

Or Murder-in-the-Mud. There is a watch-hut by the northmost gate, set up against the wall of thorn. Inside, a tall youth birth-marked red from eye to chin sits plucking birds beside an older man, his father, or, as it may be, his grand-sire. Torch lit, crouched in feathers to their boot tops.

Now, close up, the old man’s hands come into sight. They tremble, shake with age or palsy, knuckles on the one wrapped fast about the pale pink carcass, fingers on the other picking in the down about its neck. Both hands are black to some way past the wrist, not dark with dirt or sun scorched like the traders come from other lands but black, an old deep stain that fades to blue along its edge, as with a dyer’s hands.

A dried-up cone is crushed to sudden splinters under my bare foot. They both look up. Young cherry-cheek puts down his half-bald fowl and fumbles, reaching round to find his spear. He speaks as if to put me in my place, his voice half-broken and the pitch of it betraying him so that he squeaks where he is wanting to be stern. He does not meet my eye, but lets his glance fall to my neck where torch fire sparkles blue upon the fancy-beads.

‘What are you wanting in the Willage?’

There. The Willage. Why, my wager is already won.

‘My name is Usin, Olun’s daughter, come here from the North to see my father, who is sick. Who’ll take me to him?’

Fiery-face turns round towards the older gateman sat beside him, black hands shivering like a corpse-bird’s wing. A look is passed between them and a fear come into me: Olun, the cunning-man, already dead and buried, goods and all, below the flowers. His secrets rattling useless in his skull, else passed on to his son. The death-bed whisper, ‘Is my daughter here?’ Too late. My schemes are all too late.

The elder watchman spits a yellow curd into the feathers at his feet.

‘Olun’s the Hob-man here, for many years.’

He spits again. His jerking, shadow-colored hands are trying to point between the huddled dwellings at his back.

‘This night he’s set down-willage at the roundhouse making say, although we fear he has not many sayings left in him. We may walk down that way together, if you like. Are you all right to pluck these birds alone, Coll?’

This is said in way of master juice-jowels, who looks put about and sulky-eyed. He grunts his answer, so to sound more like a man.

‘Aye. What with all the while you take to pull a feather, shaking like a broke-back dog, it’s just as quick to do it on my own. Get off and let me be.’

The elder gateman stands and, spitting once more in the feathers, steps outside the hut. He takes my arm between his spasming fingers and now guides me down a path between the huts towards a looming round of posts, bark stripped away and white wood naked, thatched with reed above. Damp torches hiss, a knot of snakes beneath the eaves. A baby wails, behind us in the willage night.

‘Olun is known to me, both boy and man these many years,’ says he. ‘You are not make like him, nor like young Garn.’

The brother’s name is Garn.

‘No. It’s my mother’s side that shows in me.’ This seems to put him at his rest, and he sets one black hand to quiver at my shoulder, steering me through drawn-back veils of rush into the smoke and stink.

The roundhouse. Many people, some too old or young to talk, are sprawled on mats of reed, with flame-shapes slithering on their knobbled backs and freckled shoulders in a fog of sweat, and breath, and half-cured hide. Up in the shadows of the under-roof a shroud of smoke is spread out carefully upon the air. It trembles with each movement in the hall below, folding and fraying and unraveling.

Towards the round’s far side, across a sprawl of hairy limbs and tallow-light, there sits a monstrous woman, sunk in furs, gray ropes of hair hung to her thighs. A fierce white scar runs through one eye and down across the nose. The other, from a socket swathed with fat, gleams like a bead pressed into dough. About her puffed out bullfrog neck, an ornament of gold. The Queen.

To either side, behind her, stands a man ... no. Stands the same man. How is this? My gaze stops first with one and then the other. Back and forth, again and yet again. There’s not a fingernail of difference in between them. Shaven skull and brow and jaw, standing with their long arms folded, fixed blue eyes, snake-lipped.

Each smiles upon a different side. Why does this frighten me?

‘That is Queen Mag,’ the old, black-fisted man is whispering, behind my shoulder. ‘Those on either side of her are Bern and Buri, though there’s none but they know which is which. They are her rough-boys. Let them well alone.’

‘What are they?’ My voice, hushed as the gateman’s own. My eyes are moving back and forth between the awful look-akins and may not glance away.

‘A monster birth, but do not say it while they are in hearing. It is said their father puts his seed into their mother while she leans against an oak that’s lightning-split. When they are born, most of us say they must be put to knife, but Mag says no. She takes a pleasure in their oddity and rears them for her own. They put a scare up people’s asses now they’re grown, and Mag takes pleasure in that also.’

Both of them turn their sand-gray skulls as one and look across the room at me. They have one smile, each wearing half of it. A knowledge comes within me now that makes me look away from them: these are the ones that tend the torso garden. They clip back the limbs and gather up the fallen heads.

Dropping my gaze, it falls upon a ruined figure, resting there upon a pallet made of sticks before the seated queen. The figure speaks, a dry voice lower than the drone of bees, within my ears since entering this hall yet only come to notice now. A man. Once fat, he has a sickness eating him within. It sinks his eyes and dries his lips to figs, shrunk back to show the all but empty gums.

Where all but he are clad in robes, he lies there naked save a fine, strange cloak of blackbird quills beneath him, spread upon the bier. His will is long and skinny, bald about the root. A band of antler-twigs is tied, the bare points circling his brow, skin hanging from his bones in folds, and all of it has marks upon. The wasted body swarms with needle-pictures. Every thumbnail’s width of him from head to heel is pretty with tattoo.

‘That’s Olun,’ comes the stale breath by my ear. A cold blue line that severs him in twain from balls to brow. A red wheel, drawn above his heart with many smaller rings about. Crosses and arrow points, loop within loop on belly and on breast. The pale green patchwork of his thighs.

An eye may find no sense within the curls and turns, no image of a snake nor of a bear, as favored by the northern men. Shaped after nothing one may see within this world, it is a madness, wild in its device, and speaks that which we may not know. Star-scalped. The likeness of a womb upon one palm. The words he speaks are small and dry like beetle husks, spat out as if he does not like their taste.

‘The leaves fall dead at news of Winter.’

(The leaves. Fall. Dead. At news. Of Winter. Every word, he stops to catch his breath.)

‘Now is the sleep of lizards. Now the shortening of the days. The crops is in. The shed is full. Now must we offer thanks.’

Some men are nodding in the crowd. A little boy is led out by his father to make water up against the hut wall, then led back again, picking across the mat of tangled legs. Olun is speaking, sockets staring up into a still, flat veil, the net of smoke cast floating just below the roof.

‘Once, long ago, there is a cunning-man who may make say with all the gods below the dirt. They tell him that he must give up an offering and thank the soil for being good, and full with fruit.

“What must be offered up?” the Hob-man says.

“Your son,” the gods say back.

‘On hearing this he falls to weeping, begging them to spare his child, but they are stern and bid him do the thing they say, for he must show he has more love for them than for his only flesh. And so it is. He binds his son and leads him by the river’s edge, where is a fire built up.’

(The river’s. Edge. Where is. A fire. Built up.)

‘He sets his son upon the wood. The fire’s made ready and the dagger honed.

‘Then speak the gods below the dirt and say that it is good for him to keep his faith and love his gods more than his only flesh. “We are so pleased,” they say, “that we do spare your child. See, yonder is a pig caught in the mud. Take down your son from off the fire, and let us change the pig into a boy that you may slaughter in his place.”

‘And this is done. The pig-boy burns, the child is spared, and from that time we offer up a pig-boy to the fire upon the night.

‘When next the light is come we have one day to stack the wood.

‘We have one day to stalk the pig.

‘We have one night to please the gods.’

He sighs. ‘The gods are good.’ The crowd are muttering a muddy echo to his words, one voice chopped up with morsels lodged in many throats. One day to stack, one day to stalk, one night to please the gods. The gods are good. It seems these mutterings are a sign that Olun makes his say no more this night, for people stand and make to leave. They flow about us like a scum-tide, draining through the door and out into the night, coughing and laughing. Only scattered huddles stay to whisper in the hall.

Black fingers, shuddering, rest upon my spine and push me from behind to urge me on.

‘Go to your father,’ says the gateman. Father dies of bee stings while we’re passing through the Great North Woods, all wading belly high through hollows deep with wet and shaggy grass. Above us, where the tree’s high branches make a web of twigs against the light, a bird is singing, clear and all alone within the stifling afternoon.

My father cries out, jerks his foot up now to clutch its underside, then topples backwards with a moan, is swallowed in the grass. We reach him, mother and myself, but now he’s twitching, making noises in his throat, the sweat a bright and sudden gloss upon his nose, upon his brow. He wheezes first, then rattles. Both his eyes are open, dull and seeing nothing. One hand clutches at the grass beneath him now and then, but all in all there’s little here for me to look at and nothing to do. Leaving my mother kneeling there beside him, it comes upon my fancy to retrace his last steps through the laked grass.

In the flattened patch where he first grabs his foot and cries out lies a half-pulped bee, a smear of dangerous color wiped across the print mark of his heel. Somewhere close in the grass my mother starts to low. Taste of my fingers, sour like metal, crammed into my mouth to stop the laughter.

Still the bird is singing. From its perch up in the high woods there it may look down and see me, see my mother and my father and the bee, though separate as we are among the grass we may not see each other. As in one flat picture it observes us, with the all of father’s death caught fast there in the bird’s jet eye. The hag-queen wheezes something to her look-akins. They raise their great moon heads and watch me make my way towards the old man on his bed of sticks and feathers set below them there. Don’t meet their eye. Don’t seem afraid. The pack-dirt floor, ass-warm beneath my slow, unwilling feet.

A woman crouches by the pallet, gathering the Hob-man’s cloak of blackbird quills about his starved and naked shoulders, folding it to cover up the senseless decorations pricked upon his ribs, his sunken breast.

She’s big, this woman; man-boned at the hip and plain to look upon. Hair bound up all one lump atop her head, the color of a baby’s turd, held with a spike of wood. Red cheeks. A flat face, long about the jaw and nothing clever in her she-ox eyes.

She’s past her child time, yet too young to be the old man’s mate. Another daughter, then? No. No, one son, one daughter, that is all they say to me, the girl and gateman both. What then? His sister, or his sister’s child? A slave? About her thick gray neck a piece of thin bronze, scratched with tear-shaped marks and hung on string twists in the tallow-light.

Now, at my drawing near she turns to look at me, a flat and stupid look that has no spark in it. Pay her no heed. The old man’s lying wrapped within his feather cloak, so that he looks like to some terrible black bird that has an old man’s head and feet. His eyes are closed as if the making of his say tires all the life from him. Him. Talk to him, the old man. He’s the one.

‘Father?’

My voice. It must sound more akin to hers, the girl who met with me upon the track. He may recall the way her mother speaks to him so long ago and know me as one come from other parts. Think. Try to think back how the girl speaks, there upon the river’s edge. ‘Do you go as far south as Bridge-in-Valley?’ ‘Do you like my fancy-beads?’ Her voice, more in the nose than in the gizzard like my own. Yes. Yes, that’s it. Now, call to him once more, but in the way the girl is speaking in my thoughts. And louder.

‘Father?’

Sunk in sockets deep and crumble-edged as earth-bear holes, his dye-stained lids creep back across the wet and yellowed balls below. One eye is green and black, like water in a stump. The other eye is white. Blind white.

He lies there, staring up at me, and slowly frowns. The markings crumple on his brow. Some of the needle-painted lines are spread about their edges with the aging of his skin, become a faded smear of dirty blue, yet in their center they are sharp. It is as if he has the markings made again from year to year, gouged deeper still to keep them clear and new. His green eye squints at me, his white at nothing. By his bed, the great slow woman squats to watch us, no more life within her face than is within a stone.

‘Father, it’s Usin.’ Trying to talk down through my nose, not from the throat.

‘It’s Usin. It’s your daughter.’ Your daughter trails her eel-chewed toes through river-bottom sand and dances off towards the sea. Her hair floats out and has the look of weed, more comely when it’s drowned.

She’s far beyond this place by now, tripping her slow dance through the night. Its steps are clumsy, rousing no man with the movement of her flesh, nor ever may again. Only the current holds her, fast against its stinking breast. He stares at me. The long, unblinking silence holds and holds, and only now he speaks.

‘Hurna? Back to my hut now.’

Not to me. Although he stares the while into my eyes he does not speak to me but to the hulking, silent woman looking on. Her name is Hurna, then. Out of her crouch she rises, wearily unfolds her largeness, all without a word. She turns her back upon the bed of sticks then stoops to grasp the poles that thrust out from its head. She lifts. The smallest grunt escapes her, less from effort than her need to mark a task completed.

Having lifted up the old man to a tilt, not steep enough to tip him from his bed, she drags the litter off towards the roundhouse door, whereby the man with dyed and shaking hands still waits and watches us. The pallet leaves a pair of grooves behind it, scratched upon black dirt, and still the old man holds my eye even as he is dragged away, bound in his blackbird shroud.

‘Well? Are you coming, daughter?’

There! He speaks. He speaks to me and calls me daughter.

‘Coming, father. Does your woman need my help in dragging you?’

He makes a creaking sound. It comes to me that he is laughing.

‘Hurna? She is not my woman. All she does is wipe my ass and feed me, drag me here and there, and in return it is for me to suffer through her thoughts upon the spirit world and all her foolish gods.’

Her. Foolish. Gods. The words burst out between the shallow breaths. The woman pulls the litter, slow and even; does not seem to hear the Hob-man make complaint against her. Follow, walking in between the scratch-lines scored upon the dirt behind. Deep in my throat there is the smell of tallow smoke and feathers.

One last glance behind: the monster boys are sitting on the furs to each side of their bloated queen. One, Bern or Buri, nuzzles with his head to kiss her underneath the arm. The other has his hand beneath her wraps. Look quick away. Out through the veil of reeds we step into star-frosted air. The palsied gateman with the blackened hands watches me pass, but does not speak or follow.

Outside, it seems that Olun and his tow-horse woman do not wait for me, but drag away into the twists of path foot-worn between the crowding huts, asleep and sunk in dark. They make me run to fall in step with them, walking beside of Olun’s bier and talking to him once my breath is caught again. About us, shiftings, mumbles in the thatch-topped dwellings, bodies settling for the night into their rags and straw.

The old man turns his head, looks up towards me from his bed of sticks that bumps along here by my side.

‘How well are things,’ he says, ‘now that here is my daughter come. What is the many of the nights you spend upon the track?’

This is an answer that the dead girl does not give me, at the river’s edge, one of the things it slips my thoughts to ask her. Too late now to cut away her other thumb. My wits must save me and my wits alone.

‘More days than are within my reckoning,’ is my reply, then, quickly, moving on: ‘All of those nights, sleep passes by and does not take me with her, so great is my fright to hear that you are sick.’

The old man smiles, lips crawling back from off the few and yellowed teeth. The skull is restless, eager for that day soon come when it may shed the dried meat and the sun-cured hide, emerge from Olun’s head wearing a grin of victory at conquering the flesh. These teeth, poked through the shriveled gums, are but the heralds of its coming. Up above his smile, the old man slides his ice-white blinded eye towards me, sidewise there between its graying lids. It seems to stare at me.

‘Do you think that your scheming is not known to me?’ he says, the smile grown wider still, and in my stomach something heavy flops and moves and makes my ass pull in all tight. He knows. The old man knows about my plan, the borrowed beads, the dead thing in the river. What is there for me to say or do but make to run and hide myself?

He speaks again, and holds me with his smile, his dead-snake eye. ‘You think to win my favor with your words, is that not it?’ He laughs to see me, staring like a throttled cat towards him in my fear and wonderment. ‘You think to have the old man’s treasure when the old man’s dead. There is a little of your mother in you yet,’ and here he laughs again, and shuts his eyes and laughs so much the laughter turns to coughing, wet and deep.

He does not know. He thinks me sly and greedy, but he thinks me his. Thank all the gods, though none in truth there be.

My answer is come easily to me, with just the ring of feeling hurt yet touched with shame that such a girl might have: ‘How can you mock your daughter so, that walks the great long way to be beside you? How is it you say she does not care for you? Why, there’s a notion in me to walk back again, so little is my want for such a father or what wealth he has.’

At this the coughing stops. His look is worried now, less sure he has the hold of me.

‘No. You must stay, and pay my tongue no mind. It is an old man’s jest and nothing more. You are my only flesh, and you must stay with me until my end.’

His live eye searches mine, afraid that he may drive me off from him with all his taunting. He has need of me, and is not certain of my need for him: the game is mine. My voice is sniffy and uncaring in reply, to make him squirm more fast upon the hook.

‘Oh yes? Your only flesh, you say? What of my brother Garn? You favored him above me once before. Why not make him your comfort now and leave me in my northland home, if you can think so little of me?’

Here he looks away, and for a while he does not speak. There’s silence save the drag and rattle of his bed across the soil and stones; the noisy breathing of the woman as she trudges onwards, pulling him between the huts.

‘Garn is no son of mine.’ His words are hard, like unto flint. He stares up at the stars and does not look at me.

My best course is to hold my silence, wait ‘til he says more of this. The huts crawl by. The woman pants like some great dog, and now he speaks again.

‘It is our custom, passing teachings to the boy, as it is our custom to seek mates among the further lands so that it gives a strongness to the blood. That is why Garn is taken far away and you are left beside the great cold sea. It is our custom, to pass teachings to a boy, but Garn ...’

He stops and hawks, spits something dark into the dark about us.

‘Garn will not take up the task, and sets a face against his duty. Says he’s not a cunning-man and makes work as a metal-monger, which he thinks a craft more fitted to our time. He says he does not care to know the old and secret ways. We cannot talk save that we quarrel, so we do not talk at all.

‘Why, even when he knows the sickness is upon me and my living all but done, he does not bend, nor put aside his hammer-stones and molds. There’s none but you to take my learnings ‘fore my breath is gone, girl. None but you.’

His eyes are pitiful, cast up at me as with an ailing beast. When men are weak, my heart’s made harder yet, but there is only care within my voice, hushed so as not to wake the sleepers in the reed-topped mounds about.

‘What is your illness, father? Is it in your wind, that you have not the breath to speak?’

His bed bumps heavy, dragged across a sudden hollow in the dirt. He grunts, discomfited, and then he sighs.

‘This willage is too much a part of me. Its sicknesses are mine. If there are beetles in the grain down at the southfields, then it gnaws my vitals here.’ His hand, a brittle crab, moves low across his belly.

‘And if the old rounds up on Beasthill fall to ruin and neglect, then in my back the bones grow weak as yellow stone and crumble where one scrapes upon the other.’

Now he lifts his fingers, gestures to the useless clotted eye, like curdled milk. ‘This happens when the dye-well in the meadows west of here runs dry. Or else a tunnel in the under-willage floods, a cave subsides and leaves me pissing blood from one moon to the next. They burn the trees from off the great east ridge to level it atop, and now my will no longer stands. The hairs fall out and make it like a babe’s.’

Ahead, set some way off from all the other huts, a pile of shadow hunches in our path, to where the woman Hurna trudges, drags the old man in her wake who drags me like-ways with his words.

‘The people are the worst of it. When Jebba Broken-Tooth takes mad and kills his woman and their child, then is there seeping from my ear. Or, if the brothers Manyhorse are feuding my teeth have a cold burn. And now all the doers of wrong that we get here, the cut-bags and the cheats, the tap-and-takes all living in stilt-settles by the drownings. They give me the lice.’

He grins, and shows his lonely teeth, that ache with all the angry words that pass between the brothers Manyhorse, whoever they may be.

‘One time, it pleases me to pick a fat one out and split it with my thumb. The next day, word is come of how some bucket-belly fenland cheater gets caught in among his stilt logs when they fall, so that they crush him near to one piece and another.’

Here he laughs again, the creaking of a dead bird’s wing, and here we reach a halt, the woman ceasing in her haul before the heaped up dark that is the old man’s hut. She shoves aside the stop-woods on their swing of rope, wherefrom a dull red light pours out, as from a torture hole, and as she drags the old man in he’s laughing still and makes a pinching motion at me, thumb and finger. Black nails bite together. There in Little Midden once a girl not much more than a babby tells me how she may not find her mother in the market crowd, as if it’s given up to me to do her mother’s minding for her. From a black man in a robe whose color is outside my power to name, she fetches me a bright new dagger and a silver piece in trade.

Upon Shank Sister Hill a millman gives me a half a pig for near as many bags of dirt as there are fingers on one hand, with but a finger’s depth of grain spread out atop each bag to mask the soil beneath.

In Dullard’s Way they curse me still for trading dried out dog-stool wrapped in bark as proof against the pox.

An elder man of Reekditch gives me half a skin of mash to have me in the mouth, then falls asleep to wake with treasure bag and gizzard cut the both.

In Fat Ass Fields, the opened mound by night, my shoulders racked by all the shoveling, a rag held to my nose. The rotted fingers swell beneath the rings, which must be twisted off. The softened flesh rucks up about the joint, sloughs off completely as the ring’s pulled clear.

In Sickly that big fat girl and her half a loaf of bread ...

The old man clicks his beetle-colored nails and moms the splitting of a tick. Inside, the great bellhut’s a lung stitched out of rush and hide on ribs of wood, filled with the breath of souring piss and damp that marks the old, though spiced with rarer scents. Big, yet made small by all the clutter stacked within, fantastic cliffs of dog-skin masks and god-faced shields, of rattles, feathered bones and claybaked men-in-kind. Strange birds, dead yet unrotten, stiff and staring, caged in woven wood. A snarl of pickled rats all knotted at the tail and nailed to bark. A cured and varnished heart. Rocks finger-marked by monsters, cooking bowls and spools of stitching gut and more and more in hazard-footed screehills to the roof’s dark underhang.

There are but shoulder-narrow passages left clear between the listing scarps of muddled tool and fetish-stick, between the dust-dry garlands and the eelskin robes. Is this like something seen before, in a forgotten baby dream of mine?

A fist of amber with a horrid little sea-fright caught inside, its body flat with tufts of bloodworms growing from the back of it, raised up on many pin-stiff legs, and from one end a bulb where is a face that makes me jerk away. A bowl that may be seen through, and an unborn baby girl, curled up, her blind head chalked to white then painted brightly, like a whore.

Somewhere towards the center of this queer-mazed round an ember pit throws up a sulking light. Like beads of melted ore it prickles red upon the rubbled ornaments; is caught in painted sailsheets, shadowbacked; cut into smoking slats of pink and greening dark upon the sharpness of their edge. Slabbed black falls on the passageways among the useless things, slashed here and there by shafts of bloody forge-light spilling from the heaped-up side-paths of those corners where one channel forks into another.

Saving when they drag through such a chimney-shaft of sudden warfire brightness, nothing may be seen of Olun on his bed of sticks. Following them with ears alone: the pallet’s rasp across the scored black dirt, the woman’s foot-thud muffled, drumming through it, tickling beneath the bareness of my heel. Now losing them about a bend and hurrying to catch them up, come round the turn in time to see the old man’s needle-harrowed face bleed sudden red and bright from out the dark as it drags through a stripe of light. The stripe grows wide. We are stepping out into the ember-lighted round of open space there centering this puzzle-track of piling casks, dream tumbles, rary bits.

Her flat face gleamed with sweat, the woman, Hurna, sets the old man and his pallet down to rest beside the sunken fire, then lumbers off without a word for wood to bring it back to the flame. Lost in a moment, great bear footfalls stumbling off into the maze of relic toys.

The old man’s tired, so sends me off to sleep in one far corner hung with hides and set apart. He tells me not to pay it mind if he and Hurna set and talk about the embers for a time. It’s plain he does not wish me to keep company with them, and so my bed is made from furs, the fireside’s light shut out about me by the hangings.

Soon, there’s the sound of Hurna coming back with wood, the clatter as she throws it down. They talk then, low, the first time that she speaks within my hearing. Why, she sounds more flat and stupid than she looks, which is a thing to say.

It is my hope that they may talk of shanking, or of something good to listen on, but no. She drears about a god that swallows us, which does not sound the god for me. She says once we are swallowed up then we may be born new among the gods. As what? A turd that bobs there in their golden midden-hole? Things may be born then swallowed, though it may not be the other way about, not in my reckoning.

Once in a while the old man’s voice breaks in and crackles something sharp with scorn, withdraws again to let the woman’s answer drag away and on and on into the night. She pulls their talk along, a pallet weighed with blunt and heavy words.

Below my fur and naked save my fancy-beads, my eyes are shut but not my ears. Her words float through me. Essence. Spirit-ore. The hobbles of the flesh. Change. Be transformed, refigured in the passion, passion, passion ash ... The ashfields. Me a little girl. This snow is dry, warm gray, its smoothed and rounded flanks just right for stepping in, a powder finer than the stone-ground corn, as cool and slippery as water on my foot that now sinks in, and in, expecting ground, and deeper, there’s no firmness underneath the ash to stop me falling ... Start awake. The furs piled up about my neck. The hangings, pink lit on the other side and still the woman’s voice beyond them. Sweat all up my back and silky wet between the breasts. These furs make me too hot. Take out my arms and shoulders from beneath. That’s better. Cooler. Turn and roll upon my other side. The beaded hoop of wire now digs into my shoulder that it must be pushed away. There. Now the all of me feels good, so slack and tired that it escapes my thoughts just where my leg rests, or my hand. All one soft piece, that does not know the different bits of me.

The woman’s words, smooth of all meaning now, are only sounds, gray pebbles sleek and wet that tumble slow through nothing, here inside my eyelids: Beasthill. Heartring. Urned with queens. The cheated worm. Bones milled and raked. And when you. And when all of us. When we. When we are sparkborn ...

In my dark, the color flukes play blue, no, red, and run to make a ring. It cobwebs out, it cobwebs out and at the center comes a melt, deep winter green and, glimmering, breaks apart, the ripples, river, river’s edge, and here she comes, the girl, her throat all open but she does not pay it mind, and she is smiling, pleased to meet with me.

‘Come up the river bank a little way,’ she’s saying now. ‘There is a big black dog up there who says he knows of you.’

She turns and walks, leading ahead. Where is the river gone to? There are bushes at each side and piles of clutter stood among them, heaping mounts of queer and clever things that are well known to me, although their names are not now in my thoughts. The girl is calling up ahead, along the passageway.

Trying to catch up next to her but something’s tangling my feet and makes me slow. Her voice goes further off from me. She’s talking now to someone, yet her words are flat and have no spirit in. That must be how it is, the talk between the dead. Push on. Push deeper after her. It’s darker now. Is that her calling me? It’s darker now ... Light. Morning light. What place is this to find myself awake?

Olun. The old man’s hut. The father of the girl. The girl beside the river’s edge.

Ah yes.

Yet half asleep, still furry in my thoughts and muttering to myself while pulling on her clothes, my clothes, then crawling out into the center round of Olun’s hut. Deserted. Fire pit cold and dead. The graying, liver-colored ranks of oddment that surround me robbed of all their midnight glamour by a sun that’s strained in dusted spindles through the chinked rush roof above.

They have a stillness and an old hush in them now, these chines of bauble and remain. The narrow paths ravining through them are less mazed as seen by pearl of morning, making it a simple thing to find my way out, stumbling and mumbling to day. Squinting against this bright; the world smears in my lashes.

‘Usin? Usin!’

He says it yet again before it comes upon me that this is my name. Turn about. The old man lies before me on his raft of twigs, wrapped not in feathers now but in a robe of many dog-pelts, whole, so that black snouts show here and there above the slashed vent of a mouth, below the lidded fastening holes.

Beside him food is spread in bowls of polished bronze. A hot fish, gaping. Clouded with alarm and great unhappiness its steamed eyes fix upon me. Near to this a dish not bigger than a thumb-cup, filled with bitter cherry mash. Crust-hided haunches of gray bread to dip. A skin of goatwarm milk to wash it down.

‘Hurna and myself, we eat at dawn. She’s off to worship with her people now and is not coming back this side of noon. Now you may eat.’

He signifies towards the food, a spasm of his patterned hand.

He watches me crouch cross-kneed, take the dagger from my pouch and score his fish along its back, about its tail, the gill-line of its throat, gray vapor bleeding up from where the black skin splits, peels back beneath my edge. Thumb out the spine. Ease up the hairbone prongs of rib from smoking whitemeat slots. Now lift the brittle centipede of backbone out with face and arsefins all, to set aside. Prick out a slat of flesh, raised smoldering and pushed between my lips on daggerpoint, which gives me cause to think of how that point is last employed.

My chewing takes some whiles, my swallow hardly less. Out from beneath a dishrim, flaring bronze, the fern-tailed skeleton is staring, girl-eyed, there beside my plate. Chew, swallow, take some more, but this time with my fingers. Olun watches me, and when he sees my mouth’s too full to make an interruption without choking me, he speaks.

‘While Hurna is not here we may walk up the river path a way, as may be to the bridge and back. If you’re to have my leavings, it’s as well you have a cunning of the land and all its lie.’

It comes to me that he says ‘We may walk’, when it is only me who’s fit to do as much. He means for me to drag him, in that ox-legged woman’s stead, and me so little built! The flakes of creature in my mouth and mention of his leavings: these are all that stop me calling him the lazy, crafty gill clot that he is.

He does not speak again throughout the fish, the bread or sweet, dirt-gritted milk, and yet from while to while he opens up his mouth as if to do so, though he makes not any sound at all. It’s only now it comes to me that these are gasps he makes to take his breath.

The cherry stew’s too sharp for me, left barely tasted. Afterwards, upon my bending low to wrap his dog-coat tighter in before his pallet’s taken up and dragged, he lifts one hand and gently wipes away the goatmilk beaded on my underlip, a taste of stale and smoke-cured finger-end. He smiles, eyes creasing in the web-skinned sockets. Three small fish-marks drawn bright red upon one lid are lost within the sudden fissured deeps. No sire or dam of mine has need to make me drag them all this way. The father lowered bee-stung to his grave up in the hollows of the Great North Woods, he does not ask for me to drag him, stinking, all about the land. Nor is my mother carried when she sickens, whoring in the mine camps east of here, the both of us together now that father’s dead, and when her cough starts putting off my customers there’s nothing more to do than leave her. ‘You rest here. It does not take me long to find some firewoods and come back. Rest, Mother. Rest and wait for me,’ and morning finds me in another place, down track, alone.

The both of them are dead and gone now, neither are they carried there. My grip is sore about the litter’s poles, hands wealed and callusing, and we are barely out the willage, barely out the skein of knotted dust tracks where the children laugh and fight between the bustling huts, their thin brown shapes that tumble in and out of view like spirits through the pot-haze, stew clouds watery and dismal to the nose, a fever fog that damps the cheek.

Though he is dragged behind upon his pallet in my wake it feels as if the old man’s pushing me, goading me on beyond the hut-rings to the settlement’s north gate. We cross paths with the birth-marked boy who plays the guard on my arrival. Walking with a short, soft-fatted girl whose speckled shoulders pale to milk beneath her blood-gold hair, he does not look at me.

The watch-hut by the gate is empty as we scrape between the shored up brackens to the field beyond. The empty watch-hut troubles me, but once we’re through the gate its reason’s plain: the withered man with dye-blacked hands is stood outside, turned face towards the barrier of thorn, a corded will limp in his rattling hands. On watch alone he steps outside the gate to make a piss, but from the look of it he stands and nothing comes.

As we pass by him, me in front, the old man dredging there behind, he glances up, sees Olun, and calls out.

‘You have a daughter, then. That’s new.’

‘Aye,’ Olun croaks, replying. ‘Aye, that’s new.’ Thus we pass on and take the path beside the river, yellow dirt trod bald between the scrubs of grass. Bronzed leaves pile against trees that stand like widows, shoulders bare and bent with grief, heads hung and gray hair catching in the riverskin where currents braid to silver, split on twig ends. Looking up from frozen, trudging feet and back across my shoulder, see the soot-gloved gateman leaning, still with face towards the thorn and waiting for the dam to break.

We scrape and clatter on beside the river, counter to its flow. The twig-bed crackles, drawn along the hard-worn path behind me, like a brushfire at my back from which a voice comes now, the old man’s, crackling also.

‘If you’re ...’ A breath. ‘To follow me ...’ Another. By these constant, desperate suckings-down of air his talk is broken, sudden eddies in its flow.

‘If you’re to follow me, then you must know my path. If you’re to be the cunning one when I am gone, why, then you have my leavings, but it must be that you have my learnings also.’

Listening to him speak, it comes to me that though he may be old he has his wits about him. You can hear it in the way he fits his words one to another, clear despite the interrupting breath. My mother, younger far than he, says only ‘Cack’ and ‘Wet’ and ‘Where’s he gone?’ those last few moons. This Olun is no fool, and so he has my ear.

The fire voice sputters on, above the litter’s cracklings. ‘My way of learning is my path, still trodden in my thoughts, although my walks in this world are no more.’

He does not need tell that to me, me with my palms all blistered and my shoulders sore from dragging him.

He draws his frantic, drowning breath and then goes on. ‘This track of knowing’s beaten through wild overgrowths of thought by long moons of repeating, yet means nothing if it has no counter in this world, the world wherein we walk and die.’

He leaves the walking up to me and, in return, the dying’s left to him.

‘My path of thoughts is therefore drawn from all the paths about me in the truth of life. These territories that we span are as like spanned within, where there are monuments of notion, chasms, peaks and streams for night-thoughts there to spawn. If you would know my path and follow in its way, then know the land about, both track and willage, in its bridge and in its drownings. Know the outcast rat-shacks, relic stones and gill-halls. Mark each path above and know the underpath below, its secret way from vault to treasure hole.’

My peace is held, all the long while he talks. This word of treasure, though, must not slip by, and bids me to break in.

‘What underpath is this, and how is it for me to walk, if all its ways be secret?’

He is sniffy, waving me away with his reply.

‘We have our Urken-tracks beneath the soil. Only the Hob or Hob-wife know their ways, that pass from hand to cunning hand across the ages. Many treasures of our craft are there, but this is yours to know when you are ready, filled with knowings of the plainer tracks above that are an equal to your calling. On that day, it may well be that you go down and walk the candled leagues yourself, where these old feet of mine once tread the wormslopes and the chilly rock, that only tread there in my dog-dreams now. Before that day you must tread all the paths above, and know the stories set along their way.’

This troubles me. It seems the old man has it in his thoughts for me to drag him all through up and down along these paths he talks about, which does not please me, not at all. As for the stories set along their way, the ones that hang there in the torso garden are already known to me, and it’s not my desire to hear of any more. It strikes me, since we do not pass in sight of those staked carrion, my path of last night gone must lie some way east of this river-walk, which pleases me right well. Trudge on, the leaves all kicking up about my feet.

Now Olun calls for me to stop a while, and bids me look away now from the river to the east, where rises up a hill with white smoke twisting out in ribbons from its top. It is the hill by which my way is made down to the bog-struck valley floor upon my coming here, its crest-fires burning still by day. Far off, across the fields, the little people stood about the blazes on that peak may yet be seen. Their chanting, faint and distant, comes to us with each new shift of wind, one voice of note more strident than the rest, that carries further.

‘That is Hurna,’ says the old man, cackling the while and spraying spit across his pup-faced wrap. He offers up no further word, but bids me heft the poles and carry on. Our shadows shrivel up beneath the climbing sun. The whiles pass by.

Ahead and to my right a meadow swamp of rushes fans away, a hollow of blanched spears that has a crop of solid land knobbed up from out its middle like an island in a lake of reed, and there upon it stands a mound of wood, as for a fire. There are some children playing near it, boys who crouch about another of their kind, who lies upon his back. They jab, and fondle him, and make loud cries.

As we tread nearer, passing them, it comes to me that this is not a child that lies between them but a boy-in-kind, whose empty rags they stuff and poke with straw to lend him form.

‘They’re readying the pig-boy in the Hobfield, then,’ says Olun, but it’s better that my breath is put to hauling him, and not to asking him the where of every mad-head thing that he may say. Trudge on. The leaves burst up like birds, and on, and on, and only now, my back nigh broke and fingers fit to fall away, is there a sighting of the bridge, there at the far end of this river track, all passage-walled with peeling birch trees, ashen silver in the light. Almost. We’re almost there. The old man tells me all his secrets just before he dies, and lets me journey down into the tunnelways beneath the settlement, where there are silver bowls and wristlets made of gold. By still of night, this hoard is carried off down track a way, to where my new home waits for me. My new wealth’s traded in for land, for oxen and fine wraps and pretty slaves, that all those passing by my hut may see its grandness and its herded grounds and say, ‘How fine a woman must live there.’

My food is nothing save the rarest fish and the most tender pieces cut from infant beasts. Tall, painted warriors are set to guard my days; the strongest service me by night, and every moon my willeins offer up their thanks and bags of grain to me. Their children dance between the rose-twined pillars of my stilted chair. This is their bridge, then. Big black logs that smooth together down across the ages make the curve of it, that rises gently up away from us towards its hump, above the foams and churning deeps below. For all my care in hauling him and litter both across the bump-topped woods, the old man grunts and clicks his tongue and makes complaint to me each time his bones are jarred.

Here, on its near-end slope, the blackened span has chinks between the timbers. It seems there is a little pit dug underneath this south side of the bridge. My eyes squint, peering, but whatever once may be to see inside the hole is long since gone. There’s only pale flecked dirt, lit bright where sunlight’s wrung between the roof logs over which we make our way now, passing on.

‘Stop here,’ says Olun as we reach the middle of the bridge, and bids me set him down and sit beside his litter on the wetworn logs, the waters roaring under us. The cold strikes up my ass. We do not talk of much. He makes remark upon my fancy-beads, blue sparks hung on their copper strand about my throat, and asks me how they’re made.

It startles me, the ease with which this stolen tale comes tumbling from my lips: the sand fires, seaweed banked, seen through the shore fogs, burning. Men with puckered, flame-scarred hands who tip the ore and curse if it should splash, the reek of singeing beard, a scorching in the lungs and, afterwards, the glazed sands all about the furnace hole made hard, shot through with bitter juice of kelp and bladderwrack and coppered blue. My words pour, effortless, and conjure tangle-headed beachgirls, skirts damped dark about the hem by surf, that pick for skybeads in the fire-struck dunes, as if these sights are ever known to me.

The old man nods and smiles and gazes off downriver where the stone-green waters bend away among the western nettle wastes. A bark-boat breasts the current there, two men whose shoulders roil and wheel about their paddle blades, a glittered spray each time these cut the frothing swell. They lean into a turning masked with trees, are gone.

Off on my right a man calls to another, leading me to turn my head and look about. Up by the bridge’s farmost end there’s someone crouched to squint into the belled and ringing hollow underneath its arch, where fray-edged water-shadows shoal to form a ghost bridge, top-side down below the blurring torrent.

Now the figure stands, a gray, pot-bellied man, and calls again to some few fellows who are sitting sharing bread just up slope from the river’s edge. They call back to the man beside the bridge and seem to laugh at him. He speaks again and makes a sign towards the hidden shallows of the underspan. One of the feasters passes on his bread and stands, runs stumble-footed down the bank to join the other by the bridge, where both now stoop to peer. More shouts. Another man trips down the slope to stand with them, and yet one more.

It is some game they play to put aside for now their slog among the ditches and fields, which is no great concern to me. My gaze turns back upon the old man, hound-clad on his bier. Side-edged to me, his skull is round and beaked, a gray shaved bird. The eye that’s nearest me stares into nothingness, its socket pool froze white in Olun’s winter. On his leather cheek, a patchen stole of colored scars.

He asks about my beads: It may be that he waits for me to ask of his tattoos.

‘These markings that you have are of a style that is not known to me. It seems they have not rhyme, nor a device.’

He turns his corpse-bird skull that he may see me with his good eye, sucking in the air to speak. His breath, warm game that’s hung too long, blasts stale against my face and makes me flinch away.

‘Oh, they have a device, girl, and a rhyme. Don’t you think otherwise. They are my crow designs.’

His crow designs? The worm-blue mottle of his shoulder, bowlined red from nipple back across to spine? His firmament skull, scribbled jowl, fern-cornered lips? There’s nothing here that’s of a like to crow or bird of any kind. What is his meaning?

Lifting up my gaze from out this skin maze, back to meet his own and further question him, it seems that he forgets me. Staring past my shoulder to the bridge’s northern end, only his dead eye lights on mine, looks through and out the other side, which makes me shiver with a notion of not being here. It’s plain that he is looking hard at something off behind me. Glance about, to see it for myself.

The men stand in the shallows, wading thigh deep as they gang about beneath the bridge. They reach with sticks to hook out something lodged there; yell like boys, excited, to each other as they poke and splash and heave: Go careful. Here, watch out. It’s coming. Here it comes ...

Big. Gray and bobbing, water meat. The young men crowd about. A gas-blown calf that’s taken by the flood, or ...?

A sudden thought’s come into me. The young men grasp the creature fast beneath its arms and draw a silver furrow to the bank, where it is hauled up streaming, flopped out bare and heavy on the grass that we may see it properly.

Oh no. Boiled fish her breasts. Weed-tongued and staring. Why is she not half-way out to sea by now, couched to her ribs in silt or strangled in the crabnets, sopping, lying still among a sprawl of severed hands that writhe and gesture yet? How is it, dead, she has the wit to stop here at the place she seeks while she’s yet quick and warm? How may the dead have destinations? Trickling mouth. Leech ridden, phlegm-black jewels that cling upon her instep there.

They do not know her, do they? Nor the old man. She is not come here before. Weir-carrion, that’s all she is. A poor thing river-born and fish-mouthed at the throat, done in, but no one’s daughter. Usin. That is my name now, and hers is washed away with all her blood and color. Rotted tide-fruit, bare and nameless, floundered in the stripes of scum that mark the water’s highest reach, she is not anyone’s concern. The bedstream’s ripple-sands are copied, soaked in replica upon her logged and runnelled skin. Cave-nosed, and one cheek holed by sticklebacks. The old man bids me lift him, pull his stick-wrought bed across the causewayed trunks to where the willeins gather, down beside its farmost end. Legs bristled to the wading line with jewels of wet, the down ringed into hooks and coils, they stand as still as heel-stones all about the stiller yet.

Hearing the racket of the litter drawing near across the wood, the men look up, make frowns at me yet wipe them off when they see who it is dragged here behind me. Olun lifts his head from off the bier and cranes to overlook them, standing closed about the corpse. The bubble-gutted man who sees the body first below the bridge touches one finger to his brow and mutters, ‘Good luck to the Hob,’ then looks away from Olun, staring at the grass as if afraid. The other men do likewise. What is there to fear about this painted bag of sticks? And yet they shuffle there below us on the river bank and wait for him to speak.

‘This morning there is bleeding in my stool, which tells of trouble at the bridge, and brings me here.’

The men look to each other, scared and marvelstruck that this event is known to Olun long before they think to peer beneath the shadowed arch. The laughter chokes and bubbles in my nose: if all his tribe are shit-wits such as these, it is no wonder Olun’s thought the cunning-man. This very morn he lets me drag him leagues, yet makes no mention of this omen given from his bowel, the crook-tongued little fiend. It comes to me he lives by gulling lackards, and in truth we are one kind. Why, he might nearly be my father, all things said.

The man so fat he looks with child now waves one hand towards the throat-cut woman at his feet.

‘Well, here’s the reason to your sign. We find her underneath the bridge, brought up against the beaver dams.’

By all the markings, there’s the why of it! There’s why she is not by now danced half-way to Hotland in the undertow or pecked clean on a reef of crusted salt: the bridge is built upon the backs of beaver dams! The fat man falls again to silence, waits once more for Olun to give voice, his fellows hulking restless by his side.

Now Olun does a queer and frightening thing. He shuts one gaudy lid across his sighted eye, so that the white-yolked blind one seems to stare upon the spraddling girl meat, cold among the weeds.

‘Her throat is cut. Her ear is gone, and like to this her thumb.’

It’s plain the old man notes these things before he shuts his one good eye, yet still it makes a weird to see him take her measure with his deadsight only. Mummery and nothing more, yet no less hackling for that.

‘She’s thrown into the river last of all, for it is only reason that her gullet’s slit before. Alike to this, the torture of the ear and thumb may not come after she is dead, so must be suffered first of all. She is not cut for sport, for why then stop with but one ear, one thumb? These cruelties are with purpose, and with purpose served are followed swiftly by the kill. Somewhere up river, not a day since gone.’

No, it is not the slowness of his tribe alone that makes him seem more cunning. Here is clever. Here is clever deep enough to drown in. Looking down, it takes my notice that the woman’s neck is banded by a stain, mold-green. It is not there when she’s thrown to the river, save it’s hidden ‘neath the blood since sluiced away.

‘See that she is not moved. We go to tell the roundhouse what is here.’

With this, he bids me lug him back across the river, juddering down the bridge’s southern slope, and now along the balded turf that ribbons by the waterside. Back past the marsh-pond white with rush, its island with a firewood crown whereby the unhaired boys bask naked, belly down on sun-cooked rock. Atop his pyre their rag-child sits, his straw head tipped upon one side, regarding us as we pass on, though yet without a face. The same leaves rise, a dry gold splash about my heel.

The silence holds ‘til we are near to half-way home, whereon my question may no longer go unasked.

‘What happens now, about that poor killed woman?’ Lightly spoken, this, and sounding free of care.

His voice comes back above the creak and crackle of his bier, a whisper from the blaze.

‘Oh, nothing much to speak. The river brings us matters like to this from while to while. All nature of occurrences take place among the passes north, their remnants fetched up here: unwanted newborns, oxen with too many eyes, or the encumbering old. Saving for if they have the mark of plague we put them to the earth within a day, with flowers offered in the stead of goods. That is the custom here ...’

He pauses. On the east wind comes a wail, as from far off. Before me, turning to look, stretch the sodden fields and then the hill, its summit wound about with smokes. The tiny figures fling their arms up, keening in the distance.

‘Although there are some who wish it otherwise,’ the cunning-man concludes, and we go on from there to come at last upon the bracken-fortressed settlement. There Olun tells the gateman, with his bat hands flapping black, about the murdered woman by the bridge, and bids him pass along the story.

‘Good luck to the Hob,’ say all the willeins as we groove the dirt between them, dragging back to Olun’s dwelling. ‘Good luck to the Hob.’

It comes upon me now that they are speaking to the both of us. No. No, not me. To be a Hob-wife is no lot for me, the tiresome learning of each chant, a hut you may not move within for all the tokens sinister. To know each duty and each ceremony, dressing in a robe of faces. No.

Nor is the thought of wasting moons while learning all the old man’s mummery a pleasing one. There is no saying how long it may be before he dies. It’s up to me to find some quicker way of worming out his secrets.

Here’s a thing: though he casts off his son and has no love for him, it may be that the son has knowledge of the father’s ways. Aye. Aye, that’s neatly thought, that it may be as well to pay a visit to my brother Garn before the shadows grow much longer. He may tell me of the tunnels that his father walks in dog-dreams.

What are dog-dreams? After a while, big Hurna lumbers back to Olun’s hut from her devotions on the hill, her slab face flushed with blood, all bright after her sing-song in the smoke. The old man tells her she is lazy, and that he has need for her to caulk his sores. ‘They’re bad today,’ he grumbles. ‘It’s a long job that you have.’

She nods, without complaint, and pulls him from the sun and through the cram of charm that bounds his hut. Let here alone, it seems that now may be a while as good as any for to visit with the Hob-man’s son. Hurna is talking deep inside the hut, still trying to persuade the old man to her faith while she attends his weals. Scraps of their converse drift out past the swing-woods hung to one side in the doorway there.

‘The world is made in fire, which is thereby superior, and ends in fire as all the prophets say. The grave-soil may bring pests and blights to rack the living, and yet we who choose the bright track into dream-while leave no miseries behind. All that is pure within us rises, save our residue. We that proclaim this creed ...’ and on and on, her voice flat as the murmur of a hive. It is a marvel how these godly bodies manage it, to be at once both mad and dull. Let me steal off, between the dozing huts and leave them prattling, away into the noon. There are no spirit-women in the trees, there are no gods below the dirt, else that they be as daft as Hurna. People all are born with no more why to it than some poor sagging fieldgirl shows her ass off in the high weeds, and there’s scarcely better reason in the dying of us neither. Where is there a god that strikes us down with venom from a trampled bee? Who puts us in this place then floods the crop that there is not enough to feed us with; drops ashes from the sky and strikes our cattle blind? If it be gods, they have queer sport.

And yet in every willage there are fat-faced little men and sickly girls who scourge themselves and fast to please some spirit-bear, or else a tree they fancy speaks with them. How can the gods demand starved ribs and lash-striped backs above the sufferings that they already fashion for us? If we in this world are cruel by harsh necessity, how much more wicked are the gods who want for nothing yet torment us to the death? Such things there may not be.

It is not gods that welcome us beyond the grave, but only worms. Small children shriek and dart between the willage huts, where men smoke fish above low fires and women flint away the last few bloodied snots of meat from off the wool-stripped hides. Their mothers chew the skin to make it soft. The squeal and bark of chatter everywhere. Among the cauldron steam a dog limps by the moldered pelvis of another fast between its jaws. With eyes like bile it watches me walk on.

A gaunt man milling grain upon a flat-stone tells me Garn has made his forge upon the valley’s eastern edge, above the Beasthill. This is all the worse for me, that my bare feet must walk again this morning’s great long round, but there is nothing for it, and the day is warm.

Outside the settlement’s north gate, a lard of men is settled thick about the bowl-rim of a fresh-dug pit, wherein an earth-bear’s set against a brace of dogs. One of the hounds is near to gutted, sundered by the earth-bear’s shovel paw. It drags its hind legs in the bloodied dirt and whines, its purples bulging through the belly’s rent.

The other dog is stronger and starved mad, to see its eyes. It snaps and lunges, scores a stroke of pink across the white stripe of its adversary’s brow, which trickles down until the earth-bear is made blind in its own juice. The men about the hole crowd in and laugh, so that a quiver ripples through their soft, gray-spidered tits. They cheer. They fiddle with their balls and do not know it. In the pit, now hidden from me by a wall of wart-hung backs, the earth-bear screams in triumph, else in agony.

Continuing along my path that winds out from the willage gates across the marsh, the torso orchard comes upon me in the bluing flesh even before it comes upon me in my thoughts.

They seem like giant, severed heads, sex-mouthed and nipple-eyed, each with a plume of meat-flies trailing in the breeze. Ant freckles moving, out the corner of my eye. Don’t look. Walk on, and stop my nose against the maggot sweetness in the air.

Across the dampland hulks the bare-flanked pile they call the Beasthill, with the fires about its top extinguished now, its silver crown of smoke dispersed, all wailing stilled. Above this, on the valley’s eastern slope, a yarn of gray twists up alone through paling sky from out the coppermonger’s forge. This is the last age of the world, for we are come as far now as we may along our path from what is natural. We herd and pen the beast that’s born to roam. In huts we cling like snailshells to the fenland that it is in our great-fathers’ way to stride across and then pass by. We cook the blood from out the earth and let it scab to crowns and daggers; pound our straight track through the crooked fields and trade with black-skins. Soon, the oceans rise and take us. Soon, the crashing of the stars. Across the reaches, lush and puddle-sored; the beds of quaking sphagnum moss; midge thunderheads above a stream as dull as tin. The massive wildsheep grazing on the lower slopes regard me from a distance, watch me circle warily about them and continue to the valley’s brim, up track beside the Beasthill’s northmost face.

Above the hill now, looking back. The dirt-walls ringed atop it, seen by daylight, plainly once hold beasts within them, yet are given to another purpose now. Among the banked up rounds huge flowers of soot are seared into the dirt, the shadow petals flared about a gray and crumbling heart, still warm. There are no people to be seen, and so my climb continues up to where the trees are burned away to stumps along the torn sky’s ragged edge. Tooth-colored smoke is raveling from the forge in tatters, brief and dirty flags to guide me there.

It stands alone, Garn’s lonely den, among the ugly, char-topped stumps; all roof, with walls so low they hardly can be seen beneath the ghost-green cone of rush. The forge is drystone built and caulked with mud. Neck high, it stands outside the hut and by it swelters Garn. It must be he, his eyes so like the cunning-man’s, and yet how different in his frame.

Baer to the middle with an apron hung about below. Fat, yet the fat is hard, slabbed thick in bands about his red and glistening arms, his oak-wide breast that does without a neck but rounds directly to a bull-ox head. His features seem too small, all crowded in between that spread of babe-smooth cheek, beneath the damp and sweeping blankness of his brow.

In one hock fist he grasps a clefted pole that holds the metal to be worked above the coals until it colors like the dawning sun. At this he lifts it, ginger in his movements, to the beating block where, with a hammer-stone, he pounds its clear and heartlit otherworldly length to fine leaf all along one edge. The heft and clang, the heft and clang, a sudden wash of sparks along with every beat, the sound made visible, that rings out bright and then showers dull to earth.

And now the blade is quenched, thrust in an old bark trough, moss powdered, where the water coughs but once to swallow it, then gasps up steam to further bead the coppermonger’s jowl. Making my way towards him in among the fire-felled woods the fierceness of his purpose hushes me and yet he glances up and squints to make me out against the sunlight at my back. His chin is rounded, like a crab-apple that bobs half sunken in the billowing flesh. A salted pearl drips from it, then another, and he lifts one hand to throw a half-mask of cool dark across his eyes.

‘What do you want?’ His voice is marvelous soft to come from such a furnace-brute who snorts and clamors in the spark-blown fumes.

‘Are you named Garn?’

He lowers now his hand and turns back to his forge.

‘Aye, that’s my name. What do you want?’ He works a bellows made from horse lung, bringing back the coals to heat.

‘My name is Usin. Usin Olun’s daughter.’

Here, the bellows catch their breath, are slowly lowered from their task so that the embers cool and film across with mothdust. Now the great head turns once more towards me, eyes grown narrow with suspicion. Ill at ease, he wipes the back of one great paw across his lips and leaves a smear of black from beak to chin. The silence holds a while, there in the cinder-grove, and now the sooted corners of his babe-plump mouth begin to turn up, ruefully.

‘It’s you he sends for, is it, when he mayn’t send for me? He wants to dump his load of carcasses and painted picture-barks and that on you now, does he? Well, good luck to him.’

He twists his face into a sneer, turning away from me, and furiously works his bellows. ‘Good luck to the Hob,’ he adds across his shoulder, whereupon he spits a gob of bitterness to sizzle in the glowering coals.

‘Is that all you’ve to say now to your sister?’ My words stumble slightly to betray my courage, faltering. He makes me frightened with his size and his ferocity.

‘My sister?’ He does not look round, but squeezing his contraption made of mare’s lights all the harder, fans the embers to their noon.

‘The old man claims me as no son of his, and for my part he is no Da of mine, so how then may you be my sister? All that you are after is the old man’s treasure, else why are you come here all this way? It’s not as if you care for him, who does not wish to see you all the while since you’re a babe.’

The brightness of the coals now paints his arms and brow. The bellows cease, and here he wades a few slow paces to a stump nearby, where lie the rawcast lengths of ore, all cold and rough. He does not look at me the while, but speaks, his mouthings full of grudge.

‘If you desire his wealth so much, then have it. It is tainted stuff, all full of fevers and queer notions. Much good may it bring you. Just leave me alone to do my work. It is enough that all my growing up is done there in that curse-draped warren that he calls a hut, so don’t you bring me any more of it. It’s bad stuff, that is, all that crawling underground and talking with the dead. Just give me my clean ore and let me be.’

He chooses now a blemished, ugly rod that’s colored like the leaves about our feet, returning with it to his forge.

My path of questioning is clear. ‘What’s this of crawling underground? Do you, with your own eyes, see Olun do these things?’

Garn now takes up his handling-pole again, to wedge the ingot in its cleft. He turns his head to glare at me, a sulking youth for all his flesh, then looks away. With his split wand he thrusts the ore-strip deep within the furnace mouth and holds it there.

‘What, see him go down holes or into hollows? Are you mad? To see those secret runs is not allowed save you’re a cunning-man. That’s where their treasure’s kept, you know, and all the bones of Hob and Hob-wife gone.’

He smiles about at me, and has a knowing look, his voice grown low as that between one plotter and another one alike.

‘But here’s the trick: you may not know a little of his secret, lest you know the all of it. To know, like him, each weed-lost path and passage, and the name of every field. To know, as he knows, whence the floods are coming, and where cattle-grabbers make their sly approach or have their hide-aways. To have each tree; each rock; lanes that you do not walk for years, all held within your thoughts at every moment by some rare craft that no common man may fathom. Every well and fisher bank. Each tomb and buried lode.’

This last one puzzles me. Among the coals, Garn’s bar is turned the color now of old blood, now of fresh.

‘How is it bad to have such knowledge? Why, with you a metal-monger, surely it is all the better that you have a cunning of the lodes and seams?’

He shakes his head. ‘If all his wisdom’s mine then metal-mongering’s my craft no more. If all his thoughts are my thoughts also, why, then he is me and me a Hob-man just like him, left having no thoughts of my own. These thoughts, they are not even his, nor yet his father’s nor his great-sire’s. They are old as hills, these notions in him that shape every deed of his and word. It is as if the old man and the old men come before him are all one, one self, one way of seeing, single and undying through all time. It is not natural.

‘My way of seeing’s not the same as his, nor is it to be put aside that his old way endures. My forge, my fire, my knowledge of the favoring heats and tempers, these are things to fit the world that we have now. His dowsing and his chanting have no use to me, they give me bad dreams still, and make me set myself apart from him and all his works. This hill’s the place for me. It has a feel about it that is right for furnaces, and fire sits well here.’

Now the metal in the forge is near too bright to look upon. He lifts it out with cloven pole and takes it to the beating block.

‘But surely, you need not come all the way up here to get away from one old man who may not walk? Why not take somewhere in the willage, nearer to your trade?’

Garn stands with hammer raised, about to start once more the sparrow-scattering din, but pauses, lifts his head to stare at me with eyes so filled with scorn and loathing that it makes me take steps back away from him.

‘Live in the willage? Ha! And how may Olun be escaped within the willage? Are you listening to me not at all?’

He speaks between bared teeth, a hiss much sharper than the quenching-trough: ‘He is the willage.’

And with this he turns away. The hammer lifts and falls. Its deafening chime dismisses me, driving me from that charcoal glade, back to the path that twists beside the Beasthill, down towards the valley floor. Descending, in the far south-west the settlement may yet be seen, long shadow fingering the fields. Late afternoon.

Behind me, going down, the hammering grows faint. Above the distant huts, a pall of smoke. Unease. It gnaws in me and yet its name may not be said, nor where it comes from, like a low horn sounding in my heart, a cold that rimes my bladder. Is there something going wrong here? Beasthill, fen and torsos. Finally, the willage gates come into sight, but all thereby is clamor and commotion. Smoke hangs everywhere, that wreathes the sinking sun and drowns the settlement in smolder-light; great choking banks that seem more made of noise than vapor, cloaking the lament of ghosts, the yowl of unseen babes. My pace grows faster, running now towards the wall of tangled thorn and fume.

The young man with the birth-stained face leans from his gatehouse when he hears me call to him.

‘What’s happening here? Is ...’ Now the smoke bites in my throat and makes me cough, unable to speak more.

The tears gleam on his mottled cheek, though born of grief or from a smut-stung eye is not for me to know.

‘A fire, among the eastern barns. It’s out now. No one’s killed, but there’s as many huts as claws upon an owl’s leg put to ash.’

Making my way between the coiling drifts, the veils flapped open by a breeze to show me now a woman crouched to wipe her soot-blind infant’s face, or now a pair of men that stand beside a guttering ruin, making sour jokes with one another.

‘You see how our Dad gets out all right, then?’

‘Aye, and me half set to grab his lazy ass and drag him back.’

The veil drifts back. They laugh, and do not see me pass them by.

Beyond the settlement’s south reach sets Olun’s hut, untouched by fire nor troubled much by smoke by reason of a south-west wind. This same draft brings me now a noise that quickens once again my pace. Olun is squealing louder than the great black swine who run before the deadgod’s hunt. Reaching the hut and making now my way inside, it echoes from the avalanche of hex and foe-skin drums, a shrill that guides me through the morbid huddles to the center round.

Naked upon his bracken bed he writhes and weeps, with Hurna knelt beside him, meat-faced as she dabs wet rags about his breast, half lighted by the fire pit.

Stepping nearer, crouching now to have a closer look at him, it’s clear he has a monstrous burn below one shriveled nipple. Weeping blisters udder from the scorched and gritted flesh among the tattooed shell-curls, hoops and signs. He squeals again, then sinks to fever-talk.

Shifting my gaze to Hurna now, who meets it with her own, the stolid eyes as flat as nail heads.

‘How is Olun burned? The blazing in the willage does not come as far as here.’

She shrugs her plowboy shoulders, grunting her reply. ‘It’s when the fire starts, over in the eastern huts, before they bring us news of it. Your father yells and bids me look to see, and there it is upon his chest, this awful burn.’

She wrings a little smirk from out between her rind-thin lips. ‘You ask me, it’s a sign for him to change his faith.’

The old man screams again. If fire burns a willage, may its welts be raised on one who thinks he is a willage? Does the smoke gust from his lungs and from the settling’s narrow paths alike? A blaze for curing fish runs out of hand and half a league away a breast yet blisters in its heat? No. Such things may not be, unless the footsteps of our days are echoed in his veins; unless it is the piss of dogs on distant stumps that yellows now his tooth. Do our skies darken if he shuts his eye, our banks burst if he wets his litter in the night? That sour-meat breeze that wafts among our huts, is that his breath? And does the dead girl bob downstream through his intestine, so that blood clouds up from where her corpse-nails dredge the sponge-soft bed, brought up at last against the log-dam of his fundament?

No. No, it must be that the old man burns himself, unless this Hurna sears his breast for sport. It’s one way or the other, for a place it not a person, nor is there a sympathy ‘twixt flesh and field.

We die. The track endures. The shifts, the crumbles and collapses barely heard within the dulling coals are all that mark the passing whiles in Olun’s hut. That, and the gradual fading of the old man’s plaint, the slowing of his pained contortions into but a twitch; a shudder now and then.

His moans come softer: no less urgent, yet they sound as if they hail from further off, the old man wandering lost away from us, his cries for help grown faint as he recedes down dusk-paths woven through the queer and complicated willage of his dreams. Naked upon the bed of wefted twig he stills; he sleeps.

Sat there to either side of him within our cone of ember-light, big Hurna and myself do not have much to say. We share a bowl of curds with crusts torn from a thigh of bread to make our sops. From the surrounding steeps of curio, dead birds observe us as we dip and slop and wipe our chins. Their eyes unsettle me, filled with bleak knowledge of demise.

On finishing her bread and curds, Hurna sits silent for a while, a strange look on her face until she looses a great belch that rumbles on and on like toads in chorus. Seeming much more settled after this, she’s quick to start with talk about her faith while making out she wants to talk of mine.

‘You hold with all this, do you?’ Here she gestures to the teetering stalagmites of dross that stand about us, leaning in like bullies. My reply is but to shrug, which she takes as encouragement; agreement with her side of things.

‘No? Well, you do not look the sort for it, and there’s no blaming you for that. Dirty old notions, that is all they are, and it’s a lucky thing that most good people in these whiles are come to know a better way.’

‘Oh? And what way is that?’ My question’s asked with little interest, and yet she seizes on it like a hare-lipped man upon a compliment.

‘My way. My people’s way. We do not hold with gods who dwell below the earth and there receive the dead. Why earth is but the lowest of the spirits, having wood and water, air and fire all above it in their import. Earth is that which we must raise ourselves above, not put ourselves below! Young Garn, he sees that well enough, but Olun does not listen.’

Here she tilts her head towards the old man, twitching on his bier and naked save his lines and whorls, his crow designs.

‘Your father clings to his old ways and pays no heed to reason. Even when we tell him that when he is dead he may rest in the heartring there on Beasthill, urned with queens, he does not seem to care.’

Her stupid little eyes grow sly.

‘If you talk with him, if you tell him that our way is best he may abide by what you say where he will not pay mind to me or Garn.’

It angers me that she is making plots against the old man in this way. That’s mine to do.

My words are sharp. ‘It makes no difference to me where a man’s put when he’s dead, nor woman. Bury them there where they fall, or ...’ Checking myself sharply, on the brink of saying ‘Throw them in the river’, my quick wits come to my rescue just in time: ‘... or leave them hung out for the birds. It may be that this is a thing of great concern to you and Olun, but it is not any great concern of mine. Now, all this talk is tiring me. My bed is soft, my father’s sleeping peacefully, it seems, and it is time to make my rest. A quiet night to you.’

Leaving her squatting fish-jawed by the bier, making my way through decorated hangings to my screened-in bed: there is a deep, still well of fur and comfort waiting for me; waiting for my bones that tire with all the walking of the day. Upon removing everything except the copper ring where hang my fancy-beads, the hides close over me like warm, dark waters. Sinking. Sinking deeper in the swirling black. A big dog turns, its great eyes empty save a white like lightning, fierce and flameless brightness that may burn away the world. Harsh brilliance pouring from its mouth now, as it splays the rawness of its jaw, and lunges ... Scream and sunlight both awaken me, so muddled in my rousing thoughts that sound and shining seem to be all of one part. The scream is mine, cut off as realization comes upon me.

How is morning here so quick? It seems no sooner do my eyelids close than these rude rays are come to prize them open, stuck with sand and lashes though they may be. A food smell finds me now shucking off my night-skins and pulling on my clothes. The dream that woke me up in such a fright is gone, for all my efforts to recall it in my thoughts. Ah, well.

My stomach growls and bids me rise to trace the skein of cooking-scent that’s threaded in between the dumps of lore and curse and keepsake. What great feast does Olun set for me this morning? My hand shoves back door-woods on their creaking rope to let me step without and view my meal.

The dead girl’s at my feet, stretched out and belly up there in the dust before the hut. A cloudy-eyed and gazing accusation, face expressionless yet there’s a black smile just below her chin, above the slime-green stains that stranglemark her throat. Blue-white. A subtle shine, a mooniness about the skin. Her back teeth, clenched together, bared to vision by the fish-hole in her cheek.

There on the corpse’s far side, facing me, the hag-queen’s rough-boys, Bern and Buri, crouch upon their glittering haunches like to one man with his shadow given flesh, both naked save for will-sheaths made from hollowed catfish that start bulge-eyed with the horror of their plight, the ugly ribboned mouths agape, exposing yellowed spikes of fang. They stare at me, the mold-cast bullies and their catfish all.

Glancing in panic from the shaven rough-boys to the dead girl sprawled between us and then back again, my eye alights on Olun, resting with his dream-daubed and loose-larded frame propped by one tattooed elbow on the bed of sticks, that’s drawn up right beside his murdered child. Though better than last night, he yet looks sick with weakness, worse by far than he has seemed of late. Upon his breast a dressing made of rag and plastered mud is tied to stem the weeping of a burn that scorns all sense, and dog-skin robes are draped across his lower half. Some way beyond him there is Hurna, looking put-on as she stirs a mess of fish and meal above a stuttering fire.

Craning his thick-strung neck to peer up at me now with ill-matched eyes, the old man speaks: ‘Why do you scream? We hear it right out here.’

The thudding of my heart stops me from making sense of what he says, and prevents an answer. All that’s in my power to do is goggle at the picture-hided witch-man and his river-raddled daughter both.

‘What is she doing here?’ This is the best that may be squeezed out past my lips, set tight and bloodless as a rein upon the terror welling in me.

Olun looks down at the cold, still girl beside him with surprise, as if he but this moment notices she’s there, then he looks back at me.

‘Her? It’s our custom to inspect the unknown dead for marks of plague or other signs before they’re put to rest. This is accomplished at the roundhouse in the usual way of things, but being sickened by my burn it is not in me to be moved that far, so Bern and Buri bring her here. Sit down and watch. Remember that upon my death, these duties pass to you, with many more beside.’

What is for me to do but kneel as he directs me? Both the rough-boys bare their sundered smile at me as Olun turns once more to his inspection of the girl. My smile is faltering in reply.

Closing his good eye, Olun now regards the dead thing with his blind and frosted orb alone. One brittle, painted claw creeps out to crawl across her belly, cold as polished stone. It kneads and probes her flaccid breasts, then scuttles further, past the stripe of green about her neck, to linger at the caked lips of the gash below her jaw. One finger traces this along its length and then moves up to rootle through the hole gnawed in her cheek, and to caress the tube-shot scab of red where once her ear is joined. A shudder passes through me when he speaks, although it is not cold considering the season.

‘She is pulled from out the river one day since. She is perhaps another day afloat before she’s found, and so is killed not far up river north of here. Her throat is opened by a dagger or a short-blade knife, both sharp and hard enough to cut through bone, as in her thumb.’

Though they may see me staring hard away from them, the brothers Bern and Buri now both speak to me in turn, and force me to look up.

‘It seems to me she dies the day that you arrive.’ These words are spoken by the brother on the left. His voice is slow and drawling, filled with strange amusement, though he does not smile or crease his eyes as he squats there regarding me across the slaughtered woman.

‘From the north. Arrive here from the north, the same as her.’

This is the other brother speaking, though in voice and manner they are both alike as in their looks. What do they wish for me to say?

The left-most brother speaks again. ‘Do you hear anything of robbers in the passes while you are upon the track?’

Half-drowning in my fright of what they may suspect, this notion is a welcome raft to clutch at.

‘Robbers? Why, you may be sure of it! The travelers that meet with me these last few days upon the track all talk of nothing else. A great fierce band of men, they say, though speaking for myself it seems the cut-bags do not show themselves to me. My way here is without event.’

Both brothers purse their lips at once and then nod thoughtfully.

‘A band of robbers?’ says the one upon the right. ‘It may be so. Such things are known to us. You’re lucky that you do not meet with them yourself.’

‘Aye,’ adds the brother on the left, ‘considering that you must be not much more than a league or so away when she is murdered. Very lucky.’

All of us nod gravely here, acknowledging my fortune, and let Olun carry on with his investigation.

Still with nothing but his blind eye visible the old man shifts his hand back down the woman’s drift-meat belly to explore the curl-ferned mount there at her fork. His knowing fingers sort amongs the coils and ringlets, moving them aside to better see the cold white hillock whence this overgrowth is sprung.

‘There are no bruises.’ Here, the old man clucks his tongue in disappointment and a sudden chill falls over me: he does not move aside the hair to look before he shuts his sighted eye. How may he know a bruise is there or not by touch alone? The hand moves further down now. Fingers struggling like blind-worms crowd in, eager for admission to her rigor-narrowed aperture, and yet without avail. The frail and painted hand withdraws. The witch-man speaks.

‘Her gill-caul is unbroken.’

Here the rough-boys both look up at Olun with the same frown drawing tight their shaven brows.

‘She is not shanked by force, then?’ Buri says, or Bern.

‘There’s queer now,’ Bern comes back, or Buri. ‘She’s a comely girl and if she’s to be robbed and killed then why not shank her first?’

He does not need to add ‘That’s what we’d do,’ for it is in his eyes. Instead, his frown grows deep and, after thinking for a little while, he ventures now his next remark. ‘Does she have pox?’

The old man shakes his head so that the stars designed thereon swoop wildly from their course.

‘No pox. No mark of plague. She’s safe to bury.’ Here he turns his face to me, and shows me all the pain and fatal weakness graven in its lines. The old man’s nearer to his death than is my guess before today, and he does not yet tell me of his tunnels or his treasure holes.

‘Usin?’ he says now. ‘We are finished here. You may as well go take your feast with Hurna while we ready this poor child for burial.’

Though Hurna is not any favored company of mine, it does not grieve me much to do as Olun says, so great is my relief to be away from these same-seeming brothers and the corpse they peck about so thoroughly. It’s bittering scent is all about me, walking from the hut to where the dour, god-muddled woman crouches by her fire and shapes the fish-meal into flat gray cakes.

She passes one to me that’s like a half-formed animal, so horrible it is squashed flat beneath a rock at birth. We do not speak, still thoughtful of the words that pass between us this last night. The dead girl’s smell is everywhere about my hair and clothing, and my appetite is poor. Each mouthful of the fish-meal cake takes me that long to chew it is not in me for to finish more than half of it.

Shifting my gaze from Hurna to the group before the hut. It seems the bully brothers are employed in rolling up the corpse within a drab, soil-colored sail of cloth, the old man looking on as he rests there beside them on his bier. About to wind the shroud about her head, one of the rough-boys points towards the stripe of bright stump-water green that’s ringed below her open throat. He mutters something to his brother, then to the old man, who nods and makes reply, too far away for me to hear a word. The brothers shrug, and now continue in their dressing of the dead.

Beside me, Hurna gives a sudden snort as if to mark contempt. ‘He need not hope for me to drag him to his filthy rite. That’s up to you, girl. It may serve you well: you’re sure to pay more heed of how the dead are put to rest if you must make the long walk to their grave yourself.’

She laughs and makes her tits shake. Overhead a single crow looks down in passing and calls once, as if alerting us to the approach of something that may not be seen save from that soaring vantage. Clouds mass on the west horizon. In the willage, children chase a painted pig between the huts, now cheering, now complaining as the frightened creature veers this way and that, a gaudy smear of color streaked among the barns and horse-yards, squeaking. What hope may there be for anything so shrill and bright? No hope. No hope at all. There is a fearfulness that gathers weight and form within my belly day by day, grown restless and uneasy as a cold gray baby turning in my womb. You must be gone from here, part of me tells myself, before another dawn is come to find a dead girl placed before your door. Leave with the wolf light when there’s nothing save the birds awake; steal off between the snoring huts and never more return. It is not safe here. There are shadows that loom big behind each happenstance, each chance remark, and more is meant than what is said. Move on. Take up the track again and put these whispering huddles at your back.

And now another part of me replies: You cannot leave, it says, and throw away the only chance for ease and wealth that you may ever happen on, not when the stink of it’s so close. Think of the tunnels that may snake, gold flooded, here beneath you as you sit; the wells of treasure deep enough to draw from all your days. Are you a child, to start at dreams born of bad curds you eat before your bed? To mewl when there are creakings in the dark? These night fears must not cheat you of the old man’s leavings, that are yours by right. Stay. Stay and bide your time, and come at last to wear a colored gown and dine on fat.

But what of her, the dead girl? If they find you out ...

Don’t pay that any heed. There’s not a thing to forge a link in twixt of you and she. Why, even now the rough-boys, like as berries on a missel-sprig, prepare a bier on which she may be hauled to burial. She is not long above the ground, and when the soil is fallen on her face, then you may put her from your thoughts.

But if his dead eye truly looks upon a world we may not see ...

All that is nothing save for mummery. Put it aside and think instead of Olun’s gold.

But ...

Oh, be silent, both of you. There is a fishbone lodged between my teeth, and over by his hut the old man calls for me to drag him to the grave fields. Coming, father. Coming. For a change, the journey is not far. We walk south from the settlement, with Bern and Buri carrying the cold and naked bride upon her hasty bed, while me and Olun scrape along behind. Above us, dead leaves rustle in great muttering crowds upon each yearning bough.

The grave site sets upon a weed-cleared rise that’s higher than the puddled boglands soaking all about. The women from the willage are already gathered there as we arrive. They glance up, silent, narrow-eyed, kneeling so to surround a place where all the turf is skinned away, the earthmeat there below scooped out and heaped up to one side as if with taint, a man-deep wound revealed. They crouch about the grave and braid a ring of flower-heads between their many hands.

The women part to let the shaven brothers and their lifeless burden move between them, making high steps, queer and delicate so as not to disturb the floral braid. Once by the graveside, Bern and Buri set the bier upon the grass, one of them clambering down into the pit to take the body from the other who now lifts it up, his fingers clenching in the curls beneath her arms. She’s lowered thus into the gravemouth, eyes still open, staring at us ‘til she sinks from sight in awkward jerks, each lurch and start accompanied by grunts from Bern and Buri. Settling her upon the gravebed now the bully boy climbs up to join his brother by its edge. Crows wheel above, charred flakes of noise that scatter and re-form against an empty sky.

The ceremony is a dull thing with no rise or fall of feeling, no relief, made flatter yet by this wan, uneventful morning light: the gravewords called in Olun’s failing snake-skin rasp, each phrase cast up but briefly on the shores of speech then dragged back by the undertow of straining and collapsing breath; the women, chanting their response learned long and hard above the holes of mothers, husbands, sons, now lavished on a stranger; Bern and Buri, taking up an earth-ax, one apiece, before the chanting’s over, standing shift-foot with impatience to refill the hole and be away back to their queen, their suckling place.

The call and echo of the bone-chant dies away, replaced by other rhythms. Bern and Buri, each in turn, now stamp an earth-ax deep within the hill of soil discarded by the gravemouth, scooping up the dirt upon their blades to shower in the dead girl’s eyes. The grit-edged chop and bite, the rattling lift and fling, again and yet again. Her body lies unmoving in this sharp, dry rain like some abandoned settlement back in the highland north from which all life is fled, silent and still beneath the steady fall of ash and mud that covers now her wrinkled tracks and bristling gorse, her sinks and outcrops all erased. The breasts and face alone remain. Now nothing but her jaw; her chin. She’s gone.

The grave is filled. The women chant again, and Olun scatters dog teeth on the damp, untrodden mound. The petals of the braided flowers begin to curl and darken. Everyone goes home, with Bern and Buri striding off in step across the fields, the women trailing after them all in one long unraveling knot. We bump and judder in their wake, but soon they are too far away to hail, leaving me and Olun to our own company.

‘Why do you scatter dog teeth on her grave?’

My question is put forward more to break the dismal silence of the marshes than from any great desire to know its answer, yet the old man answers anyway.

‘That spirit-dogs may keep her safe, and guide her through the underpaths into the willage of the dead.’ He seems about to venture more, but now a dreadful coughing falls upon him and he may not speak.

‘There’s none save you and dead men, then, as know these underpaths?’ This is my next inquiry, offered once his hawking dies away.

‘That’s true enough. It seems you must have one or both feet planted in the underworld to know its windings.’ Here he laughs, a brittle noise that’s thick with mucous, very like the crushing of a snail. ‘Except old Tunny. He knows every turning of the path, but all the knowing’s in his fingers. None of it is in his head. He ...’

Here the cunning-man breaks off, as if he thinks it better not to tell me more. At least, that’s how it seems to me. A moment passes, then another. There is still no voice come from behind my shoulder where the old man drags, there at my rear. Turning about, the reason for his quiet is plain: his eyes start out like painted eggs. Beneath the crazing net of signs that mark his flesh the skin is turned a slow and ghostly blue.

Not now! Not now before he’s told me everything! Dropping the bier to run, my screams alert the settlement before my feet can bear me halfway there. Out from their huts they waddle, slow at first then faster as they see who calls and understand what must be happening. They hurry in a line towards me through the long gray meadow-grass, wiping their hands upon their coats or hitching up their leggings as they run.

He’s still alive when we get back to him, some of the blueness faded now, his bird-breast settled back into a lurching rise and fall. He tries to speak as one great oxen-shouldered man scoops Olun from the pallet up into his arms to carry like a babe. His lips move, crinkling their colored scars, but no words come. Across the field he’s borne amid the buzz and whisper of the willagers that crowd about him in a wavering swarm, towards the far hives of the settlement, already humming and alive with rumor and lament. Beneath the soil she lies, her yawn packed full with earth, a dry and bitter lace of root-hair snagged between her teeth. She comes here for her father’s leavings, closer to them now than all my cleverness brings me, with secret paths of gold coiled all about her while she sleeps and stinks and falls apart. Jeweled gravel lodging in between her toes, and chewed by silver worms there in the wasted treasure houses of the dead; the dead, alone of all the world in that they have no greeds to satisfy, no fears to salve or needs they must placate. Their sockets brim with wealth more splendid than their living eyes may ever know, and it concerns them not at all. My body, warm and anxious, moves to cruder drums. Outside, beyond the cluttering strangeness of the old man’s hut, noon comes and goes, marked by the squeals of panic drowned in children’s laughter as the painted pig is killed, off near the roundhouse by the sound of it.

Olun is dying. Sprawled there facing me across the burned-out ember pit he does not seem to breathe at all, but only sigh from while to while, his blinkless eyes fixed on me, blind and sighted both. He sinks into his death and grows remote, unanswering for all my urgent query and demand.

‘Please, Father. There’s so little time and you must give me all your learnings. Teach me. Tell me how to be a cunning one like you before death draws a curtain in between us.’

Olun smiles, a dreadful splitting of the picture-bark that is his face, and tries to speak.

‘The curtain ...’ Here he coughs, breaks off, recovers, starts again. ‘The curtain’s torn. There is a way we may speak with the dead and have their learnings. Patience, daughter. Patience.’

Patience? What is all my toiling; dragging; all my listening to his dull mumbles if not patience?

‘How, then? How then may your learnings come to me if you are dead? Please, Father. Why not tell me now, while there is time?’

Again the smile, the decorated bark peeled back. ‘A test. A final test. If you’re to be the cunning one then you must learn to hear the voice of those that bear the name before you. Come now, daughter, do not look afraid. It’s not so hard to know the teachings of the dead, for those whose wits are quick and have the eyes to see.’

My mouth falls open here to make complaint, yet Olun lifts one trembling hand to still my protest ere it’s born.

‘Let’s talk no more of this, for there’s another matter: something you must give to me while there’s yet breath within my mouth. Something of yours, to be my comfort in the tomb.’

What’s this? He makes no hurry passing on my leavings, yet he asks a gift of me? My tongue grows tart, as if with bile. ‘You say that we may talk when you are dead. What need is there for comfort more than this?’

He shakes his constellation-spattered head. ‘No. Though my voice may hail you from beyond the grave, it does not work the other way about. You may not speak with me, though there’s a way for me to speak with you. My need is for some token, some possession of my daughter’s for to hold beside me in the dark and make me less alone. It is our custom here. What of those beads about your throat?’

My best chance seems to lie in pleasing this old fool, so that he may relent and tell me all he knows. Making no answer save a shrug, my hands reach up behind my neck to fumble with the knot of copper wire that holds the threaded beads in place. My fingers wage a brief, blind struggle and the hoop of hard blue sparks lifts free, held out towards the old man on his bier.

He does not take the beads, nor look at them. Instead, his gaze still rests with me, seems fixed upon my chin or shoulders just as if the loop of fancy-beads still dangles there. At last, his eyes fall to the gift that’s held out in my hand. Reaching, he takes it from me, holds it to his face and then begins to weep.

‘My daughter. Oh, my daughter ...’ More tears fall, his words slurred to a moan, an idiot snuffling. It fills me with unease to see this softness in his manner, he who holds a frightened willage in his thrall. To think it brings such grief upon him, just to part with me. How does this world endure, if all its sages are so weak?

He lifts his head and stares once more into my eyes and there is something fierce within his look. Perhaps he feels an anger with himself, to bawl thus like a babe before his child. He speaks to me, his voice grown flat and cold. ‘Send Hurna to me now. It is my wish to speak to her alone.’

There’s nothing for it but to do his bidding. Picking over hurdles made from gaudy wands and caps adorned with fishbone, my way’s made from in the hut to where the dough-faced woman sits and tends her cooking fires outside. She seems surprised at being summoned thus and, after gawping for a while in disbelief, she hurries through the wood-stopped door to be by Olun’s side.

Sat tired and disappointed in the dust with back against the bare-stripped wooden walls my vision lights upon the view between the willage huts. Off by the roundhouse men with knives of copper flay the face from off the carcass of a colored pig. My eyes close, shutting out a world that swiftly moves beyond my understanding. Lurid shapes transmogrify and melt against a scab-thick dark. The rounded woods still press into my back, the hard-stamped earth against my spine. Off in the mottled dark behind my eyelids there are distant calls and coughs and creakings, willage sounds that penetrate my doze, serve as reminders that the world is yet about me. Half-dreams come. Thoughts blossom into pictures, then dissolve.

Garn hammers bees upon his anvil until black and yellow pulp drools down its side. He stands knee deep in ash that rises slowly in a warm gray flow-tide, covering his thighs, his belly, everything except his head, which has the features of a pig, and now the women of the settlement are come across the risen powder-flats to knot a ring of bright blue flowers about its throat. Their stems leave stains of vivid green against the swells of fat and now an understanding comes upon me that Garn’s body is no longer underneath the ash: the head is severed, and the flesh torso hangs nearby, transfixed upon a spar of wood. The bulging skin is painted everywhere with images of birds.

Off from the willage in another world a cry is come, at which the birds rise up in flapping blind alarm and take me with them high above the riverside where, looking down, we see one woman cut another’s throat, drag off her clothes and throw her to the sluggish waters. Rising higher now, until the people are not visible and all we know are fields and hills; the clustered pale green dots of distant huts. These sights, though strange and thrilling, are yet known to me from somewhere long ago, but where, and when? My body rises up and up until the acrid scent of wet-furred dog awakens me. My eyes are open now upon an afternoon grown longer since they close, yet still the sour hound-perfume lingers. Are there dogs about? A half-remembered dream rolls over, flash of black-scaled underbelly just below the surface of my thoughts that resubmerges and is gone, unrecognized. Rising up stiffly to my feet it seems to me the spoor is come from Olun’s hut and therefore make my way inside where it grows stronger, thick enough to sting the eyes. How great a dog is this to have a stench so fierce?

Shouldering through the lurid piles and trick-tracks of impediment, the rain-dog smell becomes more overwhelming with my every step towards the center round, its stinking heart.

There are no dogs.

The fire pit, kindled now, casts up a dance of red across the curves and crannies of the old man’s hut. Across it, Hurna sits and faces me, arms hooped about her drawn up knees and head cocked to one side. There comes the spat and hiss of green-wood from the embers, but all else is silence in the junk-ringed clearing. Something in the noise-shape of the hut is wrong. There is a part removed; some sound no longer there. Listening for a moment, the omission’s plain: it is the rhythm of his breath.

The witch-man lies upon his bier, bathed in the ghosts of flame that shift and tilt the shadow, setting his tattoos to writhe though he is still as stone. Each staring wet and blind to where the fire pit’s smoke is hauled in ragged twists out through the chimney-hole, his eyes achieve a final match, both fogged and frosted now. His breast becalmed, the hands that rest upon it knot and petrify about my hoop of fancy-beads that glitter violet in the coal-light. Piss, his final offering, soaks through the pup-skin robe whereon he lies, from which the scent of dog steams thick and clinging in the fireside heat.

Tell me your secrets now, old man, the way you promise. Peel apart your death-gummed lips and speak to me.

‘It happens when you send me in to talk with him,’ says Hurna. She is calm and smiling, squatted in the hearth-light next to Olun’s corpse. ‘We make our converse but a little while, and then he dies. But do not worry ...’ Here she notes the anguish in my eyes, mistakes it for compassion. ‘Olun dies a rightly death. His spirit treads upon the bright path now, and best of all he leaves no drudgery for you. His funeral matters are in hand and there are no great tasks you must perform. All things are well.’

All things are well? Gods curse this stupid woman blind! How may all things be well if Olun dies before the secret of his wealth is shared with me? How may she sit and smile and look content when all my schemes are falling down to dust? Beneath my feet the golden tunnels fall away, recede beyond recall. What may be done to bring them back?

A thought comes to me: dragging Olun back towards the village from the dead girl’s funeral, and asking if there is no man alive save he that knows the underpath, the trackways of the dead. The old man’s laughter, like the splintering of snail husks; his reply that bubbles thick with tar from out among the whorl-marked shards: ‘Except old Tunny. He knows every turning of the path, but all the knowing’s in his fingers. None of it is in his head.’

‘Who’s Tunny?’

Hurna looks towards me, startled first then puzzled by my outburst, for she may not see how Tunny is connected with my father’s death. She frowns, and when she speaks her words are slow, filled with a gentleness that makes me furious. It is as if she’s talking to a babe.

‘Tunny’s the gateman here, the old one with the shaking hands, but you have other things to think of now. It is the upset of your father’s death that muddles up your thoughts. Why don’t you rest, and leave the readying of Olun’s wake to me? You need your time to mourn, and ...’

Turning from her, stumbling through the hulks and hinders to the dusking air outside.

Her cries of consolation follow me: ‘Don’t run. You’re just upset, but there’s no need. He’s in a better place. He’s on the bright path now...’

A strange excitement hangs upon the settlement as twilight falls and objects lose their shape and edge to merge within the falling light. From every hut the people are emerging, laughing, chattering and firing torches, one from off the other, flares of yellow in the settling gray. In whispering groups they drift towards the northern gate, a great slow swarm of amber lights that travels in the same direction as myself. They watch me dart among them, running hard towards the watch-hut with the sweat of desperation on my brow and yet they do not pay me any heed, caught up in some excitement of their own.

The ancient gateman with the black and trembling hands is nowhere to be seen and it appears his post is empty and unmanned until a muffled grunting causes me to peer inside. At my back the torch-lit throng moves through the willage gates and out along the river path, a thread of floating lights.

Inside the watch-hut, by the wall, the red-haired girl with freckled shoulders sits beside the birth-marked youth whose name, it comes to me, is Coll. They have their breeks let down about their ankles and their lips locked hard enough to bruise. Each holds the other’s sex.

‘Where’s Tunny?’

Startled fingers suddenly withdraw from in between the loved one’s thighs to cup between their own. Their lips part, shackled only by a silver chain of spit.

‘Shank off! He isn’t here. Shank off and leave us be!’ The boy’s spoiled face becomes so red that all its markings are consumed and lost within the flush of blood.

My question, though, is urgent and may not be put aside. ‘Where is he, then? Come, tell me quick and you are rid of me.’

‘He’s gone to watch the pig-night in the Hobfields. That’s where everybody goes tonight, and more’s the pity you’re not gone there too.’ Here, breaking off, he makes another face and grins to show the stains upon his teeth. ‘Unless you care to stay, that is, and try a bit of this yourself?’

My wad of spittle breaks against his cheek. Cursing, he clambers to his feet and starts towards me, hobbled by his breeks and far too slow. Only his cries of rage pursue me out beyond the blackthorn walls and through a dark alive with shrieks, calls, trailing flames. The pig-night. Fires and dolls and painted swine and flickering processions, blazing spills of rush that move along the river’s edge reflected in its depths like burning fish. A smell, a thrilling taint upon the air and fever in the children’s faces. Pig-night. Every year these passions and these lights, sparked in their fathers and great-sires alike, and back and back to when the Urken leap and gabble in the autumn smokes. This night is not a single time but is as many as the stars, a string of nights drawn through the ages on an awl of ritual and hung with old fires in the stead of beads. Blanched rushes, pale and craven, bow in quivering supplication to the wind, a landlocked pool of them where from the middle bulges forth a skull of brain-gray flint and crumbled yellow stone that wears a crown of burning wood. Of all the willeins crowded in the Hobfield, but a few have room to stand upon this outcrop, faces red and sweat-bright, backs in shadow as they gang about the pyre. The rest are forced to perch about the sodden meadow’s edge upon the harder, risen ground while children scamper back and forth along the narrow spines of path that join this human wheel-rim with its blazing hub.

Fat Mag, the hag-queen, has her place atop the knoll, with Bern and Buri flanking her. The brothers’ voices carry on the breeze across the reed-bog, seeming louder and more guttural than when they speak with me. They are both drunk on mash, and one of them now fumbles with his will-sheath then makes water on the fire. A copper stream pours from the drawn-back eel lips of his sheath, whose eyes look on, appalled. His brother and the hag-queen laugh and clap. Old Tunny does not seem to be among those on the knoll.

Atop the pyre, among the ribboned smoke and flame a figure sits. It is the queer and faceless boy-in-kind that me and Olun see the children making when we drag past here towards the bridge. Making my way about the meadow’s rim to see if Tunny is among the crowd that gathers there, the straw-stuffed body is concealed from me by rising veils of fire and fume, which now the breeze draws back ...

It is no boy-in-kind that roasts upon sputtering woods. It is a child. It has a face that seems to turn towards me, eyes alive with pain and fear and lips that move to shape themselves about unknown and terrifying words. Its snout ...

No. Not a boy. A pig. A pig that has the body of a boy. It is the figure made of rag and straw save now it wears a face flayed from the gaudy hog that’s killed this afternoon. It is the settling of the wood that makes it seem to tip and lean at me; heat-rippled air that brings the stilled squeal of its mouth to life. A prickling cold trails spider legs against my nape and then is gone. Push on. Push on between the jostling strangers, tiny furnaces alight in every eye.

Strung out along the raised-up half-moon of the rim the crowd congeals to separate clots of people, no more than a handful in each straggling knot. They drink; they laugh; they hold their smallest children up to see the fire across the ghostly lake of rush. Some have withdrawn into the overgrowth nearby for making sex, touched by the wild scent of this night as were the birth-stained gateboy and his copper-headed girl. From out between the sting-weeds drift their little cries of grateful pain, their hot and frightened breath. Above, the beady, lecher stars look down and know a jealous wish for skin.

Ahead of me a cooking fire is built upon the Hobfield’s edge, a smaller brother to the central blaze. Above it, spit from ass to gizzard, turns the carcass of a pig whose face is skinned away, over and over in a great slow roll as if its hissing flesh recalls old wallows in cool mud. Along one flank the meat’s already pared down to the bone, white ribs bared in a grin through pink and sizzling gums.

Not far beyond this, Tunny stands apart, a gaunt and rangy thing with skull tipped backwards savoring the smell of fire; of roasting pig; a sniff of gill borne from the weeds behind him. By his side, forgotten, hang the stained and shivering hands. He turns his head at my approach and recognizes me.

‘Ah. Well. Your father’s dead then, is he?’ Awkward in his speech, he is not used to consolation.

‘Aye, my father’s dead. He speaks of you before he dies. He says you may have things to tell me.’

‘Oh? What things might they be, then?’ Old Tunny looks confused, the dye-dipped fingers grown more restless by his side.

‘The underpaths that lead beneath the willage. Olun says you have a knowledge of them, you alone in all the world save he.’

Across the beds of sickly reed blow smoke and laughter from the fire-topped knoll where burns the pig-boy. Tunny frowns and shakes his head. ‘What underpaths? That’s cunning talk is that, and does not mean a thing to me. Why, Olun barely has a hail or fare-you-well for me since my affliction forces me to quit my calling and take on a lowly gateman’s lot.’

His eyes grow distant, damp with memory. My gaze shifts down from them towards the palsied, black extremities. Within my thoughts, a dark thing crawls towards the light.

‘Before you are their gateman, are you ...?’

‘Their tattooist. Yes.’

‘And it is you that marks my father with his crow designs?’

He gives a braying laugh that seems too big for such a pinched and narrow chest. Off on the knoll there’s nothing left now of the pig-boy save a charring mound that puffs and bursts and shrivels in among the roaring tongues of light.

‘His crow designs? If that is what he calls them, why, then yes that is my work, although they do not look like crows to me. They have no sense in them at all and yet he makes me copy them so careful from his painted barks, as if no other half-wit scrawl may do as well. When we are done he burns the picture barks and makes a proper thing of it, you mark my word. Each year he comes to me and has them traced afresh to keep ‘em bold, but then my hands get bad and Olun comes no more, nor anyone. Who does their tattoos now is not for me to know.’ He pauses, wrinkles up his nose and squints in the direction of my neck. ‘Who does that one about your throat? It must be someone in the willage, for it is not there when you are first arrived.’

What is he speaking of? My hand flies up unbidden to inspect the soft skin there below my jaw. There is no scar that may be felt, no raised-up lip of fresh tattoo. This flutter-fingered fool is either addled or else blind, and there is much for me to think of without paying further notice to some lack-wit gateman’s mutterings. Still squinting at my neck he lets me clasp his shuddering hand and thank him for his help, then watches me turn from him, walking off into the firelit crowd along the meadow-bank.

The dark thing in my thoughts crawls closer still. Old Tunny’s fingers know the underpath, though there’s no knowing in his head. Old Tunny’s the tattooist. He scores Olun’s marks, his blackened fingers moving, year on year, along those mad and weaving tracks, the old man’s crow designs that do not look like crows, yet now is all come plain. They are not images of crows at all.

They’re what crows see.

The river from above become a line, a crooked thread of blue. The patchworked fields all hemmed with bramble, huts made small as finger-rings and forests shrunk to fat green slugs, all crinkle-edged and veined with paths. That is the means by which the old man knows each track and by-way. There’s the reason Olun feels the willage is too much a part of him: the all of it is etched upon his hide. Its hills, its ponds. Its underpaths. Its vaults and treasure holes. That’s how he means to speak with me when he is in his grave.

My shovings and my squeezings now return me to the riverside that wanders back towards the willage. Casting one last look towards the knoll it strikes me that the hag-queen sits alone before the pyre, with Bern and Buri gone elsewhere. My eyes sift through the ragged crowd about the Hobfield’s rim and finally alight upon the monstrous brothers, standing by the spit on which the painted pig is roast. Old Tunny stands beside the pair, looking afraid and talking with them. Now he lifts one hand and gestures to his gullet. Both the brothers nod. They stare as one across the flickering yellow reed-field, peering through the smoke towards the river path and me, although they may not see me this far from the fire.

Turning away from them, my hurried footsteps bear me off into the lapping dark, back to the willage and the old man’s precious, cold remains. Even if Hurna is already settling him within his grave, it is no obstacle for one as skilled in resurrection as myself. My feet are tingling as they pound along the riverbank, warm with the feel of all my gold that’s hoarded there beneath them.

Is there something on my neck? Inside of me, the dark thing slowly drags towards the light. There’s something missing here, some knowledge that’s not yet disclosed. A picture comes of Hurna, squatting there by Olun’s body, smiling through the coal-glow of the inner hut. What does she have to be so pleased about? Atop the Beasthill to my left are dancing lights, wherefrom a distant hollow keening rises bare into the night.

‘He’s in a better place,’ she says.

‘He’s on the bright path now.’

The understanding, when it comes upon me, tears a scream from out my throat. Forget the willage. There is nothing there for me now. Run. Run up the Beasthill. It is not too late. My tears may be misplaced, to make so much out of a word, a look. Keep running, up and up.

Besides, what reason may there be for Olun to consent to such a thing? He has no love for Hurna or her gods, and says time after time that he wants me to have his learnings and his leavings when he’s dead. He has no cause to change his mind ...

... but then there is the way he looks at me after he takes my fancy-beads. His eyes and voice grow cold and then he asks to speak with Hurna as if ... No. Forget it. It is nothing. In my side, a pain. My gasping breath, so much like Olun’s.

Stopping half-way up to rest and looking back a pair of torch-lights may be seen, that move along the river path towards the Beasthill’s lower slopes. They seem to come from the direction of the Hobfields, following my own route here. A group of revelers, perhaps, all overfed and drunk with mash, that make for Beasthill so to ask some god’s forgiveness of their gluttony before returning home. The lamp-fires glide along the riverbank, their pace matched perfectly as if the bearers walk in step. They start to mount the Beasthill. Run. Run on.

Across the flattened summit stretch the rings of broken wall, one set inside the other, ancient banks of earth heaped up by men yet now reclaimed by grass that looks like slivered metal underneath the stars. Away towards the hilltop’s further side, beyond the smallest and most central ring, a crowd of women are convened, all wailing.

They are standing in a ring about the fire.

Shouting and screaming, bidding them to stop, my frantic, hurtling form careens across the stretch of grass and dark between us, dodging through the crumbling gaps that separate the turf-capped walls and leaping puddles wide as baby ponds to come at last among them, sobbing, half collapsing there at Hurna’s feet who stands beside the pyre.

She smiles down fondly. Off across the field two torches breast the hill and start to move towards us. Bern and Buri. Hurna’s voice is hearty and forgiving, brimming over with dull-witted sisterly affection.

‘We are pleased that you at last decide to share our ceremony. And your father. He is pleased as well.’

She looks up here towards the towering center of the blaze, much higher than the pig-night fire.

He sits erect upon his burning throne, shrunk to a hideous charcoal infant by the flames. His blackened sockets stare as if to scry the smoke for messages, for intimations of reprieve. Behind these gaping orbits soft gray tendrils smolder from a soot of brain. Across his breast, held in a death-grip, cindered fingers clench upon his daughter’s fancy-beads. His skin flakes off to rise as great slow moths of ash into the firmament, above the heat where they grow cool and fall to lazy spirals of descent, raining about me.

Bern and Buri stand behind me now, patient and silent as they wait for me to turn and face them. From the sky a frail black fragment, tumbling as in a dream, drifts down to settle on my arm. Upon it, barely visible against its black, the faintest silver tracery of lines may yet be seen: a gentle curve that is perhaps a stream or else some buried lane, the clustered spider-marks that may be trees viewed from above.

It breaks against my wrist and falls to dust, caught by the wind to scatter over the cremation fields.