Black Juice (2 page)

The wreath showed up in the crowd ahead, a big, pale ring trailing spirals of whisper-vine, the beautifullest thing. I climbed up the low bank there, and the ground felt hard and cold after a day on the squishy tar. My ankles shivered as I took the wreath from Mai. It was heavy; it was fat with heavenly scents.

‘You’ll have to carry those,’ I said to Mai, as someone handed her the other garlands. ‘You should come out, anyway. Ik wants you there.’

She shook her head. ‘She’s cloven my heart in two with that axe of hers.’

‘What, so you’ll chop hers as well, this last hour?’

We glared at each other in the bonfire light, all loaded down with the fine, pale flowers.

‘I never heard this boy speak with a voice before, Mai,’ said someone behind her.

‘He’s very sure,’ said someone else. ‘This is Ikky’s Last Things we’re talking about, Mai. If she wants you to be one of them …’

‘She shouldn’t have shamed us, then,’ Mai said, but weakly.

‘You going to look back on this and think yourself a poface,’ said the first someone.

‘But it’s like—’ Mai sagged and clicked her tongue. ‘She should have
cared
what she did to this family,’ she said with her last fight. ‘It’s more than just herself.’

‘Take the flowers, Mai. Don’t make the boy do this twice over. Time is short.’

‘Yeah,
everybody’s
time is short,’ said the first someone.

Mai stood, pulling her mouth to one side.

I turned and propped the top of the wreath on my forehead, so that I was like a little boy-bride, trailing a head of flowers down my back to the ground. I set off over the tar, leaving the magic silence in the crowd. There was only the rub and squeak of flower stalks in my ears; in my eyes, instead of the flourishes of bonfires, there were only the lamps in a ring
around Mumma, Felly, Dash, and Ikky’s head. Mumma was kneeling bonty-up on the wood, talking to Ikky; in the time it had taken me to get the wreath, Ikky’s head had been locked still.

‘Oh, the baby,’ Mai whimpered behind me. ‘The little darling.’

Bit late for darling-ing now
, I almost said. I felt cross and frightened and too grown-up for Mai’s silliness.

‘Here, Ik, we’ll make you beautiful now,’ said Mumma, laying the wreath around Ik’s head. ‘We’ll come out here to these flowers when you’re gone, and know you’re here.’

‘They’ll die pretty quick—I’ve seen it.’ Ik’s voice was getting squashed, coming out through closed jaws. ‘The heat wilts ’em.’

‘They’ll always look beautiful to you,’ said Mumma. ‘You’ll carry down this beautiful wreath, and your family singing.’

I trailed the vines out from the wreath like flares from the edge of the sun.

‘Is that Mai?’ said Ik. Mai looked up, startled, from laying the garlands between the vines. ‘Show me the extras, Mai.’

Mai held up a garland. ‘Aren’t they good? Trumpets from Low Swamp, Auntie Patti’s whisper-vine, and star-weed to bind. You never thought ordinary old stars could look so good, I’ll bet.’

‘I never did.’

It was all set out right, now. It went in the order: head, half-ring of lamps behind (so as not to glare in her eyes),
wreath, half-ring of garlands behind, leaving space in front of her for us.

‘Okay, we’re going to sing you down now,’ said Mumma. ‘Everybody get in and say a proper goodbye.’ And she knelt inside the wreath a moment herself, murmured something in Ikky’s ear and kissed her on the forehead.

We kids all went one by one. Felly got clingy and made Ikky cry; Dash dashed in and planted a quick kiss while she was still upset and would hardly have noticed him; Mumma gave me a cloth and I crouched down and wiped Ik’s eyes and nose—and then could not speak to her bare, blinking face.

‘You’re getting good at that flute,’ she said.

But this isn’t about me, Ik. This is
not at all
about me.

‘Will you come out here some time, and play over me, when no one else’s around?’

I nodded. Then I had to say some words, of some kind, I knew. I wouldn’t get away without speaking. ‘If you want.’

‘I want, okay? Now give me a kiss.’

I gave her a kid’s kiss, on the mouth. Last time I kissed her, it was carefully on the cheek as she was leaving for her wedding. Some of her glitter had come off on my lips. Now I patted her hair and backed away over the wreath.

Mai came in last. ‘Fairy doll,’ I heard her say sobbingly. ‘Only-one.’

And Ik, ‘It’s all right, Auntie. It’ll be over so soon, you’ll see. And I want to hear your voice nice and strong in the singing.’

We readied ourselves, Felly in Mumma’s lap, then Dash, then me next to Mai. I tried to stay attentive to Mumma, so Mai wouldn’t mess me up with her weeping. It was quiet except for the distant flubber and snap of the bonfires.

We started up, all the ordinary evening songs for putting babies to sleep, for farewelling, for soothing broke-hearted people—all the ones everyone knew so well that they’d long ago made rude versions and joke-songs of them. We sang them plain, following Mumma’s lead; we sang them straight, into Ikky’s glistening eyes, as the tar climbed her chin. We stood tall, so as to see her, and she us, as her face became the sunken centre of that giant flower, the wreath. Dash’s little drum held us together and kept us singing, as Ik’s eyes rolled and she struggled for breath against the pressing tar, as the chief and the husband’s family came and stood across from us, shifting from foot to foot, with torches raised to watch her sink away.

Mai began to crumble and falter beside me as the tar closed in on Ik’s face, a slow, sticky, rolling oval. I sang good and strong—I didn’t want to hear any last whimper, any stopped breath. I took Mai’s arm and tried to hold her together that way, but she only swayed worse, and wept louder. I listened for Mumma under the noise, pressed my eyes shut and made my voice follow hers. By the time I’d steadied myself that way, Ik’s eyes were closing.

Through our singing, I thought I heard her cry for Mumma; I tried not to, yet my ears went on hearing.
This will happen only the once—you can’t do it over again if ever you
feel like remembering
. And Mumma went to her, and I could not tell whether Ik was crying and babbling, or whether it was a trick of our voices, or whether the people on the banks of the tar had started up again. I watched Mumma, because Mumma knew what to do; she knew to lie there on the matting, and dip her cloth in the last water with the little fading fish-scales of ice in it, and squeeze the cloth out and cool the shrinking face in the hole.

And the voice of Ik must have been ours or others’ voices, because the hole Mumma was dampening with her cloth was, by her hand movements, only the size of a brassboy now. And by a certain shake of her shoulders I could tell: Mumma knew it was all right to be weeping now, now that Ik was surely gone, was just a nose or just a mouth with the breath crushed out of it, just an eye seeing nothing. And very suddenly it was too much—the flowers nodding in the lamplight, our own sister hanging in tar, going slowly, slowly down like Vanderberg’s truck that time, like Jappity’s cabin with the old man still inside it, or any old villain or scofflaw of around these parts, and I had a big sicking-up of tears, and they tell me I made an awful noise that frightened everybody right up to the chief, and that the husband’s parents thought I was a very ill-brought-up boy for upsetting them instead of allowing them to serenely and superiorly watch justice be done for their lost son.

I don’t remember a lot about that part. I came back to myself walking dully across the tar between Mai and Mumma,
hand-in-hand, carrying nothing, when I had come out here laden, when we had all had to help.
We must have eaten everything
, I thought.
But what about the mats and pans and planks?
Then I heard a screeking clanking behind me, which was Dash hoisting up too heavy a load of pots.

And Mumma was talking, wearily, as if she’d been going on a long time, and soothingly, which was like a beautiful guide-rope out of my sickness, which my brain was following hand over hand.
It’s what they do to people, what they have to do, and all you can do about it is watch out who you go loving, right? Make sure it’s not someone who’ll rouse that killinganger in you, if you’ve got that rage, if you’re like our Ik—

Then the bank came up high in front of us, topped with grass that was white in Mumma’s lamp’s light. Beyond it were all the eyes, and attached to the eyes the bodies, flat and black against bonfire or starry sky. They shuffled aside for us.

I knew we had to leave Ik behind, and I didn’t make a fuss, not now. I had done my fussing, all at once; I had blown myself to bits out on the tar, and now several monstrous things, several gaping mouths of truth, were rattling pieces of me around their teeth. I would be all right, if Mai stayed quiet, if Mumma kept murmuring, if both their hands held me as we passed through this forest of people, these flitting firefly eyes.

They got me up the bank, Mumma and Auntie; I paused and they stumped up and then lifted me, and I walked up the impossible slope like a demon, horizontal for a moment and then stiffly over the top—

—and into my Mumma, whose arms were ready. She couldn’t’ve carried me out on the tar. We’d both have sunk, with me grown so big now. But here on the hard ground she took me up, too big as I was for it. And, too big as I was, I held myself onto her, crossing my feet around her back, my arms behind her neck. And she carried me like Jappity’s wife used to carry Jappity’s idiot son, and I felt just like that boy, as if the thoughts that were all right for everyone else weren’t coming now, and never would come, to me. As if all I could do was watch, but not ever know anything, not ever understand. I pushed my face into Mumma’s warm neck; I sealed my eyes shut against her skin; I let her strong warm arms carry me away in the dark.

M
ULLORD RIDES FAST AWAY
, to the forest.

‘Give me that grey,’ I say to Bandy.

Bandy hooks the mare out of the stall, and I’m astride and moving before I’ve properly had time to think. Mullord is a small patch of darkness rocking through the dusk. Taking the hill path, as I said he would.

‘That wagon will slow them,’ I told Cook and Gerdie. ‘All our master has to do is go over the hills. They’ll camp at Tampton, or at Brittly Spring, under the Seat.’

‘Not with that prize aboard,’ said Cook, all in a shiver of delighted horror. ‘Not if they’ve a brain anywhere among their rags and tattles. Bury theersalluvs in a cave somewheres. Magic theersalluvs right off to Arribee, or further. They could do that, theer kind.’

I can believe it. I can believe Mullord and I are riding out to nothing, to a long night of black nothing, silent country. So outlandish has the day been, and last night, and yesterday, too.

But now all will be well. Mullord is back from his travels,
and he knows. Whatever can be put right, Mullord will put it. We needn’t twirl our thumbs and worry any longer.

I throw myself low on the grey’s neck as we go in among the trees. I know the hill path, but not branch for branch as Mullord does. I might not catch up with him; I might meet the both of them coming back, like that time she set out for her father’s hold, in that great temper after they were wed. Yes, I’ll meet them like that, hand-in-hand between the horses, their heads together in close-talk, Mullord’s face with the look on it, like a warm hand has smoothed off all the sternness.

Except it’s night, rushing night, and it hasn’t happened yet. And sternness wasn’t the word for Mullord when he was told, this evening, as he came in the house-gate. Leermonth and Jamey got to him first, the young bletherers.

‘Is this true, Berry?’ he said to me as I hurried up.

‘About her ladyship? Every word, Mullord.’

I saw, ’twas as he heard it fall from
my
lips that he credited it. Time was when that would have given me pleasure, when I was young and learning the ways of lords; nowadays it’s only my due. All it did this time was bring home, like a hammer blow to my chest, how terrible a thing she had done. To all of us through him, to be sure, but mostly to him; what her cruel cold heart had done upon his true one. I saw her for the child she was, for the thoughtless murdering child, in that moment, in Mullord’s fallen face.

My cheek is against the grey’s mane, my ear listening past our thunder and branch-crack, up to Mullord on the hill
ahead. I can hear nothing, but he must not go too fast, must not tire that big black horse, for all it’s fresh and kept trim for just this use. Them rag-tags may have gone hell for leather, taken fright once they got out, once they sobered up and saw they had a lord’s wife with them.

‘Did
none
of ours go with them?’ Mullord had raged, striding to the stables.

‘Mullady wouldn’t let us,’ I said. ‘She cast a pot at Minnow’s head, who would go with her. The woman’s been senseless these many hours since, and the leech don’t hold out hope for her. After that, only the little handmaid would go, and she came back weeping, at noon-tide, saying Mistress had spoken harsh to her and would not have her near.’

I did not like the look of him, the darting eyes, the snarl on his mouth. If she had meant to send him mad by this, I thought she had perhaps succeeded. And I did not want to see such a noble mind turning.

And then Bandy was before us with the coalblack saddled and bridled, and Mullord walked straight up onto its back, and off he rode.

I come out onto the bald hilltop, and in the freedom from branch-thwackings I hear him ahead, well ahead, turmoiling up the next hill. He doesn’t need me; his rage and power will alone accomplish whatever he intends. But could I bear to go back to the keep, and gaze at wall and window? Better to be out and moving, even fruitlessly, than sitting wondering, stilling servants’ chatter. And I would go after him as I would
not go after his wife; I’m his, not hers, as I’ve said to Gerdie many a time.

‘Get you,’ says my wife, her eyes laughing. ‘One kind word from her and you’d be theirs both.’

‘And I might,’ I rally, ‘but the mistress is hardly one for kindness, is she?’