The Gift of Stones (3 page)

Leaf placed his sharpened antler tine on the flint, exactly where the tendon was attached, and struck it with a wooden mallet. These were the perfect tools but only in hands like Leaf’s that were firm and certain. If the direction of his impact were a feather’s breadth too shallow the fracture would surface too soon. The knife blade would be shorter than a thumb. It would be chisel-shaped. Or, if the impact were a feather’s breadth too deep, the fracture would plunge so that its blade end curved in a lumpy hook, a talon, a beak, a keel. Who’d want a poisoned arm removed with that?

For Leaf himself there was no tension. He knew what to do. He’d done it many times. One blow and the blade blank broke loose, spiralled for an instant on the anvil and fell into the apron on Leaf’s lap. There, on its underside at the point of impact, was the distinctive raised tump of stone, like a tiny bulb or a winkle shell. Beyond, in the foothills of the tump, the flint feathered and radiated like a slow tide on a flat beach. It was a good, long blade, still warm from the fire.

Once again Leaf and his daughter returned the stone to the flames. Leaf exercised his hands and – half exultant, half impatient – blew out his cheeks to match the working of the bellows. He chose the best tools from his workshop for turning the blank into a finished blade. He sat, with a different, lighter anvil on his knees, to receive the hot stone. Again he worked with antler tines but with no hammer. A little sideways pressure removed the tump, the shell, the bulb. More pressure produced a mounting nest of fine and shallow flakes on the anvil as the blade was patterned and reduced.

Enough, you say. A boy awaits. The afternoon has almost gone. There is no need to detail the patience and the expertise with which Leaf etched a pattern of shallow facets along the cutting edge, or how the flint’s parallel flaking scars were ground ice-flat with grains of sandstone, or how the stoneworker reconciled his quest for beauty, symmetry, utility with the urgency of his task. If there had been time he would have cut a block of ash and made a handle for such a knife. He would have fixed the blade into the ash with birch resin. It takes two days to harden. He would have worried at the flint until it had lost all resemblance to stone. As it was he simply rubbed the blade in grease, to boast its natural colours and to catch the light, and – picking up a few sharp scraps from the flake nest on his anvil – delivered his newest tool to the crowd who waited at his gate. He was not patient with their flattery. The blade was good, for sure. It’d do the job. But he was aggravated by the thought of what the new knife might have been were there time to finish. It would have been a tool too fine to use. It would have been an ornament.

T
HOSE OF US
who have kicked an anthill will understand the chaos in the village. The dreaming ants, so used to patterns and to chores, had been sent wild and spirited by the unheralded disorder of the day and by this thin excuse to shout and smile and swagger. In the causeway between the huts and workshops, where normally at that hour in the afternoon there were only hens and children, the crowd was advancing with the amputation knife. Faces, which usually were white with dust and concentration from the shaping of the flint, were flushed and restive and keen to play a part. Voices were high and unrestrained. There were wars of jostling and of tripping in that crowd. It was as if the sober stoneys were all drunk and far too blithe to care exactly what it was that brought them there but only glad to be involved.

There was a mood of unexpected celebration, too – not because the wounded boy – my father – was considered careless, indolent, untrustworthy, the sort who only had himself to blame for any ill-luck in his life, but because their rigid working day had been disrupted by the horsemen, by the making of the knife, by the prospect of a bloody afternoon.

Who would carry out the operation? There were no volunteers. There was no man or woman among the villagers who could boast experience in such matters. And there was no time to fetch some expert from the outside world, some butcher-herbalist or adept knapper of the flesh. My father’s version of events expertly shapes a symmetry between his dying body on the bed – the stillness of the bulrush boy, with the blackening blood, the paling skin, the cold and sweaty forehead – and the bluster of the villagers faced with a task beyond their skills. A balding volunteer was quickly nominated, one who was not present in that room and so could hardly make his case for staying absent. Leaf should carry out the amputation, someone said. He’d made the knife. He would know its properties. Besides, he was the finest craftsman of them all. He had a steady hand. Compared to making leaves of stone it would be a quick and simple task for him to shorten this boy’s arm.

Once again the crowd set off – this time, uphill, into the wind, towards the ocean brow. Come on, Leaf, they called. There’s work for you. No one was fool enough to specify. But Leaf would not leave his workshop – where he sat, another anvil on his knees, excavating oysters – until he knew the story. And then he wouldn’t move at all. He had no ambitions as a carver, was all that he would say. He had his lunch to eat. He’d done his share and made the knife. No more. Find some other sap to chop the boy in two.

At last, of course, partly persuaded by the accusations that his reticence was merely cunning, that his knife was blunt and splintered and could not amputate a toadstool let alone an arm, Leaf was persuaded to leave his shellfish and his workshop and set off, downwind, towards – he thought – the dying, poisoned, bloodless boy. Meanwhile my father, for some reason unexplained and inappropriate for his condition, had begun to feel quite well again. His arm was painful, but the sleep had restored his spirits and reduced his fever. He sat up upon his bed and wondered what there was to eat about the house. He wondered, too, what all the noise was in the causeway beyond the wall. Slowly the possibility occurred that he would not need to lose his arm at all.

His revival was not widely welcomed. Leaf and his companions were not relieved to see their patient standing at the gate, his expression once again the usual stew of idleness and insolence, his arm hanging heavily at his side. His liveliness presented them with problems. ‘He should be down and out,’ said Leaf. ‘I can’t cut a boy who’s half awake. He has to be unconscious.’ Some beer would have done the trick for a boy of father’s size. Or – better – a cup of wood spirit or headspin made from grain. But this was the village of stone where work and trade were king and queen. No one got drunk, no one had drink. The fabric of the village was made strong by the warp and weft of rules. Intoxicating drink was not allowed. It produced bad flint.

They returned my father to his bed and debated their difficulty. Here they had a boy whose arm was damaged beyond repair. If they did not swiftly put Leaf ’s knife to use, first his shoulder, then his chest would succumb to the poison in the elbow. It might take hours, it could take weeks – but finally the boy would die. There is a limit to what can be cut away. You can’t remove a shoulder and a chest. But with a cussedness that matched his usual manner the boy was conscious. How could they put an end to that? There were those amongst them – Leaf included – who harboured thoughts that perhaps the village would be no weaker if the boy did die. He’d never make the best of workers. He had no love of stone. He spent too long idly on the beach, or in the woods. Such thoughts, of course, were left unvoiced. The warp and weft again demanded that the boy be saved. And now.

It is not difficult to stun a sheep. A blow to the head with a wooden mallet is known to quiet the beast for the butcher’s knife. So it was with father. They thought they’d knock him out. Here the tale presents a boy of seven, already bloody from a wounded arm, stood up by men twice, three, four times his age and battered round the head. One misjudged fist blow to his nose caused more blood to flow. One mallet blow to his brow (to which, by now, we must add my father’s terror and his sobbing) brought up an instant, broken bruise in the shallow flesh above the skull. A last desperate finger chop to the nape of his neck caused the perpetrator more damage than the boy. He was not stunned. It was a scene too rough and comic to seem cruel. Those men who could strike a flint and dislocate its core with the force and delicacy of owls hunting mice and shrews could not bludgeon one small boy to sleep. It was a foreign craft.

Here I am tempted to infiltrate my own concocted version of those moments in the past. I knew my father and his neighbours. Timid is the word. They could not strike a boy in such a heartless way. I imagine them frozen and hesitant at the very thought of it. The fist drawn back would not unleash itself. The raised mallet would be held back by the force of custom. Theirs was an ordered, working village. Scrapping was for cockerels.

It was at this moment, then (my father cowering but untouched, Leaf’s new knife untested, the dusk upon them), that the horsemen of that morning returned to the village with goods to trade. They left their horses, as requested, in the care of children and proceeded on foot between the huts and workshops to the market green.

It would be an error to imagine that just because a small boy had been injured and that a crowd had gathered for the amputation, that the working life of the villagers had ended for the day. There are those who cannot settle and for whom any occurrence is excuse enough to form a crowd. But there are others, too, who never let their focus shift. The world could split in half and still they’d have their noses pointing down at the work bench or the stall. And so it was that the horsemen found a reduced but busy marketplace on their return and merchants there whose outrage at the wounding of a village boy was swiftly tamed by the usual courtesies of trade. Except, of course, that the crudely struck arrowhead that had caused such hilarity in the morning was prominently displayed amongst the local, finer tools so that the horsemen might understand exactly what debts there were to pay. Yet far from embarrassment at the rediscovery of their arrowhead these men were jocular. They pointed at the head and chuckled. So there it is, they seemed to say. They’d spent a lot of time in vain knocking back the bracken. They expressed no interest in the boy who’d last been seen in flight. In fact these horsemen did not seem reliable, predictable in any way. There was much laughter amongst them, and warmth and swagger, too. Their hair was long. Their clothes were decorated. The expression in their eyes was bold and childlike. They seemed at ease – yet wayward, loud and unrestrained.

Everybody there was drawn towards this knot of men. The villagers were hypnotized, and for a while the trade in borers, burins, sharpeners, harpoons, stone wrist-guards, sickles, fire-flints, sling-stones, scrapers, hand axes, arrowheads and tangs and barbs came to a pause. Women stopped their basketry. Small boys who fashioned string by rubbing buckleaf fibre on their thighs finished early for the day. The man who sold coloured dyes which came, he said, from snails and molluscs, bark, insects, the waste of certain birds (but which, my father claimed, were lightning dust) ceased for once to sing his wares. Visitors from far away who’d come to trade with fat-hen weed or honey, with herbs or decorated bone and slate, cups and birch-wood boxes, with shells, wood, shellfish, nuts, sloes, pears, peas, apples, round cakes, flour, clothes, with frogs and brownies from the stream, forgot the purpose of their journeys. Piles of clay pots, antlers, charcoal, willow fish-traps, nets of hens were left without attendance. Everyone – except the opportunists – came to watch the fun.

We knew that you’d be back, they told the horsemen. We knew that once you’d seen the flints that we make in this village you’d want to talk with us, not fight. Now, what’s on offer?

The horsemen sat amongst the mats. Candles were brought and dishes of curd. A skin bag was collected from the tethered horses and emptied at the merchants’ feet. There were five hollowed lengths of femur bone, cut from the carcasses of deer. Each had been stained yellow and then carved with flower heads in crowded, perfect detail and linked with filaments and lines, so that the surface of the bone was frost and lichen interlaced. It was the sort of pattern, finely traced by insects, that could be found beneath the loosened bark of trees. For the knappers in the marketplace the bonework was the finest they had seen. They crowded round to rub their thumbs along the yellow, decorated shafts. Yet no one was fool enough to speak out loud the price they’d pay for such ornaments. Instead they shook their heads and said, No use to us. What could we do with these?

One of the riders – a man as old and bald as Leaf – gathered up the bones from the rubbing thumbs around him and placed all but one before him on the mat. He took a finger of flat wood and, holding the bone high in the candlelight so that all could see, he scraped a plug of hardened fat from the bone’s hollow. Now he was careful that no one else should grasp the bone. He held it upright at his nose and sniffed. Perfume, he said. Those villagers who stood behind his back could lean forward and see a blinking disc of green fluid and smell the unmistakable fume of orris plus the honeyed redolences of new, dramatic odours. It made their hearts beat fast. It made them blush and pass uneasy smiles. The bone of perfume was passed across to those traders whose flints the horsemen had inspected. They assumed the expressions of experts as they each lifted the perfume to their nostrils and, a little shakily, passed on the bone. Their mouths were watering. Their eyes were cloudy. One, at least, shifted uneasily where he sat to disguise a sudden, unheralded erection. A little touch of this behind my wife’s ear, a smudge between the breasts, he thought, a dab between the thighs. Another, made suddenly breathless and urgent for transaction by the fragrance in the bone, could manage his palpitations and impatience only by sneezing like a horse. Here was something that defied reason. A sneeze and an erection were both appropriate ripostes.

Where is this perfume from, they asked. The horsemen shrugged. They weren’t completely sure. We didn’t ask, they said. We simply saw the opportunity and helped ourselves. There was a caravan, beyond the forests, a dozen days from here. They’d traded horses for some skins. And then, at night, armed only with a knife they had crept up on the sleeping caravan and cut the horses loose. They weren’t ashamed of that. It was reclamation only, hardly theft. They’d found the skin bag with its decorated bones strapped to the blankets of a horse. One had splintered and there was perfume on the horse’s flanks. They spoke what every man was feeling – that even a horse, with perfume like that upon its flanks, could make a man keen-set.