The Gift of Stones (5 page)

What would you do if you were me? Run back and tell the stoneys? What? That they should arm themselves and gather on the shore? That they should hurry from their workshops – the stones left baking, the bellows breathless in the hearth – and prepare themselves for trade with sailors? That they should simply stand in awe, like me, and witness from the land the recklessness of travel on the sea? They’d tell me, Scram. We’ve work to do. They’d call me Little Liar. And, for sure, if one or two were tempted to take the bracken path towards the sea to prove me false, they couldn’t reach the cliffs in time. For all the stillness on the beach, the muscles in the clothing of the sail made clear enough to me that there were breezes just offshore. That ship would soon be out of sight. Unless, of course, I followed it. Why shouldn’t I? I had no stones. I simply filled my chest with air and took off down the coast.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I
N FACT
, it might have been a dream. I fell asleep, my head upon my hand. The walking and the wind had tired me out. When I awoke I couldn’t see the sea, I couldn’t tell the colour of the rocks. There was a mist and it was dusk and all that mattered was the distance from our village and the fear of being stranded in the night. You’d all be just as fearful, that’s for sure. The beach is fine by daylight, but at night it is too open and too cold. There might be wolves. There might be worse. And yet to walk back along the cliffs could not be done. I’d fall. I’d shred myself on thorns. I’d drown in rain and blackness and in leaves. I stood and looked inland across the heath. I filled my lungs with damp and heavy air. “Who’s there?” I said. And then I raised my voice and called, “Who’s there?”

I was answered by a dog. Its bark was wolflike for an instant. My stomach and my bowels made soup. My legs gave way. I’d never known such fear, not even when young leather-purse, the bowman, had come blundering through the bracken to retrieve his arrow, his stave circling in the air, my right arm lost. That was in the day, and I was close to home. Now I stood as still as stone, breathing through an open mouth and planning what I would do when the pack had sniffed me out. I’d run into the sea. Would that have done the trick? Can wolves swim? I wouldn’t know. There were no wolves. There was another bark, high-pitched and servile. It was a single dog. And there behind its call, just lit and barely visible, the grey on grey, was a streaming plume of smoke.

Now you see me running on the saltland heath, sending rabbits to their burrows, putting up the roosting birds. I didn’t care. There was a smudge of safety in the air. If there were fires and dogs then people were close by. I’d pass the night with them. They wouldn’t harm a one-armed man, a youth, a boy. I’d eat, sleep, go home in light. I’d take an elderberry stone.’

‘A
LL WE HAD
to eat that night was slott. The woman ground the fish eggs into creamy paste and added green flour. She rolled the mixture into dumplings and heated them in sea water on the dampened fire which she had lit too dangerously close to the reedwork of her hut.

“Watch the pot,” she said. “Don’t let it crack. And call me when they’re done.”

“When are they done?”

“They’ll rise and float,” she said. She took a cup of water and stooped to leave the hut. In the dull light that lingered in the distance I watched her step into the grasses with her dog and walk a little way from the hut. She wore a belted smock. She took it by the hem, lifted it up to her breasts and squatted on the ground. Beneath the smock, she was thin and naked. Her buttocks and her thighs were creased and empty like punctured water bags. The hair between her legs was long and black. The dog stood before her, its tail erect, sniffing at the ground. She took its muzzle in her hands and pushed the dog away towards the hut. Her eyes were good. She saw me watching her as she added earth to earth, and cleaned herself with the water and some leaves. “Watch that pot,” she called, and pulled a screen of grass to block my view.

The dumplings were still boulders at the bottom of the sea. I turned my head away from the woman in the grass and looked about her home. Her child was sleeping on its mat. I could hear the snort and whistle of its blocked nostrils, the insect in its chest. The woman’s woven house had once been strong, but water, winter, sun, wind and frost had soaked and dried and split and snapped the reeds. Its coating of caked mud had cracked and fallen. Its roof required new timber. Its floor, fresh mats. The bracken fronds that she had used in bunches on the ground to keep out draughts and rats wheezed and fidgeted with bugs and roaches. Now I saw the sense in lighting fires so close. What smoke remained blew low into the hut, into my eyes, into the baby’s chest, into the bracken and kept the flies away.

“Are they done?” she said. She was standing at the fireside, her smock in place, the dog sniffing at her hands.

“Not yet.”

“You’re not much use.” She shook the clay pot with a stick and the slott came up like bubbles in a pool. She tipped the pot and let the water run away until there were only dumplings and a little juice. She reached for some dry wood which was stacked inside the hut and for a while we had a golden flame without much smoke by which to eat our meal. She looked much older in that light. Sockets large and rimmed from sleeplessness, lips cracked and ulcerated, hair coarse and bunched in stooks behind her ears, white sores in clusters on her nose. I’d seen her skin before. It had the points and peaks of urchin shells. I’ve said her eyes were good. Quite clear and grey and unabashed. She handed me hot dumplings.

“They’re good,” she said, but she did not eat with appetite. She ate as if it were a duty. She had good cause. The taste was high and tedious.

“We had much better food,” she said, “when my husband was around. We had our pick. Crab, we had. And laver soup. And samphire, too. That tastes so good. He picked it at low tide in summer from the marshes over there.” She hardly moved her head. “You have to let the roots hang for a while before you cook. And then you strip it with your teeth. You eat the flesh and throw the stem into the fire. It whines and bubbles there like spit. We had all sorts of fish. He caught them in those baskets.” Again she hardly moved her head to indicate the fish traps, holed and ageing, hanging from the roof. Her voice woke up the baby. It was a girl. She crawled onto her mother’s lap but would not take the salty pellets of slott which her mother offered on a finger. She lived in the hope of milk and nuzzled at the smock until her mother pushed it from her shoulders to her waist and let her suck. Her breasts were scarcely more than nipples. ‘There is no milk,’ she said, and shrugged. She must have known that I was watching her, a youth who’d never seen a woman naked and so close.

I see you smile and brighten up as if you think I’ll tell some tale of how I dropped my head, perhaps, and took the woman’s other nipple in my mouth. Or, throwing down my dumpling, put my one good hand upon her knee. Hard luck. You have ignored the state that she was in, the ulcers and the dirt, her thinness and her poverty. What I said about her eyes – quite clear, and grey, and unabashed – has made you think of sex. Me, too. She was a beauty in decay. And I was cold and wet and far from home and frightened of the night.

She was obsessed with food. She went on talking with the baby tugging drily at her breast: “When my husband was still here we’d eat so well. Lobsters, coalfish, ebb meat. We never ate the same thing twice. Baked eel. Baked guillemot. Seakale. Goose eggs. Have you had those? Have you had mussels roasted in hot stones?” She told how her husband and her two boys would scour the sea shore for its fruits, how they would search the cliffs for nests, and harvest reeds, and club the seals to death. Once they found a whale, a rorqual, on the beach. There was meat and hide enough to feed and clothe a hundred men. And fat for light, and bones for fuel, and ribs for making huts. They took the surplus – the whale, the eggs, the kale, the tasty saltland rabbits – to the markets at the villages around, and they came back with meat and milk and cheese and beans and beer.

“On market days we had a feast,” she said. And then, one day when they had gone to trade at the village where the stoneys lived, they did not return. The dog came back. But not her husband or the boys. She waited. She was waiting still. Who knows what happened to them? She went herself to the village. “I’ve never seen such things,” she said. “Such wealth. Such homes. But the people there …” She mimed some spit. “They had no time for me. I came back here. I had this child, poor thing. I do the best I can. I have the dog. I do a little trade. But I never caught a fish. No one taught me how. I never clubbed a seal. I couldn’t climb a cliff for eggs. So I make do. I found a dead fish on the shore today, its eggs were swollen in its pouch. This slott has been a treat. And then? Perhaps my family will come back and we’ll eat well again before we die.”