The Mammoth Book of Historical Crime Fiction (22 page)

Niav bit her lip. There had to have been a reason for her Aunt not having told her something about the snake rock. “Is it true my mum was washed in down by my snake rock?”

“Yes, she was. And—”

“Was she all bloated – like a blown up bladder – and blue and green?”

“No she was
not
. Befind was as beautiful as she always was. I wonder whose lively imagination that was? Pity you didn’t chuck two eggs.”

“And my dad?”

“No, he came in up by the Beast’s Paw”

“Was he all bloated?”

But Aunty Grizzel just looked away. “Diarma floated in quite a while later …”

Niav had stood outside the weaving-hut as Grizzel started to pick through the basket of wools. “It’s all going wrong,” she growled, standing back from the loom to check the colour match of her new skein of wool. “And this one’s wrong too. It’s dyed a much deeper colour than last time – nothing’s going right today – something’s in the wind for sure.”

“A bit of deeper tone will just make the pattern more interesting,” said Niav, trying to maintain a cheerful front in spite of how she felt. She could see little difference in the shade this time, but Aunt Grizzel was much more aware of colour subtleties than she was, than anyone was – a real artist. “I think maybe I will just go for a walk on the clifftop – don’t worry, I will be back before dark. I will leave the eggs on the cool-shelf, and there are some sweeties in the basket too. We can roast them before we eat – that’ll be nice.”

“Don’t go too far then. I think there is rain brewing …” Aunt Grizzel was clearly not for a moment taken in by Niav’s attempted nonchalance. “Like I said, the sea threw your Pa back on to the rock by the Beast’s Paw. Lurgan went out in his coracle and brought him home – such a dutiful man, your Uncle Lurgan.”

***

Now Niav looked down at the dark swirling river. Was there truly something in the wind? She wouldn’t have cared to say.

But, suddenly, picked out by a moment’s hectic beam of sunlight, something was scudding in fast ahead of the dark storm clouds that swirled around the eastern headland.

A smallish craft, desperate to make landing before the skies broke – Niav caught her breath in a sort of wondering ecstasy as she made out the symbol clearly painted in brown and yellow, wings picked out in white, right across the square leather sail. A bee. It must be Artin. It had to be Artin. Why did he always swirl in on the bow of a storm? Artin the Smith, maker of dreams, who had returned from the dead. People said that he had defeated the mighty Sea God in an epic battle, and some folk even went so far as to say he was somehow the Sea God himself; but he would only smile and say that he served a power far, far greater than that of the waves, or any other force of nature.

No wonder Aunt Grizzel was acting up. In her few years of conscious observation, Niav had noticed that her aunt was particularly prone to her nonsense when Artin was in the offing – almost like some people’s dogs sensing that their owners were coming before they walked up over the horizon – uncanny! Perhaps this was the time when she might pluck up the courage to try to discover why.

Originally when she had seen her aunt so twitchy, she had thought that it might just be a general dislike of strangers. However, she had soon come to realize that that would be completely ridiculous. Though the strangers always made a reverent visit to the Sacred Howe on the east bank, the chief reason that brought them from far and wide to their river mouth was the trade with the artisans on the western bank. The strangers understood the quality of their weaving and pottery and in particular the value and beauty of their magic black stones – jet.

Jet wasn’t merely something for making jewellery, it had very peculiar magical properties too. It was very rare – a stone, but as light as wood and as warm as wood to touch – even though it came out of the ground. When you polished it against sandstone it would show you reflections of a sunless, secret magic world. If you rubbed jet with woollen cloth, it could be made to pick things up. The fumes from burning jet could be used to test virginity, and they could even be used to drive out snakes. All the headless stone snakes which could be found dotted everywhere about the valley – though few of them were quite as large as the special one where Niav had found the eggs – were often pointed out as proof of this. But why such things were so was really still a mystery, even to the people from the river mouth, though of course they would be the last people to admit it.

Jet could be quite dangerous as well. Though you could collect jet along the sea and river shores, the best jet was mined – often dangling, from an exposed cliff face. This had to be done with caution; if you were not careful, you might awake the hidden spirits that lurked in the rock faces. If they were treated wrong they would get angry and the ground around the mines might burst into fire – to show the spirits’ power and spite – and be of no use to anyone, unless, of course, you were trying to dispose of an unwanted serpent.

People like Uncle Lurgan (and her long chain of grannies stretching back into the past) on the eastern bank inherited the job of taking care of the right ceremonies for this sort of thing. It was time someone explained to Niav how and why she had lost this right when she ended up on the west side of the river.

No, Niav appreciated that her people were very special, and had been chosen by the gods because of their artistic talents and shrewd business sense, and not only for their wisdom and piety – so why this strange divide?

Aunty Grizzel summed the dilemma up. Of all the people who lived on the west bank, she was the most talented, on top of which she could look really beautiful. She might be shockingly failing in piety but she was also amazingly and universally accepted to be wise. For her, not liking strangers just for the sake of it would be particularly unlikely.

But it wasn’t
all
strangers, she had eventually realized; it was the group of strangers led by Artin.

Looking down at the small, blunt-prowed boat, with its steering oarsman making purposefully towards the eastern shore, Niav remembered another thing said about jet: it could keep away dogs. Aunt Grizzel disliked dogs almost as much as she seemed to dislike Artin – and there was another bit of nonsense.

Kyle had a big half-sister called Estra (she was Uncle Lurgan’s daughter but not with Kyle’s mother, Aunty Helygen. Estra’s mother had died when she was a baby). Estra could tell the most gripping stories – particularly ghost stories. There was one peculiar tale about the very first time that the people of the river-mouth had been visited by Artin. Niav didn’t know how long ago this was supposed to have been. On the few times Niav had seen Artin, he always seemed to her to be quite young.

“It was a really wild evening,” Estra said. “All the boys were up on the west cliff watching the sunset and then the sky opened and the rain came lashing down. Everyone started dashing down the pathway to get home but suddenly they saw this slip of a boat leaping from wave to wave, driven in by the storm. But it never made the harbour and crashed in under the east cliff – as boats do – and it was sucked clean under, all in a second.” Then Estra put on her creepy story voice. “Everyone was stunned. There in front of them, something horrible and dark was fighting its way in through the surge and it leapt ashore – a great black dog – and they all watched it limp out of the water and clamber, really slow, up the path by the east cliff. It seemed to have injured its back left leg.

“But the next day, they found Artin (just a boy) lying out on the hillside with a horribly mangled left knee. The bodies of the other strangers floated in all white and bloated after that.”

Niav was so taken with the story that she had told Aunty Grizzel.

“Now that must be a very old version of Artin’s first arrival – I wonder where Estra got that from?” she laughed.

“But it’s so weird – almost as though Artin’s something evil. Estra’s an idiot – she talks rubbish.”

“You’re happy enough to listen to her. She’s just got a vivid imagination. Poor child, with her mother being drowned like that – you of all people should be a bit more understanding.”

“But I’m not creepy and try to stand too close to people, or say I have got magical powers because my mother was some wise-woman!”

“Well, you could if you wanted; besides, Estra’s poor mother, Seyth, was a wise-woman – where she came from.”

“But Artin’s not like that. And Uncle Lurgan almost worships at his feet …”

“Yes, nauseating, I know. But in the early days, everyone over there thought he was the spawn of Evil – couldn’t ship him over to this side quick enough, forget hospitality! Your Uncle Lurgan decided that the nursing might be better done by your mother and father and me rather than him and Aunty Helygen – a delightfully backhanded bit of recognition.”

Niav knew she had a lot to learn about the feud there had been between Uncle Lurgan and her father Diarma – even after he was dead. Things she had a right to know. But what a story! There must have been something in it, because Artin still walked with a limp to this day. And her parents really had nursed Artin the Smith – amazing!

But how strange, too, that story of the black dog. She knew there were tales of living black were-beasts – but more like cats than dogs – out there on the northern headland, but certainly not the east cliff. Imagine that though – Artin lying there in their hut, possibly even where Aunty Grizzel slept now.

Artin had hair the colour of honey and eyes the shade of new-dug peat. His smile was like dark sunlight and when he spoke to you, they said, he made a special moment for you all your own – a special place in time where you would understand, and know the way to go. But Niav herself had only seen him from afar.

“Artin took a long time to recover from the knee injury. Your father designed the first of those famous decorated wooden leg guards Artin always wears – we padded it out with moss to protect the shattered knee.

“He insisted on giving your mum and dad something for their kindness, though of course as healers we made a point of never asking for payment. So we were the first family that Artin showed how to tame bees, since we were fellow magical practitioners, so to speak.

“I think it started to restore your mum’s good name; Shamanistic integrity, as it were, after eloping with a smelly weaver-dyer – from the west bank, like your dad – who had unsuitable ambitions of being a wise man and healer, too.”

It was difficult for Niav to take in exactly what this must have meant, such a long time ago, when Artin was only an injured boy and not almost a demi-god. These days Uncle Lurgan seemed to see himself, somehow, as Artin’s representative when he was not there (which was most of the time). She couldn’t understand why Aunty Grizzel found the whole thing so ridiculous.

“What else can one do?” Aunty Grizzel smiled. “Yes, times do change, Artin had lost everything, but wanted to show his gratitude. He persuaded your mum to let him join me in learning how to make jet beads. He was a stranger and it is meant to be a secret but they let him. That’s Artin for you. We would sit polishing them for hours on those flat shards of sandstone. You know what it’s like, all the dust and oil getting up your fingernails. He was very good at it.”

It was around this time too, apparently, that Artin had made the decorated sandstone plaque that was kept propped high up on the weaving-hut wall, tucked in among all the rugs and shawls that hung there for traders to haggle and bargain for. It showed the mountains and his home valley far away across the world. These days quite a lot of people, both local and visitors who had reached the river mouth by sea – and sometimes even overland – looked on it as a sacred object, and offered Aunty Grizzel the most amazing trade goods for it, but she simply laughed and said it should stay where he had left it.

“It was just a way of him practising decoration before we let him loose on the jet,” she told Niav. “But it’s a nice design – I’ve used it for I don’t know how many rugs since then.

“But he wanted to return to his own family – poor boy. He had at least six brothers and as many sisters and he was the youngest of the lot, so he missed them terribly. He had a mysterious young wife, too, called Orchil. She was somewhere else, he said, and she was in danger. He was desperate to get to her.

“Everyone, on both banks, rallied round and helped him build a new boat – to his design of wood, of course; not a skin coracle like we were used to, or even a dug-out tree trunk like the people from the north – poor Estra’s mother included – will insist on travelling in.

“We were not at all impressed with her and her boat. While our little community was graced with her presence, she tried hard to convince us that it was much the superior water-craft – and look where it got her, poor woman.

“Do you know the very first thing that you do when you are making one of those dug-outs? You wouldn’t believe it,” Aunty Grizzel scoffed. “You bore a big hole in the bottom to the thickness that you think your boat should be. Then you start hollowing the whole thing out from the top – it takes forever – and when you finally reach the original hole you made, you know it’s finished.”

“But won’t it sink if it has a hole right through it?”

“Exactly. However, you bung the hole up. But when you need to beach the boat, where we, of course, would be able to turn our coracles over to dry, a dug-out is too heavy – that is when you pull out the bung to drain it.

“So, you can imagine that no one round here had any intention of trying their hand at one of those, but they did their best to help Artin to make the sort of craft that he was used to. They are obviously excellent boats, you have no idea of the distances they voyage or the weather they battle through. You never know if the strangers are lying, of course, but I don’t think they often are – they all say much the same things.

“Anyway,
you
try stitching planks together with osiers and caulking it all with moss and resin – that’s how they make their boats – I expect you have worked that one out. It’s very tricky. But that’s Artin and his folk all over, isn’t it? Everyone was very eager to help, but it took months of experiment.”