by Paul Kearney
‘You don’t be worrying about them curs,’ Queenie tells me. ‘They won’t come nigh my fire, not on a night of moon.’
I am too tired to really care, my mind fuzzed over like a barley sugar left in a coat pocket. I see Luca across the fire, and will him to look at me, but he is busy talking to that horrible rat-faced old man, Job. He has brought me here. Maybe that is all he ever meant to do. Queenie says. I don’t know why I keep looking at him, or why it should seem so important that he not ignore me.
‘Drink this,’ Jaelle says, offering me a tin cup. ‘There’s wholesome stuff in here. Mint and dandelion and Angelica root, and feverfew for the aches and pains.’
I sip the hot liquid cautiously. It tastes like minty mud, and Jaelle laughs at the face I make.
‘Every drop, girl. That’s real medicine that is, as good as any bolus you buy in a shop. It’ll settle you, flesh and bone.’
I drink it back. The warmth is welcome, at least. Jaelle strokes my hair. ‘Such a pretty girl,’ she murmurs.
Sleep starts to sink down on me like the curtain at the end of a play. I am blinking and yawning, and the tin cup clinks aside. Jaelle stretches my old blanket over me.
‘Lie here now, Anna, and take thy ease. There ain’t nothing in the night to worry ’ee, not no more.’
‘Why am I here?’ I ask her, blinking.
‘Don’t you be worrying about that now my sweet. Sleep. Sleep, Anna.’
My knapsack is here beside me, and Pie too. She looks so out of place, like something left abandoned by a passing child. I hug her; I feel the same way myself.
I thought that when we came here and found Queenie and the others again I might feel as though I could belong. But instead it feels more like I stepped off a cliff that day I walked out of the old house on Moribund Lane, and I have been falling ever since.
Too tired even to stay afraid... I yawn, and watch them go about their business around the fire. One woman is sewing, though how she can see to do it in the firelight I have no idea. Another is scrubbing out some pots with a bunched handful of grass and a third is slicing up meat on a tree-stump, licking her thumb and smiling.
Men come and go across the campsite, and drop bundles of wood down beside the embers. One of them carries a small axe, another a billhook. For the first time, I see that they have made a series of hurdles out of chopped saplings interwoven on upright stakes. These are set up along one side of the fire, either to help reflect the heat or to hide the light. Hanging from the hurdles are little dangling bodies. I see rabbits there, and squirrels, and a cock pheasant with the feathers reflecting back the firelight like jewels. I wonder if the Romani have guns, to shoot these for their food. I have seen none, and I don’t want to. Knives are bad enough.
My head sinks back, too heavy to lift. Above me, five pointed stars made of twigs are dangling all over the campsite. Like Christmas decorations, I think hazily.
And I suppose I sleep at last, with my old blanket around me and Pie, and my feet pointed at the fire.
IT IS LONG into the night, and I think I am awake. I open my eyes above the edge of the blanket and my face is stiff with the cold. The fire has died down into red embers and low flames that grasp feebly at the blackened wood. Everyone is sleeping, and so quiet is the night that I can hear the breath of the sleepers. I look up, and above the trees the stars are glinting and sparkling like frost, millions of them. They gather in an arc that carves clear across the sky. I look for those that Pa taught me, but the familiar ones seem lost in the welter, a vast span of spangled light. I never imagined there could be a night sky like this.
I stand up, and the blanket falls from me and I step as quick and quiet as a cat around the fire. I feel light as a dragonfly dancing on the air.
Luca lies with a blanket up to his chin and an old wool cap on his head. He looks much younger while asleep, all the lines faded out of his face. But I can see others beneath the skin, as though his flesh has too much bone beneath it, and the black hair at his nape continues in a line down into the collar of his shirt. He looks as doll-like as Pie in the night. If I raised him up I almost think his eyes would spring open and there would be nothing but black glass in the sockets.
The wood is long. It streams along the slope of the down for more than a mile. But it is narrow, too. I step through it without a single twig so much as creaking under my feet and look out to the west, where the land rises up to Whitehorse Hill.
There is a fire burning up on the hilltop, high and bright.
THE OLD YEAR has died and the new one is begun, but the dark still lies heavy and cold across the world, and winter hangs deep in the night. I begin walking uphill. I am barefoot, coatless, but I feel no chill. Looking at my arms I see the frost glitter bright upon them, yet my breath makes no cloud. I walk with huge, easy strides, eating up the ground, and in no time at all I am on the hilltop on the eastern edge of the ancient hill-fort, and the bank rises up before me like a wave frozen in the grass.
The fire is crackling and roaring and there are shadows dancing around it, but it seems almost that the light flows through them. It is like seeing the sun dappled through the leaves of a living tree. There is no sound but the click and rush of the flames.
And beside the fire there is a pale horse, and on its back is the man who called himself Gabriel. But he is no Oxfordshire farmer now. He sits naked on the horse, and his white torso is daubed with circles and sigils of red clay, and on his head are the antlers of a great stag, and in his eyes is the same light which burns in the distant glimmer of the stars.
‘Daughter,’ he says to me. He holds out his hand, and in it I see a sprig of mistletoe, the berries upon it as bright as pearls in the moonlight.
18
IN THE EARLIEST red glow of the morning the camp comes awake, the women first. I lie and watch muzzily as Jaelle bends and blows at the grey ash of the fire, and feeds the sparks she raises with dried grass and bark which she takes from a leather pouch. Then she sloshes water around in a tin and sets it by the growing blaze, and bit by bit she builds the fire again until it has light and heat once more.
I get up with the blanket around my shoulders, and crouch by the flames for a second. My stomach feels almost normal, but my knee throbs and there is a black scab of blood on the wound.
‘Don’t pick at it,’ Queenie says from a mound of rugs on the other side of the fire. ‘Why must young ’uns always pick at these things?’ Then she turns over and pulls a blanket over her head.
‘Queenie ain’t much of a lark,’ Jaelle says, grinning.
Someone walks past me and dumps a dead rabbit at my feet, making me start back in shock. The little eyes are wide open.
‘Think you could gut and skin that?’ a voice says. I look up and it is the old man, Job, sneering down on me from his hairy rat-face.
‘Well?’
I touch the rabbit – still warm. ‘Is it dead?’
Job laughs, a horrible wet sound. ‘You ain’t much use, are you? Is it dead!’ He snorts with contempt and walks away.
I leave the fire and the rabbit. I want to pick up Pie, but somehow I can’t after that – not in front of these people.
Luca is standing on the eastern edge of the wood. Beyond the trees the land is open and rises slowly to the horizon. And the sun is just above it, still stained red from its rising. The light is cherry-bright on the grey trunks of the beeches and there are birds singing all through the wood, a glory of sound.
Luca turns and glances at me irritably. ‘You make a lot o’ noise.’
‘It’s not like walking on a carpet.’
‘You got to pick your way more careful, like. And keep looking all around, all the time. That way you gets to see things that ain’t common or everyday.’
‘What like?’
He is staring out at the sunrise. He points across the open fields. ‘Out there, come spring, you’ll see the hares come, if you sit quiet enough. They jump up and prance and dance and box each other, mad as March. �
�Tis a sight to see. That’s how this place got its name. We calls it Boxing Hare Wood for ’em, though the name ain’t on no map. Hares is sacred animals, creatures tied to the moon. Some o’ the Romani hunt ’em for sport, but not us – not my kin. We sets traps for rabbits and squirrels, and we’ll take a pheasant or a pigeon, but not a hare. They’s things of beauty.’
It seems an odd thing for him to say, and as he speaks he has almost a kind of wonder in his voice. I sit beside him in the dead brown bracken.
We watch together as the morning grows. At last I say, ‘Are they still out there?’ It is not hares I speak of, and he knows it.
‘They’s always out there Anna, like rats in the hedge. Sometimes close, sometimes just a lonesome man on the track miles away.’
The answer is not enough for me. ‘Luca, who is the man on the pale horse?’
He frowns, and looks down at his hands. ‘He is the leader o’ the Roadmen. He’s more than that, too. He comes and goes like some ordinary man in the world, but he’s…’ He trails off.
‘What?’
‘I shouldn’t be speaking of it.’
‘Speak to me. I won’t tell anyone. I want to know.’
Luca’s face screws up in a scowl. ‘He is the Great Hunter. A fallen angel, some say. He is death, Anna. When he appears, it follows on after him like a cloud o’ crows follows the plough.’ His voice drops. ‘They says he and the Devil, they do compete for lost souls. He is to be fled from, always.’ He turns and looks at me.
‘Remember that. He ain’t some farmer on a cart. You is in the Old World now, and nothing is what it looks like.’ He reaches out a hand and touches my face; and we sit like that, just for one moment, while the sun rises out of its bloody bed in the east and the light climbs higher up the trees.
THERE IS TEA for breakfast, and a kind of flat cake which the women bake in the ashes of the fire. Bannock, Jaelle calls it, and it sits heavy in the stomach. When they are done I help them haul up water from the little stream which runs down at the bottom of the wood, and they douse the campfire in a whoosh of sharp-smelling steam. Then we all go on our hands and knees and break up the warm wet embers in our fingers and scatter them, and the men rake dead leaves over the scar, and everyone packs up.
‘Where are we going?’ I ask Queenie as they all begin to troop out of the wood and onto the track again.
‘Does it matter?’ she asks me with a smile. ‘You don’t always got to be going somewhere, little one. The journey is what counts. Soon enough, we’ll be scattering again, and some of us will go one way, and some t’other. Best thing is to taste the time together and enjoy it. Come sowing, the family will be all over the country working here and there, and we’ll be bent-backed with the labour o’ the birthing year. Right now, the land sleeps, and we can walk across it as grand as kings. The crops is yet to be planted, and the beasts are all in the byre. Winter is hard, but in winter we is as free as we can be.’
‘What about the Roadmen? How do we stay clear of them?’
‘You might as well ask how we stay clear o’ the rain. They is part o’ the world just as we is. Sometime there is a storm, and sometime there is shelter to be had from it, and sometime not. We takes it as it comes.’
It is not much of an answer, even to me. But I see that I will not get anything else out of Queenie for now. As we move up the track she and Jaelle have their heads together, talking quietly, and I can’t quite pluck up the courage to eavesdrop.
WE WALK EAST along the old track, a close gaggle of ragged people with burdens roped to their backs. I scan the surrounding hills and downs as we go but the countryside seems empty, to me at least. Nothing moves in the bright chill of the morning but us and a few distant birds, and as the day grows the flight and pursuit of the night before seems almost like a dream, a moving picture left behind in the dark of a nickelodeon. Life is normal again, or as normal as this new life can be.
We come to a crossroads on the height of a tall down, and turn north along a real road. It leads off the ridge and plunges steeply downhill with a thick wood on our right and a village straddling the way ahead.
‘Blowingstone Hill,’ Luca says, striding along beside me with that tireless pace of his. ‘And that is King’s Stone village. Queenie – tell her about it – she loves the stories, this one.’
The older woman looks down at the country below. ‘There’s a great stone with a hole in it, and some can get it to sound a note, if they’ve the lungs of an ox. An old king blew through the stone to summon his soldiers for a great battle with the people o’ the north, long ago. They say those as can raise a sound from the stone is a future king of England.’
‘Have you tried?’ I ask Luca.
He grins. ‘I ain’t never going to be no king, Anna. That’s for sure.’
We are down from the ridge now, and the land has become ordinary, the little roads and woods and villages of the heart of England. We turn off to the north-west so the sun is behind my right shoulder, and tramp through Uffington. The company splits up here, some going ahead, some falling behind.
‘Shouldn’t we all stay together?’ I ask Luca.
‘There’s folk would not take too kindly to seeing two dozen of our kind walk past ’em in a bunch,’ he says. ‘One twitchy old maid calls in the peelers, and before you knows it they is packing us in a Black Maria and it’s away to a workhouse, or the cells. Best to come through these places a trickle at a time.’
‘That’s not fair.’
‘That’s the way o’ the world, Anna. You wants to stay free and clear of ordinary folk, then you got to be careful about it.’
We walk on. The roads are quiet. I count half a dozen motor cars and a single horse and trap before midday. We walk through Fernham, Little Coxwell, and Great Coxwell, and it comes on to rain. A steady, chill up-and-down kind of rain that patters on the head and shoulders. I am glad of my galoshes now. I think of all the times I sat in the hall in Moribund Lane and watched the old Greeks come through the door shaking the wet off themselves, Pa pumping their hands and rattling away in Greek and English. And the fire burning in the front room. And I would give anything – anything – to have that back again.
It has not been such a long time I suppose, but I feel so very different from the little sulking girl who just wanted to be left alone. Even Pie is not the same. She is packed up in my knapsack now like any other kind of baggage. I miss her and I do not. I miss being able to talk to her as though she was a real person. I think that is over and done with now. But she is still all I have left of a far distant world, and I will never part from her.
I am glad of the rain. I hate people to see me cry.
THE LAND RISES once again. I am rather grumpy now because the wet has soaked through my coat and I can feel it cold on my chest and it is dripping from my fingers. Pa’s old cap keeps the worst of it from my head, but his scarf is as sodden as if I had thrown it in a ditch and trodden on it. I think about sleeping out of doors in this, and my heart is down in my galoshes with my poor numb toes.
Luca appears beside me, bobbing up like a Halloween apple. For some reason he is smiling. ‘It gets like this, and I just starts to thinking about the fire at day’s end,’ he says, and nudges me playfully. ‘Don’t be fixin’ on the here and now. We’ll sit around it tonight and all be wet and miserable as sin together, and I’ll bet you anything you like you can laugh about it then.’
I have to smile back.
Then I look up at the slope rising ahead. It is a low hill crowned with trees. It looks somehow important, and I can’t say why.
‘Is that where we’re going?’
Luca wipes the rain out of his eyes. He sobers. ‘Seems so.’
‘Does it have a name? They all have names.’ I nudge him back. ‘I bet you know.’
We splash along. Luca does not seem to want to talk any more. In fact he has drawn away and pulled his cap down to shield his face from the weather.
We are all bent into it, lashed by it, the January
day closed in around us like a wet fog. I wonder if I have said something wrong.
‘Badbury Clumps, they names that place round here.’ It is Jaelle. Her black hair is plastered like seaweed over her face and her skin is as white as Pie’s. She looks as though there is no blood in her at all, but she is peering up at the looming tree-topped height with an odd light in her eyes.
‘Our folk still uses the old name for it. We calls it Badon Hill.’
THERE IS A shallow bank with a wood inside, tall beeches again with still a few coppery leaves clinging to them. The wood floor is flat and open. The trees make the patter of the rain even louder but it seems somehow quieter within, like being in a shed with the rain on the roof. I take off Pa’s hat and look up. We must have walked ten or twelve miles this morning, and already the day is drawing in. Once again, the normal world beyond pulls back, and there is only the dark sky and the rain and the wood, and the cold wet earth underfoot. Ageless things.
I shall get used to it I suppose. I hope I do. I hope it is not always this hard.
One by one, the rest of them trickle in. Queenie is not here, which is odd since I have never yet seen her more than ten feet from Jaelle’s side. There is little talk; they all seem to have been here before and know what to do.
I stand there dripping and watch them, for despite this morning I don’t feel as though I should just pitch in with the rest. I don’t know quite what to do. Not yet.
It is the women who do all the setting up. The men seem to drift away into the trees. I don’t know if they are hunting, or seeking firewood or water, or perhaps even guarding us. But the women need no help from them. And Jaelle is a wizard when it comes to getting the fire lit.
She clears a space down to the earth before laying a little carefully made bed of twigs. Then she produces a fistful of timber from the leather pouch under her coat. I half want her to start striking flint and steel, but it is a match which does the trick, and more of the women step forward with sticks and little branches that they produce from under their clothing as though they were hoarded treasure. They have been carrying them all day it seems, and I feel horribly guilty. I did not know. I wish someone had said, and I would have done the same.