Contents
Title Page
Also by Margaret Redfern
In memory of
Acknowledgements
Hereford: November 1326
1
Anatolia: late summer 1336
2
3
4
5
Ieper: spring: 1334
6
New Article
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
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Glossary
Select bibliography
Author’s note
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ABOUT HONNO
Copyright
The Storyteller’s Granddaughter
by
Margaret Redfern
HONNO MODERN FICTION
Also by Margaret Redfern and available from Honno
Flint
In memory of:
Annette: 1943 – 2010
Dave: 1958 – 2011
Graham: 1940 – 2013
Nigel: 1949 – 2014
And to both of you, of course
Acknowledgements
to the writers of books that have delighted, instructed and inspired me
to the Internet and its fabulous electronic book-hoard
to the staff of Lincoln Central Library for their generous help
to all at Honno for their patience, help and guidance
to the Woad Centre, East Dereham, Norfolk, for a splendid workshop
to the people of Antalya, Konya and Beyşehir for their many kindnesses to a stranger
Hereford: November 1326
1
This sorwe is more
Than mannis muth may telle
(Anon, 13thC)
This is how it was. This is what he could never forget. This was his remembering. Blackest night, and him choking, choking. His eyes squeezed tight shut but still he couldn’t shut out the Devil’s face, blood clotted, bulging eyes blood red, and the devil himself lamenting and howling. My bowels, my bowels. Entrails wrenched from the living body writhing like bloodied snakes. Oh the stench, the stench and the she-wolf devouring them, cramming them into her open maw and the faces, grinning and leering, bawling their glee, and the screaming coming from that mask of a face…no man could make such moaning.
Voices out of the suffocating black…
‘Shut it, you.’
‘What’s to do? Is it murder?’
‘It’s my sleep he’s murdering. Get ’im out of ’ere.’
She’s not a wolf – she’s a devil.
‘I’ll clout thee if tha doesna shut it.’
I saw her. I saw the devil feasting on flesh.
Hard knuckles on head bone.
Rough hands in hard hold over mouth. Gagging, gagging.
‘For dear God’s sake, he’ll have us all killed. These days, there’s daggers in men’s smiles.’
‘Qu’est ce qui se passe?’
‘Nowt’s ’appened. Nightmare is all.’
‘Sweet Mary, that’s all we need – that yappy little Frenchie’ll ’ave us all locked up.’
‘Or worse.’
‘Do something, Tom. You’re ’is father. Sort your brat out.’
‘Dit donc, bandes de bittes, qu’arrive?’
‘It’s nowt – guts’ ache is all. Stuffed ’is face at the feast and now ’is belly’s suffering, little swine.’
And that other voice. A boy’s voice, low, calm.
‘Safe now. Safe.’
Hand stroking hair, wiping away sweat, smoothing away fear.
Safe now. Sleep.
That was his remembering. That was what he couldn’t forget.
Anatolia: late summer 1336
2
What do they do with the old full moons?
They cut them up into pieces,
crumble them and make stars.
(Nasreddin Hoca, 13thC)
Every winter they dreamed of returning to the summer pasture. They were warm enough in this place where the ancient people used to live. They used the shaped stones to make the winter quarters sound. Their hearths were warm against winter storms. Their animals were well housed and there was food enough, for man and beast alike. But they longed for the time when the snow melted from the mountains, and the rivers rushed through gorges swollen with meltwater. They talked of it, while the rain beat down and white-capped waves tore at the shore. They crammed together in the smoky, steamy winter houses and the old ones told stories of past times, of the great warriors, of things that happened long before the girl was born, long before she and Nene came to live with the wanderers, the yürük.
There was a time long ago when the little tribe had belonged to the great tribe of the sarıkeçilis, but there was a quarrel between two friends, friends who had grown up together as brothers, who had fought together and hunted together and herded together. They swore to be loyal to each other beyond death. But when they grew to be young men they loved the same girl and one spilt the blood of the other and so had to leave the tribe. That was the law. Besides, had he stayed he would himself have been killed. So he left, taking his fought-for bride, and brothers and mother, and a share of the animals, and so began their tribe.
The girl thought she had just a memory of him when he was an old, old man, and his wife was a wizened face atop a scrawny body with wisps of hair – grey as smoke – twisted into skinny plaits. The women said she was beautiful when she was a young girl but the girl found it hard to believe. But that was when she was very young.
When the night was quiet and it was just her and Nene in the dim firelight, the old woman told the young one the story of her own long life, and how she met the girl’s grandfather, and what happened in that magic year. And the story of the girl’s mother, and the girl’s story, and how they came to live with the tribe. All this she told in the quiet nights, and all the nights blurred into one, and all the winters.
Spring returned and the high valleys bloomed scarlet with anemone and poppy and pale purple with crocus, and white daisies with yellow eyes waved through grass that was lush and fresh. Then they left the mosquito-ridden coast lands, winding up and up the gorge through the corridors of rock and in the shadow of rock, through pine-scented air, higher and higher. Below them was the glistening river, brown as a horse and as strong, pulling and sucking at the trunks and bending the boughs of trees. Ahead of them was the tight flock of sheep – fat long tails and rumps waggling – hemmed in by black, curly-haired goats, with the shepherds and sturdy dogs pushing them on.
The donkeys were loaded with belongings: bedding and kilims and the saç for baking bread and the stout beams for the loom for carpet weaving and the spindles used for spinning goat hair and sheep’s wool into yarn. There were the cauldrons used for cooking, the ewers and wooden bowls and copper bowls, the samovars and the big brass serving trays. There were the wooden chests for storing cloth, and the leather containers for water and others for butter making. There were the chickens in wicker carriers and the last sacks of corn. What the donkeys couldn’t carry, the women carried on their backs, together with the babies – the toddlers too when they were tired out with the climb, as the girl was carried when she was a child. The men rode the fleet, sturdy mountain horses that were descended, so they said, from the ancient horses of the great plateau far from here.
All of it, clanking
and jingling and creaking and hooves sharp on rock and bleating and barking and braying and squawking and shouting and chattering and laughter because all were happy to be on their way back to the yayla, to the summer camp, though they were quiet later in the day because the way was hard and steep and they carried heavy burdens and the little ones fretted because they were weary.
Every year they made their camp in the same flat stretch of land sheltered by craggy mountain sides that were backed by range after range, all blurring into blue.
They placed the tents carefully, like the swift ships the girl had once seen in Silifke harbour, in rows, sailing the grassy plateau. Some families lived in tents that were like upturned boats, with ribs of wood covered in black felt, but she and Nene lived in a black tent with its poles proud against the sky and wooden battens tethering it to the ground. They made their hearth and the platforms at opposite ends for the beds and stores; they spread kilims and cushions where they would gaze at the green and gold summer world through the framework of the black tent.
Here too, straggling up one side of the valley walls, were the ruins of another world, another time. Springs bubbled from the ground and gushed over pebbles and there were the cut and shaped stones ready to use if they had need of them. They used fluted pillars, end on end, to dam the stream for the grazing flock. The girl used to look at them, those old stones lichen-blurred with words she could not read when she was young. There were marble figures draped in marble cloth, all of them taller than she was. Paved streets and blocks of carved stone bleached by the sun lay half buried in undergrowth; whole streets of stone and stones that were once houses were tumbled now in heaps and cicadas sang loudest here, as if they were the souls of the dead. Who had lived here? If this was their summer dwelling, it was a place of miracles. If she climbed the steep-stepped half-circle in the ruins, right to the highest, loftiest, top-most point, on a clear day she could see the glittering blue of the sea far below. She liked sitting there, so high up with the mountain peaks travelling across the land and the lines of the tents lying at anchor below her.
When summer ended in the mountains, the tribe left, winding back down the mountain pass, down through the gorge to the coast where summer still stayed, to prepare their winter quarters once again. One year, winter ambushed them and frost and biting wind drove them back down the mountain. The girl loved that time, and the whole silent world of the high valleys, and the icy chill of morning and the frozen ground and mist hanging heavy and their breath spilling more mist.
But the summer months were as precious. At night, the sky was crammed with stars. ‘As the roof of our tent covers our own little world so the roof of the sky covers the whole world,’ Nene told her, ‘and we are all part of that greater whole. All – men, women, children, fish and fowl and creeping things and creatures that go on four legs – all have their own stories. Stories within stories, never-ending, as infinite as these stars we gaze on.’
When the whole camp was silent and sleeping, she and Nene would sit outside under the sky blanket and stargaze.
‘If you listen, you might hear the stars singing,’ Nene told her. When she was very young, she would sit very still and very quiet and she thought then it was true and she could hear them, faint and far away, like the hardly heard singing of precious metal.
Once when she was a child she asked Nene, ‘Where does the fat old moon go?’
‘They cut it into little pieces, child, and make it into stars.’
The girl believed her. She was Nene, her grandmother, and the wisest woman in the whole world. Her eyes were grey as the grey-eyed goddess; the girl’s eyes were deep brown flecked with gold and she wished she had Nene’s eyes and that way she had of looking into your very soul. Nene said she had her grandfather’s eyes and sometimes she would gaze into them and sigh and pinch the girl’s cheek.
The girl had lived with her grandmother for as long as she had memory. It was Nene who taught her the names of the stars in the vast sky, and how to travel by their direction. She taught her the uses of plants for medicine, and the best way of making fire. She taught her how to track the wild animals, silently, scarcely breathing, making herself invisible. She taught her the ways of the seasons and the routes that were passable in summer but not in winter. She taught her to read the strange marks on the stones and to speak the strange language of the merchant men who travelled across their land from sea to sea and to far distant lands because who knew, she said, when the girl might need to converse in another’s tongue?
It was Nene who insisted she was taught to ride bareback and to out-ride any mother’s son because who knew, said Nene, when she might need to ride like the wind? The girl could out-shoot them, too, stringing and drawing the curved bow and loosing the arrow with speed and accuracy so they teased her and called her ‘Çiçek’s daughter’, though that was not her mother’s name, until she tossed her head and dared them to out-shoot her, dared them to race against her. They named her after the Lady Çiçek of the old stories, who out-rode and out-shot and out-wrestled all the warriors until the hero Bamsi Beyrek of the grey horse came and she was in turn out-raced and his arrow split her own and she was out-wrestled by him and became his promised wife, but he was captured and kept prisoner for years before he escaped and returned to her. The girl wondered if there would ever be a Bamsi Beyrek for her, who would match her skill and be her equal. She was very young then.
So many things she learned as the seasons passed and she grew older and Nene grew old, though never to her, not old like the old chief’s wispy-haired wife. It was that summer when she saw it, the summer when the moon and the stars shifted and slipped, and the world tumbled. It was as if the pole of the tent cracked and split.
They were toiling up the rocky gorge. Nene stopped to catch for breath and slipped suddenly on the rocks and was slithering away over the edge of the gorge. The girl grabbed at her arm and her fingers closed round bone as frail as a lark’s wing. It was easy to haul the old woman back to safety.
‘Well done, child,’ Nene said quietly, because she was a quiet woman. The girl had never heard her raise her voice. It was then she saw her grandmother’s dark face was wrinkled like a walnut. Always a small woman, she had withered into a bundle of skin-wrapped bone. Only her eyes were luminous and mysterious as the morning mist.
And then one night when the fat old moon was cut and crumbled and made into stars she died as quietly as she had lived.
Earlier that evening they had sat under the star blanket.
‘Child,’ Nene said out of darkness, out of silence, ‘I want you to go to your grandfather’s country. I want you to find him.’
The girl stayed still as she had been taught, whatever happened, whatever she heard or saw. That had been the hardest lesson and a long time learning because she was by nature impulsive and her face was a mirror of her moods and thoughts. Now she knew the value of the lesson. At last she asked, ‘Leave you, Nene?’
‘Leaving,’ she said. ‘What is that? It means nothing. While the heart remembers, there is no leaving.’
‘What if he’s dead, Nene?’
‘He is not dead. I know it.’
The girl believed her. Those grey eyes saw what others could not.
Nene fumbled at her neck, pulling at a leather thong until she held up something between her fingers that gleamed pale in the night. The girl recognised it, remembered the first time Nene had shown it to her. ‘This is old,’ she had said. ‘Very old. Who knows how old? See?’ It was a tiny axe of polished jade from the far countries, a miracle of workmanship. The blade was honed and the carefully wrought hole in the gleaming shaft was threaded with leather. ‘Your grandfather came by it on his travels. He said the people of the far countries value the jade stone for its many powers and gave it to me as a token of his love. I have kept it with me all these years wondering if he might some day return. It was not to be.’ And she had sighed and replaced the tiny axe in the pouch and the pouch inside the neck of her blue tunic, nestlin
g between her breasts and next to her heart.
Now she held it up in the starlight. ‘I give it to you, daughter of my daughter,’ she said. ‘You are more precious to me than any carved jade or gold or jewels. I want you to go to your grandfather’s country. Take this with you and it will protect you. Give it to him and he will know you are truly his grandchild.’ She fixed those grey eyes on the girl’s face. ‘Do not stay here to be taken by your father’s family and wedded to some sheep-brained oaf. Do you promise?’
What could she do but promise? She took the token of love so skilfully worked, so ancient, so safely kept, and she promised. And that night the old grandmother died as quietly as she had lived with no more than a sigh to say her soul was freed.
The girl sat with her all through that night at the dark of the moon. She watched the stars wheel through the vastness of the firmament. She watched rosy dawn stretch fingers across the morning sky and touch the mountaintops. She watched spiders’ webs shimmering in early morning mist, glittering with dewdrop jewels. There was time enough to tell the tribe. For now, this forlorn body belonged to her alone. The stars shifted and slipped, and the world tumbled. Nene, grandmother, teacher, guide, home, lodestar, was dead, and the girl had promised to leave all that was left of their life together to journey to a strange, cold land in search of an old man of whom she knew only stories.
When Nene had thought the girl was old enough to understand, she told how she had stolen her granddaughter away after the mother, her own daughter, had died. The girl’s father wasn’t a bad man; stubborn and mule-headed, yes, and without the wit to use what sense God had given him. But not a bad man. It was the place where he lived that was bad. The house was carved out of the rock itself and the air had poison in it. It was this that killed the girl’s mother when she was too young to die and the girl not a year old. No one would believe that this was true. We have always lived in these cave houses, they said, as our parents and grandparents did. Our people found safety here. You are a foolish woman to believe such things, some said. Others, that it was grief for her daughter that had crazed her mind.
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