The Gift of Stones

by Jim Crace

  The Gift of Stones

  JIM CRACE is the author of Continent, The Gift of Stones, Arcadia, Signals of Distress, Quarantine (winner of the 1998 Whitbread Novel of the Year and shortlisted for the Booker Prize), Being Dead (winner of the 2001 National Book Critics’ Circle Award), The Devil’s Larder, Six, and The Pesthouse. His novels have been translated into twenty-six languages. In 1999 Jim Crace was elected to the Royal Society of Literature.

  ALSO BY JIM CRACE

  Continent

  Arcadia

  Signals of Distress

  Quarantine

  Being Dead

  The Devil’s Larder

  Six

  The Pesthouse

  JIM CRACE

  THE GIFT OF STONES

  PICADOR

  First published 1988 by Secker and Warburg

  First published in paperback 1997 by Vintage

  This edition first published 2008 by Picador

  This electronic edition published 2008 by Picador

  an imprint of Pan Macmillan Ltd

  Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Rd, London N1 9RR

  Basingstoke and Oxford

  Associated companies throughout the world

  www.panmacmillan.com

  ISBN 978-0-330-47389-7 in Adobe Reader format

  ISBN 978-0-330-47388-0 in Adobe Digital Editions format

  ISBN 978-0-330-47390-3 in Mobipocket format

  Copyright © Jim Crace 1988

  The right of Jim Crace to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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  I asked my boys to search and sort the flints in the spoil heap by the mine. They had high hopes of finding implements, a broken arrow at least. All they found, in fact, was the skeletal lower arm of a child. Marks on the hinge joint of the ulna suggested that it had been removed by surgery of some kind. We sent the bones across to Carter for some tests – and then we entertained ourselves that night, in the darkness of our tents, inventing reasons why the arm was there, and what the fate had been of that child’s other bones.

  SIR HARRY PENN BUTLER,

  Digs and Diversions – Memoirs of

  an Excavationist (1927)

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  1

  MY FATHER’S right arm ended not in a hand but, at the elbow, in a bony swelling. Think of a pollard tree in silhouette. That was my father’s stump. Its skin was drawn tight across the bone and tucked frowning into the hole left by the missing lower joint. The indented scar was like those made in the ice by boys with stones – a small uneven puncture, wet with brackish pus. The arm was rarely dry or free from pain. As he grew older it would seem (he said) that his wasted and unsummoned semen had found less rewarding outlets from his body than he would have wished. He picked it rolled and spongy from the corners of his eyes after sleep. It gathered on his tongue and stretched into stringy tresses when he laughed or spoke. It formed white blisters on his lips, on his thighs, between his toes. It dried and hardened in his nostrils. And it formed pools of sap in the vents of his severed elbow.

  He would invent tales to explain the injury. The arm was taken by a drunk and hungry traveller who mistook it for a chicken. Or it came away at his birth when the women, made impatient by their night-long vigil, tugged too hard upon it. Or it was torn free by an animal – no one knows its name. One bite.

  I – his daughter and his only child – took his most frequent, detailed repetition as the truth. It was less fantastic than his other tales and his expression, in its narration, lacked the usual mannerisms of the storyteller, the floating eyebrow, the single, restless hand, the dramatic contours of the voice. He was small and young. The tides were forming crosses on the sandspit. The wind was twisting untidy braids in the manes of horses. The bracken was brown with blood. I can retell it word for word.

  At dawn some men had come on horseback to trade. What they wanted, they said, were arrowheads, some spear-stones, some tools. They had heard that those made in the village were the very best. And, in exchange, what could they offer? The stoneworkers looked in vain for the sides of deer, the skins, the livestock, the cheeses, the baskets of emmer grain which were the usual tokens of trade. These men had none. All they carried were their bows and staves. Dismount at the edge of the village, they were asked. Leave your horses in the care of boys. But they refused. They rode instead between the homes. They clapped their hands like children, calling out obscenities and threats. This is the trade that they would offer: for arrowheads and spear-stones and tools they promised the villagers a year of freedom from attack. Acquiesce, they said, or we will take this village from you.

  ‘Of course, we simply turned our backs,’ said my father. ‘They could shout and shake their sticks and rear their horses at our doors until night came for all we cared. They could help themselves to our village and its stone. Then what? Could they work it? Could they fashion what they wanted from the shattered, clumsy pieces of rough flint which were carried from our pits?’ He rehearsed for us the scripture of our village – that we could not be touched because we possessed the gift of stones. If all that the outside world needed was to pound and crush and hammer like savages then any rock would do. But once they wanted more, to pierce and slice, to cut and scrape, to remove the flesh from the inner side of pelts for making clothes, to have harpoons and arrows light and sharp enough to fly and kill, to cut back wheat with just one sickle-stroke, then they, those farmers, horsemen, fishers, wrights, could not be free of us and we were safe. ‘Our skills had made us arrogant,’ my father said. ‘But let the truth be told. Anyone can ride a horse and shake a stick. There are men enough for that and some to spare.’

  It was his misfortune to be walking from the beach when the men on their horses rode empty-handed from the village. He had with him in a sling a dozen scallops which he had hunted with his toes in the sandspit between the tides. He liked the springy, bracken path that led up from the crusty boulders of the shore, with the wind and spray at his back, spitting and whispering, ‘Go home to your house and fire. Go home.’ So he was in no mood – and of no age – to treat the horsemen with suspicion or to roll into the undergrowth when they called him over to them.

&nb
sp; Here, perhaps, a picture of my father as a boy should take its place between the bracken and the riders and the sea. It was his seventh year and though there were children of his own age and younger whose weight and muscles had matured, he was still a bulrush of a boy, a stem, his elbows – both elbows, still – thinner than his arms, his chest as flat and formless as a slate. His cousins said his face was disobedient and dreamy, a combination which they found more than doubly irritating. Perhaps it was this challenge and this indifference in his face which caused the riders to treat him roughly. They paced their horses round him and one put out his hand to take the scallops. My father was small and fast and unafraid of horses. He rolled beneath a mare and disappeared into the bracken. And then he showed himself again, standing and jeering on a rock where the horses could not reach.

  The picture is incomplete. What he did not see, what only now I can construct in my imagination and place a little distance from the horses, was one other man, dismounted, bow raised and drawn, arrow loosed. It struck the boy, my father, in the arm below the elbow in the arc of flesh which hangs like cobwebs from the bone. It broke the skin but did not enter. Its flight had been uneven. Its head was far too crude and heavy for the sapling reed which was its shaft. But then, what could it matter? The skin was pierced and the goat’s purge or the urchin milk or the silverdew which provided venom for the point had mingled with his blood and he was all but dead.

  It is better to bleed than not to bleed when there is poison in your blood. My father put his own knife to his wrist and cut a line, half-heartedly, across the three mauve filaments beneath the skin.

  Give us the details, we, his audience, would say. Tell us once again how your blood flowed like a cliff spring down your arm, into the sling, onto the scallops, how the landscape turned from bracken-brown to red, how the bracts on the under-leaves stuck to the thickening blood as you toppled from the rock. Tell us, too, about the rich foliage that would have grown, coddled, germinated by the blood. What mushrooms, toadstools; what grubs, what flies, might have flourished there if you had simply fallen and not staggered to your feet again?

  That one dismounted man, the bowman barely twice my father’s age, had come blundering through the bracken to retrieve his arrow and – who can tell – to put an end to that small boy. My father had sense enough to know the meaning of the stave that the bowman was swinging in his hands and strength enough to run.

  Here my father’s voice would drop as he, the skilful storyteller, detailed the list of those sensations which gave power to his flight. The bracken, snapping underfoot like kindling to a flame, the bowman’s broken bracken gaining on the boy’s. The hubbub of the riders and their mounts. The wind, ‘Go home. Go home. To your houses. And your stone.’ My father’s lungs, his blood, his elbow. The resolutions for the future that he made. His dry and swollen tongue of fear.

  There was a moment when the bowman reached the rock from which my father had fallen when his choice was either to continue the chase or to stop and search for that poisoned sapling reed and stone. The world was full of boys that he could chase and kill, but an arrow was of value. It could make its heavy, winding flight again, ten, twenty times. You can’t eat boys, but an arrow can stop a deer, a seal, a hen. You can barter arrows for some honey, say, or skin. There is no trade in dead and skinny boys. That, then, is where the bowman stopped the chase and knelt in the undergrowth. Where was his arrow? He found the scallops. He wiped the blood which had stuck to them on the mosses and the grasses and put them in his purse. And then he set to work on the vegetation with his stave, beating at it in a circle and looking for the polished rose and yellow of the arrow’s shaft. He did not find it. He could not find it. My father held it in his one good hand and was running with it to our village.

  I cannot guess what spiteful, foolish instinct had made father pause to stoop and take it from the ground. But there was some sense of triumph there, as he made a bloodied return to his people, that he had doubly vexed the stranger with the bow. ‘That man had lost the chase and he had lost an arrow, too,’ my father said. ‘Some compensation for the blood and scallops which I had lost, and his poison in my arm.’

  His neighbours passed the arrowhead from hand to hand and shook their heads and laughed. They knew this stone. Greywacke. Picked out of the gravels, the shales and mudstones, on some riverbank and worked on by an amateur. Here were the flattened planes where the stone had been pounded. Here was a fracture at the arrow’s stem. Here were the impact dents where the hammer stone had struck the parent stone sending random chips and dust into the eyes, no doubt, of some muscular, hasty manufacturer who had not grasped that simple truth that stones are broken not by the power of the hammer. Stones are like scallop shells, like nuts. A clumsy, heavy blow will shatter them. One gentle, well-aimed strike with a wooden pin and they will open for you like a gate.

  Yet what clumsy tool was this? A small boy could do better. No wonder that the horsemen wanted trade if all the stones and arrows that they had were worked so poorly. They would be back, for sure, and with better trade than threats. If they came again and my father lived, the bowman could be asked to provide some recompense.

  I will not tire you with my father’s recollections of the fever and the pain that followed. He had saved his own life, it was said, because he cut himself below the arrow wound. Any poison had dispersed. But he had lost much strength and the wounds were slow to bind. His wrist and elbow began to swell and then his fingers became both stiff and shaking. By noon the colour of the skin had changed and, if his arm was pressed, clear water which smelt like damp earth bubbled through fissures to the surface. Soon the pain transferred itself to his upper arm and there were no feelings below the elbow. It was then that he was told that he must lose an arm or die.

  2

  IT HAD BEEN my father’s task, some months before the arrow struck his arm, to help with the opening of a new shaft on the hill beyond the village. All the boys and girls were ordered there. It was their job to stand in line with baskets and tip the disturbed topsoil – and the useless stones, the surface flints made unworkable by frost – into disused workings. What they sought was the undisturbed floorstone of flint at depths unknown to worms. This was the act that underpinned the village. If the stone was good then there were profits to be made. The hefters and the craftsmen, the women in the workshops pacing the five-pointed star between the spit, the anvil, the bellows, the cradle, and the pot, could expect good prices for their finished flints from the traders in the marketplace. This is how it worked: there were two breeds existing side by side, the stoneys and the mongers, the villagers who dug and worked the flint, the traders who hawked and peddled it with the world beyond.

  ‘You’ll never guess,’ my father said, ‘which breed was fat and wealthy, which gave the orders, which named the price, which (for the opening of that new shaft) did not stand and shiver in the line with baskets full of earth.’

  The stoneys’ children had been told to start at dawn. It was the light that woke them, and then the noise as all the able-bodied people cleared their throats and noses for the day or stretched their limbs or greeted their families and their neighbours. It was another working day but an exciting one for the children there. The usual routines could be discarded. The village and the workshops would be empty until the new shaft had been dug and the quality of the new stone tested.

  The hill was reached by taking paths across the coastal, cliff-top bracken until a bluff of chalk with seams of flint was met. Then the paths converged as there was only one route forward, a steep track with two rock sentries. The youngsters reached it first and for reasons of their age took the gradient at a sprint. Behind, the older men and women, still half awake on this latest day of labour, were less eager to begin. They made their way through the bracken, some singly, some in pairs, so that to a hawk – be grateful to my father for the image – their progress would seem like a waterfall of people, a dozen slow streams meeting in an impatient, fresh cascade.

&nb
sp; My father’s ornateness as a storyteller cannot obscure the one plain truth that needs no hawk for decoration – that the village was obsessed with work, with industry, with craft. It made the people purposeful, wealthy, strong. It made them weary too, and a little jealous of the outside world beyond the hill, beyond the warren of mineshafts, its drifts of unworked flint.

  ‘There were outsiders close by on that morning,’ said my father. ‘As we came onto the hill, breathless from the climb, all could see a distant, breakfast fire, plaiting a rope of smoke for the sky. There was the sneeze of tethered horses. There was the smell of meat.’

  Here, perhaps, we should raise an eyebrow. Beware of father’s tongue. He has led us in his story to the hill and what we might expect is some detail of the labour there, the firing of the grass and gorse and heather, the loosening of the turf, the breaking of the chalk, the shifting of the stones as a hundred people went to work, the tedium. Instead, my father said, he slipped away. No one missed him. He walked towards the smoke. The men there called him over. They let him feed the horses with long grass. They gave him bread and rabbit. There was more laughter amongst these dozen than amongst the hundred on the hill. They blew birdsong with blades of grass. They were in no hurry to begin the business of their day.

  Later they put him on a horse and rode away from the coast. He visited their encampment of houses made from skin and wood and played with boys of his own age whose hair was long and tempers short. Some time later he returned to the hill along the landmarks that he had noted in the morning, the fallen tree, the rookery, the clearing with the spongy path, the bluff. The villagers were hard at work. Men were disappearing underground to shoulder height and loosening the chalk with antler picks for the children and the women to load in baskets and dispose. No one had remarked on his departure or greeted his return. For all they knew or cared he had been relieving himself behind a bush. That was his day of labour. And though our eyebrows may be raised when we consider the facts that father conjured for us, the challenge that he made was this: Who there, amongst the hundred on the hill, did not take a journey on that day? The eye is focused on the stone that must be lifted to the shoulder and then pushed onto the broken turf at the rim of the pit. And then the next stone. And the next stone too. All day. That is how the job is done. The body is engaged. But the mind is like the hawk that father summoned for the image of the paths and the waterfall. It can fly. If one of the men had clapped his hands at one instant in the deepening of the pit and asked, ‘Where are you?’, not one would answer, ‘Hard at work upon the hill.’ They were elsewhere. Kings and heroes. Young again. Out at sea. In love. Winning arguments that they had lost the night before. Eating well. Rich. Walking in the forest to the plume of smoke that beckoned there. Hunting scallops with their toes.