The Gift of Stones

by Jim Crace

  “Afterwards,” he said. He felt triumphant and in charge. He knew how hungry she must be. Her eagerness for him and them would fade as soon as his fresh and salty bribe changed hands. He gripped the sling and pulled Doe to the ground.

  That would have been the end of that. My cousin would not be the patient, careful sort. His passion was short-lived. Except the girl was calling, “Doe,” and whimpering.

  “Stay there. I won’t be long,” her mother called.

  “Can I go, too?”

  My cousin found it hard to concentrate when the woman he had bought was shouting conversations in the wind. He pulled my mother to her feet. “Come on,” he said. “I know a private place.”

  She went with him because she had the scallops on her mind. He said, “I’ll walk ahead. You follow me.”

  He led her through the village and across the market green. The stoneys and the merchants were too preoccupied with worries of their own to pay attention to my cousin or to Doe. All kinds of people passed by them. Why should they notice who went where with whom? You can’t sell gossip – gossip’s free.

  When they had passed the moss-packed walls of Leaf’s stone house my cousin paused for Doe to take his hand. It would have seemed a touching sight for simpletons, the awkward, blushing man, the meagre Doe, the fragrance of the bracken and romance. The stoneys seldom passed by here. They were not fond of cliffs or sea. And so my cousin felt emboldened by their privacy. He did not understand what she was trading for his shells. He thought he’d purchased her affection with his trophies from the beach. He thought each scallop would secure a kiss from Doe. He made a nuisance of himself.

  “Come on,” she said. “Let’s not waste time. You’ve brought me all this way and I’ve a daughter waiting for me and for food.”

  Doe led the way into the bracken and – that painful, reminiscent lifting of her smock – she stood ready to receive my cousin and his shells. She might have been upon the heath once more. Her thighs were punctured water bags. Her breasts were flat. Her face was reddening with hidden sores. Her eyes were beaten and appalled at the prospect of her task which made of her both the trader and the labourer. She was the merchandise as well. My cousin’s role was more clear. His clothes were off and he was holding Doe as if she were as light and worthless as a shock of reeds.

  They should have hidden when they heard the horsemen come, but Doe could not distinguish cry from cry or heartbeats from hooves. It was too late to hide once the troop of riders had reached the clifftop path beyond Leaf’s walls and turned their horses. They had been seen, two nearly naked bodies, standing waist high in bracken. Who knows what mischief made one rider pause and loose one arrow at my cousin and at Doe? It was the kind of mischief that makes men kick down toadstools or snub a passing beetle with their thumb. Those chance-encountered things – untouched – seem far too innocent, insubstantial, perfect, to pass and leave unscathed. It must have seemed too good a chance to miss – the prospect of dividing those two lovers by the sea.

  The arrow’s flight was even and too swift for Doe to move or sink. She simply joined my cousin in his panic as he twisted her around to shield his naked flesh with hers. The bronze and shiny leaf was like a yellow-throated diver when it hit her skin, the point its beak, her flesh the sea, its fish the kidney in the woman’s back. Its impact was as neat and light as those which open up a flint to show the blade within.

  The rider did not wait to see what damage he had done. His horse was separated from the rest and he must give pursuit. Nor did my cousin wait to see. He dropped the scallops, turned and ran. For all he knew the horseman would return to put an end to him. You cannot blame him for his flight. But what he should have done was this. He should have run straight to the market green and told his neighbours there about the woman and her wound. They could have armed themselves with sticks and come to take her home. But he said nothing. He just ran, by routes which took him to his house avoiding stoneys and the market green. He hoped her wound was only slight, that he would spot her, once again, outside her hillside home. What was the point, he asked himself, of letting all the world into the secret of his trade with Doe when she was only scratched or bruised or shocked? When it was dark he’d climb up to her house to check that she was well.

  She fell onto the bracken with a pain which came in waves like childbirth. She fell onto the arrow and snapped the shaft and drove the head more deeply in. She was unconscious fairly soon, with shock, fatigue and pain. What were her dreams? We’ll never know. Her face was pale. The earth was damp and dark with blood.

  Or else she did not die just then. Or else she did not die like that. The gossip on the green was this, that I’d been spotted on that day. I’d been along the cliffs and come back to the village with my bag full-gutted with the free food of the coast. Who knows what else I hid inside my bag? An arrowhead, perhaps?

  Anyone that saw me then, they said, would wonder at the luck and skill which brought the one-armed man through thickets, over rocks, without a wound or fall. I had a purpose. What it was they could not guess. But there was a saying, the agile and the speedy ram is the one with sheep in view. My sheep was Doe. How well they could remember that first night when I had brought the woman and her girl to the village. The refugees had slept, exhausted by the walk, while I had told my cousins and their friends the story of Doe’s life. They’d fled before the tale was done, both bored and irritated by the passion and the anger in my voice. My ailment was too clear. I was besotted with the skinny woman from the heath. It did not take a sage to see that love like mine – belittled, spurned – would turn to poison once the object of that love became the willing consort of all men but me. The gossip made a killer out of me. It seems the stoneys hadn’t got enough to do – already they were telling stories of their own.

  So let me pick their story up. They’ve left it as a rough and ready core. The craftsman in me wants to strike it softly here and there, to give it shape and symmetry, to hone and burnish it. Imagine, then, that I’ve been telling lies. I found fresh samphire for Doe’s gift not on the heath but much nearer to the village. It flourished on a stream bank where a shallow valley joined the coast. It was where I’d lit the fire with hair. I picked the samphire and found, too, a colony of scallops in the tidal sand. My bag was full. I had no other tasks. Besides, the fresh hoof-marks in the mud and sand were warnings that there were horsemen close. There were the embers of a second fire, some flattened grass, some rabbit bones, a broken arrow shaft with the smoothest, lightest head which was not stone. That, too, I put inside my bag. I was unnerved by what I found. I hurried home. And so I returned to the village in the early afternoon and not at night as I have said.

  Remember what my plan had been? I’d take the scallops and the samphire to Doe’s house. I was as hollow and as brittle as a blown egg with jealousy. I’d stand outside and call, “Doe, Doe, sweet Doe.” And when she came? I’d pay. I’d fall down on my knees. I’d throw her samphire as a gift. I’d be as giddy as a goat. I could invent a thousand reconciliations.

  Instead, I heard the sound of calling in the bracken which stood between the sea and Leaf.

  “Come on,” she said. “Let’s not waste time.” It was Doe’s voice. And the man that she addressed was my sheepish cousin. He seemed less sheepish for a while. He was shedding clothes as if they were alive and venomous. The Doe I saw was just the same as that first sight upon the heath when she had offered shelter from the rain and we had dined on slott. That was the day I pulled that first and modest screen of grass across my tale. If I’d been wise I would have let the bracken and the grass provide another screen. I should have shut my eyes and ears or run down to the shore. But jealousy is like a moth – it seeks the brightest flame.

  I was close enough to see her buttocks and her back, to watch her smock rise up, to witness cousin – erect and tremulous – enclose her in his arms. What might I have done had not the troop of horsemen passed close by? Thrown scallop shells, perhaps? Or crept away? Or strode into t
he clearing they had made and, with my one arm round Doe’s waist, have said, “This woman’s mine, not yours. I found her on the heath. I brought her here. Who said that you could take my Doe?” Then I might have struck my cousin on his mouth like some possessive stoney beaten to a flint. And he – the soft and cheerful sort – would have simply turned and fled.

  Instead I remained hidden while the horsemen galloped past. They were in too much haste and fear to even notice those two people, those two nearly naked bodies standing waist high in the bracken. We could hear cries from the market green. My cousin was alarmed. He wondered what had happened to his family, his home. He ran – his clothes half on and off – into the swathe of broken stems where the riders had just passed. He called to Doe that she should dress and hurry, too. Who knows what dangers there might be with horsemen so close by?

  There was no time for her to leave. In moments I was at her side and throwing samphire in her face and pelting her with shells. The riders had invaded me. Their flight, their speed, their carelessness. What must it be to simply fly on hooves like that, to be the two-armed horseman in the wind? That demon part of me which lived in caves was now set loose. It was as weathered as a piece of bark. It had a horseman’s squint. You’d take its face to be a leather purse with teeth. It knew no bounds. The woman’s dignity beneath its blows, her independence as she fell, only increased its rage. She was a goose. She was a mortar full of corn. She was no more than stone. And yet she spoke. She said, “What kind of friend are you? You don’t touch me.”

  She would have crawled away, just bruised, if that odd, smooth arrowhead had not fallen from my bag. I picked it up and – so the gossip goes – I plunged it in her back.’

  29

  ENOUGH. My father’s stories are a mask. I owe it to my mother and to him to tell you only what is known and not what he would wish us to believe. Doe had bled to death for sure and father had, indeed, found her beneath the shadow of the hawk. He had wiped clean the arrowhead, and placed his ear against my mother’s chest. She was entirely cold and still. In that my father told the truth. She was no more than stone.

  It was not easy for a one-armed man whose stump was swollen and in pain, whose eyes were full, to lift my mother from the ground and balance her across his back. And then to stoop and to pick up the arrowhead. And then to walk with them through bracken to the springy path which joined the village and the shore. For once he did not feel the wind and spray upon his back. My mother was his shield.

  The stoneys and the merchants were quite used to seeing father on that path. It was the path which led him to the outside world and on which he would return weighed down and weary with new tales. The magic ship had come that way. The talking goose. The boy who had the gift of flames. It would not seem so strange to see my father stooped and slow returning to them by that route. What he carried on his back, that shining something in his hand, they took to be some teasing evidence with which he’d complicate his lies.

  In fact he did not say a word. He had no breath. He put the body on the grass and, holding mother by an ankle, sat down at her feet. He placed the arrowhead on her chest.

  It was some time before the first brave men found time and inclination to take a closer look. My father’s world and Doe’s was hardly theirs. They felt no duty to the corpse. Unlike the people from beyond the wood they did not fear the dead. They saw no need to truss up the bodies of the slain or to placate them with provisions for the grave. For them the dead were powerless. They could not punish those who lived. They had no weapons of revenge. They had not been liberated from this world to carry out some mischievous design. There were no ghosts. But still, a woman dead and murdered – at a guess – by those same men who had swept through the marketplace and knocked the merchants down, was cause for some alarm. There’d be no recompense, for sure. Those horsemen did not seem the sort who’d pay their debts or recognize the rules of trade. They were the sort to fear.

  ‘What happened here?’ My father wet his lips to make reply. But he had no chance to speak. A stoney had sunk down onto his knees and, leaning over Doe, was staring at the weapon on her chest.

  ‘What’s this?’ he said. He hesitated for a moment as if to seek some reason why he could not take the object off the corpse. And then he reached and lifted it. ‘So light,’ he said. ‘So smooth.’

  My father’s neighbours turned their backs on Doe. They passed the arrowhead from hand to hand and shook their heads. They did not know this stone – if stone it was. There were no flattened planes or impact dents where the hammer stone had struck. There were no fractures at the arrow’s stem, or facets where the arrow had been flaked. The blade was flat and thinner than a cuttle shell. It was hard and sharp. Its surface was the colour of winter oak leaves and as smooth and cold to touch as bacon skin. Then one man noticed what the rest had missed. He pulled the broken wooden shaft from the arrowhead. He pushed his little finger in the hole it left and held it up for all his friends to see. At first they were confused. And then they knew that flint was second-best. This stem was something flint could never be, as hollow as an acorn cup and twenty times as deep.

  They turned upon my father now. What kind of tale was this? Invention was my father’s craft. They thought the arrowhead was father’s trick. ‘Come on,’ they said. ‘Let’s hear.’

  I do not know which of the many tales he told or who he blamed or how my mother died. If he’d invented naked warriors who’d slid down lightning from the sky, or animals, half horse half wolf, who’d sworn vengeance on the world, the stoneys would have taken it. Their sense of what was true or not was punctured by the arrowhead. A world that could produce a weapon as perfect and as beautiful as that could produce a thousand wonders of my father’s sort. In fact my father did not try to concoct a story to explain the arrowhead. He turned it in his hand and shrugged and claimed he was as ignorant as them. But we know father and we tense when we hear him using phrases of that kind. ‘I’m just as ignorant as you,’ he said, ‘of where this arrow has come from, or where the stone, or where the people with such craft. Not here. Not us, for sure.’ And then the one-armed village story-teller voiced the one thought that lay siege to everybody’s mind. He said, ‘So now we know why trade in flint is bad.’

  30

  THERE WAS no point in asking father to say more. That winter was the worst he’d known. It froze what bones he had. He was a silent man. He feared the questions, Where is my mother? What’s become of Doe?

  Together we found food enough for two. We lived, but thinly. I’d learnt and father guessed or knew which plants were good, what seaweed could be warmed and chewed, how grubs took refuge under bark, where toadstools could be found, where nuts. Each morning we went gathering ebb meat on the shore, dead fish or crabs. We were competing with the seagulls and the tide. And on those days when there was nothing else my father showed me how to pull the frosted roots of famine grass. The secret was to twist and tug. The roots were sweet to taste but bitter in the gut.

  You need not fear for us. We’d come through worse, and still had tales to tell. You might, instead, direct your sympathy downhill. The stoneys were a dying breed. This was the age of smiths. There was no trade for us at all. Who’d want to hoe their soil with stone when stone might splinter on the frost? Who’d go for flint when tools in flint would flake with too much use? Now flint was only good for walls and tombs. For implements and arms, the world demanded bronze.

  The gift of bronze, they said, had come by ships. My father nodded; he had seen the fleet. The sailors and the merchants and the smiths had put ashore. They’d found where metals could be mined. They settled there. The merchants who passed through – and, seeing our dilemma, did not stop for trade – would, pestered by the knappers, tease us all with displays of their bronze, their repertoire of shapes and decorations, their startling merchandise.

  Here were heads for hoes and mallets, scythes, with moulded holes and knobs to hold the wooden shaft. Here were blades with ribs, with spines, with knuck
les where the swordsman put his thumb. And here were knives that matched the shape of chestnut leaves, the curve of carps’ tongues, the coolness of icicles. The merchants showed us axes that had wings, and helmets horned like rams, and beaten shields as round and gleaming as the sun, and knives with pommels engraved with claws or snakes or eyes. In rabbit skins were wrapped the finest works of bronze: necklaces and rings, pins and brooches, plates and harness bells.

  The stoneys looked on in dismay. Their flint could not compete. It was too innocent and dull. They listened without comprehension while the passing traders told of how the bronze was mined and mixed and made. It took, they said, two hands of copper to each thumb of tin. And then you’d need some charcoal and a pit and some bellows with a mouth of clay. A fire was lit inside the pit. And when it cooled a metal plug was formed. That was the easy part. A child could tackle that. The craft was in the moulding and the beating of the bronze, the removal of the flashes and the casting jets, the details of design.

  There was a question that they asked amongst themselves. The question was, Who found this out and why? Who first thought to mine for copper, tin, to measure it in hands and thumbs, to charge it in a pit with charcoal, to pour it in a mould? With what in mind? And why? It was quite clear how the first knappers got to work. You only need to throw a stone to see it break and view the sinews and the flesh within. An idle child with nothing else to do would soon find out that flint was sharp and hard. But bronze? It made no sense.

  My father had some stories which would explain the mysteries of bronze. But the stoneys did not wish to hear. They knew their village was exposed. They were obsessed by that. The scripture – that they could not be touched because they had the gift of stones – had been proved false. They felt like carcasses while all around were gulls and rooks and wolves.

  Have pity, then, on gulls and rooks and wolves. They’d not dine well. Our neighbours were as thin as Doe. Their carcasses were only skin and bone. The sockets of their eyes were large and rimmed from sleeplessness. Their skin was rough and dry, their noses damp. They lived on what was left from better days. They were too timorous to forage on the hillside or the shore. They couldn’t tell good food from weed. They’d drink salt water from the sea. They’d feed themselves with sand.