The Gift of Stones

by Jim Crace

  Of course, our merchants remained fat. They had reserves of food. They’d set aside some grain and meat to trade with in the early spring. So now they traded with themselves. A merchant who had dried fruit could make a friend of one with hams. But merchants are not merchants without fresh merchandise. It was not very long before some traders packed and left. There was no profit left in flint and they would have to start anew, elsewhere, before their riches were used up. They bartered for some horses and some sleds and, while we gathered round to watch, they packed all their possessions and set off towards the place where bronze was made. Their future was with bronze, they said. They only hoped that if the outside world was wild with horsemen and with war, their tongues and merchandise could purchase passage to a market which was as safe – and profitable – as ours had been. We did not wish them luck – or well. Not even when the final trader left. We did not doubt that they’d be wealthy once again. They’d pick up riches like a rabbit picks up ticks. That was their skill.

  My father’s six cousins and his uncle were amongst the first to leave. His uncle did not say to father, ‘You are family. So is the girl. You both must come with us. I promised your dying mother years ago that I’d look after you.’ He simply disappeared at night.

  When traders left, the stoneys squabbled over who should occupy their homes. The victors lived in grandeur without food and with no purpose to their lives. They maintained walls, of course. They observed the rigid courtesies of life. They made no noise at night. And there were some who still sat at their anvils working flint as if they thought that bronze, brought in by boat, would tire of us and go to sea again.

  The wiser ones sat on the stones outside their homes to warm themselves in winter light. Why waste good wood on heating flint? They needed all the wood for night when, opened by their hunger to the cold, they could not sleep. They were not tired. Their muscles were unused. They had not spent the day silently engaged with stone. For once, low conversations filled the night. What if? What if? What if we stay here, will we live? What if we leave, what then?

  And in the day what was there else to do but talk? The village seemed a shabby and a friendly place at last. People did not shut themselves inside. They strolled. They lingered. They paused for chat and gossip and for news. They took an interest in each other’s grieving, empty inside worlds and in the outside world as well. How could they not? The outside world was closing in like lichen on a stone. Unless the stone is busy, turning all day long, the lichen creeps and clothes and wraps. And so the hill, the forest and the sea wrapped us up too. The paths became unused, the pits fell in, the wind reorganized our lives. We lived like rabbits, sociable and bored and easy prey.

  When horsemen came we hid. They did not come, of course, for arrowheads, or tools. They only came to ride between our homes and to shout obscenities and threats. They were our masters now. Some nights they used an empty merchant’s house for stables and for sleep. They drank, and were as rash and ragged as small boys. We feared the time when they would help themselves to women or to food. Was it in our lifetime or just a dream when stoneys had told such riders to dismount and leave their horses in the care of boys, when we could turn our backs on them and tell ourselves, ‘Anyone can ride a horse and shake a stick. Where is the skill in that?’

  At last the truth was plain. My father broke his silence to pass his wisdom on. ‘So now you know,’ he said. ‘You can’t eat stone. You can’t burn stone. You can’t make clothes from flint. You’ll have to leave this village or you’ll die.’ His audience told him, ‘Hold your tongue.’ They preferred – we all preferred – the entertainment of his lies.

  31

  WE TOOK our leave in spring. There were old people there, too frail to walk. They chose to stay behind and take their chances in the village of their births. They would not be alone. There were the horsemen who passed through and might be grateful for some help with caring for their mounts or cooking food. A pair of sisters and their stoney men refused to leave as well. They’d spoken – or much more – with passing merchants. They thought that they’d survive by living off the trees. The merchants promised that they’d trade food for charcoal. The cost of charcoal was too high near where the bronze was made.

  Leaf stopped behind as well. He hadn’t give up on flint. Through all the hunger and decay he’d stayed at work, producing blades. But now his box of tools had bronze amongst the antler tines and wood. He had no time to ponder on the irony of that. He only knew this fact – that bronze was tough and sharp. His spike of bronze when placed upon the fracture point of flint and hammered with some wood was better than a tine for separating tool from stone. He found he could make his perfect and unwanted flints more easily with bronze.

  We left him there behind his draughtless walls, so focused on his anvil and his stone that our departure could force few farewells – and no tears – from him. He thought we were the foolish ones. He saw no sense in flight.

  My father was restored to noise and health. At last he was in charge. As soon as it was clear that village life was dead and that the stoneys had to leave, who else was there to show the way but father? They all recalled the times he told them what life was like beyond the village and the hill. Their little liar was to be their guide. He was a young man once again, despite his weeping arm, despite the flaking of his face, despite the stretched and stringy tresses on his mouth and tongue. He leapt. And called. And danced. He made promises that they would find a world more lively than the one they’d known. He was the sporting porpoise that always leads the school.

  The school was more subdued. The villagers were weighed down by bags and slings and sleds. They’d packed each scrap of food or cloth, each pot, each tool, each skin as if they thought that their new world would match the old. They did not know what travel meant. Most had never been beyond the hill before. They carried children in their arms. They seemed to think their journey was a stroll. To where? Who knows? The stoneys dared not guess. They left it to my father to invent or find a route for them. So when he told them to leave their chattels and their sleds behind and carry only warm clothes, water, food, they did as they were asked. He told the parents, too, to carry nursing children in a sling and not across their arms. They’d need their hands and arms to fend off branches or to grasp on rocks or to spread like wings for balance when paths descended cliffs.

  Leaf’s house, his walls, were our last view of home. The chippings and the knappings that we heard from his workshop were our last village sound. Leaf stayed inside, at work. His labours were a rebuke to us all.

  ‘Work is for the idle,’ father said. Our laughter gave us courage. We did what father had done all those years before. We simply filled our chests with air and set off down the coast.

  You must have seen the way sheep move. We were like that. Our eyes were on the ground. There was no purpose in our step. Our faces were expressionless and worn. But, once we had passed by the flattened bracken where my mother’s life and my father’s arm were lost, there was something in the wind which made us lift our chins. The odour and the challenge of the sea, perhaps. The salt. The mewling of the gulls, distressed and fearful that we were hunting for their eggs. Or something else? Or something more like joy. Our faces which were like the chalk that once had settled in our lungs became like apples, shiny, fleshy, red. We looked about. The world was upside down, just as my father said. The gulls had backs. The shallows of the sea were edged with arcs of phlegm. The wind was low enough to touch and cup inside our palms. We’d thought the sea was flat – but now we gazed upon its trenches and its peaks. It seemed as solid as a hill.

  The flock of sheep quite soon became a line of goats, adept at finding ways which skirted brambles, gorse and winkle-berries. The stoneys found that feet and legs could bounce, that songs and whistles and wisecracks could well involuntarily from their mouths, that there were rewards to be had in doing simple things.

  We stopped to drink and eat what food we had brought at the stream amongst the boulder
s by the beach. Leaf, the village, flints, were only half a day behind. But none of us looked back along the coast. We had our greedy eyes upon the undulating path which led up from the stream, through mallow, bracken, moss, into the clouds and sky. The only mentions people made of the village that they’d left were jokes at Leaf’s expense. ‘He didn’t dare to walk with us into the wind,’ they said, ‘for fear his hair would blow away. Some gull would take his bald head for an egg and use it as a nest.’ And they repeated father’s joke that work is for the idle. It pleased them more than anything he’d said.

  That evening – more weary than we’d ever been – we came to lowlands which were unlike the landscapes we had known – except, we recognized this place from stories father told. Low heathland swept gently to the shore where thrift and black-tufted lichens lived side by side on rocks with barnacles and limpets. There were clumps of seablite, flourishing on spray. There was arrow grass and milkwort. All the herbs and medicines and vegetables that we had seen bunched up for barter in the marketplace were in abundance here.

  Do not imagine that I felt that this was home or that I ran in search of where my mother’s hut had been. I was too young – and tired – for sentiment. I lay down by the fire they’d made and slept. And while I slept the stoneys gathered food while father pointed with his hand at what was good to eat and what was bad. He challenged boys and girls to bring some rabbits back. He went with neighbours, hunting eggs. He showed how samphire should be pulled and cooked.

  The stoneys could not stick at any task. They were like dragonflies, first here, then there, then by the water’s edge. It was not long before someone picked up a juice-red elderberry rock and – half recalling tales that father told – flung it to the ground. It fell apart. No piece of it was larger than a plum. Soon other stoneys gathered round. They clapped their hands in glee. They’d never seen such soft and useless stone before. They squatted on the beach like children, crumbling stone on stone, reducing rock to shingle, grit and blood-red sand. Some kept the larger pieces for good luck.

  That night we gathered at the fire and shared out all the food. It did not matter that some hunters had had no luck with rabbits or with eggs. A shared pot shares out luck as well. There was a little talk of how our lives might be but mostly there was sleep.

  My father’s arm was at its worst at night. He stood with his back to the fire and hugged his stump with his one hand. He would have stayed like that all night, except he heard me calling out his name. I was unnerved by what I thought were wolves. I’d heard a cough or barking coming from the heath. We listened, and at last we heard the sound again, the faintest summons from far off.

  ‘It’s only foxes,’ father said, and then, unable to resist the lie, ‘Listen, and you’ll hear the seals. You’ll hear them barking at the foxes in reply.’

  Once more we listened to the night. The next bark that we heard was full of salt and came in on the wind.

  My father did not smile. At last his lies had caught him out. He knew what no one else had guessed, that this salt heath was the limit of his knowledge of the outside world, that all he knew of better days was those few times with Doe. He looked out at the night beyond the heath where, next day, we would go. The stars were just the same, the moon, the wind. No doubt they had a sun there too. The stories that he’d told were now our past. His new task was to invent a future for us all. He closed his eyes and what he saw was the shingled margin of the sea with horses wild and riderless close by. He tried to place a sail upon the sea, but could not. He tried to fill the air with human sounds. But all he saw were horses in the wind, the tide in loops upon the beach, the spray-wet rocks and stones reflecting all the changes in the sky, and no one there to notice or applaud.