by Jack Lasenby
I had tried to keep my distrust of Larish to myself. In one thing I was wrong: she was not lazy; her need was for a man; whatever he was interested in would become her interest, too. Her constant attempts to attract Jenek and Tobik were not just flirting; Larish’s impulse had a deeper source, and was amply fulfilled by Petra, his skills, his need for someone to speak for him.
“He likes to do something with his hands,” Larish said when I first told him he would not recover full use of his leg.
Petra muttered.
“I was born with this crooked body, then my legs were crippled by the illness, as I told you, but my family were shepherds. I didn’t even like sheep, but I had no choice,” Larish repeated. She listened to Petra again. “What I like is making things, making them better each time. Being lame won’t stop me doing that.”
I heard the hunger in his voice. Petra got so much satisfaction out of making things, he took little interest in anything else, let alone the running of our village.
He taught Ruka and Peck everything he knew about sheep, and handed over their care relieved. At first, his dog Pelt mooched around the workshop, but was quick to accept the boys and their pups Flick and Tack as his responsibility, together with the sheep. Pelt still visited Petra, but was busy up on the clearings most of the time, and, as I said before, he liked to keep an eye on Enna.
Beside making pots, Petra was soon spinning and weaving. Larish learned quickly from him, got much satisfaction, and I hoped it might distract her from the dislike I knew she still felt for me.
Using oily fleece, Larish spun and wove wool tighter and tighter, while Petra tried spinning looser yarns, weaving them with less tension, and shrinking the cloth in hot water. Between them they made a cloth both woven and felted, and near waterproof. Tobik said they must have treated it with some secret mixture, but Petra just smiled and muttered something.
“Every craft has its secrets,” Larish said rather smugly.
There was a white-flowered tree we knew as hoherry but Petra called ribbonbark. He stripped some big ones of their bark for its inner layers, twisting together several strands to make a rope that we used on the nets. When Jenek and Tobik grumbled and patched the sails yet again, Larish said Petra thought he could weave new ones of flax.
Once Pelt had taken over the sheep, Katerin spent less time on the clearings and more with Ansik whom she bullied constantly. The rest of us laughed at the way he let her think she was having her own way, yet went on with what he was doing. Their net kept catching, and in all weathers they explored the outer beach and its rocks for shellfish.
Peck and Ruka dared not leave the sheep on their own, nor would Pelt have let them. They practised all day with their slings and bows. Even though Jenek and Tobik thatched them a shelter, they often came down in the evening wet through. One night, Petra looked at their worn tunics patched with sacking and drew something in the ashes, Larish asked a question or two, and they re-drew whatever it was, Petra grunting an occasional word.
Soon after, they came across from their workshop with two heavy tunics of the new material, and tried them on Ruka and Peck. They came right down over the boys’ knees; a large pocket in front had a flap that closed with a wooden toggle, and side pockets opened through vertical slits to keep the hands warm. The tunics laced at the neck, and best of all they had a hood with a drawstring. In the worst weather, Peck and Ruka went out now, only eyes and noses showing. Both boys refused to take off their new tunics when they came into the Great House, and they even tried sleeping in them.
“Why didn’t anyone think of hoods before?”
“Petra’s idea,” said Larish.
Petra muttered to her without taking his eyes from a bundle of goat and dog hair he was trying to spin. We were sitting in the Great House after eating stew out of our new bowls.
“The first time Petra was big enough to go down to the big village, Thorn, to trade wool,” said Larish, “he saw a man wearing a sack over his head to keep the rain off, then realised it was part of his tunic. Back in Karo, he described it to his mother.
“‘He’ll be a stranger from the big town,’ she told Petra. ‘Those people in Thorn, they’re different enough, but goodness only knows what outlandish clothes they wear in Wenton. I’ll make your tunics the way I’ve always made them; the same way my mother made them, and her mother before her.
“‘Hoods,’ Larish said in a cranky old woman’s voice. ‘Whatever next?’”
Petra looked at Larish and chuckled with the rest of us. I had never heard her mimicking before. Perhaps there was more to Larish than met the eye.
“You never told us,” Jenek said to Petra, “what happened to your mother.”
Larish looked at Petra, but he ignored her and spoke directly to Jenek.
“She died after my father. Poisoned.”
His hoarse mutter became clear, as it had when he had told us of Karo and the feud. So used had we become to Larish saying almost everything for Petra, we stared.
“Your mother, too?” said Jenek, and Larish moved uneasily, but Petra put his hand on her arm.
“She always thought the Diggers started the feud.”
“But you said the first two killed in the feud were speared?”
“When she was little, my mother heard a story about the Diggers doing those first killings with spears, so they wouldn’t be suspected.”
“The Diggers started the feud deliberately?”
“According to my mother. She once said I was born crooked because of something the Diggers put in her food when she was carrying me.”
“Why?”
“Because she had spoken against them.”
“Was she right?”
Petra shrugged. “Nobody liked the Diggers; they kept to themselves, and yet they belonged to Karo. Their work made them outcasts; I told you what the children thought about them. And here, after years of the feud, in front of everyone in the big meeting house my mother accused them of poisoning my father.”
“What happened?”
“We were short-handed, and we came inside, all of us, after yarding up the flock one wet evening of thunder and lightning, and were just about to eat a goat stew when our mother stopped us.
“‘There’s something wrong.’ She sniffed the air.
“‘What?’
“‘Something’s not right.’
“We were hungry and looked at the stew, but couldn’t smell anything wrong. We’d eaten it the day before, and had put the camp oven to heat over the fire while we yarded up the sheep. You know how stew always tastes better, the next day. My mother was suspicious and tried it with a wooden spoon, just a little.
“‘Ugh,’ she spat. She tipped the stew into the fire. ‘Don’t eat it.’ She spat again, stuck her fingers down her throat and made herself sick, but that night she had convulsions, and died next day.”
“You didn’t tell us about that before.”
“How did somebody poison the food inside your house?”
“We were busy in the yards with the sheep. Poison is a dark and secret thing; it makes everyone uncertain and suspicious.” Petra thought awhile and said, “A terrible way to die.”
“Painful?”
Petra nodded without looking at Tobik. “We carried my mother’s body across the water, and the Diggers buried her.
“My father had said that when the feud started, there were over a hundred people in the village; now we were down to about forty. It was late summer. I told you how we moved our flock up to graze the higher grass, but never returned to Karo.”
Petra stood with the spindle and the bundle of hair under his arm and went outside, followed by Larish, who looked at Jenek and Tobik as if to blame them for upsetting him.
“He had to tell us,” I said.
There was no more talk; by the time I fed Enna, the others were all asleep. I looked up at the stored sacks and baskets of food and thought, even if we were strong enough to defend ourselves, there was still the danger from within. �
��A dark and secret thing,” Petra had said of the poison. I thought of the time I had spent winnowing with Lorne, my satisfaction with the abundance of our stores, and remembered again how Hornish, too, had once known that abundance, and I felt uneasy. From what Petra had told us, Karo had also been a place of plenty.
The morning was sunny and everyone cheerful, as if they had forgotten what Petra had told us last night. That evening it rained heavily.
“The hoods,” Peck burst in the door, “they stop the rain running down our necks.”
“And they’re good in the wind.”
“You don’t need to wear them inside,” Katerin told the boys. I smiled to myself. In a way, she was taking what had been Larish’s place.
“They’d be good in the boat,” said Jenek. “When are you going to make one for me and Tobik?”
Larish laughed. “You’ll have to card the wool. At this rate, we’re going to need more sheep.”
Petra said something to her.
“We’ll have to put off making blankets,” said Larish. “And if we’re going to get those sails finished, Petra says we need more flax.”
“There’s heaps ready to bring down, and we’ll catch some more wild sheep.” Jenek looked at Tobik. “There’s the ones that took off over the ridge.”
“Hoods, mugs, bowls,” I said to Petra. “We are more comfortable, thanks to you and Larish.”
“Lucky for us, we found you,” Tobik said.
Petra ducked his head. “Lucky for us,” his hoarse voice muttered. “I’d have died but for Selene. And the Diggers who came hunting us, they’d have killed Katerin and stolen our sheep.”
“I wonder if they were chased out of Karo by the men from Thorn?” said Jenek. “Remember you told us how they started taking over the valley? I’ve been wondering if the last Diggers followed you with their own sheep and settled in the bay where we found you.”
“If they build a village in that bay,” said Larish, “we could trade with them, dried fish for wool.”
“I’m not going back there.” Petra said it loud and clear.
“They wouldn’t need to know that you and Katerin are here,” Larish told him. “We’d keep it a secret, everything you told us.” Petra glanced up, and she was silent.
We closed in one end of the thatched firewood shelter for a cottage, roasted a pig whole on a spit over a trenchful of embers, and celebrated their setting up house together. I wished Ennish was there to live with Enna and me in a cottage, too.
Katerin moved in with Petra and Larish, but drifted back to the Great House. She didn’t find Larish easy, and her father had less time to spend with her. Bewildered for a while, she adjusted and became more independent, and the rest of us tried to help her.
In the Great House, Katerin still corrected almost everything Ansik said. Gardening, netting, helping the younger boys with the sheep, or fishing and hunting with Jenek and Tobik, he fitted in. I often saw him watching Petra and Larish, or Jenek and Tobik, copying, learning. Although Larish was his sister, they were quite unlike each other in appearance and personality. A few years, I thought, and Ansik and Katerin would make good partners, give us more children.
We had been eating peas and green stuff from the gardens for some time now, and before mid-summer we ate the first runner beans with new potatoes.
“Satisfying,” Jenek said.
“I will sleep easier when we have lifted the main crop of potatoes and stored them.” I thought for a moment. “I want to be established, but even with Petra and Katerin, there are hardly enough of us to do everything.”
“What about Petra’s wheat?”
“Once the ground is a bit warmer, we will plant half, keep the rest just in case.”
Jenek nodded and flashed his smile. I was always aware something could go wrong, but he would take a risk for the fun of it.
We planted our second crop of barley, then the new ground was ready for the wheat. The night after sowing, I woke from a dream of whales, looked up at the roots clasping the beams in the high shadows, and sang the words for the gods to follow home, towing the new sun, lengthening the day.
On their way to lift a net one morning, Ansik and Katerin dropped me off across the harbour. Tiny red strips split the buds of the mercy trees on the sandspit. Soon bees would come for the pollen, and birds for nectar from the flower cups. I leapt down the dunes, ran scattering gulls, and took my first swim, diving and rising, spouting and going under to rise and spout again. As I came back up the beach, Ansik and Katerin jumped out of the sandhills.
“Is it true you can call the whales home, Selene?” Katerin’s dark eyes fixed on mine. How pretty she is, I thought to myself.
“I used to, at Hornish.”
“Teach me?”
“The gods decide when there will be another Selene and who it will be. My mother was visited by the whale in a dream. When she told it in the Great House, the old women said it meant she was going to have a daughter who would be the next Selene.”
“Does the Selene stay in one family?”
“It goes wherever the gods decide.”
“Have you dreamt that Enna is to be the next Selene?”
I shook my head.
“How old do you have to be?”
“I was chosen before I was born, but there were stories of older girls being chosen, too.”
We were walking down the inner sandhills towards the raft.
“As old as me?”
“Much older. Some of them almost grown up.”
“Is it always a girl? Not a boy?”
“Always.”
“Why?”
“That is just the way it is. All the girls at Hornish wanted to be the Selene, but there can only be the one until the gods send the sign for another.”
We paddled home. The brown humps of the Great House, Petra and Larish’s cottage, the firewood shelters, stacks of barley and oats, the two boats drawn up, movement around the gardens, the green of the growing orchards: it all made me feel good. I tried to see a stockade around it, like the one at Hornish. There are other things we need to do first, I thought.
“I never want to go back to our old place again,” said Katerin, “but I wish my mother was here.” It was the first time she had mentioned her. “Sometimes I forget growing up in Karo. Have you ever thought, Selene, the only one of us with a mother is Enna?”
“I think of it often. Soon there will be Larish’s baby: it will have a mother — and a father.”
“You’re the only one of us with a father now,” Ansik said to her.
“I suppose you think that makes me lucky,” Katerin told Ansik. “Why aren’t you paddling? Do you want to get us swept down the channel?”
I hid my grin.
“I was born at Karo,” she said suddenly. “Does that mean I can’t be the Selene?”
“You are one of us now. The gods know that.”
That night, Petra told us more stories of the dark and secretive Diggers and the feud, but through Larish this time. Katerin sat leaning against him, Larish on his other side.
Larish’s grandmother and mother had brought her up to hate me, but something better was happening at the inlet. She seemed content with Petra, with their work, with the fact that she was going to have a baby. I thought of that as I stood under the wooden map and called the gods.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Five of Them and Twenty-Three Sheep
The nights shortened, the wheat sprang green. I told the children the gods were towing home the new-born sun, and we looked at the sticks and their shadows that measured its rise up the sky.
I beat the first strokes on a hollow log, and the others took turns so it never stopped. Even as we ferried the log across to the sandspit, its steady throb travelled through air and water, echoing our heartbeats and the gods’.
The dark flame of mercy trees charred the blue and white sky, matted the yellow sand red as I spouted and swam in the shallow water, and the others surrounded me singing, helping
me up the beach. Next night I lit the bonfires, everyone danced, the drum beat faster, and earth, air, fire, and water mingled as the gods sent us their children. We chanted thanks and helped the black bodies up the beach. The tide withdrew, the drum stopped, and in that silence I drank the first blood, ate the first flesh of the sacrifice.
Enna sucked and chewed on a piece of skin, and smiled up at the baskets of dried whale meat and smoked sausages hanging under the roof. I showed her the barrels of oil, and crooned the whale songs. Light from clear-burning lamps filled the Great House and Petra’s workshop, and Larish burned some fenks on her fire. Tobik sniffed the air and said, “Remember at Hornish they dug them into the garden to give strength to the soil?” It made me think again of how much we had forgotten.
Ansik and Katerin paddled their raft back one day, holding up a heavy kit. Their yells reminded me of Ruka and Peck when they saw smoke coming from Table Island.
“Teetees,” said Jenek, looking in the kit. “Who said we had too many barrels?”
The young muttonbirds were in burrows on the cliffs, and all through the sandhills where they hatched amongst marram grass. While the boys knocked them on the head with a stick, Katerin, Lorne, and I plucked and singed till the air smelled sharp with burning down. Back at the village, we soaked them in brine.
Petra and Larish had kept an eye on the yarded sheep, and made a smokehouse of a thatched shed with brush walls and a firepit dug in the middle. We hung the brined muttonbirds in pairs over poles, and lit a slow fire, dozy wood from a fallen mercy tree.
As the teetees smoked brown, we packed them in barrels with a stone on top of a floating lid. Each morning we ladled off oil, topped up the barrel with more smoked birds, and got ready for last night’s catch. Jenek and Tobik now took the teetees after dark, using torches of dry grass and flax stuffed in tote bark and soaked with whale oil. When two rows of barrels were filled, and the boys complained of lack of sleep, I kept them at it till another row was added, and the rest of the teetees lived to breed.