by Jack Lasenby
Petra grunted the first time he tried one.
“Come winter,” Larish told him, “they’ll taste even better.” She rolled her eyes, smacked her lips, and I turned away.
We made more salt to preserve a good crop of runner beans in big clay crocks. In pear-shaped pits dug in a dry bank, we stored potatoes, sweet potatoes, onions, and carrots.
“I don’t know which is more satisfying.”
I looked at Jenek.
“Saving food for winter or eating it now,” he said.
His smile flashed, his grey eyes, and I almost gasped at his look and had to turn away. Jenek, of course I had thought of him, but never seriously. Now I asked myself why not.
“I think we called them roos at Hornish,” said Tobik.
“What?”
“The pits.”
“You’re making it up.”
“I don’t make things up.”
“All right, we’ll call them roos.”
By the end of summer when Enna was trying to walk, Katerin and Ansik came back from setting their net, calling and waving their paddles again. I was helping Larish set out some new-thrown pots to dry.
“What have they got now?”
“Not more teetees,” she groaned, and we laughed together, a little self-consciously.
Katerin and Ansik had seen the bay filled with gulls, a whirling tracery of diving wings and beaks. When Jenek and Tobik came back from hunting, we had finished roping the new herring nets, tying wooden floats along the top and fixing the stones to make them hang like curtains in the water, and loaded them, the cooking pots, and food for several days in the boats.
Again, Petra and Larish kept an eye on the sheep in the yards while we threw up a camp in the outer bay and netted the crowded shoals. Strung and dried in wind and sun, smoked, salted, the herrings filled more baskets and barrels, and the tide carried another rich harvest home, both boats low in the water.
A pack of wild dogs had attacked the sheep, but Petra and Larish had driven them off. Petra caught several in clever noosed traps, hung their carcasses, and the rest of the wild pack nosed them and disappeared after Larish hit a big red dog with a stone out of her sling, broke its front leg, and finished it with a spear.
“Good for you,” I told her, and heard the reluctance in my own voice.
As we stored baskets of smoked herrings in the roof of the Great House, Ruka and Peck, Katerin and Ansik led the sheep up to the clearings, but brought them down that night, saying they had been attacked again. Jenek and Tobik set more of Petra’s nooses in gaps the wild dogs had made in our fence, hunted them with their own dogs, Kik and Teg, and found where the pack was living on a ridge above the inlet. They destroyed two litters of pups, a bitch, and several dogs. Tobik had one arm bitten, so I squeezed blood out of his wounds to wash them clean. Even he winced at that. I made him drink plenty of karwa water.
“Try not to get bitten. Dog bites are deep and nasty. They get poisoned easily.”
Next day, they went back and killed another dog, but two other bitches had disappeared.
“They’ve shifted a half-grown litter somewhere,” said Jenek.
“Petra says we could have trouble this winter,” Larish told us. “This is the way the packs built up at Karo.”
Petra made supplejack cages with doors that dropped shut once a dog tugged at the bait, and he showed Tobik and Jenek how to make deadfalls with rocks and logs. One of his most successful traps released a bent-over sapling so it swung a dog up in the air by its neck or a leg, whichever it put in the noose. Still there were signs of the pack getting bigger.
“They’re passing the word around their mates,” Jenek grinned at me, and again I felt that little tug inside. “They’re ganging up for winter. And Kik’s carrying one foot. He got bitten.”
Petra and Larish worked late that night, and we all helped finish the nets they made, so light they almost drifted on the air. Set among shadows on runs in the bush, they caught several dogs but, as with the other traps, the survivors got leery. The sheep had to be grazed, but it was taking our whole time to protect them.
“You’ve got to do more.” Larish stared at Petra. She knew something, I could tell.
At last, reluctant, Petra admitted he knew how to make poison. Refusing help, even Larish’s, he hobbled into the bush, gathered berries and leaves, he would not say which, brewed them into a poison over a fire around the point, and dosed some goat carcasses while we tied up our own dogs. The wild dogs wolfed down the meat and died, so many the pack seemed finished.
“They’ll breed up again, if we let them,” Larish said for Petra. “You’ll have to follow and kill them whenever you’ve got a chance,” she told Jenek and Tobik.
We were standing near the ashes of the fire over which Petra had made the poison, looking at the bloated carcass of a yellow dog, the froth on its jaws.
“It works,” Jenek admitted, “but I don’t like poison.”
“Petra hoped he’d never have to make it.”
We built a stack of driftwood there, dragged all the bodies down, and burned them with a couple of half-eaten goats. Even the stretchers of branches we’d made to carry them, a couple of old ropes, and the sticks we’d touched them with, we burnt the lot.
Jenek and I watched Petra pour beeswax over the lid of the clay pot of leftover poison, making it airtight. He folded a flax leaf around and around the pot, bound it with a layer of twine, and finished with an intricate knot.
“I’ll hide this. Keep it only for when we get desperate.”
When Petra came back, he knelt by the water and scrubbed with sand until his fingertips bled. Jenek made the sign of the horns, and I hid my shudder, but his quick eye had seen.
The sheep grazed unharmed. Early snow splashed the hilltops white. When the storms eased, Ansik and Katerin set their net in the channels. We all wore heavy tunics, grateful for their hoods and pockets. Ansik and Katerin were returning across the main channel when a southerly boomed over the hills, thumped flat on the water, and blew their raft up the north end. Jenek and Tobik rowed after to tow them home.
“It came up too fast for us,” said Ansik.
“Build a hut across the other side,” Jenek told them, “with dry stuff for a fire, a pot of oil, and stores in a barrel. Get caught by the southerly again, you can make yourselves comfortable till it blows over.”
It was as Katerin and Ansik dug their shelter in the dry sandhills that they found lengths of iron, some heavily rusted, but most in good condition. Petra hefted the piece they brought back and smiled.
We were busier than ever, making charcoal and building a forge. Petra made a clever pair of bellows out of a goatskin stretched over two flat sheets of wood. When he opened and closed the handles, air shot out through a hollow bone at the other end.
He made several long pairs of wooden tongs that would have to do until he could make iron ones, Larish explained, and a heavy hammer, and tried heating and working the iron. A boulder gave way under repeated blows, so he drove an old axe head into a block of dense, plum-dark wood for what he called an anvil.
“What do you call that wood?” asked Ansik.
“At Karo, we called it rart,” Petra muttered. “Heavy and strong.”
He heated a length of iron red-hot and, using another old axe as a chisel, cut off the tip. That piece he heated and hammered, heated and hammered, working it into a long, flat strip that he plunged into water, and teetee oil. He experimented, reheating, hammering, and cooling again, what Larish said he called tempering, until one night he brought a knife blade into the Great House.
“It’s got no handle,” said Peck.
“It’s blunt,” said Ruka.
“Petra’s made his first knife,” Larish told him. “Lashing a handle on is easy.”
“We’ll soon sharpen it on a bit of sandstone,” said Jenek.
“Remember the round grindstones at Hornish?” Tobik’s voice was excited, unusual for him. “Like a wheel that you turned ar
ound while somebody held the axe or knife against it?”
“We’ll make one,” said Jenek, and Petra nodded and gave his short bark of a laugh.
“And remember,” said Tobik, “the querns we used at Hornish, a flat, round stone with a handle sticking up, set on top of another? The oats and barley got ground between them. We could make one of those, too.”
Petra laughed again. “He said not to remember anything else for a while,” said Larish, “not till we get the grindstone made. He wants to have a go at making an axe.”
“That’ll take some sharpening.”
“Make a turning grindstone, it’ll be easy,” said Tobik.
The air was sharp with their excitement. I caught Larish’s eye and smiled and shrugged at her, but she looked away.
“Petra says we know we can make tools now. If you see any more iron across there,” Larish told Katerin, “he says bring it home.”
“There’s lots. Too much for us to shift.”
“We’ll take the boats across.”
“Why was the iron in the sandhills?” Peck asked Ruka.
“Somebody hid it. They covered it with sand, and went away and forgot it.”
“Maybe somebody killed them before they could come back for it.” Peck threw an invisible spear.
“You missed.” Ruka jabbed him, and Peck fell over dead. “Are you going to make us some iron arrow heads?” Ruka asked.
“Get out of here,” Larish told them, “before you burn yourselves. Petra says we’ve got to finish the new sails, don’t forget.”
Perhaps the poison’s success made us too confident. We woke one night to barking and ran to the yards. With arrows, spears, and slings, we killed five of that pack, wounded several more, and the traps caught another three, but we had to finish off two sheep that were down. A third the dogs had pulled around survived only because of its thick fleece.
Ruka and Peck slept in a shelter by the yards the rest of that night with Pelt, Flick, and Tack wandering loose, Kik and Teg tied by the fence. They barked in the early morning, yammering, leaping on their ropes, but we saw nothing.
Tobik and Jenek hunted the pack again, destroying another litter, but saying there were several half-grown dogs they had missed.
“They’ll breed up again,” Tobik said, “but we should be all right for a while.”
Petra and Larish cured several of the dogskins, soaked the rest for several days, and slipped the hair for spinning.
After that, Jenek and Tobik caught five more wild sheep up the northern valley. Tobik’s dog, Kik, was too hard on them, but Jenek’s brown bitch, Teg, learned quickly from Pelt.
“She followed him away out of sight,” said Jenek, “around the shoulder of the hill, and they headed off the sheep, turned and brought them down, and we caught them in some scrub. You could see Pelt out-thinking the sheep, and Teg watching him, learning, but we had to hold in Kik. He’d have savaged them.”
“Kik’s the best we’ve got for hunting wild dogs,” said Tobik loyally, “and pigs, too.”
“He just about pulled you on your face,” Jenek laughed.
“I had him tied to my belt.”
“It’s funny,” said Jenek. “There was no sign of wild dogs up there. You’d think they’d be around where there’s sheep and goats.”
Returning there to look for more sheep, Jenek and Tobik climbed the valley, followed the ridge around its head and found themselves in a grassy basin, the source of a stream into the north. On the floor of the valley far below were green clearings. They climbed further around the ridge and looked down into a creek. The cries of sheep floated up. Jenek and Tobik crept down a spur through scrub, heard voices, and saw people washing a flock in a damned-up pool near a hut.
A little girl screamed. Several older children snatched up spears and bows and stood their ground. They had nowhere to run but uphill, because Tobik and Jenek had got between them and their hut. If they ran, the sheep would scatter.
Jenek and Tobik laid down their bows and spears, held up their hands, and sat. Two boys about the age of Ansik came forward, the rest of the children edging in a huddle, shy and curious, a girl and a boy not much bigger than Lorne, and a girl about Jenek’s age.
They were the survivors of a village called Pyke, near the coast. The rest had died of what they called the Punishment, a red rash and a fever.
“They left Pyke,” said Jenek when he and Tobik came back to the inlet with their news, “those of them who could walk, and drove their sheep up the valley. A man and a woman led them, but fell ill and died. They said the Punishment came from the gods. The older girl, Luce, says there were some others who tried to escape, but they don’t know what happened to them.”
“How long ago?”
“They left Pyke halfway through summer,” Jenek said. “They brought some food, and there was a lot stored in the shepherd’s hut, but it’s running out.
“They were washing the sheep before shearing them and setting up looms to try to make clothes for winter. They’re too scared to go back to Pyke, and they don’t know what they’re going to eat.”
“They don’t know how to survive, Selene,” said Jenek. “They could eat their sheep, then what? Specially once it gets really cold.”
“There’s enough feed on our clearings for lots more sheep. They know how to spin and weave. It would give Larish more time for potting, and Petra more time to work with the iron.”
“Five more mouths.” Larish looked up at the food stored in the roof and shook her head.
“Just as well Selene made us put down more than we thought we needed.” Jenek grinned at Tobik. “They’re big enough to set nets, fish, and garden. And there’s all those sheep.”
“How many?”
“Twenty-three.”
“Twenty-three? How did they keep off the wild dogs?” asked Peck, and Ruka nodded.
“I asked them that,” Jenek grinned. “They said something about balance. Someone in their village made poison and kept the dogs down. That’ll be why you and Ruka found the wild sheep and goats living up the northern valley.”
Larish looked at Jenek. “We could do with the sheep, but with winter coming on do we really want five more hungry mouths?”
“They’ll earn their keep. They might know things we don’t.” Jenek smiled as he spoke. It was a gift in argument, I thought, his smile. “Look how it helped us, Petra and Katerin coming to the inlet,” he said. “It’d have taken us years to work out the things Petra knew already.”
“Petra’s older.” Larish’s voice sharpened. “You said yourself they’re just children.”
“Same age as us.”
“It means building more huts. Adding on.”
“We can do that.”
“What about the red fever, the Punishment? They could bring it with them. They must have offended the gods.”
“The sickness would have gone with the summer.” Everyone looked at Tobik, surprised at his speaking up. “They told us people at Pyke vomited and oozed blood and watery muck from their bellies till they died.”
“We could just take their sheep.”
Tobik stared at Larish. She shrugged.
“It’s us or them, isn’t it?”
“A belly sickness,” Tobik turned and went on as if she hadn’t spoken, “that people got from drinking filthy water downstream of the latrines, and then caught it from each other, that’s what they had in Pyke. Nothing to do with gods or punishments.”
I sat and listened. Five strangers. Sixteen with us: something like a village. And another twenty-three sheep.
Ansik spoke for the first time. “You’re sure …?”
“Jenek and me, we stayed with them a couple of days, and we’re all right, aren’t we?”
I looked around the faces and read sympathy and concern on them. When everyone but Larish was in agreement, I spoke.
“We need them as much as they need us.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
The Old Man’s Story (5) So
mething Dark in Larish
I told myself it was the gaps between its appearances that made time seem to go faster in Selene’s village, but I struggled still with the telescoping of present and future.
“Telescope?” I said aloud to myself. “More like a bloody kaleidoscope.” For it didn’t help when those appearances got jumbled, so the family would be younger than the last time, and I’d have to adjust my ideas again. Was it all happening inside my head? I thought of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, and re-read Eliot’s “Burnt Norton”.
“‘Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future, / And time future contained in time past …’” Sailing one day, I spoke the opening lines aloud, the mainsail luffed, and I got the words wrong. It was easier to recite when rowing, the pull of the oars adjusting itself to the rhythm of the words. I’ve never found the poem easy to memorise; even once fixed it tends to disintegrate because the rhythms of meaning don’t always follow the movement of the lines — and I’m not even sure if that’s exactly what I mean.
Anyway, I was there on the outer beach when Selene called the gods home, and I saw the family welcome the pilot whales ashore with drums and bonfires, helping them up the sand. What Selene did was both magnificent and moral in a way today’s wet-suited Pooh-Bahs and Pecksniffs of political correctness don’t understand.
Watching the splendour, her splendour, I murmured Fairburn’s lines “in summer when the coasts / bear crimson bloom, sprinkled like blood / on the lintel of the land”, and then Curnow’s “these dying ejaculate their bloom”. I wished I could communicate both poems to Selene, thought she might have the depth for them. Good poetry is not decoration, has a harsh application few understand or value in an overpopulated world in which words go awry, flaccid, lose their virtue.
The family added dried whale meat, smoked sausages, and oil to their stores, and the village filled with a sense of seasonable plenty. Petra worked iron, muttering and hobbling among smoke and clangour like the lame god himself. Larish took over the potting and weaving with a life in her step, her voice, her appearance that I hadn’t seen before. She was never going to have Selene’s spare beauty; Larish’s face was too coarse to have more than the attractiveness of youth, but for a while it had that brief spring.