Calling the Gods

by Jack Lasenby

  And then while hunting wild sheep up the top of the northern valley, Tobik and Jenek crossed the watershed and found Luce, a curly-haired girl of about their age, and four youngsters. They had escaped what they called the Punishment, with a flock of twenty-three sheep.

  Typhoid from infected drinking water, I thought, hearing Luce describe what sounded like an epidemic in their village, and I remembered the stinking long-drop dunnies of my own childhood, how close they were to the bores put down for water on our quarter-acre sections.

  I asked my brother how we escaped infection: we often phoned and swapped memories of the nineteen-thirties and-forties.

  “Maybe we were saved by the sand under there,” he said, “working as a filter. You rarely heard reports of typhoid; more often people spoke of ‘summer sickness’. ‘Oh, there’s a lot of it around,’ they’d say. ‘It’s that time of year.’ And everyone got the trots.

  “Remember the school nurses and their needles, after Labour got in?” my brother went on. “Mickey Savage’s government. We had to take a bit of soap to school, and they taught us to wash our hands, but a lot of people never gave a thought to the flies and the pitful of shit down the back of the section. Some farm houses had a basin of water on a box at the back door, soap, and a roller towel, but you’d see the same water used again and again. I don’t know if the towns with their night-carts were much better. Any wonder people got crook?

  “Do you remember the Radio Doctor, Dr Turbott, talking of hot water and soap? Schools never had hot water.”

  Something of hygiene must have been passed down the centuries, because Jenek and Tobik had dug the latrine well away from the Great House and the trickle of fresh water down the cliff. And Selene made sure everyone understood the importance of never fouling the water upstream, scattering ash after using the latrine, and washing with the rough soap Petra boiled from fat and ashes. She listened to Luce’s story of the Punishment, and got Katerin to spell things out to the survivors of Pyke. With her streak of bossiness, it was the sort of thing Katerin enjoyed.

  But first Selene had put it to the family whether to accept the newcomers. Apparently Larish objected. All simple ruthlessness, she wanted to take their sheep and leave the children of Pyke to die.

  The next time I saw the family, they’d found two more boys of about twelve, and another older girl, Jedda, three more survivors from Pyke. I couldn’t make out whether there’d been any discussion about taking them in this time, but knew what Larish’s reaction would have been.

  Selene’s inlet village was now nineteen, which made things easier: Ruka and Peck’s flock had grown out of mind, and they had plenty of help; and Jenek and Tobik began work on a small boat, a dinghy we’d have called it, but they didn’t seem to have the word.

  Jenek set up house with Luce, the older girl from Pyke. If Selene had other plans for Jenek, she kept them to herself. It was different for Larish: she’d always had an eye for Jenek, but seemed to have forgotten that when Petra arrived.

  Her baby, another girl, must have been born before their second summer on the inlet. The appearances of Selene’s village started jumping backwards and forwards in time about then, and the baby was sickly when I first saw it. As usual, I struggled to make out what had happened.

  Tara was a mewling baby, and for good reason: Larish hadn’t enough milk and didn’t make much effort to feed the little creature. Lorne carried Tara to Selene who was still suckling Enna, and she fed her.

  Christ, that is one of the great gestures in the canon of kindnesses; I thought in my bookish way of that scene in Steinbeck.

  Larish found out Selene had fed Tara and raged out of hand until Petra quietened her down, but the latent hostility had been excited.

  At the same time that she showed her child no affection yet objected to Selene’s feeding her, Larish seemed to lose interest in potting and weaving and began separating herself and Petra from the Great House. Something dark had been triggered, and it was reflected in her physical appearance: that youthful flowering vanished, she thickened, and her face became misshapen, almost brutal.

  Selene went on feeding Tara, and weaned Enna on to goat’s milk. Everyone but Larish joined in building Jenek and Luce a cottage and celebrated with a feast, and in no time Luce was pregnant with another child for the village.

  That seemed the sequence, but it’s easy to get things wrong when you’re seeing only glimpses out of order, yet it felt as if I was watching a tragedy build. You know how the play ends, have seen it before, know it’s going to happen again, that nothing can stop it. The sense of inevitable doom was so strong, I tried to put Selene’s village out of mind, to see the inlet only in my own time. It didn’t work, of course. But one thing I’d learned: the village usually appeared only when I was outside in the garden or on the beach. Inside my cottage, it seemed I had some control. But you can’t stick indoors forever.

  Things sped up so fast that Selene’s people seemed confused themselves. Only one appeared detached, intent on some course of her own. I watched Larish and thought her behaviour had the detachment and objectivity I’d seen in the amoral.

  I tried again to warn Selene and Tobik, but I was a watcher, that’s all, the disjunction between place and time never so profound. I’ve always tried to avoid the tawdry attractiveness of superstitious prediction, but whatever was going to happen in the village was ineluctable. At times I thought of an unappeasable force, godly and malevolent.

  Back in my own time, I read again Aeschylus’ Agamemnon:

  Chorus: Why do you cry out thus, unless at some vision of horror?

  Cassandra: The house reeks of death and dripping blood.

  Chorus: How so? ’Tis but the odour of the altar sacrifice.

  Cassandra: The stench is like a breath from the tomb.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Something Beyond Ordinary Misery

  Jenek and Tobik led the five survivors of Pyke to the inlet, driving their sheep up and over the ridge and down the northern valley to the inlet, lighting fires for smoke signals as they came so Ansik and I were waiting with the boats at the creek mouth.

  There were three boys, a fair-haired older girl called Luce, and a little girl of Lorne’s age. By the time we had made several trips down the inlet with the trussed sheep, we were getting to know each other.

  Luce was light-skinned, her laugh a happy peal that rang across the water and filled the village so everyone ran down to meet the boats. For the first time, I realised how serious we had been for so long: escaping Hornish, sailing north, getting established. Everybody felt better for having Luce there, and I learned I could relax a little.

  Sixteen of us. Our stores were not too much now, and as Jenek said there were more hands as well as mouths. At night in the Great House, there was some squabbling over who got the seats in the chimney.

  “I’ve been here longer than you,” I heard Katerin tell one of the Pyke boys, so I laughed aloud and sat in front of the fire, and Tobik and Jenek copied me. We had to make sure the newcomers became part of us.

  When we talked of the village growing, Tobik mentioned a stream that we could tap by damming its gully, digging a drain around the spur, and building a wooden chute to deliver the water to our beach.

  “We don’t need it yet,” he said, “but we will”, and I smiled at his promise.

  He and Jenek laid a keel, fitted bow and stern pieces, and set up the frames and stringers for a small boat to make netting easier. Having no saws, they split and adzed their timber from slabs of kike, and pegged everything together. They had trouble fitting the planks until Jenek remembered the steam box the boatbuilders used at Hornish.

  “Why don’t the planks straighten out when they cool?” asked Likad, one of the older boys from Pyke.

  “Steamed and pegged,” Jenek told him, “they’re fixed in that shape for good. Like some people who can’t change.” He winked and nodded, and the pair of them chuckled.

  As well as the adzes, Petra made them narr
ow-headed hammers to caulk the seams, and Jenek, Likad, and Tobik tapped in flax fibre mixed with its gum. They burned oyster shells to powdery lime, stirred in whale oil, and smeared the creamy shenam thick on the bottom of the new boat.

  “While we’re about it,” said Jenek, “we might as well do the other boats as well.”

  “Oh,” said Ansik, who with Katerin had collected most of the oyster shells, “we did them not long ago.”

  “Shenamming’s a lot easier than replacing wormy planks, but it only lasts a while. The boats were in the water a long time on the way here, and I’ve been keeping an eye on them ever since, but you never know with worm. A plank can look sound yet be eaten away inside.”

  “Then how can you tell?”

  “Only one way: tap, listen, and use the tip of your knife. If the shipworm’s bad, you’re better building a new boat.”

  At Hornish, the elders kept records of what food was stored, how much was used, how much seed to keep for sowing. I did that now and made a calendar of the best times for planting, the arrival of the teetees, the herring shoals, and the return of the gods — though the last was easy because of the spectacular annual reminder of the mercy trees.

  “Satisfying,” Jenek said when I explained my charcoal marks on flat strips of wood.

  “That’s how much we had to start with, how much we’ve eaten, how much we need to grow next year. We’ll know before things start to run out. And when to get things ready, the nets, the barrels.”

  Jenek nodded. “Satisfying,” he said again.

  “Satisfying,” I told Enna, and “Satisfying,” she babbled, delighted when anyone talked to her.

  If I was not close, Enna would go to Lorne for reassurance, something that had always displeased Larish even though she was busy with her pottery and weaving. She had a difficult pregnancy but resented help, so I tried mentioning things to Petra, hoping he might pass them on. When she started keeping Petra away from the rest of us, I blamed myself and hoped time might take care of her troubles. Larish flared with rage at the younger children from Pyke several times, so I asked Katerin to keep them out of her way.

  Ansik and Katerin found the stores rifled in their shelter across the harbour, and tracked and found two more boys of about their age and another older girl, Jedda, living in our fishing camp in the outer bay. Luce recognised and welcomed them with her joyous laugh, and there was no question this time of whether or not they could join us.

  Accompanied by two women, a couple of babies, and a man, they had fled Pyke by following a long valley south. The adults and both babies had died of the red fever, the Punishment, not long after leaving Pyke, Jedda said.

  “We found a big swamp and lived on eels and swamp hens, and those thieving, long-legged wecks. Then we followed a creek down to the coast, and came to your camp. The boys took the stores from Katerin and Ansik’s shelter, and I was scared you’d be unfriendly, but it was too late to put them back.”

  “Lucky for you we’re friendly.” It was impossible to resist Luce’s good humour. Everyone laughed.

  Like the other group, Jedda and the boys were fearing winter, but had already made a small fishing net, begun a bigger one, and had started drying mussels. They planned re-thatching our fishing shelter and walling it against the cold storms, but had not found time. They were tough, but three was too small a number to survive long.

  Nineteen.

  Larish had a long, difficult time giving birth. Petra and I helped, but it was Lorne with her small hands who turned the baby so it was born alive.

  Twenty.

  Larish showed little interest in Tara, had trouble feeding her, and was easily upset. My mother had told me of similar cases in Hornish, and I brought to mind the sound of her voice, pictures of her face and the inside of our old cottage to help me remember all she said. Perhaps that was why I was unsurprised when Lorne carried Tara to me, weak, distressed.

  I put the little scrap of a thing to my breast where she sucked hungrily and fell asleep. Enna found her there, and I said, “Tara’s mummy has no milk, so I have given her some of mine.”

  “Mine,” said Enna, but Lorne distracted her with a bowl of the mashed vegetable stew she was now eating. Enna came to approve as if she were responsible for Tara, watching her suckle, and weaning herself on to goat’s milk as if it were her own idea.

  Larish was furious, but accepted my feeding her baby because she was not really interested. Petra was good with Tara, brought her to me discreetly, and kept her in a flax basket nearby while he worked at his forge.

  In case of any more difficulty with Larish, I got Petra to make a clay pot with a spout the baby could drink from. I was still feeding her, but Lorne began giving Tara a little goat’s milk, and she kept it down well enough. The pot was easy to keep clean, and we scoured its spout with spiky tote and marnoo leaves and sand.

  Tobik, Jenek, and Likad went north up the valley with the flax swamp, to see if anyone else had survived the sickness in Pyke, and I noticed Luce fell quiet in their absence. When they returned, Jenek told me Likad had stopped one day and pointed east to the grassy basins of a higher valley to the east.

  “That’s the way Luce and the others must have gone, where you found them. The shepherds grazed a lot of our sheep up there and brought them down to Pyke and the winter pastures in autumn.”

  “Didn’t they have trouble with wild dogs?” Jenek said he asked Likad as they stood looking across the country.

  “We had an old woman who made poison. In autumn, once the shepherds brought the sheep down, her family went up, killed wild goats, and poisoned their carcasses. All winter, when the wild dogs were hungriest, they killed them.

  “They laid poison in the other valleys over the ridge-tops,” said Likad, “so the packs were wiped out in every direction, and the sheep were safe when they came back in spring.”

  “That’s how the wild sheep survived, where Ruka and Peck found them,” Jenek said to Tobik. “Maybe we should poison further away from the inlet, wipe out the dogs right back into the hills.”

  “The old woman spoke in the meeting house about the need for balance,” said Likad. “Too many wild dogs, and the sheep and goats would be killed out. Too many goats, and the bush would be eaten out. She said both things happened long ago. She talked of balance till everyone called her Baal behind her back.”

  Likad led Jenek and Tobik through a saddle between hills. The ground dropped beneath their feet, and they were looking down on the village of Pyke set among trees either side of a stream. Out to sea was the large, high-peaked island we had seen far to the north when we arrived at the inlet.

  “People used to live out there,” said Likad. “They attacked Pyke, but that was ages ago, before I was born.”

  “Do they live out there still?” asked Jenek.

  “If they do, there’s no sign of them. The last time they attacked Pyke, most of them were killed. That’s what the stories used to say. A few escaped on their boat and headed back out to Pity Island.”

  “Pity Island?”

  “That’s what we always called it.” Likad looked back down at Pyke.

  Around its silent cottages stretched orchards, gardens, and the grassy enclosures that once held goats and sheep. Likad pointed at a cottage downstream from the village.

  “Baal’s cottage. She was the first to die of the Punishment, and everyone thought it must be the dog poison she made there.”

  The boys did not dare go into the village itself, but camped upstream, kept a bonfire going all night, made smoke, and called from nearby. They saw fowls that had gone wild, marked where they roosted in the scrub, and caught five hens and a rooster after dark.

  “We baked eels in embers, as we came back down the valley through the swamp,” Jenek told us when they returned carrying the fowls on their backs in woven baskets, a marvellous prize. “The chooks liked eating them. And we tied them by one leg, and let them scratch around and feed themselves wherever we stopped.”

  “You
saw nobody?”

  “No one,” said Jenek, and Tobik shook his head. “We might go back in a year or so and see what’s left. It should be safe then. Likad said they had no iron in Pyke, but they traded wool with people away to the north, and got tools from them. He said that arrowhead Ruka found was one of theirs.”

  “So there’ll be iron tools in the village?”

  “Lots, from what Likad said.”

  “What do eggs taste like?” asked Lorne when she saw the fowls.

  “You remember,” Peck told her. “The rest of us do.”

  We built coops, and as soon as a hen went clucky, set her to hatching chickens.

  I had hidden my own feelings when, during his absence, Luce confessed to me her love for Jenek. She did not even try to hide her delight at his safe return from Pyke. The village rang with her laughter, and we all smiled. All but one.

  “There’s trouble,” I heard Larish say to herself, but it seemed unimportant then. She was moody anyway, ignoring her baby, keeping to herself more and more, losing interest in the potting and weaving she had so enjoyed and which she was so good at. I watched, tried to help her indirectly, and encouraged Ansik and Katerin when they gave a hand to Petra, now busier than ever.

  Larish would sometimes join the rest of us in the Great House, but her habit of grumbling and muttering to herself was upsetting to those who had not known her long. One night, Ansik spilled hot soup from a bowl on her leg, and her face contorted as she struck him down, kicking him before Tobik and Jenek could interfere.

  Her sudden fierceness was frightening. Ansik said nothing, just got out of the way, but I thought of their former relationship, how he had grown in confidence when separated from her on the journey from Rabbit Island. It had been much the same with Lorne. Though Larish was their older sister, neither trusted her.