It took slow steps to negotiate the hummocked grass of the steeply sloping clifftop. One missed footing and they could both be hurled into the sea, so far below them – but she tried to watch the swirling grey waters for even the tiniest scrap of hope.
Once she was safely on the bouncing turf of the path that led down to the river’s edge, she started to run. The smudge of a dark head could be seen, bobbing through the current’s swirl, in along the river – could they still be breathing? Would they whirl in on the tide or would the river catch hold and swirl them out to sea again? Grizzel knew the way the river could run.
Faster and faster over the grassy hillside, hoping against hope that she wouldn’t trip and let fly the baby too, her whole family gone in one fell swoop. She could see a body – whichever one it was – still being tossed along the western side, trapped by the current. A sudden glimpse of yellow and she knew it was Befind – might she wash in where other people sometimes had – and yet survive?
Now Grizzel was speeding over the well-trodden route along the river bank. She almost slipped on a patch of slime, and baby Niav let out a yowl of protest which turned into a full-blown spate of yelling. Grizzel’s breath was agony and there was a taste like dried blood in her mouth. “Please be alive, Befind, please be alive!” Surely someone from the village would still be around? There had been so many people there to see them off.
And Befind did wash in where the others had. Among the dark green reeds, Grizzel saw the crumpled shape, still recognizably Befind by the tatters of her yellow tunic. She was slumped half-in, half-out of the great, grey bowl of the headless snake-stone.
Leaving the yelling Niav firmly wrapped in her shawl between two rocks and well above the waterline, Grizzel waded over to the huge stone bowl. Befind’s beautiful face was almost under the blood-stained water – her long auburn hair floating in tendrils around her. What irony to drown in her own blood, if somehow she had managed to survive the onslaught of the waves.
Standing with feet wide apart to get some purchase among the squelching mud and the reed stalks, Grizzel yanked Befind out of the hollowed stone in a promising trail of bubbles and dragged her up the bank. To the background clamour of the baby’s yelling, Grizzel worked hard to force some life back into its mother. “Can’t you hear her? You can’t leave her, Befind, what would she do!”
A great blood-soaked cough – and Befind’s eyes flickered open, only to close again. Grizzel wouldn’t let her go. “What were they doing? Had Diarma seen?” She sat Befind roughly against a flat-faced rock and placed baby Niav firmly at her mother’s breast. The yelling ceased.
Befind’s eyes flickered again. “This is where Seyth …” she murmured, letting the baby nuzzle.
“Yes, yes – we are where we found Seyth washed in,” Grizzel almost screamed in exhaustion and grief – she could see that she was losing her.
Befind was stroking the baby’s tiny hand. She raised her head and looked across the river as though trying to focus for one last time on the image of the eastern headland and the mound of the Sacred Howe that she had betrayed for love. “I told them the bung …” she whispered through the blood, and with a final racking sigh, her head dropped forward on her breast.
Beating back the tears, Grizzel bent over them, knowing she would discover the worst, that Befind was dead. She found that baby Niav had her hand curled firmly round the shaft of her mother’s sacred barra which, miraculously, was still held secure by its snakeskin strapping to the blood-soaked belt at Befind’s waist.
“So much for its sacred power!” thought Grizzel contemptuously. “What good has it done Befind to make it worth her spiriting it away? What good would it do this poor infant either!”
And then the villagers arrived.
***
Niav picked her way to the top of the cliff-path, wiping away angry tears. A single pure white gull swooped and soared against the leaden clouds as she surveyed the familiar skyline from where the dark beast-like headland jutted out over the northern sea on her left, across the deep grey expanse of swollen river-mouth down below her, and on to the stately beauty of the sacred headland far to her right, with the wedge-shaped Sacred Howe in silhouette.
Maybe it should have been her sacred howe by now; who was she to say? Lower down the ridge, the ancient house that had been home to her mother and grandmother – and the countless grandmothers before that – stood out among the patch of smaller huts that clustered around it like so many limpets. Niav felt cheated, her Aunty Grizzel had lied to her – suddenly this was an unlovely world. The soaring gull did not impress her. She stood hunched and shivering in her shawl at the clifftop, gazing sourly up at it.
The replying scut of bird lime, which just missed, was somehow not a coincidence.
“I am not going to blame her for not telling me,” she told herself as she glowered out over the grey sea, trying to fight her anger. “It must be terrible to have your brother scraped off a rock and then brought home by his greatest enemy, particularly if he could then look smug about it.”
Was she fooling herself? Hadn’t she a right to have been told a long time ago? She wasn’t a baby, and, if there was some mystery about it all, it was a mystery that belonged to her. She was just so used to Aunty Grizzel’s moods – but maybe there should be limits. She couldn’t just throw those eggs away. It would be wicked to let them go to waste on a whim. And it was just a whim. Gloom, doom. People listened to Aunt Grizzel quite enough as it was. Being expected to act as fledgling to the local wise-woman really could be depressing if they treated you like a baby the next minute.
It had been a beautiful, sun-kissed morning and the rain, so far, was holding off. Niav had come down to her special spot by the river in search of bull-rush roots. Aunty Grizzel seemed in real need of sweetening up, and the roots, after a short spell shoved among the hot ashes, were the sweetest thing she knew.
They had told her it was meant to be a bad place, an unlucky place where unfortunate things were washed in, but there, amid the gentle rustle of the reeds, at the very centre of the great, headless snake-stone bowl, Niav had discovered an impeccable nest, exactly placed, holding six perfect eggs, and not a guarding parent in sight – almost a miracle.
But then cousin Kyle, that vermin, had ruined everything. He hadn’t just burst through the rushes and spoiled the perfect moment, he had told her something utterly unforgivable – that this, her favourite place of all places, was where the body of her mother, Befind, had been found washed in “all bloated like so much bladderwrack!” And she had never, never known. No one had even so much as hinted.
Of course she threw an egg at him – and it did not miss.
She had held herself firm, while he crashed his way back through the rushes trying to wipe the egg yolk from his eyes. She didn’t cry. Not only had she collected up the remaining eggs and packed them neatly in the basket, all carefully bounced out with moss as she had been taught, she had even gone grubbing for a respectable bundle of roots as well.
Unsurprisingly, the last thing Niav got when she reached home laden with her unexpected goodies was gratitude or congratulations.
“They will be bound to have gone rotten. Why else would they be left for you to find so easy?” Aunt Grizzel said sourly, after one glance at Niav’s basket.
She had tossed her long wavy hair from around her shoulders and swept back towards the weaving-hut. The beads of her many-rowed jet necklace all flashed in a shaft of sunlight – she was a good-looking woman and everyone acknowledged it.
“Perhaps something got the parents – a fox or something. I don’t know!” said Niav, trailing behind her in exasperation.
“Can’t have been anything with any sense, or it would have eaten the eggs as well. No, they are bound to be bad. Get rid of them, I’d say.”
“The egg I chucked at Kyle was just fine! I had a good sniff at what was left of it.”
“What a waste, then,” growled Aunty Grizzel. “Is that what you’d prefer me to say in
stead? And how did poor little Kyle offend you this time, Madam?”
Niav bit her lip. There had to have been a reason for her Aunt not having told her something about the snake rock. “Is it true my mum was washed in down by my snake rock?”
“Yes, she was. And—”
“Was she all bloated – like a blown up bladder – and blue and green?”
“No she was not. Befind was as beautiful as she always was. I wonder whose lively imagination that was? Pity you didn’t chuck two eggs.”
“And my dad?”
“No, he came in up by the Beast’s Paw”
“Was he all bloated?”
But Aunty Grizzel just looked away. “Diarma floated in quite a while later …”
Niav had stood outside the weaving-hut as Grizzel started to pick through the basket of wools. “It’s all going wrong,” she growled, standing back from the loom to check the colour match of her new skein of wool. “And this one’s wrong too. It’s dyed a much deeper colour than last time – nothing’s going right today – something’s in the wind for sure.”
“A bit of deeper tone will just make the pattern more interesting,” said Niav, trying to maintain a cheerful front in spite of how she felt. She could see little difference in the shade this time, but Aunt Grizzel was much more aware of colour subtleties than she was, than anyone was – a real artist. “I think maybe I will just go for a walk on the clifftop – don’t worry, I will be back before dark. I will leave the eggs on the cool-shelf, and there are some sweeties in the basket too. We can roast them before we eat – that’ll be nice.”
“Don’t go too far then. I think there is rain brewing …” Aunt Grizzel was clearly not for a moment taken in by Niav’s attempted nonchalance. “Like I said, the sea threw your Pa back on to the rock by the Beast’s Paw. Lurgan went out in his coracle and brought him home – such a dutiful man, your Uncle Lurgan.”
***
Now Niav looked down at the dark swirling river. Was there truly something in the wind? She wouldn’t have cared to say.
But, suddenly, picked out by a moment’s hectic beam of sunlight, something was scudding in fast ahead of the dark storm clouds that swirled around the eastern headland.
A smallish craft, desperate to make landing before the skies broke – Niav caught her breath in a sort of wondering ecstasy as she made out the symbol clearly painted in brown and yellow, wings picked out in white, right across the square leather sail. A bee. It must be Artin. It had to be Artin. Why did he always swirl in on the bow of a storm? Artin the Smith, maker of dreams, who had returned from the dead. People said that he had defeated the mighty Sea God in an epic battle, and some folk even went so far as to say he was somehow the Sea God himself; but he would only smile and say that he served a power far, far greater than that of the waves, or any other force of nature.
No wonder Aunt Grizzel was acting up. In her few years of conscious observation, Niav had noticed that her aunt was particularly prone to her nonsense when Artin was in the offing – almost like some people’s dogs sensing that their owners were coming before they walked up over the horizon – uncanny! Perhaps this was the time when she might pluck up the courage to try to discover why.
Originally when she had seen her aunt so twitchy, she had thought that it might just be a general dislike of strangers. However, she had soon come to realize that that would be completely ridiculous. Though the strangers always made a reverent visit to the Sacred Howe on the east bank, the chief reason that brought them from far and wide to their river mouth was the trade with the artisans on the western bank. The strangers understood the quality of their weaving and pottery and in particular the value and beauty of their magic black stones – jet.
Jet wasn’t merely something for making jewellery, it had very peculiar magical properties too. It was very rare – a stone, but as light as wood and as warm as wood to touch – even though it came out of the ground. When you polished it against sandstone it would show you reflections of a sunless, secret magic world. If you rubbed jet with woollen cloth, it could be made to pick things up. The fumes from burning jet could be used to test virginity, and they could even be used to drive out snakes. All the headless stone snakes which could be found dotted everywhere about the valley – though few of them were quite as large as the special one where Niav had found the eggs – were often pointed out as proof of this. But why such things were so was really still a mystery, even to the people from the river mouth, though of course they would be the last people to admit it.
Jet could be quite dangerous as well. Though you could collect jet along the sea and river shores, the best jet was mined – often dangling, from an exposed cliff face. This had to be done with caution; if you were not careful, you might awake the hidden spirits that lurked in the rock faces. If they were treated wrong they would get angry and the ground around the mines might burst into fire – to show the spirits’ power and spite – and be of no use to anyone, unless, of course, you were trying to dispose of an unwanted serpent.
People like Uncle Lurgan (and her long chain of grannies stretching back into the past) on the eastern bank inherited the job of taking care of the right ceremonies for this sort of thing. It was time someone explained to Niav how and why she had lost this right when she ended up on the west side of the river.
No, Niav appreciated that her people were very special, and had been chosen by the gods because of their artistic talents and shrewd business sense, and not only for their wisdom and piety – so why this strange divide?
Aunty Grizzel summed the dilemma up. Of all the people who lived on the west bank, she was the most talented, on top of which she could look really beautiful. She might be shockingly failing in piety but she was also amazingly and universally accepted to be wise. For her, not liking strangers just for the sake of it would be particularly unlikely.
But it wasn’t all strangers, she had eventually realized; it was the group of strangers led by Artin.
Looking down at the small, blunt-prowed boat, with its steering oarsman making purposefully towards the eastern shore, Niav remembered another thing said about jet: it could keep away dogs. Aunt Grizzel disliked dogs almost as much as she seemed to dislike Artin – and there was another bit of nonsense.
Kyle had a big half-sister called Estra (she was Uncle Lurgan’s daughter but not with Kyle’s mother, Aunty Helygen. Estra’s mother had died when she was a baby). Estra could tell the most gripping stories – particularly ghost stories. There was one peculiar tale about the very first time that the people of the river-mouth had been visited by Artin. Niav didn’t know how long ago this was supposed to have been. On the few times Niav had seen Artin, he always seemed to her to be quite young.
“It was a really wild evening,” Estra said. “All the boys were up on the west cliff watching the sunset and then the sky opened and the rain came lashing down. Everyone started dashing down the pathway to get home but suddenly they saw this slip of a boat leaping from wave to wave, driven in by the storm. But it never made the harbour and crashed in under the east cliff – as boats do – and it was sucked clean under, all in a second.” Then Estra put on her creepy story voice. “Everyone was stunned. There in front of them, something horrible and dark was fighting its way in through the surge and it leapt ashore – a great black dog – and they all watched it limp out of the water and clamber, really slow, up the path by the east cliff. It seemed to have injured its back left leg.
“But the next day, they found Artin (just a boy) lying out on the hillside with a horribly mangled left knee. The bodies of the other strangers floated in all white and bloated after that.”
Niav was so taken with the story that she had told Aunty Grizzel.
“Now that must be a very old version of Artin’s first arrival – I wonder where Estra got that from?” she laughed.
“But it’s so weird – almost as though Artin’s something evil. Estra’s an idiot – she talks rubbish.”
“You’re happy eno
ugh to listen to her. She’s just got a vivid imagination. Poor child, with her mother being drowned like that – you of all people should be a bit more understanding.”
“But I’m not creepy and try to stand too close to people, or say I have got magical powers because my mother was some wise-woman!”
“Well, you could if you wanted; besides, Estra’s poor mother, Seyth, was a wise-woman – where she came from.”
“But Artin’s not like that. And Uncle Lurgan almost worships at his feet …”
“Yes, nauseating, I know. But in the early days, everyone over there thought he was the spawn of Evil – couldn’t ship him over to this side quick enough, forget hospitality! Your Uncle Lurgan decided that the nursing might be better done by your mother and father and me rather than him and Aunty Helygen – a delightfully backhanded bit of recognition.”
Niav knew she had a lot to learn about the feud there had been between Uncle Lurgan and her father Diarma – even after he was dead. Things she had a right to know. But what a story! There must have been something in it, because Artin still walked with a limp to this day. And her parents really had nursed Artin the Smith – amazing!
But how strange, too, that story of the black dog. She knew there were tales of living black were-beasts – but more like cats than dogs – out there on the northern headland, but certainly not the east cliff. Imagine that though – Artin lying there in their hut, possibly even where Aunty Grizzel slept now.
Artin had hair the colour of honey and eyes the shade of new-dug peat. His smile was like dark sunlight and when he spoke to you, they said, he made a special moment for you all your own – a special place in time where you would understand, and know the way to go. But Niav herself had only seen him from afar.
“Artin took a long time to recover from the knee injury. Your father designed the first of those famous decorated wooden leg guards Artin always wears – we padded it out with moss to protect the shattered knee.
“He insisted on giving your mum and dad something for their kindness, though of course as healers we made a point of never asking for payment. So we were the first family that Artin showed how to tame bees, since we were fellow magical practitioners, so to speak.
The Mammoth Book of Historical Crime Fiction Page 17