The music stopped. All was bluster and slap on the hill, and my unravelling braids threshing so that I was half-blinded. Across the curve of the hilltop a thready form split off from its knot. I saw straightways it was that changeling from the palings. He came high-stepping just like a long-leg crab. My braids whipped about and lost their ties entirely. Halfway over Scully Slevin stopped and tilted his face to the sky, turtle-like, listening.
“Hoy!” shouted the harewitch. “Over here.”
Scully shifted his head and came straight again. The rising moon lit him as he came. He has those long legs, and that spindleneck, and all that black hair hanging down to his middle. It makes him look right stretched-out even by daylight. By moonlight he looked like some giant. A few of those long-leg steps and he was with us.
I didn’t know where to look at first so I looked at his fiddle. His spidery fingers never stopped moving up and down the neck. They moved like he was weaving – quick, watery. Soft.
“Dolyn’s had a bit of trouble,” Elley Craig said to him.
“Well,” said Scully Slevin. “He’d be just your man for that.”
Elley took Scully’s hands and put them on Dolyn, and together they lifted him to his feet. Dolyn moaned. His lips twitched and his head rolled.
“All right there, Dolyn,” said Scully Slevin loud into his ear and took him firm under one arm. “One foot in front of the other will do it.”
Elley held him fast on his other side and we went off the hill and down into Shipton-Cronk. As we dragged Dolyn under the Cross the robe fell from his back and scars showed there, silverbright in the dirt, like trails of stars.
“How could you let them keep him?” I asked Elley Craig in low tones as we turned into her wasteland yard.
“I thought he’d be better off,” she said.
“That’s Mally Crowal,” Scully told the senseless Dolyn. “Out of town. And talking too! Right out loud.”
Lovelypig skidded out into the yard and dinned like I’d deserted her. I picked her up and her trotters were still running in the air. I put her over my shoulder, where she hung loose and drooling while I scratched her belly.
“Now then, you got out,” said Scully Slevin, smiling everywhere but at me. “You should be proud.”
He held out his free hand. I still thought it just possible the hand might sprout so I didn’t touch it. He waved the hand about in the air, and I gave him Lovely’s trotter instead. He took it in his hand, and then put Dolyn down and reached for the whole pig. I gave her to him.
She gruntled at his face and under his hair. She followed the trail to his eyes and tasted them, light and soft. Scully let her.
And then Scully’s Ma was coming to meet us, hiptilted and whittering about burnt rabbit and reaching for Dolyn like he was pudding. She took him off us and put him to bed on a pile of hay-rot, cobweb and old rug. And we all stood about looking down at him.
Over-and-over in his Fevers, Dolyn’s feet walked from one side of the bed to the other.
“The rightness of his fast,” said Ma Slevin in slow tones and making signs over his body, “has turned.”
Elley Craig made an irritable sound.
“It means it’s done, birdie. He’s just famishing now,” Ma told her, turning for one of her baskets and pulling out a plume of mixed feathers. “There’s no goodness left in his fast. It’s turned to hate and bile and nothing else. We must get him to eat something quick as can be.”
She put the motley plume to the embers and black smoke filled the snug. It was bitter and thick and filled my head with prickles. Scully squinted and coughed. He stepped outside saying as how he was going to fetch eggs. Ma chuckled and broke out choking somewhat.
“That’s what he always says. He’s right tender-nosed, that boy,” she said to me, prideful. “It’s a gift.”
I knew what she meant.
“So’s my pig,” I told her and we turned to admire Lovely but she’d goatfooted it too at first whiff.
Dolyn was suffering a Palsy now and still sleeping in spite of the feathersmoke. Ma took two piggins from her baskets. She broke the seal on one and the snug filled with bitterness. My spit dried in my mouth. I covered my face with my hair. Inside the undone braid it still smelled like home.
“Oo-ooh,” choked Ma Slevin slapping her chest. “Good batch.”
She took a dollop of the green slime and smeared it all over his chest and belly. She lifted his robe and I looked away straight-up. Whatever she did stopped his shakes though. Then she wiped a dab of the slime on my nose.
“Also good for wakefulness,” she said with a toothless grin. “And worms.”
The other piggin looked to be full with honey and when Ma coated Dolyn’s lips with it, I saw it still held tiny pale flowers. She said it was for heart trouble and gave me a spoonful before I could close my mouth. The tiny blossoms clung to my teeth. Dolyn clucked his tongue some time before he swallowed his. Then he sighed but didn’t wake up.
“What now?” asked Elley Craig.
“Now we wait,” said Ma and settled herself by the fire.
In spite of itself that old wasteland house was coming back. It was all Ma’s doing. She’d rekindled the hearth and slow, slow, the room had filled with smells of sweet turf and roasted rabbit. They’re the sort of smells that would bring anybody back to life, and I hoped they’d reach down to Dolyn in his sleep and make his mouth water.
Lovelypig came drooling soon as she heard the meat being moved and the blade being sharpened. Me and Ma and Elley sat and peeled slices from the rabbit and nobody talked for a while. I fed Lovely slices thick as thresh-stones and dripping grease. Our food was never this good.
Ma had stuck the meat all about with wild garlic and thyme and something else. Something sweet and something strong. Scully came back and she handed slices to him on the blade and he sucked them into his mouth whole. Then he chewed and chewed, rolling his eyes.
“Why did you think he’d be better off with the Brothers?” I asked Elley Craig.
“They were so clean,” she said, calmed by the rabbit and the sleep, but sorrowful. “White, they were. Like angels.”
“Cleanliness isn’t everything,” said Ma Slevin. “Neither is angels.”
Elley nodded like she knew that but wished otherwise. Like she wished cleanliness and angels could be everything.
“Look at him,” she said and we all turned to Dolyn. “It was bad enough when it was just scars.”
I thought What’s worse than Scars?
But I knew as I thought it, what was worse.
Never feeling all right was worse. Never feeling safe, not in your own town full with monks and neighbours. Not on your own shore overlooked by the fleet. Not even in your bed compassed by mothers and fathers and sibs. Never showing you’re not all right and never telling. Going in trembles and sweats and a jiggydoll smile for fooling people.
Seeing dooms everywhere: in the sea and the woods, the hills and caves, down by the Blackwater and up in Owney’s Close. Even walking on safe paths, always seeing dooms.
And seeing other folk go about the world like there wasn’t a doom in sight.
Scars are over right quick next to all that.
Scully’s eyes rolled back, showing their whites for a moment. It was like he’d just looked through some upper window in his head.
That Scully Slevin was even stranger in real life than he was in stories.
“I suppose he’s told you they locked him up after Boson Quirk,” Scully Slevin told Elley Craig.
“No,” the harewitch said.
“After he beat Boson Quirk, the Father had him put into the pit-cells and left him there.”
“How long?” asked Elley.
“A week or so,” he said.
The harewitch’s face looked to just about wither and drop off.
“It might have been all right,” said Scully to me. “But his time was on him; he was no child any more. He was wakeful all night, twitchy all day and bristling with irrits.
Well, you know. His skin itched him worse than fleas. The calls to the outside got into his cell on the smallest gust. The chapel-stones couldn’t keep them out.
“He prayed until he choked, but it couldn’t be stopped. It was time to become the man he was going to be. There were new prayers praying themselves inside him now and there was no not hearing them. They were old prayers from before the chapel or the altars. From before the Old-ones, even. The oldest prayers.”
“What’s older than the Old-ones?” I asked Ma.
“Everything,” she said. “All the business of living and dying. Let him talk.”
“For months,” Scully went on with his ma nodding at everything he said, “instead of working Dolyn had been drawing on his pages. Hares, mostly. He hid them in his twisty vines and behind his capitals. And he’d been dreaming of winds. And hearing music. And sneaking out to run in the night. All of that.
“He knew about the bloodline – he’d never been let forget about his mother – but I suppose he thought he was just about full-grown and had sidestepped the worst of his nature. All he had to do was grow up a bit more and he’d be right. But they’d noticed, see? They’d seen.”
It’s a bad thing to be noticed by the Little Brothers. I was always trying not be noticed by them. Once they see you, there’s no being unseen again and then everything you do and think is up for comment.
“The Devil came while he was locked up,” I told Scully Slevin.
“She talks!” he said, his eyes upturned to Heaven and his hands held to his heart.
“All right!” I said. “How do you do? Pleased to meet you. Glad to know you. Happy?”
“Yes,” said Scully.
“Harewitches can’t stand the lockup,” Ma said.
“It sends them anyhow,” Scully said and shook his head. “The last one tried to bolt right through the wall. The one before was left too long. He thought it likely as weather he’d never get out and he bolted in the other way; his spirit ran off and left his body behind.
“Actually, the Brothers still don’t know he’s gone. His body carries on with the vigils and prayers, and his arms still toll the bells, but nobody’s noticed he’s not there any more. They think he’s just a big one for silences.”
“Scully sees right through folk,” Ma Slevin said, coming to hold his face in both her hands, red with pride. “He sees all their sorrows and troubles. He can’t help it, bless him.”
“There’s worse than Dolyn. One devil,” said Scully, wiping away the slime she’d smeared on his cheeks, “is neither here-nor-there.”
“Dolyn doesn’t think so,” I said sharpish.
It’s all very well for a person who hasn’t seen it, to say that seeing a devil is Neither here-nor-There. Particularly if that devil comes and calls a person by their own name. Having a devil call you by name is like being noticed by the Brothers – but much worse.
“He couldn’t sleep for a long time,” Elley Craig said. “He was up-and-about all night sometimes.”
Ma Slevin turned with tears coming and snugged the harewitch tight.
“I knew it!” she said, like she’d lost something small and precious and now it was found. “You’ve been going down, haven’t you? You have! You couldn’t just leave him to them. You knew something was up. I told you and now you know. A mother knows.”
She bent to the new-kindled hearth and dipped her finger in the ash, and she wiped it across Elley Craig’s brow and mouth.
“I didn’t know anything for sure, you doting old dug,” the harewitch said, spitting.
But Ma Slevin jigged a bit on the spot; her great middle flopping about and her hands drawing small circles in the air. Then she went nodding back to her cures like she knew something we didn’t.
“I didn’t know anything was up!” Elley Craig insisted. “I just went down. To see. I just wanted to look on his face. I don’t know why. I stopped in Midwood most days – townies have got all those rules and I can never remember them right. So I stopped mostly up by Midwood, and a bit down at the caves. Nobody saw.”
“I saw,” I told her.
“Well, yes,” said Elley. “You. But nobody else.”
I thought, She still thinks I’m some kind of Witch. That’s why she came to Spindlestone that morning. She wanted me to see her. But then she didn’t know how to ask me for help. That’s what I saw in her face when she stopped by the cliff and looked so wild. I was what she was looking for.
I remembered her and me running the hills together, and I wished I was a witch.
“He came out to the hives every morning,” she said. “That’s when I first looked on his face again. I looked on him and I was glad of him – he has the look of my father. I hadn’t thought on such things before. He just looked like a small one when he went. You know.”
I saw in her face the remembering. He’d been one of those Cronk children. I saw it in her face – the little boy with a pot-belly and black eyes.
“But he wasn’t all right, was he?” Elley went on in sharper tones. “I saw it on him. And I tried to talk to him. But he saw me come out of the trees and he knew me straightways. They’d told him about me – and he was frighted. Like he’d seen a scaan.”
Elley Craig’s face looked at us like we were faraway.
“He ran from me,” she said.
Lovelypig smelled the sorrow on her from the other side of the hearth. She came straight to the harewitch and climbed into her lap. Then she sat there like a dog and waited for her tears.
Elley Craig did not cry.
“I was twelve when the Brothers came to the Cronks,” Elley told the sleeping Dolyn. “I liked them. Everybody did. They gave us food and they cured folk. The Father was young then and a big one for the mission. And they liked to come and pray. Up at the Cross. They said they were praying for us.”
“They prayed for you all right,” said Dolyn, woken up of a sudden, quiet and bloodless in his threadbare bed. “Last summer they prayed for the lot of you to starve and free up some stores.”
It plainly fortified him to be so mean straight on waking. Some took their waking brew, Dolyn Craig took his cup of bile. If he died with those the last words out of him, who knew where he’d end up. He used such words like they were nothing. Like they had no power in them.
Ma went to him with wet cloths and shushing.
“I prayed with them,” he added. “And for the same thing.”
“The Father’s grown you up into such a little man, Dolyn Craig,” said the harewitch, twitching him a grin. She’d thought she’d been funny.
He lay like a slab, flat and unchanging.
“He’s grown you into a monkhouse rat,” she said. “When you should be a buck hare. But you’re mine. Whether he likes it or not.”
The harewitch took a slice of sticky-sweet rabbit and slipped it between his lips.
“Whether you like it or not,” she told him.
The slice of rabbit sat there and leaked grease down his chin. Dolyn lay there and let it leak. Me and Ma watched Dolyn; Dolyn watched Elley – and Lovelypig watched close the good slice going to waste.
“Don’t give them the satisfaction, my boy,” she said at last, wriggling the slice on his lips.
And Dolyn opened his mouth and let her push the blackened rabbit between his teeth. Spit started pouring from his mouth and he retched. Between retches he chewed. He chewed on the good meat like it was a bit of hide. But still, he’d broken his fast.
And now-and-then, the harewitch slapped him soft on his cheek, busting out with lopsided but barefaced love.
Chapter Twenty
Weft
EVERYBODY SAYS THINGS DON’T just happen; they happen for a purpose. That God has a plan and everybody is part of it, even bad ones like Dolyn Craig. In fact, they say the bad ones are as necessary to the plan as the good ones in the end. That’s why God even forgave that Judas Iscariot, who was a right bad one – the worst one in any of the histories, for the betrayal of friends. God forgave him, but Jud
as still hanged himself in that field.
And I know why.
He didn’t want to be left behind by himself. Jesus had been his best friend and now he didn’t know what to do. Everywhere he went everybody looked at him with their rightful faces that didn’t understand about the plan. That there was nothing he could have done but what he did. Everything that went before Judas led him straight to that day. The day of the betrayal.
Even Jesus knew that.
Jesus and Judas were lucky. To know there was some plan and purpose to their sorrow. The rest of us have to live without knowing. I didn’t know what God’s plan had been for Dolyn Craig or his mother. Or Boson Quirk. Or Dodi or me. But we’d all ended up together in this trouble. Those of us still living, that is, telling our stories of betrayal and murder here in the harewitch’s house.
“I thought you were a scaan when I saw you first,” I told the harewitch after her rabbit was eaten and all bones.
“Well, I’m not,” she said, playing with Lovelypig’s ears.
“Whose scaan did you think she was?” asked Scully Slevin, like we were talking of having friends in common.
“Pond-Averick,” I said.
Ma Slevin stopped clearing the meal.
“Where did you hear about her?” she asked.
“Shenn Cooley told me,” I said and her face lit up.
“Shenn Cooley,” she sighed. “Well.”
“He’s the oldest person on the island,” I told her.
I was prideful about Mr Cooley and me. I didn’t know why. Something to do with him being so old and me being so young and him still liking me.
“He is not!” said Ma Slevin, with a hot temper. “Did he tell you that? I used to tend him when I was your age. By the apron of Blessed Bridie! Oldest person in Carrick, indeed! It was me that gave him that story.”
“Well, it’s a right good one, Ma,” I said, sorry to have stirred her up. “He thought I was needful of it. He was right set on giving it to me.”
“Is that right?” she asked, thoughtful. “Yes. I can see that. Because of Collect never leaving the monkhouse again after. That’d be the right bit for you.”
Secrets of Carrick: Ghostheart Page 14