“He never told me that bit,” I said. “Mr Cooley just said Brother Collect didn’t talk again and didn’t collect again. And that Midwood was haunted by her not being there–”
“No, no, no,” Ma said. “What’s the man thinking? He could never tell a story right. After Pond-Averick, Brother Collect never left the monkhouse grounds again. He got an impossible fright on him. About going outside.”
We stopped and watched the fire.
“See?” said Ma.
“Yes,” I said.
“And that’s how young Cooley should have told it,” she said and crossed her arms.
Outside, night had come and the people gone to their almost lightless houses. There were no tapers, no torches inside the house of the harewitch. Only the fire and the moonlight.
Inside, crouching by the embers and folded down on herself, Ma looked like a cowpat in an apron. Lovelypig glowed in the firelight and was just about the most beautiful thing in the world. She was calm and peaceable. She wasn’t gruntling up in my face. She wasn’t at my knees, getting ready to drink my tears. She wasn’t fussing at what she smelled coming off me. No sighs, no snorts, no deep-gut creaks and groans.
And that’s the moment I knew I wasn’t frighted any more.
I didn’t know how I did feel exactly. Only that I wasn’t all trembles or floods of tears. Only that I wanted to tell somebody and stop waiting for my doom.
“I have a story,” I said.
“Oh, lovely,” said Ma, and Lovelypig thought she was being called, and came.
“When I was seven years old,” I told them, “Dodi Caillet was my best friend.”
“I know the Caillets,” said Ma Slevin. “They lost their last child. A girl.”
“That’s right,” I said and I couldn’t look at her. “The Caillets are our neighbours and me and Dodi used to play together every morning and every evening. Every time we could. Most nights I’d sneak to her place and we’d sleep together too. There was only her in her bed and there were too many in mine.
“Next to Dodi’s bed there was a wall-crack. It split the stone roof-to-floor by where we lay. On clear nights we could see the stars through it. Mr Caillet wanted to bodge it up but in spite of waking damp from night-rain, Dodi never let him. She’d put up with a bit of rain any day to be able to see the stars from bed. Then after it happened Mr Caillet couldn’t stand to block it up. He just lay where she’d lain and looked on the same stars as Dodi.”
“This is a sad story already,” said Ma Slevin. “Is it real?”
I nodded.
“Oh dear,” she said but she sat stiller and quieter.
“Inside the wall-crack by the bed,” I said, “me and Dodi saw the Others. It was only us they showed Themselves to and we learned right quick not to talk about them to anybody except each other. It made everybody else angry, though they never said they were. They’d just look like they didn’t know what we were at.
“We weren’t at anything. We just put our heads together and through the crack we’d see Them blazing away in there. Giving off lights. Twinkling, glowing, going in beams, singing their little songs. They had sharp faces and their mouths were tiny and red as kittens’, with their teeth like needle points inside. They danced on bare feet, and me and Dodi watched them doing it, tucked up close as peas in her bed.
“Mam came late to fetch me back and most times she ended up staying for a brew with Mrs Caillet.”
Those nights came back to me in a heart-rush and with a strong taste of salt. After she’d gone there’d been no room for anything but my shame. The manner of Dodi’s going had smothered everything else about us. But those good days came back clear now.
I could hear them. Our mothers. Have just the one Manna, to test the Batch, Mrs Caillet would say and Mam would slip over their threshold with a quick look back at our place. Just a fortifier then, Murkial, she’d say. For the cure in It.
They were the best times.
I could see them there. Laughing like drains, open-throated, wide-mouthed, over by the hearth, with me and Dodi in our dark corner, watching the glow in the wall. Mrs Caillet choked when she laughed, sometimes to retching, but it never stopped her. Mam just clouted her on the back and the spilled brew spat on the hot hearth-stones, and then they’d share a pipe to clear the chest. Sometimes me and Dodi couldn’t stop laughing at them. Trying to stop only made it worse, and made our mothers worse too.
Mam used to say there was some gladden-spell on their house. I could hear her saying it now.
“Where are you?” Ma’s voice came to me soft from faraway.
“Sorry,” I said and shook my mind-eye clear. “Me and Dodi, we were going to live together and work the Caillet holding – there was only her left over to take it on, and we had big plans. We were going to make a sea-garden. Sea-holly, cats’ ears and pinks for her. Starstone and shepherds’ crowns for me. No land plants for us; we wanted the sea in our garden.
“And we wanted to be together always.
“Sometimes we weren’t even going to stay in town. We were going to stow away in one of the traders, and go to be nuns or take to the mainland where they said there was real coin to be had. Or sometimes just go to Merton and see what was what down there. Or out east, out through the monkhouse holdings, or right up north. She said we could be the first girls to catch a merrow.
“I wasn’t frighted in those days.
“When I thought on our lives and how they’d be, everything was good and right. All the winds were sweet because they would be at my back when we left to go travelling. All the paths glimmered because they were waiting for our feet to step onto them. The sun was a heart in the sky, beating down just for us.
“But we didn’t have to do anything or go anywhere to be happy. We spent hours backed up warm against Spindlestone, letting the salt dry on our skin and peeling it off each other in tiny scales that broke up and flew away. Dodi had brown skin, not red like me. Her eyes were brown, brown like walnuts, and she was like a sister.”
“But you’ve got any amount of sisters,” Ma Slevin said.
“Yes,” I told her. “But blood isn’t the only way of belonging to folk. My sisters weren’t like Dodi. She was … mine. It was nothing to us where we ended up as long as it was with each other. We’d build a tree house in the elders if we had to, or dig a burrow house in the Backdunes, or find some old wallstead and bodge it up. We’d walk rough and sleep wild if that was the only way. Just as long as we went together. You know.”
I stopped to gather myself. I still wasn’t frighty. But there was some deep bruise aching inside.
“I do know,” said Ma, patting my hands. “But don’t blame yourself about Dodi. It’s in that family to scatter. They’re always marrying away. Dying. Wandering off. Everybody knows that. Caillets are forever disappearing.”
I looked around at their faces. Scully was staring into the rafters like he saw something there. Elley Craig was crouched in the dark but her yellow hare’s eyes were listening. Even Dolyn looked to be waiting to hear.
“She didn’t disappear exactly,” I told them.
“Oh dear,” said Ma again.
“I saw what happened,” I told them straight. “But I never told.”
“Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.” She was rocking and flapping her apron now.
“It all happened,” I said, “because I went where I shouldn’t.”
“Things don’t happen because of things like that,” said the harewitch.
“Yes, they do,” I said. “I went where I shouldn’t and that’s why it all happened. Mam and Da always said not to go down to the shore by myself. The snakeboats are fast and only draw a span. They can get tight into the cove, slick as eels in the waters. Even the weed doesn’t notice them. The wiggynagh go in twos-and-threes, and they have learned to breathe small as spiders.
“My parents told me. Da said it and said it. Never turn your back on the Sea! You turn your back on the sea for the time it takes a hummingbird to flap a wing onc
e and when you turn back, there they’ll be. Then it’ll be off to the Northmen’s ice-hag country and all work forever with no hope of seeing home again. They told me and they told me.”
I thought of changing the story so I wouldn’t have to say the next bit. Ma and Scully, Dolyn and Elley Craig didn’t know what had really happened. It wasn’t too late to back off from this course that was bound to let them see the betraying worm I’d been. The bad friend, almost bad as that Judas Iscariot. But honest, my brains couldn’t carry this story any longer, and my heart was bowing with the weight of it. I thought it might crack for good and give me one of those faces I’d seen passing in our lane. I just had to tell somebody.
“They told me not to,” I went on. “But I went down anyway. And I took Dodi.”
“Well, who wouldn’t?” said the harewitch of a sudden, out of the dark. “What child with any gorm at all wouldn’t go to see such a thing as a snakeboat?”
I didn’t remember wanting to see the raiders or their boats. I remembered wanting to see the Sands before the sun. And wanting to make Dodi come with me. I remembered too, the feeling of that night. The feeling of being out on the paths before the moon set. Shipton was a changed place then, with everybody snugged away snoring, and only us awake. The bell called Mary-the-Sea rang out into the town. The ways went moonglazey down to the shore; the stonewalls shone inside their salt-wraps and down at the bottom of our lane the sea washed black like a big bowl of nothing.
It was a still night and the shore was still – until you stopped. And then you heard the pop of airs uprising from all the burrows and tubes. And the soft clicks of crabs and suchlike.
“So anyway,” I went on, wanting to get it done. “Me and Dodi went down without our parents knowing. To fetch sea-pansies. You could see them in the sand-ripple gullies, little lights floating. They’re what we went for.”
The whole thing was coming clearer now, like when the sand-wakes settled in the scaaney and you could at last look beyond the waters and See. The whole thing, coming back. Whether I liked it or not.
Dodi’s face looking back, her brown soft eyes in the night.
Her grin, her white teeth. Her brown feet ahead of me.
The scar where she burned her heel. Her curving back.
And we are tiptoeing through the field of the plume-worms. Their weed-ribbons and shell-hats marking them out in the white sand. The tide is out almost to the edge of the world and now the Sands spread big as the sea. And we run on them, gull-screeching, running toward the rim of that world.
At the faraway waterline we find a sea-hare, red as Mrs Fell’s yarn, sprouting bits of itself and drawing them in again, like it was nothing. We are so taken with it we turn our backs on the sea to see better. Dodi kneels to stop the creature swimming away, making a cave for it with her hands. I run up the shore to fetch some of the flatleaf weed to fetch the sea-hare home.
And that’s all it takes.
“It was just like they said,” I told them true and closed my eyes.
“There was this gritty noise,” I remembered. “The gulls called and scattered. I turned. And out of the sea the snakeboat came. They were already climbing out as the boat gritted up onto the sand. There was only the one boat, but wiggynagh came out of it like wasps from a nest.
“They were a mob of savages. Their sun-red bodies covered in yellow hairs were all over the Sands. And they were quiet as everybody said they would be. They spread out into the Backdunes. I stopped where I was, a dark spot halfway up the white sand. Everything showed clear in the moonlight: the boats, the men.
“The blades.
“I turned to Spindlestone and I went like spit.
“I felt Dodi flying behind me but I never looked back. I never called. I never stopped until I was back up by the stoneway. Then I crept deep, deep, under the stoneway ledge where the tide has washed the sand away, and I dragged the rockweed down, down, all around and over me. I made myself as small as I could. I lay in there like the weed. I watched for her.”
My throat hurt and I stopped to swallow.
“But she never came,” I said.
“Oh dear,” said Ma. Her watery eyes brimmed such great tears that I saw my face clear in them. One face in each tear.
“She only called me once,” I said. “And I couldn’t brave myself to look. I just hid deeper, pulling the weed off the rock until my nails bled. And then I lay in there with my eyes shut among the crab legs and fishbones, and the wiggynagh took Dodi Caillet down to the boats and away.
“The moon set and the sun rose and the weed stank something terrible and all these little worms came out of it. They went all over me,” I said. “But I stopped there. I don’t know how long.”
Everybody sat awhile.
“Was it her scaan in the cave?” asked Dolyn, in the end.
“No,” I said.
“Who were you talking to then?” he asked.
“Breesh Dunnal,” I said.
It was like saying the angels saying her name right out loud. Like cursing in chapel. Even with these irregular folk.
“Dunnal. I never heard of them,” said Ma Slevin, scratching her head with her big spoon. “Where’s she from?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Nobody’s heard of her. Except me.”
“How did you meet her?” said Dolyn Craig. “You never go anywhere except that cave.”
His dinner was plainly agreeing with him. He was picking up and getting mouthy.
“I met her there,” I told him again. “She just came.”
“Go on and say it,” Dolyn said in tighter tones. “It’s a scaan. You talk to scaans as well as beasts.”
“Just because you’ve got devils turning up for potluck,” I hissed, “doesn’t mean I do.”
“What is she then?” he bawled and leaped up, holding his raggy garment around his middle.
Undressed and uplit from the hearth, he was the scrawniest thing I ever saw; his ribs a shipwreck and his fingers like kindling. But his face was pink with temper instead of grey, and his eyes clear. He never looked this bright in town.
“I never asked what she was,” I said quiet-like, right into his face. “I just loved her.”
That shut him up. He wasn’t the sort to enjoy any talk of love. Even the love of a good pig was unknown to him.
“She came that day,” I told the Slevins and Elley Craig, cutting Dolyn entirely.
“She’s not a scaan, then,” said the harewitch. “Is she a girl?”
I shook my head.
“Is she a sprite?” asked Ma. “Like Pond-Averick?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Honest.”
“Well. Is she here with us now?” Ma asked then, looking about more-than-somewhat thrilled.
Her eyes fell on Lovelypig.
Lovely smiled and panted and wriggled, and Ma just about folded in half bowing before my sow like she was a queen.
“Aah. Here she is. Is she a lovely shape-changer then?” Ma said to Lovelypig. “Ooooh, she’s clever! She’s clever, isn’t she? Yes, she is – she’s beee-ooo-ti–ful.”
“That is not Breesh Dunnal,” I said, and Scully stopped whittering on his fiddle to laugh.
“Stupid old clod,” said Dolyn, raising his eyes to the monkhouse Heaven.
“Oh,” Ma said, tugging Lovely’s ears down on each side of her face and kissing her snout. “Shame.”
It was true. Here in the wasteland Cronks, Lovelypig had become uncommonly lovely. Lovelier even than in town. Her skin stretched over her, smooth and sandy as a clean summer day on the shore, and she snugged close into Ma Slevin. She gave me a look like, Well this is all very nice, isn’t It?
It was all very nice.
That I’d not lain down and died of Fright at being stuck under Spindlestone. That I’d not drowned when Dolyn pushed me into the inside-sea. That I hadn’t run back into the mountain at first sight of the harewitch. That I was still living, still talking, still upright.
I laughed. I grabbed Lovel
y’s gruntle and breathed into her nose and mouth. She licked my breath and dinned at me. I dinned too. Dolyn Craig backed off.
“You don’t have to be frighted,” I told him.
“Let me be,” he said, right touchy. “I’m not frighted.”
But he was frighted all right. Dolyn Craig’s mid-waterline was different to mine. That’s all.
Chapter Twenty-one
Backwash
THERE’S NO TELLING HOW FARBACK you have to go to say why or how things come to happen as they do. To the folk they do. In the way they do. At the time they do. All the things that come before now, they go back-and-back into the generations; one thing running into another. And all of them leading to here. Leading to now. There’s so many things that could have happened. But only particular ones did. It makes it look like what is happening was meant to happen.
Like it was always meant to happen, just like this, all along.
In the morning I was woken by eaveswarblers. Ma brought me milk and honey where I lay in a slant of light. She fetched me sticky figs and hard eggs out of her last basket. I didn’t know where she’d gotten the milk. I hadn’t seen a cow about the lane who looked like she could be bothered.
But Ma said the milk was from the tree that bore the figs we were eating, saying as how when you picked the fruit, the tree wept tears of mother’s milk that you could catch in a piggin. It was right fortifying, she said.
Ma Slevin poured that milk down into herself with plenty of noise and of a sudden I was famished again. Not like at home. In a good way. That first fig was the best food I ever ate. It was like a mouthful of sun. It was so good I took it to the threshold to eat by myself.
Out in the yard Lovelypig was frisky, tasting the new upland winds. She kept nipping behind my knees to get me going. She kept coming at me until I had to tell her off.
“Are you sure you’re not a witch-webster?” said Ma Slevin, coming out and reaching up to pat my cheek and down to scratch Lovely. “Because this pig of yours has got something. She’s right familiar and that’s for sure.”
I kissed the old woman lightly. Her upper lip was sprouting somewhat but the rest of her was soft as Mr Cooley. I kissed her heavier.
Secrets of Carrick: Ghostheart Page 15