by Jack Lasenby
“I don’t know that one.”
“Ish read it while you and Paku were hunting,” said Puli.
“Tell it to us?” Tepulka was sitting in front of the fire, sharpening an axe. As the flames lifted, Puli moved in front of her loom. They fell, she disappeared into the shadows, and her voice came out of the dark changed. Whenever I think of her telling the story, I hear the rasp of Tepulka’s iron axe against the coarse and wetted sandstone.
“A poor man once boasted to the king that his beautiful daughter could spin yellow hair into gold.”
“He said she could spin straw into gold,” said Kimi. “That’s what Ish read to us.”
A log collapsed. A whirl of sparks spun up the chimney, Puli’s weaving shimmered as someone shut the door.
“A poor man once boasted to the king,” Puli repeated. “He said, ‘My daughter can spin yellow hair into gold.’
“The king sent for all his servants with yellow hair. They came out of his palace, their hands over their heads. The king sent for the girl and led her into a room filled with yellow hair.
“‘Spin it into gold before morning,’ he said, ‘and I will make you my queen. Fail, and I’ll chop off your head!’
“The girl didn’t even know how to spin wool. Her tears fell on the stone floor. It cracked open, deep and black. The girl saw the flicker of flames. There was a shriek, a puff of smoke, and a man leapt out of the black hole and danced around the stack of yellow hair. He was beautiful. He smiled. The girl felt cold.
“‘Why are you crying?’
“‘The king said I must spin this hair into gold or he’ll chop off my head.’
“‘And if you spin it into gold?’
“‘Then he will marry me.’
“‘I will spin the hair into gold,’ said the man, dancing, smiling, ‘but you must promise you will give me your first baby after you become queen.’
“Anything was better than having her head chopped off. Besides, she wasn’t the queen yet, and she didn’t have a baby. ‘I promise,’ said the girl and fell asleep.
“She woke. It was morning. The king stood there looking pleased. The yellow hair had been spun into gold.
“‘One more test before I marry you,’ he said.
“That day he called for all his soldiers with yellow hair. They came out of the palace with their helmets down over their eyes. In the evening the king took the girl into a bigger room with a bigger stack of yellow hair. ‘Spin it into gold,’ he said, ‘and I will make you my queen. Fail, and I will chop off your head!’
“The girl wept. The floor cracked open. The beautiful dancing man demanded her second baby. The girl promised. She woke, and the yellow hair had all been spun into gold. The king was very pleased.
“That day, he ordered all his subjects with yellow hair to the palace. They came out wearing hats. In the evening, he led the girl into the biggest room in the palace. A stack of yellow hair disappeared up under the roof.
“‘Your last test. Spin every hair into gold, and I will marry you tomorrow morning. Fail, and I will chop off your head!’
“Again she wept. Again the man appeared and demanded another baby, her third. And again she promised.
“She woke, the gigantic heap of yellow hair spun into gold. She married the king. They had three babies whom she loved. Their father, the king, loved them, too. He said their hair reminded him of gold.
“One night, the floor of the queen’s room cracked open. She saw flames. A puff of smoke, and the beautiful dancing man appeared. ‘I have come for my three babies,’ he said.
“The queen cried so much, the man smiled cruelly and said he would give her three days to guess his name. If she succeeded, she could keep her babies. If she failed, he would take her as well as her babies, and all her riches. He did not say what he would do to the rightful king.
“The first day the queen sent messengers all through the city to ask people their names. She read the long list to the man that night. But he shook his head at each name. He smiled at the three sleeping babies and licked his lips.
“The second day, she sent messengers all through the kingdom. It took half the night for her to read the names. The man smiled and shook his head. The babies cried in their sleep as he snapped his teeth.
“The next day a messenger came back and said, ‘Last night, I found a strange round house. And in front of it burned a round fire. And around the fire danced a man so beautiful he shone brighter than the flames. And as he danced he sang.
Tonight I dance, tonight I sing.
Tomorrow I shall be the king.
Three fat babes with golden hair,
I shall carry to my lair.
Their blood I’ll drink, their hair I’ll spin,
and I shall call myself King Grim!
“‘He sang some more words,’ said the messenger and repeated them to the queen.
“The queen thanked him. When the beautiful dancing man appeared that night and demanded to know his name, she read a long list of names.
“‘No! No! No!’ The queen picked up another list and read out the names. ‘No! No! No!’ laughed the man. He bent over the cradles and nuzzled the babies’ necks.
“‘Is your name King Grim?’ shrieked the queen.
“The man sneered and laughed again. ‘You have failed. The babies are mine. I shall kill the king. And take everything here.’ He was shrieking now. ‘It will all be mine!’”
Puli paused and looked through the shadows at us sitting around the fire. Somebody shifted uneasily. Puli smiled and spoke again. We had to lean forward to hear.
“‘Is your name…’ said the queen, ‘…is your name Kalik?’”
From behind the camp came a crack as a tree snapped and crashed, blown down. The Children shrieked. The puppies and Kitimah’s babies woke and cried. And in the silence that followed we heard Puli finish.
“The beautiful man screamed and stamped so the black hole cracked open even wider. There was the smell of burning. Some witch told you!’ he screamed. “It must have been Lutha!’
“He stamped even harder. The hole gaped like a red mouth. There was a puff of smoke, and the man disappeared. The hole in the floor closed. Not even a crack. And he was never seen again.”
There was a long silence in the hut. Arak and Perrah slept again. The pups dropped their heads and slept, too. Puli passed her shuttle back and forth.
Tepulka laid down his axe, its face polished, its edge sharp. “Is that the story you read?” he asked, voice unsteady. I looked at the worn sandstone and shook my head.
“It was, but it’s grown.”
“It’s my story now,” said Puli from her loom. “It’s what I’m weaving.”
Chapter 31
What Tupu Found
“We’ll come down and wait for you after six days,” said Paku. Tepulka and I watched him lead Tulu and Maka back across the river. They turned and waved as we led off the laden donkeys.
“We’re across!” said Tepulka.
“Let’s hope this dry spell lasts till we get back.”
Again we circled through the Cold Hills, practised calling each other Terek and Chech, sniffed for the coal smoke, the reek of the pigs’ pens. As if they had been waiting for us, several boys appeared, shouting, grinning before Tepulka could strike the gong at the Trading Ground.
“I wanted to hear it again, Chech.”
“Well, give it a bang,” I said. “Terek.”
The mellow sound shivered as Henga led down the same two young men. She laughed when she saw the laden donkeys.
We unloaded and set out our trade goods, and Henga matched them with hers: so many spear and arrowheads, axes, shovels. Knives, needles, mugs. Cooking pots with handles and chains to hang them over the fire; some with legs to stand in the embers. Shears and little scissors, just as I had drawn them. I snipped my hair and was delighted.
Proudly, the two young men produced three long scythe blades. “They’re beautiful!” I said, seeing stacks of dried grass. And then
for a terrible moment I saw Taur scything the Salt Men.
Henga felt the tunics, blankets, rolls of cloth. “This is even finer work,” she said. “The colours! The patterns!” She traced them. As if her skin hungered for its touch, she held the cloth against her face.
We feasted again on the finest pork. They gave us each a precious potato, hot and roasted. I thought I knew where they had come from and wished we could trade for some. Then Henga gave us three tools she called sickles, thin curved blades.
“You’ll find them useful,” she said, “for cutting this.” She opened two plump leather pouches. “Oats!”
I thought of the oat cakes Taur and I had eaten flavoured with honey. Now I would be able to make them for the Children. Henga looked at my face. “It’s one of the few things we can grow up here. We had a good crop.” Henga paused. “Do you know how to grow them?”
I remembered my old ambition. “I am a Gardener,” I said.
I drew out our presents, shawls, and lengths of cloth, each finer than the last. The young men clapped their hands. Henga sucked in her breath and clicked her tongue at Puli’s greatest work: a hooded full-length cloak. I put it around her shoulders where it settled and hung shimmering: green and yellow turning through red and gold and back to green. Henga spun like a young girl so the long cloak drifted out on the air, all shades, patterns of light and dark. She stood, and the cloak fell about her, lustre shifting, shot with lights.
I thought back to Tepulka’s words: “It’s like looking at long grass when the wind blows.”
“Who made this?” asked Henga.
“Our best weaver. She says it tells a story.”
Henga looked, and I told her Puli’s story of the queen who promised to give away her three babies. But I changed the names of Lutha and Kalik.
Henga sighed. “It reminds me of a story my mother used to tell when I was a girl. But we are the Iron People. We forgot the spinning stories, lost the secrets of weaving.” I knew Puli’s story would be told that night amongst the Iron People. Henga closed her eyes, until I thought she had gone to sleep. Perhaps she was older than she looked.
“You boys!” Henga woke and snapped directions. The boys came running down with two more leather pouches. Henga undid the straps and iron buckles and showed me the seeds in one pouch. Like the grass seeds Kitimah and Sheenah found, but plumper, golden.
“Plant this lot in spring, and it will ripen in summer.” She tapped the second pouch. “Plant this lot in autumn. It will come up early and ripen in spring. So, even if you have a short summer, you still get a crop. Make sure you always set aside enough seed for next year.
“Cut it with the sickles. Grind it to flour, like the oats, but finer – a soft powder. And you can make bread.” Henga nodded. And suddenly I heard Old Hagar’s voice describing the grass seeds the Travellers had collected when she was a girl. The seeds they had lost and never found again. The name trembled on my tongue.
“Is it…?”
“Wheat!” Henga said and spun so her cloak belled and flowered. “Tell your Weaver the winter wheat is thanks for her cloak – the spring wheat thanks for her story.
“That Kalik came after your last visit, Chech. From Lake Ka.” Henga spat and made the gesture with her fingers. “He brought fine bearskins, the best of dried meat and fish, even some potatoes: those were the last we just ate. He said they were presents, that he didn’t want anything in return. But he asked the boys if they had seen a man called Ish with a band of children.” Henga’s sharp black eyes pricked at my own.
“I had warned them, so they said nothing. He noticed your woven tunics, and the boys told him a trading party had come from the Weaving People to the east. He and his warriors set off that way, but winter comes early in the Cold Hills, and the boys saw him turn back to Lake Ka. When he comes back this spring, I’ll make sure he searches east again. But I will send him further, describe a river, one the Weavers said they came up. He will spend time looking for it.”
I felt uncomfortable. Henga knew we had not come from the east.
Her old eyes snapped black. “Traders have to be good at keeping secrets, Chech.” She drew the hood of Puli’s cloak over her head as we said goodbye.
We circled through the eastern hills, made a fire under a leaning rock and left sign as if we had camped. We travelled east again and left more sign, fireplaces, and fern bedding. When we found a dry stream bed running west, bare rocks and hard clay, we turned and led the donkeys north and then west. Picking up their dung, sweeping over their hoof marks, we descended and crossed the open valley with Kalik’s trading track.
Afternoon, and the river rumbled sullen under mist, rising, turning brown. We went straight into the first channel. Paku, Tulu, and Maka saw us and came over. The donkeys were better used to the crossing. The weight of their loads helped them keep their footing. By the time we got to the first island, Paku was leading the others on to it.
“You should have waited for us!” growled Maka, smiling. We led the donkeys across the middle channel, one at a time. The river fought as if it knew we were never coming back. I led Hika last, and we were swept off our feet. This time I was ready and landed easily. As we trotted up to the head of the island, I noticed it was shrinking.
Wind moaned. Heavy rain swept down the valley. The last channel rose suddenly as the five of us surrounded Hika and led him over. We stood streaming water and rain on the far bank, laughing, and watching the river come up.
“This rain will melt the snow in the heads,” I said. “No one can cross now until late summer.”
A last look at Chak’s grave next morning. Downstream the gong of the waterfall made the valley tremble. All the way up the spur, the river shouted after us.
The little ones would have clipped the sheep and goats naked with the shears. Hurk tried clipping his own hair and sliced the top off one ear. Tepulka stitched it back on with Puli’s finest thread. It healed, but that ear always looked lopsided. Puli said we should have clipped his other ear as well.
When I drew the shape of a scythe handle, Tepulka nodded. Within a day or two he had found and shaped a bent sapling for one scythe, adjusted the metal sock and the little strut at the bottom, and was teaching himself how to scythe grass.
But that first day, everyone had to handle the trade goods. Every arrowhead, pot, and axe, every needle. All our work gathering goat hair and wool, cleaning and washing and combing and spinning it into yarn, all the hours at the looms had been traded for these. Kimi and Tupu jigged with satisfaction, and Hurk would have joined them.
“Keep still,” Puli told him, “or your ear will fall off.”
“Draw the letter for spring, and the one for winter,” she said to me.
“S” I wrote in charcoal on the pouch of spring wheat, and “W” on the other. Puli worked the letters into two watertight bags of oily wool as she wove them. “They’ll keep out rain better than the leather,” she said. And she wove another bag with “O” upon it.
“See, I told you it’s useful, knowing how to read and write,” I heard her tell Tama. “You’re going to have to learn.”
Tama took back his donkeys jealously and fattened them on the best grass. They grew sleek, their sides round. One morning we loaded them, ourselves, and the bigger sheep and goats with packs. In addition to deerskin tents and all our metal tools and weapons, we carried Henga’s seeds as well as those from the gardens, dried herbs, the salves and ointments Tepulka and I had made during winter. One donkey carried a loom with a piece half-finished, that Puli could work on wherever we stopped. A basket slung one side of Hika held Arak and Perrah.
“Travellers own only what they can carry,” I told everyone.
Hurk had cried when I said his collection of stones was too heavy to take. Kimi tried to sneak in a lump of wood she said was her baby.
“I’ll carve you a doll with a face like a real baby, when we get to where we’re going,” Tepulka told her. Kimi smiled but still had a few tears. “It’ll have real
hair!” Tepulka promised.
“True?” Tepulka nodded and Kimi gave up her lump of wood. We all had to make a sacrifice. Because the donkeys also carried something else we hadn’t owned at the beginning of winter.
While Paku, Tulu, and Maka waited to help at our last crossing of the wild river, Tupu had disappeared at Wild Dog Creek. Kitimah remembered her saying something about going up to the gardens. When she did not return, Kimi and Hurk looked for her. They came back having found her basket with some herbs.
Now Kitimah wished Paku were there to tell her what to do. She sent Tama up to the gardens before dark, but he found nothing. Kimi and Hurk cried themselves to sleep that night.
Before first light next morning, Tama took Gobble and Hurry and two pups, Bar and Tag. The gardens were empty. “Tupu! Tupu!” No reply. Tama had a look up an old track to a trickle of water. The track must have been well-used by whoever first made the gardens, because it was still clear between the trees.
“Tupu!” he called. “Tupu!” Now Gobble and Hurry disappeared, and Bar and Tag began yelping. Listening to something. Yelping again. When Tama told us, he imitated the way they stood and pricked their ears. Bar and Tag led him up a little spur, more and more excited.
The day before, Tupu had gone up to the gardens to pick the last leaves of the herb I wanted. One that was useful for lowering her fever when she was ill. She left the basket at the bottom of the gardens and searched for any plants she might have missed. At the top, she followed the track to the tiny stream. She walked up it and climbed the spur above, finding somebody had cleared the trees and sowed more of the plants along its top.
The spur dropped steeply either side. Tupu was picking leaves when the ground opened. She fell and thumped, hearing herself cry out. Looking up and seeing a scrap of sky. She tried to climb the smooth walls that curved above. “Like trying to climb up the inside of a big, empty egg,” she said.
The slab of wood which had collapsed beneath her feet fell to powder when she tried to dig steps. Tupu scratched away with her hands, but the sandy soil resisted her. She tried heaping up the things that rolled beneath her in the bottom of the hole, but the scrap of blue sky was as far out of reach as ever. If only it had been her turn to wear a knife!