by Priya Sharma
Outside the holy perimeter was the plot for suicides.
Gideon sat by his father’s grave, crying.
You knew and you still left me with them.
His mother didn’t cry on the day her husband was buried. She watched, impassive, as they nailed his coffin lid down. Gideon’s last view was the side of his father’s head that was pale and perfect.
Lichen bloomed in patches of dirty yellow and green, tenacious in their grip on the rough headstone. Gideon traced the letters. There was a name and a set of dates. No Beloved Father or Beloved Husband. The slab was cold and dead.
Sleep and death are not the same.
His father was not here. There was no cause for Gideon to stay.
* * *
Gideon ran to the Orme. The air crackled with dry heat, heralding the storm. It smelt of earth mixed with metal and rain. Clouds raced toward him, shadows on the sky. Then the deluge came, cold fat drops on warm ground. His wet shirt clung to him.
Gideon stood on the ridge, the tempest in his chest far greater. It howled around his rib cage, battering his heart. Arms skyward, he willed the lightning to skewer him to the spot. It came in fierce flashes, cracking the sky with cannon-shot thunder and letting the rain pour through. The rain rolled over him in waves and out to sea.
The storm didn’t want him. Disappointed, Gideon lowered his arms.
He followed the path down to the head of the Orme, slipping on the wet stones. From there he broke away, travelling parallel with the coastline until he cut up toward the standing stones. Turning sideways, he slid through the fissure in the rocks and into the Orme’s ear.
Gideon’s wet skin felt cold and grubby, not cleansed by the rain. He was too exhausted to take off his sodden clothes. Instead, he burrowed into the pile of tatty bed linen and told the Orme his secrets.
* * *
There’s a legend that there was once a mighty dragon that flew over the bay and swooped down to cool herself in the sea. She crept along the shore and came to settle with her snout in the surf, her great head resting on her forelegs legs as they folded under her. She shifted on her belly, lazy in the sunlight as it warmed her burnished scales. She sighed, emptying her nostrils of coiling smoke.
She slept for hundreds of years until long grass grew along her back and people forgot what rested beneath. A village sprang up in her shadow and still she slept on, until one day she heard a whispering. At first it was faint, but as she strained to hear, it got louder and louder until she heard it clearly, deep in her ear. It was a human child, a mere wink in time, where she was the slow blink that lasts for centuries.
Being long without company she came to love the boy and waited for him to come and talk to her. The human tongue had not changed so much in the time that had passed and she understood when he read to her from pilfered books and told her about his father. When he was sad, it made her sad too, a single tear welling up and trickling from her closed eye. Sheep didn’t drink from this sporadic spring, finding it too bitter.
She heard her boy crying in the darkness within her and she listened. This boy who’d never asked her for anything when she could have granted so much.
“Please take me away,” he sobbed, “take me away.”
She ached for her friend, who was now a boy made man by circumstance.
She’d slept too long.
The Orme shuddered, sending out ripples. She stretched, her muscles slack from sleep. In Ormeshadow, crockery rattled on dressers and coal dust from chimneys landed on hearths. Then there was a pause, in which the freshly woken wondered if they’d dreamt it.
Then it started. The vibrations grew stronger as the Orme fought to free herself from her partial burial in the ground. Wrought-iron bedsteads trembled and then shook violently as though possessed. Walls collapsed. Slate tiles slid from the church roof. Gravestones toppled. Horses bucked and reared in fright.
The earth was moving as the ridge of the Orme rose. As she broke away, the land roared. It was the sound of the world being torn apart. The cliffs around her crumbled. Boulders crashed into the churning sea, sheep tumbling after them.
The Orme crouched, her claws scoring the ground for purchase. Then she sprang up into the sky, all grace and fury.
Those that ran out to see what was happening fell to their knees. The land tilted beneath them. The dragon above them stretched out her wings and darkness covered the wet dawn.
She wheeled around the bay in an ecstasy of flight and freedom. With each pass over the land, she poured a torrent of fire from her nostrils. Her flapping wings fanned the sparks and flames, making them leap from house to house, from tree to tree. What hadn’t been claimed by the waves was scorched: the hovels and the houses, the church, the inn, the farms, and the very earth on which they all sat. The furious heat made wet grass into fields of fire. It was a furnace in which flesh melted together. Anything metal became molten. What wouldn’t burn glowed pure white.
The outlying farms suffered the same fate. Ormesleep Farm was a funeral pyre. Flames licked the farmhouse and the barn had collapsed in on itself, becoming a bonfire of its own. It would be days before the fire died, black smoke pouring from its charred remains.
Gideon’s Orme caught a current of hot air rising from the blaze below, letting it lift her. She climbed and climbed until she was no more than a black dot on the surface of the sun and then was gone.
Put to Sea
THE FISHERMAN, AMBROSE MARTIN, was dreaming of John Belman. It had been years since he’d found the dead man and taken him back to Ormesleep Farm. His dreams were always the same.
In the dream Ambrose found himself back there again, rowing toward the foot of the Orme, just as he had done on that day. The sea teased him, tempting his boat into more difficult waters. She was the colour of pewter, churning up white foam to mark the passage of the currents.
In the dream he could see the other boats, just as he had on that afternoon. Michael Piercy waved to him from The Tern. For all the other men’s envy of his fine catches, they dared not follow him so far out. The sea was in Ambrose’s blood. She gave him favours not shared with the others; silvery fish twitched his net, squids with their tangled tentacles and armoured prawns, like grubs curled up on his palm. She’d given him something more troubling. The gift of John Belman.
In the dream he could see the rocks around the Orme’s head, like partly submerged sea monsters.
Ambrose Martin cast his net.
In the dream there was a change in the light, the sky becoming a fraction whiter. Then, just like on that day, he saw there was a man on the rock ahead. Ambrose could tell he was dead, even at a distance. His was so pale that his skin was translucent, like wet paper, revealing the blue veins beneath where the blood had halted in its tracks.
Why risk your life for a dead man?
In the dream, Ambrose rowed on. He looked down at his own arms, the muscles straining against the tide. The man on the rock waited for him, having all the time in the world. His coat was torn and his hair was matted with dried brine. Except for his colour, he looked like he was asleep. Ambrose shook his head.
Sleep and death are not the same.
The boat was caught suddenly and slammed against the rock. Even in his dream, knowing it was coming, he cursed aloud. His wife, Eve, turned over and saw his flickering eyelids. In his dream he jumped onto the rock and tied up his boat as best as he could, looking to check the hull was still intact.
The man’s pale and perfect head was on one side, facing him. Then Ambrose saw the other side, which was all broken bone and brains. Then the dream and reality of that day diverged and Ambrose travelled down the stranger path, as he did with every dream. John Belman’s eyes opened. Ambrose was never afraid. All he ever saw there was compassion. He felt himself loved without judgment.
The lips parted to reveal creamy, strong teeth.
Ambrose wiped the dirt from the stranger’s cheek. He was cold. Immune to pain, immune to love, immune to life. Ambrose Martin felt s
omething quicken within him, years of his neglected self. It flowed down his cheeks as hot tears. He would not leave the man for the gulls to pick at.
In Ambrose’s dreams the man’s lips were always trying to form words. Ambrose knelt down on his hands and knees and put his ear close to the dead mouth. He waited. All these years he’d been waiting, but all that came out was the rasping of air drawn over ragged vocal cords.
The words. If only he could hear the words. Ambrose waited, the jagged rocks digging into his knees, knowing there would be nothing but a terrible sound instead of the words that would free them both.
Then, the dreaming Ambrose Martin was surprised.
“Put to sea.” The waterlogged words came again. “Put to sea.”
Ambrose opened his eyes.
* * *
Ambrose Martin put to sea. Martin Piercy ran to the end of the jetty, calling for him to come back. The other fisherman shook their heads, incredulous as they watched him leave. The sea was still agitated in the wake of the storm that had destroyed Ormeshadow. It churned, not knowing how to settle.
Ambrose was moving across the bay toward where the Orme had been. She’d collapsed, consumed by the waves and the hollows within herself, and now all that remained was a sheer cliff face, great columns of fresh stone rising out of the water. The wind swept the glowing ashes of Ormeshadow out to sea, where they landed with a hiss. The sky was dark with smoking clouds.
The rock where he’d found John Belman was visible ahead. There would be a new landscape beneath the waves, fresh mountains and valleys, just as there was above it. There would be great chunks of the Orme on the seabed, waiting to puncture Ambrose’s boat, Cathy.
It suddenly occurred to Ambrose Martin that he didn’t want to die after all. Instead of drifting, he put out his oars, but it was too late. He was already committed to the vortex. Then, as Cathy went around and around, taken by the current, he saw that the rock up ahead was not a rock after all, but a boy on a rock.
Ambrose hauled himself onto this arid island, tying up his boat as best he could. The boy had a full mouth, in the shape of Cupid’s bow, and a square jaw. His eyebrows were heavy. His face was no less masculine for the long eyelashes.
It was John Belman all over again.
Was it sleep or death?
The boy’s lips were dry and cracked. He had curled up on his side and waited to die rather than take his chances by plunging into the inky, churning water and swimming miles along the coast to the beach.
Ambrose knelt down and waited for the feeling of breath on his cheek. Unsure, he shook the boy’s shoulders. Nothing. He shook the shoulders again, harder. The eyelids fluttered and then opened. The boy gasped. He clutched at Ambrose’s sweater with a weak fist, trying to pull him close.
“What’s the use of gold when you have no water?”
Then the boy laughed. It was a dry sound full of madness that made Ambrose realise he wasn’t a boy after all, but a young man who’d had his fill of life and was already weary of it.
Ambrose looked to where Gideon was pointing. It was a hole in the rock. Treasures had been piled up in the hollow with no regards for their welfare. Gold, silver, and copper. Things that glittered and glowed.
A crown studded with garnets was tangled up on the hilt of a sword. There were caskets, worked in ebony and lapis. Coffers were broken open to reveal the coins they contained, flat discs of gold stamped with the images of long-dead emperors from distant lands. A rope of lustrous pearls so tangled that it was impossible to guess at its length. There were torques, once worn by chieftains who painted their faces blue before battle. Daggers nestled where they could, blades crusted with dried blood from the killing blow, while their handles were crusted in turquoise and ivory. There were shields and breastplates, marked with fabulous beasts. Unicorns, lions, griffins, and dragons reared up to vanquish their enemies, trampling them beneath hoof and claw. There were bangles and bracelets that once had adorned the arms of queens.
In the depths of this trove were gems, discarded like a child’s forgotten glass marbles. They competed for Ambrose’s attention, winking at him in shades of green and blue. Some were as clear and colourless as spring water from the heart of mountains. The jagged stones had been cut to make them burn from within, inspiring avarice and murder in the hearts of men and women.
A lesser man would have thrown Gideon in the water and loaded up his boat, but John Belman had chosen well. Ambrose had already found what he’d come for. He gave the king’s ransom no more than a cursory glance.
He gathered Gideon in his arms, despite the dead weight.
“Oh, my dear boy, thank the Lord you’re alive.” Tears fell onto Gideon’s lips and they were full of the sea and Ambrose Martin’s sadness. “I did what he said. He told me and I did it. I put to sea. I put to sea.”
The Journey
“YOU UNDERSTAND HOW TERRIBLE it will be?” Mr. Hipps peered into Gideon’s face, anxious that he didn’t understand at all. “Terrible. No one will think the less of you for staying here.”
They were in the inn at Carrside, where Henry Hipps had rented rooms for them. Gideon’s breakfast lay untouched. Grease formed on the cooling bacon. The landlady had brought it on a great tray, twittering and fluttering around the room, twitching curtains and checking the mantel for dust, and the two of them sat in silence until she left.
Gideon was grateful for Henry Hipps’s patience with him. When he tried to say anything, it came out in halting, disconnected speech that made other people pause and look at him. His bruises were fading blooms of purple and yellow and his lips were still cracked as though he were permanently parched, a man recovering from a long illness that had made a brittle vessel of him. He could shatter at any moment and everything would pour out.
“I have to see,” Gideon replied as though it were a solemn duty he would not shirk. He carried his grief close, along with the guilt of living.
* * *
Hipps followed Gideon at a respectful distance as he walked through the smouldering wreck of Ormeshadow. The ground was hot beneath the solicitor’s feet and he wished he had hobnail boots like the others. Embers eddied like fireflies in the breeze. There were timbers reduced to blocks of charcoal. When Gideon glanced back at him, the solicitor was covering his mouth and nose with his handkerchief. It wasn’t an affectation. The smell of roasted meat brought bile up into Gideon’s throat, too.
Not everyone had been incinerated. Some were overcome by fumes and mummified in ashes. Men were identified by the gold teeth melted in their mouths or a woman by a pin that remained in the burnt rags of her shawl. A child by a bone that had been set badly after a fall from a tree.
No clue was discarded.
Where there had once been furious sound, there was now a listless silence. Men recovered the Ormeshadowers, shovelling the ash in silence. There was no calling to one another or singing to lighten the load.
Gideon rolled up his shirtsleeves to help with the bitter harvest. Afterward his face was blackened like a chimneysweep’s. Mr. Hipps, unaccustomed to physical labour and in inappropriately thin-soled shoes, worked beside him as they cleared the debris of the farmhouse at Ormesleep. Everything was ashes, as if it had burnt hottest there.
* * *
The hallowed ground of Ormeshadow church had been subject to the same indignity as the rest of the village, so the deceased were carried to St. Barnabas, in the valley, for burial.
The trees around the churchyard were tall and sturdy oaks. Their roots reached out to clasp the dead, absorbing them in pieces and sending them heavenward through their contorted limbs. Ivy stole around their trunks and crept over the older graves.
Gideon spent nearly a morning there. Occasionally he’d squat down beside a headstone and stare at it in a silent dialogue. Sometimes he’d reach out and touch it in apology. Then, when his communion with the dead was over he sought out Mr. Hipps and found him by the Belman family grave. The slab was creamy marble with grey veins, its pristine
surface chiselled with names. The solicitor had laid lilies before it, tied with grosgrain ribbon.
“They’re from Lady Jessop’s hothouse,” he told Gideon. “I’m sorry. You must think me a foolish old man.”
Gideon touched his shoulder in a gesture of comfort that made the man weep.
* * *
The Orme treasure had to be inventoried and packaged, ready for transport to London. An agent would be waiting, ready to arrange its sale.
“May I help?” Gideon asked.
“Are you sure? You wouldn’t mind? It’s a capital idea. There’s lots of work to do. Lots.”
Gideon and Mr. Hipps worked together in the crowded room, guards outside by arrangement with the local constable. Obscene wealth was piled around them in boxes, heaped under trestle tables and in wicker baskets. Each day they called for fresh supplies of packing crates, sand, and straw.
When Gideon first held a pen again in his calloused hand he faltered, spraying ink from the loaded nib across the clean page of the ledger. He glanced up, but Mr. Hipps pretended to be busy with a pile of documents.
As he made the list, Gideon’s hand flowed, the pen moving across the paper of its own volition in a way that reminded him of the first time he saw his father take up the shearing shears to race against Thomas.
“Mr. Hipps. I don’t want this.” Gideon frowned, unhappy and inarticulate.
“Don’t worry, lad. I can send for a clerk to help me.”
“No, Mr. Hipps. I mean I don’t want any of this.” A sweep of his hand took in the whole of the room. “It’s not right that I keep this.”
“What will you do, then? Be a farmhand?”
Gideon shrugged. “I thought of taking to the drover’s road.”
“And then?”
“The hiring fair in London.”
The drivers would soon leave from Carrside, hundreds of cattle hooves churning up the drover’s road. There would be campfires and camaraderie. A night in London’s fields, overshadowed by the city itself. Gideon Belman of Ormesleep Farm, of fabled wealth, would merely be Gideon, a driver’s hand.