In the cottages, sleep-lidded eyes turn pale faces to flames, to voices, to stories. Small hips are set on tired legs, which become horses for knights and dragons for wizards. Strong hands scratch small skulls, tuck stray hair behind soap-pink ears impatient for the story.
So familiar voices tell a familiar tale, and it starts like this:
‘First there were the crows. And then, there was the Crowkisser.’
She stands at the entrance to the old temple, scrimshawed out of shadows. Her eyes are weary, her body bent back into the smoky sculpt of the Slickwalker. His arms lace her hips like a belt, his fingers tracing small curves on the edges of her tiredness.
The path unfurls down the temple hill, wet with recent rain. Crows chuck and worry over the scraps caught between the canted stones.
The long men lay their burdens at her feet. She sifts them rapidly, methodically. Brutally. Sometimes she cries. Sometimes she screams. Sometimes she tests things with the edge of her teeth.
She is searching for the future.
The long men wait with eyes downcast. Slickwalker moves among them, touching shoulders, murmuring encouragement, balancing blades. Once, he stoops to ruffle the hair of a slimmer shadow, adjusting the tuck of its scarf.
Crowkisser digs, her hands deep in the belly of the city. She sifts rope and leather and flesh. Fishbones and dogsteeth. Glass and clay and piss. Slowly, she feels Astic begin to breathe under her feet.
And the story carries on. Around cupped mugs and crossed legs and waiting hearts.
‘First there were the crows. And then there was the Crowkisser. Alone on the bloody beach. And the sand red, red and red again.’
‘Red again,’ the little ones chant, and giggle with the fear of it all.
‘And why was she alone?’ The storytellers ask.
‘Because there were no ships.’
‘And where were the ships?’
‘At the bottom of the hungry sea.’ Hands sketch shadows of waves, of tentacles and dipping dreams.
The audience wide-eyed and sleepy, torn between the voices stroking their hair and the battening of the wind outside.
High on the hill, the long men draw their coats tight and raise their thick wool collars. The smaller ones cluster together. The smallest hold gloved hands, but quietly.
Slickwalker rubs Crowkisser’s back as she searches, his strong hands moving over her sliding shoulder blades, her wriggling spine. If there are words in the sounds he makes, the wind doesn’t know them.
Crowkisser is lost to the city. Her fingers are deep inside it. She can feel its thick pulse, hear the words on the tongues of its people, feel the warmth of the small fires that blaze for miles around. For a moment, she feels like a mother. Then the wind gusts, the crows call and she falls beyond the walls and the sky.
To Hesper. To where a ship moves out to sea and slipsnorthwards into the old grooves of another rebellion. She moans low and long and chews her lip.
Flies onwards.
To Thell where the dead are too quiet, where the people are hungry in their heart of heart of hearts.
She sifts, pushes. Her hand rises against bright light and she sees a mountain fall. Unimaginably vast. Its depths opening up to spill forth a river of mouths that scream and scream. She can do nothing.
She scrapes her nails along wet stone. She is trapped in a fountain, she is broken and hollow and hungry and she needs blood. But there’s a wall between her and the world. Shifting, patchwork, unfriendly.
She is trapped inside. The latch will not lift. The doors will not break.
She falls backwards, and Slickwalker’s strong hands catch her before she hits the stone.
She is above herself. She is endless and vast and spiteful and blind. There are feathers across the stars. And she needs the stars. She needs their golden light.
Crowkisser’s legs scrabble on the slick stone. The long men hold her, soothe her, they straighten her neck and mop at her lips where the spit and bubble of prophecy drips down.
Her bones cannot hold the seeing any longer. The night discards her. She lands in her own weak body with the weight of a falling star. She hurts, everywhere. But she is here.
