Every whisper was resurrected now. Every house they passed echoed those same tales. A lamp kept at each threshold and a rod of iron driven deep into the earth, head to stern. They’d never really lost that suspicion of strangers wearing the faces of guests in the moving Green. Gates in the hedgerows and between the trees. Empty cradles. It had left its mark on the landscape. The fields were scored with hedges shorn brutally short, their cut branches and stumps spattered with lambs’ blood, layered and dried andspilt again, shrines of cat-skull and flint, shaped around the anvil stones of birds. Splintered snail shells ready to rattle a warning should the Green ever open its hungry throat once more.
Between the binding hedges, the going was tough; the fields of the Midlands drenched by sudden, unseasonable rains, leaving tussocks of grass half-submerged, poking above waterlogged fields. The roads were their salvation, built long ago by people who knew how to play the climate of this country, the odd jut of initially inexplicable rock a legacy of their foundations, where glacier outfall met more stubborn stone. Both were harvested with impunity and folded back into the walls of the homesteads which waited at each split of the raised roads, windows licked with butterlight and gates securely barred.
At the fifth of these the Shipwright decided to test her luck. It was too late in the day to march on through the night, and too sodden on either side of the road to strike anything like a camp. Stray off the path and your feet might call to those sleeping in the wet, their faces wreathed in green. Dreamers, their thoughts floating above the stagnant fields as marsh-light, heavy and drunk in the gloaming. Come the dry heat of high summer, the waters would recede and the Midlanders would seek them out while they were at their weakest, digging down into the damp soil, uncovering weathered skin stained darker still by years of submersion. Making small nicks with copper blades, careful never to drive too deep, decanting the dreamers’ rich blood into stoppered vials to be sold and traded for steep prices, steeper by the year. The luckiest and bravest might sever a fingerbone or an ear, flesh dark and strong as leather, and keep it in a root cellar, year on year, producing slow, black blood dripped into long, tall stills.
It was a risk though. There were tales enough of those whose knives and saws had cut too savagely and woken the dreaming revenants. Others still of a finger which had grown again an arm, a set of ribs and a beating, angry heart; an ear which had blossomed a jaw, teeth still studded royal with amethyst. Wake a revenant and let it walk the halls, the tales said, let it drink thirsty and red-lipped. And if the morning brought you familywho rose glossy skinned and ruddy cheeked, their limbs supple and their manners strange, best to let them live out their days, dark-skinned, soft-voiced, joyful.
Shipwright fought to get clear of those thoughts as they drew to a halt before the farmstead. The fields on either side were drier, but threaded with the torn stumps and trunks of thin white trees pushed down by the wind. The horizon now only a spare black line, the faint blue of the sky held for a few more seconds by the falling sun.
The column falters behind her as she stops. With a wary look at Shroud she crosses the yard to a great blackwood door, its surface studded with beaten copper. The yard itself shows signs of work in its whetstone and chicken coops. The skulls of something vulpine are speared warningly above. She raises the knocker, lets it fall three strikes, and waits.
When the door opens it does so grudgingly, the wood wet and grown with the sudden rain. The man behind is wiping his hands on a sooty rag and sucking gamely at the thick yellow chunks of his teeth. A weather eye roves over Shipwright’s shoulder to the people clustered behind her on the road, slumped in the growing cold.
When he speaks, his breath carries the whisper of woodsmoke and meat, and a slight tang of cheese. He smiles loosely, gums and lips crinkling. ‘Be ee bringing army t’door? It’s by late for an invading.’
Shipwright laughs despite herself and the old man joins her, stopping suddenly to suck on his teeth and give her a gimlet eye.
‘We’ve come from the north,’ Shipwright begins.
‘From ee shaytered city,’ he interrupts. ‘Ken I, seen it in the bone cracks hot from the fire. Took it out ee belly of a dwelling lamb. Ee shaytered city and you all its kitcast babies. You’ve come a long way and longer.’
Her heart jumps at the prophecy casually tossed off his tongue. She pulls herself together and nods. ‘If you have a byre or a building, a floor or a stable we would gladly pay. If you have food, we’ll pay again for that.’
He looks at her and waits before finally speaking. ‘Both of ’ese I have to hand, but ken your coin is nothing. Only taken in trade these given gifts to ee. Have thee labour, have thee magick? Power? From left or right. Care m’not which. Save I have loose stones and spinners to hold fast, and a body yet to lay.’
Spinners. The Shipwright’s mind races. Something in his voice scratches at her, but her mind’s alight with this little hint of home. All this shit, all this strangeness, and nowspinners, here? She catches his worn eyes roving her face, composes herself as best she can. ‘We might help with both.’
He beckons, fingers twitching like a sparrow’s neck.
She leans in, careful for her feet not to cross the stones of the threshold. His stubble is raw against her cheek, that rancid smell a little stronger, overlaid with turned earth. His voice dry as a marsh frog. ‘Cryin’ ye a boatbuilder by the sway of airms and brassy snuff.’
‘A shipwright,’ she murmurs. Her fingers dance Katkani against her back, a warning to Shroud.
Better a snared bird than a hawk in the unknown sky.
Wait, wait, her fingers say, steady, steady.
She feels the refugees gather behind her, a scattered soundtrack of shuffled feet and hesitant coughs. She trusts Shroud to keep them quiet, or to keep them steady if he can’t keep them quiet.
Her almost-host nods slowly, the skin of his cheek brushing the side of her face. ‘Better a kitcast shipwright than none at all. Long it’s been since we heard tell of your kind. There’s plenty you could do for me. A good trade, a fine trade, wind it tight with rope and salt and brass.’
He claps her amiably on the shoulder, inhaling deep, then coughs up something brown flicking the rag apologetically across his lips. ‘What else ee brought from belly of mountain? Stillbirths? Dead things?’ He fixes her with that bright gaze.
She holds his eyes for a second. Says nothing.
He smiles, sticky and yellow, laughs like a toad coughing up a stone. ‘No matter. No matter. We trade on the seen and the held. Leave the questions for the dreamers, eh? May they choke onthem.’ He pointedly scuffs the ash at the threshold, beckons with a leathery palm. ‘Come by, come by. I have drink yet. Slung from the white roots, will put a thick on your worries.’
Shipwright smiles and carefully crosses the threshold line, leaving it untouched, before flashing a quick sign back to Shroud.
A taste of meat on strange bones.
Her boots take her deeper into the belly of the homestead. It’s surprisingly spacious, with narrow, scalloped corridors opening out into wide domed rooms, fed by fires tucked into the wall like babes, decorated with twists of rushes and thin-slit curves of graceful, bog-bleached bone.
The first of these is a workroom, tools neatly stretched upon shelves, hung in pegs, by size, weight, blade. Jars and stoppers come next, honeycombed, sealed with black wax stamped with year, binding, sealant. Her host’s feet are steady, loping among the stones, sped by the gentle suck of air through the corridors as their looping shapes pull warmth down into the belly of the house, pushed along by the contrast of the bitter cold beyond the walls.
His feet are steady, but he runs a broad hand along each wall, tracing the spirals and curves. The stone is softened by carvings, hung with stitched sacks dyed bright with vegetable hues, recounting the old legends that had crawled and burrowed their way out from the memory of Luss and Rum, John a’Greenshoes, the Maid of Thriceflower, borrowed-Jim’s wending. As he relaxes, his chat becomes a low, easy thing, soft as a mole’s burr.
After the work room, there’s a kitchen, with cheeses stacked and rinded in one corner, shadowed by loops of dark bloody sausages. A drain basin is still scattered with sharpened cutting knives and the remains of the last lamb. There’s a bucket of hooves, teeth, fragments for charms. She spies brass stamps on some of the flagstones, worn grooves where one might shift and tilt them to allow access to the root-cellars below. Were there stills down there she wondered, waiting copper-necked and thirsty in the blackness, filling drop by drop? Were they waiting for the touch of a slow-grown finger, for something to push up into the warmth from below?
