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A meal half-eaten. Corn querns, smooth and new, left stacked against a wall. The black flies on a haunch of lamb; their small, vile murmurings as loud as men. The curtain of a jakes not long since used hung open, dried leaves in a hand-full there untouched beside the reeking hole. From the untended, dwindling fires great gouts of smoke would roll across the trackways where I walked, so that these things were briefly glimpsed, then gone, as in a dream. The hole in Jemmer Pickey’s roof he’d sworn to mend since winter last. An old man’s sun-hat floating in a puddle. Washerwomen’s rocks, still cowled with long-dry clothing. Here a solitary footprint. There a pool of sick.
Outside our hut, my bo
y had failed to clear away a game that he had lately taken to, involving little men-in-kind I’d carved for him from pebbles. Set as for a hunt, he had them spread across the open door and ringed about some animal he’d fashioned out of sticks. I thought perhaps it was a wolf. Stepping across this small, abandoned slaughter, I decided that he must be scolded, though not hard, for leaving all his nonsense strewn so carelessly about.
The hut was dark. My little girl was sitting in the shadows on its furthest side. I spoke some words that I cannot recall to her and, stepping forward, saw that she was nothing but a pile of furs that for a moment in the dark had seemed to hold her shape, sat there with knees drawn up, her head tipped back the way she sometimes held it. Only fur. The hut was empty. For a moment all I did was stand there in the gloom; the silence. Nothing happened. I went back outside, stepping across my son’s abandoned game with care, so that he should not find it spoiled when he returned.
Across the silent willage to the west the sun was drowning in a purple cloud. I cupped my hands around my mouth and yelled hello. I heard it echo on the empty beast-pen’s curving wall and then, after a moment, called again. The yawning huts did not reply. Their quiet seemed uneasy, just as if there were some awful news they could not bring themselves to share with me. I called again, while dusk fell all about.
After a while, I sat down in the middle of the man-shaped stones set in a ring outside our door. I picked one up and looked at it. No bigger than my thumb, it bulged at top and bottom, narrow in the middle that it might suggest a neck. I’d scratched the likeness of a face there on the smaller, upper bulge. I’d meant to make him smile but, turning it to catch the failing light, could see that I’d been clumsy with my awl, so that it seemed as if he were instead forever shouting something with great urgency, forever beyond hearing.
As I touched the stone I took a fancy that it was still warm from my son’s hand and raised it to my nose that I might smell him on it. Reason left me then. I put the pebble in my mouth and I began to weep.
Crane-legged, I step downstream now, careful not to let the current rush me on too fast. Above the sourness of the ram’s wool on my tongue it is as if I taste that pebble yet. I hurry on, that I might be beside my newest wife and young before I am quite overcome by memory.
I sat there in the ring of pebbles all that night. Sometimes I wept and moaned. Sometimes I sang a little of the journey-boy. With dawn, I stood and walked back through the empty willage. All the fires were down to cold grey dust, and for a while I played a sorry game where I imagined everyone was but asleep, about to rouse and stretch and stagger cursing, joking, out into the waking day, but no one came.
I went back through the gates and next walked once and once again about the outside of the camp. There were no footprints there, nor any flattened weeds as where a tribe of many families had fled downhill, or where as many foemen had crept up. Save for the ash-scarred turf in Garnsmith’s Forge, a burn no more than half a man in width, there was no sign of fire, and neither was there any mark of wolves or, saving for the vomit in the street, of sudden plague.
I stumbled to the bottom of the hill and circled all about its base, then walked back up. Making my way back through the silence to my family’s hut, I crawled inside to sit. I saw, with rising anger, that my wife had left her cast-off clothing thrown about the floor, a lazy habit on behalf of which I’d often scolded her. Cursing her slothful ways beneath my breath, I crawled about upon my knees and gathered up the scattered rags.
Her breeches smelled of her. I raised them to my lips and kissed them; sank my face deep into them where it was stale, and rank, and good. My will grew stiff beneath my breeks, so that I reached to pull it free then rubbed my hand upon it, wildly back and forth. The milk splashed through my fingers, fell in beads upon a mat of grass our daughter made. No sooner had the spasm passed than I began to weep once more, my seed grown thick and cold upon my palm.
After the tears, there came a sudden and enormous dread, so that I could not breathe. I ran out from the hut. I ran out from the willage and away downhill, my limp will flapping as I ran and slipped and stumbled. When I reached the bottom I dare not look back, for there was something terrible about those mute and clustered rooftops, that dead skyline. I ran on, sobbing and gasping, on across the fields, a groundfog blur of seeding dandelions about my feet, and did not stop until I reached the riversider’s settlement a little after noon.
I raved at them, and asked if a great many people had passed by this way of late; if there had been some dire catastrophe; if there had been an omen in the stars. They stared, and called their children back inside ‘til I’d passed on. I shouted at the closing doors and told them that the people from the hill camp were all gone, but if they understood me, they did not believe. When I would not be quiet, a big man with a hare-lip grabbed me by my arm and dragged me to the outskirts, where he cast me in the dirt and said that I should go and not return, his gruff words smearing on his palate’s cleft.
I had nowhere to go, save for the Drownings.
I reclaimed my spot beside the river just as darkness fell. My hide was still intact where I had left it, with the robe of rushes rolled inside. Upon my belly, I crawled in and pulled my bird-cloak up to cover me, and there I slept, all of that night and all the next day as one dead beneath the swollen, pregnant grave that was my hide. There never was a time when I was more alone.
I’ve lived here in the Drownings ever since, and in that time have found another family, another Salka, and I am alone no more, nor maddened with bewilderment and grief.
I see them now, ahead of me, sat resting on the bank down where the river curves; lengthen my step that I may be upon them sooner, striding through the eddies, stalking down the shallow and cascading steps where slippery mosses drift like banners in the flow. I have not taken off my stilts for many moons, and there are sores upon my water-wrinkled legs.
Salka lifts up her head to watch as I approach, alerted by my splashing. Soon, the little ones are looking also as I rush towards them, teetering, precarious and eager for their consolation, falling forward more than running now. I lift my arms as if in an embrace that’s big enough to span the distance yet between us, feathered rushes hanging in loose, flapping folds below, like great green wings. I call out to them through the warped flute of my beak. I tell them that I love them. Tell them that I’ll never go away.
My voice is cracked and hideous. It startles them. As one, amidst a mighty beating, they rise up into the darkening sky and, in a moment, they are gone from sight.
The Head of Diocletian
Post AD 290
My teeth hurt.
Standing here beyond the margins of the village there is only night; the hollow yawning of November wind across cold, furrowed earth; a dark that swallows utterly, so that I cannot tell where darkness ends and I begin. The tin-sharp soreness in my gums is all I have to tell me where I am, and I am almost glad of it out here amongst the black fields, where the damp wind cuts my cheek.
I have been staring at this void so long my eyes are watering, unable to distinguish between sky and landscape; near and far. Worse yet, this is the second night I have subjected my complaining lungs to this ordeal, this vigil out here in the miserable chill before the winter comes. All for the sake of some half-witted local yarn, the fancy of a farmer’s boy with eyes so close together he seemed bred out of a pig.
Still, for all that, he answered when I spoke to him. He did not make pretence at inability to comprehend my tongue, or simply spit and turn away as have the other villagers, though all he said was antic mysteries, fantastical accounts of walking spirits: on a hill, not far from here and up past the cremation fields, there is an ancient camp, hundreds of years of grass and weed above its ditches and its ramps. A settlement, he said. Score upon score of people who one night, according to the tale, were quite devoured by giant dogs with neither hair nor drop of blood to mark that they were ever there. As is the custom with such histories, the place has ever since been shunned, afflicted by ill reputation. There are spectres, naturally. On certain nights the fiery eyes of monstrous hounds may yet be seen atop the hill, their awful gaze enough to light the sky. I’m watching for them now, but there is nothing.
Off behind me in the village, distant voices, quarrelling at first, then laughing. Foul and careless oaths. The hateful braying of their women, coarse, insinuating. Is it me? Stood here, out in the bluster and the tarry dark for no more reason than the village fool sees light upon a hill-top? Is it me, the source of all their scorn, their noisy ribaldry? My teeth are screaming. Soon. A moment more then I’ll give up the night, make for the tavern; bed; my bad, louse-worried dreams.
Robbed of my range and bearings by the dark, the sudden flare of low cloud lit from underneath seems closer than it should, before my face rather than off across the fields. Its shadows lurch and flicker, make as if to leap towards me so that I step back unnerved and almost fall before my tired eyes have the measure of it.
Lights. Up there beyond the burning grounds where they reduce their dead to ash and cinder. Lights upon the hill, not cast by dogs unless they walk upon two legs.
I have them.
