Red Spikes (18 page)

A woman sat on a mat under a shade-cloth, facing out to sea and sky.

‘Greetings!’ Mummarn called out.

The woman turned. She didn’t greet us back, and her face didn’t change. She stood and took off her shawl. She was big and hale. Her flat breasts hung nearly to the top of her skirt, and were fastened against her body with a woven band.

She came to us. Mummarn gave her two big pearls and a blue-stone club. The woman put these under her sitting-mat. She unlashed the reel’s handle from the frame and began to wind in the twine.

Mummarn led me to the shade-cloth. We sat on the matting and divided our food into three, leaving a third for the winding-woman. Then we ate every bulb and dumpling, every scrap of the meat of our shares. When we had finished I felt not so dizzy, not so liable to stagger off the cliff by mistake. ‘Ah, I needed that.’ I tied the bones up in the cloth to take back to Charger and Liklik.

The woman wound; the shape at the end of the twine steered slowly towards us. Mummarn started crying again, quietly. I wrapped my arms and legs around her.

At first I thought the house had grown larger, unfolded or exploded from the strain of the wind. But then – I held Mummarn tighter, and she cried harder as if I were squeezing the tears out of her – I saw that this was not the pearly-coated paper on the whipwood frame that had been loosed into the sky this morning for the first time since Mummarn started me watching many months ago. This was something else completely.

‘So beautiful!’ said Mummarn, clearing her eyes of tears again.

‘It’s so bright, it hurts to look.’ It grew and grew. I was afraid of it. I tried instead to watch the muscles of the winding-woman’s back, but the thing on the line pulled my eyes back to it, growing towards us and shining.

It was bigger than all our village buildings together, including the lunghouse. Thick-bodied, it was, special-fleshed to live in the heights of the sky. It was a giant white fish, but it had less shape than a fish; it was a huge worm, but hollow, and more complicated. Its head was all mouth, open and drinking in air. Long fins streamed from its body, striped like a fan-fish’s, and it was these, blown against the creature’s flesh then freeing themselves to catch the wind, that made its coming-and-going song, on many notes like a chorus of widows’ voices.

‘It’s just like Widow Hogtie’s bags,’ I whispered to Mummarn. ‘Those bags she weaves, that she won’t let us use for carrying.’

‘And now you see why,’ said Mummarn. She took up her offering-bundle, and I let go of her except for one fold of her skirt cloth.

The winding-woman looked small now, dark and compact and thick-muscled against the thing’s glow. She wound more slowly. The clifftop grass bent and flattened beneath the settling creature. The wind rushed in the mouth. The body was a shining hall, white and the tiniest bit pink, ribbed like the roof of a mouth, or of a lunghouse.

‘But it’s cleaner,’ I said. ‘And thinner. Widow Hogtie’s bags are all hoary and scabby and baggy, beside this.’

The woman went about, tossing ropes over the creature, tying them to wooden pegs in the grasses.

‘Look how wide of the god she has to go, to reach those posts,’ said Mummarn. ‘Look how much rope is left over. What have we come to? It’s hardly more than bait itself.’

Now the winding-woman hammered two bentwood brackets into the earth through the creature’s lip. Now she stepped into the mouth, and brought out an armful of white-streaked jelly-flesh such as the fins were made of, and spread it out on the grass to make a glossy mat over the flattened lip and into the interior. Now she stood aside and looked at us with her imperturbable face.

I had never stepped inside a landed god before. It is not like walking into an ordinary house, or even into an ordinary whale. But it is how I found out what I was. Entering that hall was the first step to my becoming.

It was cold in there, as cold as the deepest sea to which I have ever dived. Colder. The flesh we walked on, the streaked, finny jelly-flesh, was cold, and the breath that moved over it chilled everything inside.

It was hooked just like a fish, the twine pressed into its lip, the hook buried in its cheek, running with pink water. But it didn’t gasp and throw itself about, not at all.

We walked right in, with care and slowly, stepping over bands of cartilage. My feet sank a little in the aching-cold, cushiony flesh. All my tiredness went from me. All my
life
, my small life, was blown clean out of me by the god’s breath, and I walked along as empty as a shell on the beach with the wind whistling through it.

Deep inside, in a small, padded room where the light was dimmer and more purple, we found the house. The god’s digestion had crushed it flat and round, its surface creased, shiny like pearl-shell, with splinters of whipwood pressed into it. It sat half buried in the floor-flesh like an altar stone in a mound of earth.

I tucked myself out of the worst of the wind, against the wall next to the round doorway. Mummarn went forward and crouched beside the altar. She untied her bundle and took out two little drawstring leather bags. She laid them on the house-altar, and sat back on her haunches.

‘I never thought this day would come!’ she said. ‘The day of my last hope, and all that will come to hear me is some tiddler, dragged in on a baited string. Times were, my grandmother would call your elders out of the sea-depths or the sky-heights, and they would crowd like schools of fish and flocks of birds, turning and singing at her command.’

Mummarn spat angrily, and the floor flinched under her spittle. Out over the sea the god’s tail end snapped in the wind, and its body boomed around us. I pressed myself into the cold wall padding. All I had ever done before today was play, and do the bidding of my Mummarn, or my brothers, or whatever widow was near. The only creatures I ever commanded were the dogs, and Valla had taught me that. I had never learned anything by myself; I had never taught myself anything.

But now . . . now I knew. My bones knew; my hands, spread into the damp wall, knew, and the cold, sunken back of my head. How did I know, and Mummarn
not
know? How could I be so little, and yet so sure, that this was not the way, that she was going about it all wrong?

Mummarn went on, ‘We must make do, I suppose, with this baby god, with this forced messenger. You’re all we have. This is my daughter Currija, and we’ve come because tonight the pallor-men are coming, and they will take away our last menfolk, my baby boys Valla and Brava, to make Church-men of them. Here in this bag are Brava’s hair and nail-cuttings, burnt and the ashes consecrated according to the old rites, as near as possible. This bag holds Valla’s. And here are the boys themselves.’

She laid on the altar two little grass dolls with staring stone eyes and shell mouths. It was the first time I had ever seen such figures.

‘Keep them safe and stop them forgetting. Tell your elders that’s what I want. If they ever come back and can’t speak to their mother or their sister in their own tongue; if they ever turn their nose up at a good meal of bulb and lily root and sweet white fish; if they look up in the sky at night and see only that one-true nonsense instead of all our gods painted there in white dots clear as clear the way I’ve shown them, I will have something to say about it. I will want answers from you, do you hear?’

A wave thundered into the cliff-base; I felt it in my feet and in the flesh around me. The dolls stared up into the noise. Some of this was right. The dolls were right, and the bags; I felt that the words of her prayer, they followed the right kind of pattern. But they were not said, they were not
sung
, in a way that this thing would hear them. You only had to listen to the streaming finny music, to the throaty rushing all about us sucking the warmth from our bodies, to know that. The words had to be made part of the song already there, not tossed like so many pebbles at a target, some missing, some hitting. It was amazing to me that Mummarn would be so careless. And I was frightened to find, inside my body – which was only for playing and running and fetching things, after all – this cold-minded person who
just knew
.

‘And this,’ said Mummarn. ‘You know I’m already angry about this one. I was angry last time, remember? And now I’m sending my sons after him – almost as if you weren’t there! Whose business can be so much more important? These are the people of my heart and blood!’ And she laid down a bigger doll, with tattoos sewn in pale fibres around his shell mouth and across his chest.

‘This one, Arrowman, he’s so long gone, I hardly remember even what he looks like. If a grass doll walked into my house with these tattoos, I’d think it was Arrowman; I’d run up and embrace him . . .’

She pressed her thumb to one eye, her finger to the other. Tears squeezed out and rolled down.

She wiped her face on her hand and her hand on her skirt. ‘I know you must be so busy, because the work of a lot of the other gods has fallen to you. You used to only have to look after old sad widows, the people who lived in caves and hermit-huts. You used to have a quiet life.

‘But look at me! Do you think I’m lying in a hammock drinking nectar all day? I’m trying to be the man as well as the mother of our house. I’m running around the village, getting as much men’s business out of all our brains, so that I can tell my sons. I’m making Widow Smite teach them all the fighting she used to know – and getting
her
out of her hammock is a day’s work just for one. We’ve all got to take on extra, with what happened; you can’t expect to have it as easy as before.’

She was trying to bargain with it? How could she think that
that
would work? How did she think her own doings had anything to do with this thing’s sky-life? There was no way to sing what she was saying so that it would matter to any god.

She rearranged my father into the middle of the altar, Valla and his bag on one side and Brava and his on the other.

‘Last of all, this is not an offering but an introduction. My daughter Currija here, she’s coming up to full womanhood soon. I don’t know what will be left to her but childless solitude if you don’t act soon, but what I’m saying is, I want you to listen to her. She’s blameless; she’s always done everything right, the way she was told. There’s nothing in her to offend you gods, so you take heed of her and stand by her. Whenever she sees this house, she’ll come and make offering just like today, and you listen. She’s a sensible girl; she knows what needs doing; she’ll tell you right.’

The singing wavered with the wind, then was steady again. The god was not listening; it had not heard. It was very young and wild; it hadn’t a single scar on it. It did not even know we were here.

Mummarn waved me forward.
No, you’re wrong,
I almost said.
We don’t stand in the middle and throw pebble-words;
we press ourselves into the walls, and listen, and sing.
But she looked so tired and cross with me and, as I said, all I had ever done before was obey her.

We stood like totem posts on the soft unsteady floor. She made me raise my arms like her.

‘All my words and offerings,’ she said loudly, ‘please take them up into the sky. Put them before all the gods’ eyes; pour them into their ears. Move or stay your hands as I’ve asked, in the name of these following ancients, which I and Currija will recite together.’

She nodded to me, and we began. It was clumsy and fruitless; the words fell dead against the walls, when all around us was the rushing breath, any note of which we might have used, and also, outside that noise, the softer singing of the fins, in which we might have tangled our pleas. I closed my eyes and tried to slow down Mummarn’s gabbling with my own chant, tried to sneak a little song into the sound.

She slapped my upstretched hand with hers. But just before she did, the god heard me. The god’s attention fluttered towards me, cold as cold, there as quick as a stroke of lightning, then gone again with her slap. And huge! What concerns! For the sky, it looks like a flat shell, with sun and moon and stars crawling across its blue or its blackness, but in fact it goes on and on, forever upward the way some parts of the sea go forever down. I knew I was right in my singing, I knew I had done the right thing; still, I was glad of Mummarn’s slap, for bringing me back from those heights, for knocking me out of the god’s mind. I didn’t know what to do with so much knowledge.

‘You would’ve thought she was proud as proud, handing over those boys,’ said Widow Hogtie softly.

‘She held her head up,’ Widow Longhair agreed. ‘She held her back very straight.’

I sat on the hammock between them. The moon shone down; the house behind us was silent for the moment.

‘She looked like a chief, I thought. You can be proud of your mother, Currija. This . . .’ Hogtie tipped her head towards the house. ‘This is all right, with only us to see it. But you don’t want others to see you weeping and breaking.’

‘Oh, no,’ said Longhair.

‘You don’t want to be begging at those Church-men’s knees.’

‘No, all they do is slap you away. Very hard to recover from.’