The Gift of Stones (16 page)

“Clear off,” my cousin said, to laughter all around.

“And what about the apples and the bread you paid?”

“There were no apples and no bread,” my cousin told the merchants who sat there.

“Then we are quits,” my mother said. “No pay, no play.”

All eyes – with every eyebrow raised – were now upon my cousin. They understood the tangle he was in. They saw the woman loop and tie the knots that bound him.

At last he said, “Her head’s a mushroom. She’s quite mad.” And then; “My family has been kind to her. We let her load the sled and bring us flint. We give her bread and apples for her child. For all that she’s a numskull and a clod we treat her better than a sister …”

That one word “sister” made the merchants honk. They were as merry as a swarm of grigs. The lack of clients and of trade had made them indiscreet and playful. For them my cousin, self-impaled and writhing like a half-hooked eel, was an entertainment and an excuse for jollity and smut. So when he seized the nearest object to his hand – a leather purse – and threw it after Doe, the merchants doubled up with guffaws and with stitch. And when the purse – so inexpertly thrown – merely looped and curled into the wind and fell a child’s length from my cousin’s feet, some men there wondered if their sides would hold and whether this was laughter or a fit.

For once, my Doe felt warm and welcome with these men. Her laughter was as loud as theirs. Her face was flushed and happy. They called out to her, “Good for you,” and, “Well said, sister!”

Their approbation was a sign for her to leave. She left my cousin there and, rather than retrace her steps and unravel the good humour she had woven for herself and them, she continued to that private place, the long grass on the headland beyond Leaf ’s home.

You’ve heard before how, from above, the beach viewed from the clifftop is a world that’s upside down. Its gulls have backs. You’re looking down on wind. So Doe looked down on wind, and on the mirror pools which were as blue or cloudy as the passing sky. The tide was pulling back. Each wave was more tremulous and more distant than the one which went before. The sand was beating back the sea.

You can imagine what it was that summoned Doe down from her private place. The seashore is a lure for those with time upon their hands. Who can resist the bribe and charm of shells or sand or pebble-stones? Only stoneys, it would seem, too occupied with work and trade to savour all the smells and flavours of the beach.

And so my story places her right at the water’s edge. The sun was on her back, the wind was in her face. Her feet were bare. She dug her toes into the sand. And then she must have felt the shiver of a living thing beneath her feet. She curled her toes and pulled it out. It was a scallop, taking refuge from the light. She tried again with both feet now. She must have looked as if she wished to fight the wind by gripping to the shore with toes. Quite soon she found that if she stood exactly where the tide gave way to sand, the scallops, slamming shut their wings, threw out a jet of water which marked exactly where they hid. She collected for herself a dozen scallops, as many shells as she could hold and still climb up the rocks to reach the village path. She wondered at the comments she would get when she marched through the marketplace enriched by scallops and by sea.

She did not reach the marketplace, despite the orders of the wind which spat and whispered at her back, “Go home. Go home.” She heard the thunder of the horses before she reached Leaf’s house. She knew enough of horsemen to retreat. She stepped into the bracken and sat down. She placed her scallops on the ground. She heard the cries and curses of the merchants as the troop of horsemen hurtled through, knocking men and merchandise aside. She heard the snapping heather as the horsemen passed Leaf’s house and turned towards the coast. She felt as fragile as a plover’s egg, abandoned on the ground. She saw herself turned into porridge by a hundred hooves. She stood up in the bracken and waved her arms to warn the horsemen she was there. One rider, alarmed perhaps by what he took to be a sudden threat, found time to pause and draw an arrow in his bow. He welcomed the excuse to let it loose, this sharp and shiny leaf, this bronze. She saw him and she turned her back to flee. His arrow was more swift than her. It caught her and she fell.

Or else? Or else the scallops were not hers but found by someone else. A man. My cousin, let us say. Who can tell what brought him to the beach, the morning of the day she died? Of all my cousins he was the truant one. He was the one most ill at ease with brothers and with work. Perhaps that now there was less work to do and little food from trade, he thought he’d try his luck at my one skill – not telling tales but hunting with my toes. No doubt – a stoney to his heart – he will have felt forlorn upon the beach, exposed, and bored, and cold. It would have seemed to him a damp and dirty task to unearth scallops and, once his sling was full, we can imagine how he fled the sea and sand for the order of the village.

His first thought was to take the scallops home, but they would spread too thinly if he shared. If he could have found an unattended fire he would have baked them for himself. Such scallops, after all, would make a change from bread and apples and dry meat. And then his second thought was this: he’d take the scallops to the woman on the hill. For once she would not make a fool of him. For scallops she would do what she was told.

He found the woman and her girl half asleep and sheltered in the clumsy cave of stones and wood that they called home. She seemed more flimsy than she’d been when she’d survived by sledding stone. She told the girl to wait and pointed to the bracken a few paces downwind from the path.

“Let’s go there,” she said and held her hand out for the sling of shells which he had promised her.

“Afterwards,” he said. He felt triumphant and in charge. He knew how hungry she must be. Her eagerness for him and them would fade as soon as his fresh and salty bribe changed hands. He gripped the sling and pulled Doe to the ground.

That would have been the end of that. My cousin would not be the patient, careful sort. His passion was short-lived. Except the girl was calling, “Doe,” and whimpering.

“Stay there. I won’t be long,” her mother called.

“Can I go, too?”

My cousin found it hard to concentrate when the woman he had bought was shouting conversations in the wind. He pulled my mother to her feet. “Come on,” he said. “I know a private place.”

She went with him because she had the scallops on her mind. He said, “I’ll walk ahead. You follow me.”

He led her through the village and across the market green. The stoneys and the merchants were too preoccupied with worries of their own to pay attention to my cousin or to Doe. All kinds of people passed by them. Why should they notice who went where with whom? You can’t sell gossip – gossip’s free.

When they had passed the moss-packed walls of Leaf’s stone house my cousin paused for Doe to take his hand. It would have seemed a touching sight for simpletons, the awkward, blushing man, the meagre Doe, the fragrance of the bracken and romance. The stoneys seldom passed by here. They were not fond of cliffs or sea. And so my cousin felt emboldened by their privacy. He did not understand what she was trading for his shells. He thought he’d purchased her affection with his trophies from the beach. He thought each scallop would secure a kiss from Doe. He made a nuisance of himself.

“Come on,” she said. “Let’s not waste time. You’ve brought me all this way and I’ve a daughter waiting for me and for food.”

Doe led the way into the bracken and – that painful, reminiscent lifting of her smock – she stood ready to receive my cousin and his shells. She might have been upon the heath once more. Her thighs were punctured water bags. Her breasts were flat. Her face was reddening with hidden sores. Her eyes were beaten and appalled at the prospect of her task which made of her both the trader and the labourer. She was the merchandise as well. My cousin’s role was more clear. His clothes were off and he was holding Doe as if she were as light and worthless as a shock of reeds.

They should have hidden when they heard the horsemen come, but Doe could not distinguish cry from cry or heartbeats from hooves. It was too late to hide once the troop of riders had reached the clifftop path beyond Leaf’s walls and turned their horses. They had been seen, two nearly naked bodies, standing waist high in bracken. Who knows what mischief made one rider pause and loose one arrow at my cousin and at Doe? It was the kind of mischief that makes men kick down toadstools or snub a passing beetle with their thumb. Those chance-encountered things – untouched – seem far too innocent, insubstantial, perfect, to pass and leave unscathed. It must have seemed too good a chance to miss – the prospect of dividing those two lovers by the sea.

The arrow’s flight was even and too swift for Doe to move or sink. She simply joined my cousin in his panic as he twisted her around to shield his naked flesh with hers. The bronze and shiny leaf was like a yellow-throated diver when it hit her skin, the point its beak, her flesh the sea, its fish the kidney in the woman’s back. Its impact was as neat and light as those which open up a flint to show the blade within.

The rider did not wait to see what damage he had done. His horse was separated from the rest and he must give pursuit. Nor did my cousin wait to see. He dropped the scallops, turned and ran. For all he knew the horseman would return to put an end to him. You cannot blame him for his flight. But what he should have done was this. He should have run straight to the market green and told his neighbours there about the woman and her wound. They could have armed themselves with sticks and come to take her home. But he said nothing. He just ran, by routes which took him to his house avoiding stoneys and the market green. He hoped her wound was only slight, that he would spot her, once again, outside her hillside home. What was the point, he asked himself, of letting all the world into the secret of his trade with Doe when she was only scratched or bruised or shocked? When it was dark he’d climb up to her house to check that she was well.

She fell onto the bracken with a pain which came in waves like childbirth. She fell onto the arrow and snapped the shaft and drove the head more deeply in. She was unconscious fairly soon, with shock, fatigue and pain. What were her dreams? We’ll never know. Her face was pale. The earth was damp and dark with blood.

Or else she did not die just then. Or else she did not die like that. The gossip on the green was this, that I’d been spotted on that day. I’d been along the cliffs and come back to the village with my bag full-gutted with the free food of the coast. Who knows what else I hid inside my bag? An arrowhead, perhaps?

Anyone that saw me then, they said, would wonder at the luck and skill which brought the one-armed man through thickets, over rocks, without a wound or fall. I had a purpose. What it was they could not guess. But there was a saying, the agile and the speedy ram is the one with sheep in view. My sheep was Doe. How well they could remember that first night when I had brought the woman and her girl to the village. The refugees had slept, exhausted by the walk, while I had told my cousins and their friends the story of Doe’s life. They’d fled before the tale was done, both bored and irritated by the passion and the anger in my voice. My ailment was too clear. I was besotted with the skinny woman from the heath. It did not take a sage to see that love like mine – belittled, spurned – would turn to poison once the object of that love became the willing consort of all men but me. The gossip made a killer out of me. It seems the stoneys hadn’t got enough to do – already they were telling stories of their own.

So let me pick their story up. They’ve left it as a rough and ready core. The craftsman in me wants to strike it softly here and there, to give it shape and symmetry, to hone and burnish it. Imagine, then, that I’ve been telling lies. I found fresh samphire for Doe’s gift not on the heath but much nearer to the village. It flourished on a stream bank where a shallow valley joined the coast. It was where I’d lit the fire with hair. I picked the samphire and found, too, a colony of scallops in the tidal sand. My bag was full. I had no other tasks. Besides, the fresh hoof-marks in the mud and sand were warnings that there were horsemen close. There were the embers of a second fire, some flattened grass, some rabbit bones, a broken arrow shaft with the smoothest, lightest head which was not stone. That, too, I put inside my bag. I was unnerved by what I found. I hurried home. And so I returned to the village in the early afternoon and not at night as I have said.

Remember what my plan had been? I’d take the scallops and the samphire to Doe’s house. I was as hollow and as brittle as a blown egg with jealousy. I’d stand outside and call, “Doe, Doe, sweet Doe.” And when she came? I’d pay. I’d fall down on my knees. I’d throw her samphire as a gift. I’d be as giddy as a goat. I could invent a thousand reconciliations.

Instead, I heard the sound of calling in the bracken which stood between the sea and Leaf.

“Come on,” she said. “Let’s not waste time.” It was Doe’s voice. And the man that she addressed was my sheepish cousin. He seemed less sheepish for a while. He was shedding clothes as if they were alive and venomous. The Doe I saw was just the same as that first sight upon the heath when she had offered shelter from the rain and we had dined on slott. That was the day I pulled that first and modest screen of grass across my tale. If I’d been wise I would have let the bracken and the grass provide another screen. I should have shut my eyes and ears or run down to the shore. But jealousy is like a moth – it seeks the brightest flame.

I was close enough to see her buttocks and her back, to watch her smock rise up, to witness cousin – erect and tremulous – enclose her in his arms. What might I have done had not the troop of horsemen passed close by? Thrown scallop shells, perhaps? Or crept away? Or strode into the clearing they had made and, with my one arm round Doe’s waist, have said, “This woman’s mine, not yours. I found her on the heath. I brought her here. Who said that you could take my Doe?” Then I might have struck my cousin on his mouth like some possessive stoney beaten to a flint. And he – the soft and cheerful sort – would have simply turned and fled.