Three Bags Full (14 page)

And in Melmoth’s story, it was bitterly cold.

13

Melmoth the Wanderer

Over stick and over stone, stick and stone, stick and stone, stone and bone, stone and bone, and bone, and bone, and bone
. Melmoth’s hooves hammered over the wintry ground. His heartbeat galloped on ahead of him.
Stick and stone.
The butcher’s dogs were howling. The carrion eater himself came behind them. Melmoth and Ritchfield called the butcher “carrion eater” because he smelled of death, and they thought he was too portly to kill anything for himself. But now it looked as if the butcher had joined the hunters after all, and Melmoth was running for his life.
Stone and bone, stone and bone.

“You wouldn’t dare,” Ritchfield had said, with all the superiority of the older twin. Melmoth just felt annoyed. He hadn’t thought to ask if Ritchfield himself would dare. It wasn’t about that, it wasn’t about any of the other sheep, it was only about him. Melmoth had stopped grazing. He turned his head and looked at the place where the countryside began to roll gently away from the meadow, hill after hill after hill. “I would dare,” he had said, looking straight at the derisive expression on Ritchfield’s face.

Stick and stone, stone and bone.
Melmoth couldn’t remember when and where he had learned these words. They were simply the right words. They helped him not to think of the carrion eater. Even the butcher didn’t matter. He just had to run on, over stick and over stone, with his legs flying and his breath steady. As long as he kept going, the butcher didn’t matter. But Melmoth’s breath wasn’t steady anymore. There was too much cold air outside, and too little warm air in his lungs.
Stone and bone. Stone and bone
, on and on forever.

“Three days and three nights,” Ritchfield had said, “or it doesn’t count.”

“No,” Melmoth had said. “Not three.”

Ritchfield snorted scornfully. “Or it doesn’t count. Any suckling lamb can spend a night lost in the fields. Or two.”

“Five,” said Melmoth. “I’ll be gone five days and five nights.” He enjoyed the sight of Ritchfield’s baffled sheepish face.

“Five days and five nights,” he sang, “five suns and five moons, five blackbirds and five nightingales.” He pranced around Ritchfield, kicking out in high spirits. For a moment Ritchfield looked worried. Then he let Melmoth’s good humor infect him. “Five blackbirds and five nightingales,” he sang too, and the next moment they were both romping merrily around the meadow. Neither of them thought for a second that anyone would go hunting Melmoth.

Over stick and over stone
. Most of all over stone. So many stones. And they didn’t make running any easier.

“Don’t catch a cold,” Ritchfield had said awkwardly. Melmoth flung his head proudly up. His eyes were sparkling. What did Ritchfield know about the dangers of being alone? Catching a cold was certainly not among them. Melmoth had thought about it for days, and had concluded that those dangers didn’t exist. Just fantasies. Nightmares dreamed up by frightened suckling lambs, horror stories told by anxious mother ewes. What did the sheep do in the flock? They grazed and rested. What would he do without a flock? Graze and rest, of course. Anything else was just imagination. There were no dangers. Not a single one.

Walls of rock. The moon had come out from behind clouds in the sky, and Melmoth could see rock walls flying past to the right and left of him. Not very high, but too high and too steep for a sheep.
Stick and stone, stone and bone.

Stone.

Now it was all over, and the walls of rock were closing around him into a cul-de-sac. He must climb those rocky walls. He must. There was a place that didn’t look quite so steep to his left. A collection of detritus, a natural ramp. Melmoth stumbled up it. Things went quite well at first, but then little stone falls came loose, kicked away by his hooves. It was like trying to run across falling rain. Impossible. The carrion eater seemed to sense it too. There was a terrible shout as he called off his dogs. They weren’t needed now. Footsteps shuffled through the silence. They shuffled fast. Melmoth was defeated. His fear was defeated too. In the last seconds of his life, Melmoth made up his mind to be a truly brave sheep. He would stand and face the butcher. Slowly and trembling, he climbed down the pebbly slope again.
Stone
…
and bone
…
stone and
…
bone
…
and
…

Bone.

A leg bone was sticking out of the pebbles he had dislodged in his flight. A bone inside a human leg.

Of course he had caught a cold after all, on the very first night, huddled into a prickly hawthorn hedge and hardly protected at all from the icy November wind. He hadn’t slept that night. He’d just listened to the sounds all around him and longed for day. Things were in fact better in daytime, now and then anyway. Melmoth had roamed the gray-green, wintry moorland with his nose dripping, cautiously nibbling at tufts of coarse grass.

Around midday he found himself on a hill that offered a very good view to a sheep with good eyesight. Melmoth had excellent eyesight, and he immediately turned it on the blue strip of sea on the horizon. He pretended it was to get his bearings; secretly he was looking for white woolly dots. But he saw nothing, not even a cloud in the sky, whichever way he looked. He was alone all the way to the horizon. A ridiculous feeling of euphoria crept down from his head into his legs, and he strained his eyes even more, so as to see even farther in his isolation. When the euphoria began turning to panic, Melmoth galloped away through the empty hills, zigzagging wildly.

He clambered cautiously over the human leg,
bone and stone
, until he had firm ground underfoot again. What a relief. Melmoth disappeared into the shadows at the foot of the pebbly mound and listened. The dogs were panting and the butcher was breathing hard.

“He’s in the old stone quarry,” said the butcher. “We’ve got him now.”

“Hmm,” said a familiar voice. “Hmm.”

Melmoth watched as two white clouds of light emerged from the darkness, saw the dogs’ hot, steaming breath and the massive deep black figure of the butcher. Melmoth was trembling but only with exhaustion. He heard everything, everything. The whining of the dogs and their slobbering heartbeats, the clink of moonlight on the cold ground, a night bird’s wings beating, even the velvety sound of the night itself slowly moving on. It was his fifth night—it should be the last.

The butcher had brought a light with him. Melmoth watched it darting around, climbing the rocky walls, coming closer and closer. The light hesitated for a moment at the foot of the pebbly ramp. Then it hopped its way up the slope, over stone and bone, without dislodging a single pebble. The light was a good hunter, leaping from the slope into the shadows, making straight for Melmoth. For a moment he stood blinking at the dazzling white. Then everything went black around him.

“Oh, shit!” said the butcher.

“What’s the matter? Has something happened to him?” asked George, who was lagging a little way behind the butcher. “I told you not to go chasing after him like that, not at night, not when he…” George fell silent for a moment.

Then he said, “Oh, shit!”

Forcing himself to open his eyes, Melmoth gradually succeeded in fending off the blackness again. Now he could see what had happened. The light had swung away from him once more. It had gone climbing the pebbly slope again, and had fastened on that solitary human leg bone. Only now did Melmoth realize how unlikely it was to find a human leg in this place. It was pointing to the night sky, pale and hairless and smelling of death.

The light began shaking. The butcher took a couple of steps back. Only the dogs were still showing any interest in Melmoth, who stood there in the shadow of the pebbly slope, breathing heavily.

“George?” said the butcher. His voice didn’t sound at all terrible now. “Do you think it would be a good idea to …to leave?”

George’s thin figure stood perfectly still in the dark. He shook his head.

“We’ve seen it. Not a pretty sight. I agree, I’d rather we’d just found Melmoth and nothing else, but it’s too late, we have to go through with it now. Shit!”

“Shit!” agreed the butcher. He had taken a step back. “Will you pull him out?” he asked.

George half turned to the butcher, and Melmoth could smell that he wasn’t angry anymore.

“Ham,” he said, “you’re a
butcher
. You do this kind of thing every day. Theoretically. I was hoping that you…”

“That’s different. Completely different. My God, George, this is a
body
.”

George shrugged. “Did you think you worked with some kind of fruit in your job?”

He climbed the slope, and more pebbles came away. He took his work gloves out of the pockets of his jacket and put them on. He pulled at the leg. A whole lot of pebbles came away as a large body made its way to the surface. Melmoth took a step back so that the stones wouldn’t hit his own legs.
Stone and bone
.

The butcher made a sound rather like a lamb suckling: a wet, smacking sound.

“It’s Weasel,” said the butcher. “Weasel McCarthy!”

George, who until now had been tugging grimly at the leg, looked down. A second leg had emerged beside it, topped by a thin torso, two thin arms, and a surprised, dead, weaselly face. The arms and legs were at odd angles.

“Stiff,” said George.

The butcher nodded. “After about eight hours. They have to be processed by then.” He clapped his hand awkwardly to his mouth, as if to catch back what he’d said out of the clear night air.

George shrugged his shoulders again. “McCarthy was always a bit stiff,” he said. Then they both looked as if they regretted having said anything.

The dogs were sniffing curiously at McCarthy. Melmoth could easily have made his escape at this point, but he was too tired. Listening to the velvety sound of night slipping away, he stood there in silence.

George bent over McCarthy.

“Well, not a natural death. Look at that, Ham.”

Ham nodded, but he didn’t come any closer.

“Suppose we just fetch the police?” he suggested.

George nodded. “If it was anyone else, yes, but not McCarthy. Think about it, Ham. There’s something very wrong here. And like I said, not a natural death.”

Melmoth couldn’t see anything unnatural about McCarthy. A number of small wounds on the upper part of his body and his arms, some of them harmless, not much more than bruises. But there were some sharp stab wounds too, looking as if a knife had made them. The fatal injury was probably the one on the head, where thick, cold blood covered greasy hair. All perfectly natural.

“I can’t see enough here! Give us a bit more light, Ham, will you? Over here, not back there!” George sounded annoyed.

“You’re standing in the way,” said Ham. “I can’t shine the light through you. Move aside.”

“I can’t move aside!”

That was true. George was in the middle of the narrow slope, the only place where a big Two Legs like him had room to stand without falling over.

“Then he’ll have to come down here!” panted the butcher. “There’s nothing else for it.”

George tried to pull McCarthy out of the heap of stones, but the body’s stiff limbs resisted. George turned to Ham. “Don’t just stand there, do something!”

The butcher sighed. He took George’s gloves, put them on his huge butcher’s paws as best he could, and climbed up the pebbly slope. A great many pebbles rolled down. He took hold of the corpse by one foreleg and one hind leg, with an expert grip, and heaved it up and then down to George’s feet with a single movement. For a moment, the butcher moved as elegantly as a seal in the water. Something heavy clattered over the stones behind McCarthy.

“Here.” The butcher pointed to the back of McCarthy’s head. “Blow on the back of the head. With that, I guess.” The butcher pointed to the thing that had clattered down after McCarthy. Melmoth cautiously searched the air for its scent—just a spade, the kind George used in his vegetable garden.