Voice of the Fire, Alan Moore [year 2 reading books .TXT] 📗

my fancy to retrace his last steps through the laked grass.

In the flattened patch where he first grabs his foot and cries out lies a half-pulped bee, a smear of dangerous colour wiped across the print mark of his heel. Somewhere close in the grass my mother starts to low. Taste of my fingers, sour like metal, crammed into my mouth to stop the laughter.

Still the bird is singing. From its perch up in the high woods there it may look down and see me, see my mother and my father and the bee, though separate as we are amongst the grass we may not see each other. As in one flat picture it observes us, with the all of father’s death caught fast there in the bird’s jet eye.

The hag-queen wheezes something to her look-akins. They raise their great moon heads and watch me make my way towards the old man on his bed of sticks and feathers set below them there. Don’t meet their eye. Don’t seem afraid. The pack-dirt floor, arse-warm beneath my slow, unwilling feet.

A woman crouches by the pallet, gathering the Hob-man’s cloak of blackbird quills about his starved and naked shoulders, folding it to cover up the senseless decorations pricked upon his ribs, his sunken breast.

She’s big, this woman; man-boned at the hip and plain to look upon. Hair bound up all one lump atop her head, the colour of a baby’s turd, held with a spike of wood. Red cheeks. A flat face, long about the jaw and nothing clever in her she-ox eyes.

She’s past her child time, yet too young to be the old man’s mate. Another daughter, then? No. No, one son, one daughter, that is all they say to me, the girl and gateman both. What then? His sister, or his sister’s child? A slave? About her thick grey neck a piece of thin bronze, scratched with tear-shaped marks and hung on string twists in the tallow-light.

Now, at my drawing near she turns to look at me, a flat and stupid look that has no spark in it. Pay her no heed. The old man’s lying wrapped within his feather cloak, so that he looks like to some terrible black bird that has an old man’s head and feet. His eyes are closed as if the making of his say tires all the life from him. Him. Talk to him, the old man. He’s the one.

‘Father?’

My voice. It must sound more akin to hers, the girl who met with me upon the track. He may recall the way her mother speaks to him so long ago and know me as one come from other parts. Think. Try to think back how the girl speaks, there upon the river’s edge. ‘Do you go as far south as Bridge-in-Valley?’ ‘Do you like my fancy-beads?’ Her voice, more in the nose than in the gizzard like my own. Yes. Yes, that’s it. Now, call to him once more, but in the way the girl is speaking in my thoughts. And louder.

‘Father?’

Sunk in sockets deep and crumble-edged as earth-bear holes, his dye-stained lids creep back across the wet and yellowed balls below. One eye is green and black, like water in a stump. The other eye is white. Blind white.

He lies there, staring up at me, and slowly frowns. The markings crumple on his brow. Some of the needle-painted lines are spread about their edges with the ageing of his skin, become a faded smear of dirty blue, yet in their centre they are sharp. It is as if he has the markings made again from year to year, gouged deeper still to keep them clear and new. His green eye squints at me, his white at nothing. By his bed, the great slow woman squats to watch us, no more life within her face than is within a stone.

‘Father, it’s Usin.’ Trying to talk down through my nose, not from the throat.

‘It’s Usin. It’s your daughter.’

Your daughter trails her eel-chewed toes through river-bottom sand and dances off towards the sea. Her hair floats out and has the look of weed, more comely when it’s drowned.

She’s far beyond this place by now, tripping her slow dance through the night. Its steps are clumsy, rousing no man with the movement of her flesh, nor ever may again. Only the current holds her, fast against its stinking breast.

He stares at me. The long, unblinking silence holds and holds, and only now he speaks.

‘Hurna? Back to my hut now.’

Not to me. Although he stares the while into my eyes he does not speak to me but to the hulking, silent woman looking on. Her name is Hurna, then. Out of her crouch she rises, wearily unfolds her largeness, all without a word. She turns her back upon the bed of sticks then stoops to grasp the poles that thrust out from its head. She lifts. The smallest grunt escapes her, less from effort than her need to mark a task completed.

Having lifted up the old man to a tilt, not steep enough to tip him from his bed, she drags the litter off towards the roundhouse door, whereby the man with dyed and shaking hands still waits and watches us. The pallet leaves a pair of grooves behind it, scratched upon black dirt, and still the old man holds my eye even as he is dragged away, bound in his blackbird shroud.

‘Well? Are you coming, daughter?’

There! He speaks. He speaks to me and calls me daughter.

‘Coming, father. Does your woman need my help in dragging you?’

He makes a creaking sound. It comes to me that he is laughing.

‘Hurna? She is not my woman. All she does is wipe my arse and feed me, drag me here and there, and in return it is for me to suffer through her thoughts upon the spirit world and all her foolish gods.’

Her. Foolish. Gods. The words burst out between the shallow breaths. The woman pulls the litter,