Bitterhall, Helen McClory [red queen free ebook TXT] 📗

‘I’m there,’ I said. ‘Consider me there.’

‘I’ll send you the theme later.’ He said. We stood. He hugged me, gave a surprised look, then was gone.

Skin

A book of religious poems is made; it begins with skin. In the meadow a thousand years ago, a herd of nine red yearlings are drawn away from their mothers by a man in a smock, calling, bearing an armful of sweet hay. Tails beat the air as they trot. It’s raining lightly on another island; the rain will be on this one soon. The drover lures his nine red cows over the meadow to a low stone-ringed field. His youngest, a girl, slaps their flanks – dusty with pollen, the soft red fur quivers – through the gate one by one, towards the cutting stone. His eldest boy looks up, just a moment, from sharpening the knife on a long black strop. The clouds come in. His sister wipes her wet hands on her own sides, and looks about for how to begin.

The vellum is cured at the hands of skilled workers on the sacred island from the raw calf skin, which is of high quality, and soft. The book is one made to order, Old English text copied from Old English text, illustrations chosen by the buyer and inserted as miniatures, ornate with pleasing details of flowers or fruits common to this area of the world. It takes a team of scribes and illustrators working together for months to make it as perfect as they are, in their effort, able to. One side of the vellum was the outer-facing part, where the hairs grew on the body of the calf. The other side faced inwards, against the flesh of an animal that once fed and walked, lived. It is high quality; nevertheless there are imperfections, raised veins, a stippledness on a few parts. They write on this skin, dead skin, the scribes and illustrators, the edges of their hands rest on it, skin against skin, the points of their tools mark where the borders within which the writing or pictures must lie. They tire; they rub their faces and touch this dead skin, which doesn’t feel them back. The penmanship is beautiful, showing only small variations between the characters of the men who write it, their moods for the day, the light they had to see by, the temperature that cramped a finger or caused a momentary distraction in the line. Behind the flyleaf are hidden little ink marks made by one writer or another, testing out a new quill, writing their initials or a corded flower on a stem. Such small things to last so long in secret. The flyleaf is sealed away against the leather binding, until such time as the method of sealing fails.

The book is finished and the buyer takes it home. The buyer’s family cherish it, then, over generations, slowly forget it. A candle burning too closely to a library shelf smokes a line across the cover. Its spine crackles like a fire when opened. Fashions change; the buyer’s entire family are killed on the wrong side of a war. There are innumerable wars, it is a miracle it has stayed so long in the one family, until now. The book goes to a soldier’s house. The soldier’s son practices his letters under the image of the Virgin, piety towards her belonging to the old religion. He draws a horse shitting and a portrait of himself as a soldier. His brother draws a boat. The soldier’s grandson, hard up, sells the book. The buyer sells it on. The buyer sells it on. The buyer dies and his estate sells it on. The book is lost, recovered, sold on. No one has opened the book to read its poems with the devotional attention for which it was made in five hundred years, though by now the book is much older than that.

The book does not remember how old it is and no one is asking it to tell. A small private museum holds the book in a box in its storage area, until a university buys the book, and takes it to where other books are, to cherish what the book is, what great vessel it has become. It begins to be read in a new way. New hands gently touch its skin, its dead skin, try to understand the marks left on it by the hands that made them, now lying much reduced in vanished graves in graveyards full of their narrow like, once living, cautious, skilled, near what once were tall, steady collections of buildings, hubs where beautiful books were written for export or to be stored in libraries, places where page lay open next to page on huge tables in the light, text to text, illustration to illustration, scribe to scribe, on islands tiny, now out-of-theway places of half-fallen stones and blackberry vines. The graves of the calves that made the pages that make up this book are not known, and neither are those of the drover and his family, nor the people who made the vellum that made the pages, nor the grasses that the calves ate, nor the flowers.

This is the book that I, a thousand years after its birth, wanted to know. By touch. By sight of course, but I could see that in the database, online, all scanned in and correct. I wanted to touch it. I did, with my bare hands – the white glove thing is a lie. I had been taken in to see it years before and watched the archivist open the book in its foam cradle, I had listened to it creaking open and smelled the mustiness of its pages. Some sweet note in there, grassy. I had been shown the horse shitting and the boat. I had looked at the drawing of a boy, funny long body and big head, and the sword he seemed