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

not a child that lies between them but a boy-in-kind, whose empty rags they stuff and poke with straw to lend him form.

‘They’re readying the pig-boy in the Hobfield, then,’ says Olun, but it’s better that my breath is put to hauling him, and not to asking him the where of every mad-head thing that he may say. Trudge on. The leaves burst up like birds, and on, and on, and only now, my back nigh broke and fingers fit to fall away, is there a sighting of the bridge, there at the far end of this river track, all passage-walled with peeling birch trees, ashen silver in the light. Almost. We’re almost there.

The old man tells me all his secrets just before he dies, and lets me journey down into the tunnelways beneath the settlement, where there are silver bowls and wristlets made of gold. By still of night, this hoard is carried off down track a way, to where my new home waits for me. My new wealth’s traded in for land, for oxen and fine wraps and pretty slaves, that all those passing by my hut may see its grandness and its herded grounds and say, ‘How fine a woman must live there.’

My food is nothing save the rarest fish and the most tender pieces cut from infant beasts. Tall, painted warriors are set to guard my days; the strongest service me by night, and every moon my willeins offer up their thanks and bags of grain to me. Their children dance between the rose-twined pillars of my stilted chair.

This is their bridge, then. Big black logs that smooth together down across the ages make the curve of it, that rises gently up away from us towards its hump, above the foams and churning deeps below. For all my care in hauling him and litter both across the bump-topped woods, the old man grunts and clicks his tongue and makes complaint to me each time his bones are jarred.

Here, on its near-end slope, the blackened span has chinks between the timbers. It seems there is a little pit dug underneath this south side of the bridge. My eyes squint, peering, but whatever once may be to see inside the hole is long since gone. There’s only pale flecked dirt, lit bright where sunlight’s wrung between the roof logs over which we make our way now, passing on.

‘Stop here,’ says Olun as we reach the middle of the bridge, and bids me set him down and sit beside his litter on the wetworn logs, the waters roaring under us. The cold strikes up my arse. We do not talk of much. He makes remark upon my fancy-beads, blue sparks hung on their copper strand about my throat, and asks me how they’re made.

It startles me, the ease with which this stolen tale comes tumbling from my lips: the sand fires, seaweed banked, seen through the shore fogs, burning. Men with puckered, flame-scarred hands who tip the ore and curse if it should splash, the reek of singeing beard, a scorching in the lungs and, afterwards, the glazed sands all about the furnace hole made hard, shot through with bitter juice of kelp and bladderwrack and coppered blue. My words pour, effortless, and conjure tangle-headed beachgirls, skirts damped dark about the hem by surf, that pick for skybeads in the fire-struck dunes, as if these sights are ever known to me.

The old man nods and smiles and gazes off downriver where the stone-green waters bend away amongst the western nettle wastes. A bark-boat breasts the current there, two men whose shoulders roil and wheel about their paddle blades, a glittered spray each time these cut the frothing swell. They lean into a turning masked with trees, are gone.

Off on my right a man calls to another, leading me to turn my head and look about. Up by the bridge’s farmost end there’s someone crouched to squint into the belled and ringing hollow underneath its arch, where fray-edged water-shadows shoal to form a ghost bridge, top-side down below the blurring torrent.

Now the figure stands, a grey, pot-bellied man, and calls again to some few fellows who are sitting sharing bread just up slope from the river’s edge. They call back to the man beside the bridge and seem to laugh at him. He speaks again and makes a sign towards the hidden shallows of the underspan. One of the feasters passes on his bread and stands, runs stumble-footed down the bank to join the other by the bridge, where both now stoop to peer. More shouts. Another man trips down the slope to stand with them, and yet one more.

It is some game they play to put aside for now their slog amongst the ditches and fields, which is no great concern to me. My gaze turns back upon the old man, hound-clad on his bier. Side-edged to me, his skull is round and beaked, a grey shaved bird. The eye that’s nearest me stares into nothingness, its socket pool froze white in Olun’s winter. On his leather cheek, a patchen stole of coloured scars.

He asks about my beads: It may be that he waits for me to ask of his tattoos.

‘These markings that you have are of a style that is not known to me. It seems they have not rhyme, nor a device.’

He turns his corpse-bird skull that he may see me with his good eye, sucking in the air to speak. His breath, warm game that’s hung too long, blasts stale against my face and makes me flinch away.

‘Oh, they have a device, girl, and a rhyme. Don’t you think otherwise. They are my crow designs.’

His crow designs? The worm-blue mottle of his shoulder, bowlined red from nipple back across to spine? His firmament skull, scribbled jowl, fern-cornered lips? There’s nothing here that’s of a like to crow or bird of any kind. What is his meaning?

Lifting up my gaze from out this skin maze,