Black Juice Page 14

I slither a little lower. There’s a yowlinin mud-hole over by Harrow’s house, a scatter of munkee-corpses. (They don’t like munkee; you can’t buy them off with munkee. They won’t be distracted, says Goodwoman Pratt. Won’t be distracted and they won’t be killed, ’less you take out both their eyes, clear and complete, and how you ever get close enough to do that I’d not know, for they never sleep over ground.) So Harrow and his son made it back, that means, if there are munkees here.

  I’m in the lowest branches now. Oh, it’s too quiet. Look at that stove-in roof. The yowlinin must’ve gone in after the smell of them. It’s had a good rummage: munkee-skins on their frames all over the yard, the door broken out from all the stirring around inside, that dog in black and white pieces around the end of its chain. If they were in the house, it’s got ’em. Dormer-beetles are everywhere, black and busy, winking red and green light. They’re spattered all over the sustenancegarden along the side there, crusted on the drools on the house and shed. Patches of them mark a yowlinin’s drag-path into the corn, where the thing, having fed, has gone to ground again, to sleep who knows how long.

  Movement behind the house—I shrink up into the tree again. Off in the distance there’s a yowl—there are always these outriders, after the main mass. I’ll stay up here as long as I have to. It seems to be a safe place; I’m alive, aren’t I? Though I can scarce believe it. And do I want to be alive, in such a dead world?

  Movement again. It could be people, or it could be the bumpings of a yowlinin on the rise. I lie out thin along a branch, my heart banging again.

  It’s my boy. I nearly fall out of my tree. He stumbles from behind the house, over the spilled stone. He comes to the front, stares around, sees the dog pieces and goes to them. He starts putting them together, but his hands are shaking too badly to do much of a job, and he has to stop to cry. He’s filthy, too, must’ve fallen in the mud-hole. Almost as filthy as me. If I didn’t smell so bad I’d go down there so he wouldn’t be all alone—me, either. Maybe I should go down anyway. Or maybe just call out from here. But I don’t want to startle him. What if he chased me off? Could I bear that, just now?

  Then bursts up the yowlinin, the one with my name on it. It’s only a tree-trunk away from me, its head caught and fighting in the branches, gargling louder than thunder. Its great, flat, unlidded eyes loll—they’re for seeing things underground, useless out here. A tassel of it slaps me wetly on the back of my head. Straight away come dormer-beetles, from all directions. Straight away the skin of my head and neck starts to pain like its stuffed full of needles.

  ‘All right, then, beast,’ yells Harrowson, ‘come and get me! Don’t make me a left-behind! Take every scrap of me!’

  Idiot boy—this one’s mine, doesn’t he know?

  The yowlinin yowls and lowers itself out of the treebranches. Its breath wheezes among its teeth. It nods around for him, just below me.

  ‘I’m over here, dolt!’ yells Harrowson. He gets up from the dog. His face is red and mucky and teary and he doesn’t know what he’s doing. I gather to a crouch on the branch. ‘What are you looking for? Eat me, here! A tasty mor-horhorsel!’ And he comes right up to the froth-draped front of it and starts pounding the soft bits. I jump.

  A yowlinin’s only got sort-of shoulders; the tops of the limb-y things that the tassels slop from. The only place to hold it is in its mouth corner, where the lip stretches and tightens against the teeth and holds my fingers without slipping. My other hand’s cutting out the far eye, my knife feeling deep into the cone-shaped socket. My eyes are tight closed, and my mouth, against the poison gunk of the thing—my lips, my lids, my whole face and arms and legs are swarming with its stings.

  Leave a little bit, even, says Goodwoman Pratt, and the thing will go down again, and grow back, and come to rise another day. So let it thrash, let it bellow and froth and shred leaves, let it whack me against branches behind; I will cut that tough, slippery eye-root down there in the point of the cone. I will keep scraping until the socket is clean. And then, because I’m sliding already, because my only steady place is my stinging maw-trapped fingers, I’ll start the second—Oof! I am swimming in drool, spitting in terror of swallowing it, and only the knife itself is holding me here as it cuts to bone, solid bone in a world of squash and slither and foam.

  I cut the second gristly eye-root through. The eye-cone falls out and knocks me swinging, and my fingers slip from the yawning mouth, and I drop to the ground as the yowlinin splinters the tree with its head, stuns itself with a blow that would have crushed me, killed me quicker than yowlininteeth.

  Harrowson has dropped to the ground; he raves and weeps. Squinting through my gunked eyelashes, I take his ankle and pull him out of the beast’s reach, for it’s still half in the earth, not pulling itself free to roam. Wet grey fluff fountains from its eyes, and it lashes hugely back and forth, suffering. Glug is coming up through its teeth, too, and the yowling has gone gargly and choked-sounding.

  Harrowson and me, we’re well back from it, back from the squashed-snail stench. I’m feeling sicker and sicker, the worse the yowlinin flails, the harder it drowns. It’s all mixed up with the pain flaming thick in my skin. I spit and spit, and still it feels as if gunk has slipped down my throat and burst and foamed inside me. It keeps foaming up the back of my nose.

  Finally the yowlinin falls. Its falling pulls one stubby leg out of the mud. The rubbery toe-things grope a last grope. The beast rolls and arches once horribly, then slackens onto the ground.

  The dormers come down in a thrumming cloud. They cloak the whole yowlinin-corpse, dark and glittering. They coat me, too, like perfect armour, while Harrowson’s got spots, like decorations, where the yowlinin sprayed him, and his hands are in mittens, his front an apron, of dormers. He’s weakly retching, lying face down where I dragged him, his forehead to the dust. Both of us are a-shiver with yowlininsickness.

  ‘They got my dad,’ he finally says.

  I nod, and spit, and shiver more. ‘Mm. M-mine, too.’

  ‘He was just getting into the cess with me, and it came up behind.’

  ‘You were in cess?’

  ‘They don’t smell you if you’re in the shit. They think you’re people’s leavings, ’stead of people. My dad said. It worked for him last time. But he weren’t quick enough. They throw you up, you know, like a dog throws a munkee.’ He looks around at me with the awfulness of it. ‘I saw him go up in the air, and he was still fighting, all the way—’

  ‘Stop. I know all that.’ Her skirt flying, her hair falling free of its cloth. His tools spinning out of the pouch at his belt, in a curve across the sky—hammer, hasp-bother, and a spray of copper-bright tacks—

  ‘I saw him come down … and the thing—’ Sobs shake him. He mouths, snap, and one of his mittens rises and snaps closed, sending dormers dizzying.

  I turn away. I could sit down and mourn, as he mourns. That’s one way to win a boy, to sit close and share miseries. I’ve watched that happen, from the schoolyard tree.

  But I can’t. My mourning time is long ago. That arc of dad in the sky, that arc of mam, those are gone hard in the shape of me; they’re not fresh-pressed and hurting like this boy’s.

  I leave him weeping, flat on the ground, and go down to the stream. I wash myself and my knife well, scrubbing us with sand to get all the gunk off. Already it’s raised welts on me, numb on the surface, sore deeper down. But the gagging lessens as I pound my clothes and squeeze them out with my welted hands, and put them back on still damp.

  I go back up, past Harrowson. He’s quiet now, poor boy, but still flat under his dormer-blanket. In the house-mess I find the big pot, and drag it out and put it on the handcart. At the clang of it Harrowson sits up and dully watches. I don’t look at him much, but my thoughts sit about him, small, fine, silent flames of hope.

  Three of the munkees are beetle-free. I take them to the stream and rinse the dirt off them, and throw them into the pot. I go around to the garden, and in a clean corner I pul
l a carrot and some garlic and taters. I carry them back, brushing the soil off them. Harrowson is rising slowly to his feet, not knowing what to do, or what I’m doing.

  ‘You go for a wash,’ I say. ‘In your stream, not your pond—you need running water for yowlinin-gunk. And then we’ll go.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Everyone brought what they had into town last time, Goodwife Pratt said, and fed each other, ’cause some didn’t have anything. These munkees won’t keep, for just you.’

  He looks at the pot on the cart, and at me. And it was a mistake to get so clean and damp and ready. I should have just slipped away into the cornfield. For I know what’s coming.

  ‘Only…’ He falters. He might not even say it.

  But he does. ‘Only, you come separate.’ His eyes slide back to the pot. ‘You come into town round by the piggeries or something, and maybe not exactly at the same time. You know?’

  Ah yes, I know. Behind him, the dead yowlinin is piled gross and grey. One of its eye-cones has rolled in among the dog, and glistens there as a cone of dirt and beetles.

  ‘I know, you saved me and everything,’ he continues. However small he tries to make it sound, it won’t go small. He knows it, and I know it, but he’s still going to be one of them, a lucky village boy. He’s not going to change. I put up my swollen hands, but he keeps on, though more softly. ‘I’m old enough to claim my land,’ he says. ‘It’s different for me.’

  ‘Doesn’t have to be.’ The words come out all blunt and wild. Of course, it must be hard, having once been lucky. ‘You can say it’s different if you want, but the only difference is, you had your mam and dad longer. You were just a bit luckier, that’s all, for a bit longer. But you still lost everything, and by those monsters. Just like me.’

  Everything except your land and your place. Yes, it is different—he’s right. Nothing I say will make him want me, make him prefer me to propertied girls, and familied ones.

  ‘Never mind,’ I say. I start walking, a long way around him. ‘There’s lots to eat out here, if you know where to find it.’ As if I’m too good for his munkees—munkees are for soft people who can’t handle wild-meat and bush-berries. As if my mouth wasn’t watering for the beasts just a minute ago as I chopped. What was I doing, thinking him handsome, calling him mine? Who did I think I was, all these months, following and watching him? This must be what they call love sickness. But the love has fallen from my eyes now, and left only the sickness.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he says, but he’s glad. He is sorry, but he’s more glad. His feet stay still, but his body turns to watch me go, to see me off.

  I’m not looking at him any more. I’m stepping over dogchunk and beetle-patch, working around the yowlinincorpse, to disappear into a clean part of the corn. And I’m the only one who can smell, through the dog-blood and the cess, through the sap, slime and splintered timber-rot, the thin sharp salt, on the breeze, of the sea.

  rite of spring

  THIS WIND DOESN’T SHRIEK OR MOAN—nothing so personal. When the river took Jinny Lempwick last spring and half-killed her while we watched, it was doing what the wind’s doing now, racing so strongly that a little thing like a person was never going to matter. All I can do is keep myself out of the main force of it, because it doesn’t know how to care.

  It’s madness to be here at all, up on Beard’s Top in an end-of-winter blizzard—and I’m near mad. I’m past thinking about soup, about fire, about sleep; I can only gape at how dumb, what a stupid idea, who thought of this? My mitted hands grasp and fumble ice and rock in front of my eyes. How do they keep going? How do these legs keep pushing me up the mountain as if I believed, as if I were as mad as my mad mother, or my mad, holy brother? Don’t they realise I’m not made of the same stuff?

  I don’t know how my scrawny brother managed last year, with this robe in his pack. I feel as if only my hunting, my built-up muscles and my good lungs, stop me toppling off into the darkness. Sappy little Florius is stronger than I thought. I knew Mum was strong; Mum’s the kind of person who can move a strapping great hunter like Stock Cherrymeadow aside with a word, with the force of a single lifted eyebrow. If she were in good health she’d be laughing now, thinking of me up here. Hellfire, she’d be here herself, not letting a big brawnhead like me go about her important business.

  But she’s not in good health. Felled to her bed, our mum, coughing, and raging at the cough. ‘Don’t come near me, thick boy! Just stop still and listen for a change!’ And between her instructions I could hear Florius trying to breathe, in the outer room by the fire. He sounded like a hog caught in a prickle-bush. It hurt just to listen. Mark Langhorne’s lost all his five daughters to this cough.

  Here we are, the cairn. This is where it all starts to happen. ‘Don’t get changed up top,’ Mum said, ‘or the wind’ll snatch the robe away and we’ll never afford another.’ And I’ll not forgive you, ever, she may as well have said, and neither will anyone else in the village. Anything that goes wrong from here until king’s-turn will be your fault and no one else’s. May as well throw yourself off after the robe, for your life won’t be worth living if you come back without it.

  So I use what small shelter the cairn gives to wrestle the robe out of the pack. The cold has stiffened it into great goldcrusted boards—I’m afraid it’ll crack apart in my hands.

  It’s a wondrous treasure. I’ve only seen it the once, when Parson Pinknose shuffled in with it, autumn before last. ‘It’s all yours now, Ma’am,’ he miseried. ‘They won’t let me do the thing again, after three summers’ drouth.’

  ‘Neither they should,’ crabbed my mum. ‘You Pinchnazes always do sloppy work, for all your prating about tradition. Next time your lot breeds a Deep One, do us all a favour and let its cord strangle it.’

  You could tell the parson was too low-feeling to fight her back as she liked. He sighed as he pulled open the cloth bag, and the robe—well, nothing like that had ever been in our house before. Like bagged-up dragon-fire, it was, all full of danger and brightness. It pulled me out of my corner as on a trap-loop.

  ‘You keep your mitts off,’ my mum said, smacking me away and pulling the drawstring tight. ‘What do you think you’re up to, Parson, opening that here?’ She glared at him.

  ‘Just a last look, I thought,’ said Pinknose wetly.

  ‘A look for every boy and his dog? You know that’s only for the Deep to see.’ She shook her head and tut-tutted at the hopelessness of him and his ilk. ‘You!’ she added, shouldering me backwards. ‘Stop gawping and bring some wood in.’

  And here I am wearing the thing, Mum, I said to her in my mind, as neither you nor I would ever have imagined. Here’s your thick boy, trying to keep side-on to a wind coming from every way, so it doesn’t catch the blessed robe like a sail and blow him off your holy mountain and splat into Beardy Vale.

  A terrible glumness settles on me. The thing is too big—not just the robe, which gets between my knees and presses on my shoulders like a pair of filled hods, but the whole damn weather and task and nonsense. I’m not Deep—everyone who knows me would laugh at the idea, loud and long.

  ‘I can’t do that sort of thing!’ I whined in the sickroom. ‘I’m not like Flor… I can’t even—’

  ‘“Can’t” sets no blossom, boy!’ Mum snarled, holding back a cough, looking all witchy with her slept-on hair and her bared teeth. ‘“Can’t” melts no snow. You get your boots on and take that pack out of my sight. And now!’

  And I got out, thinking I’d just stay out overnight, go down the old Brimston mine and come back and say I’d done it.

  ‘But she’ll know,’ I said to myself, in the forest-green, in the mild and ferny places I can hardly remember now. And she will know, if I ever get back—ha!, it’s a big if—she’ll know if I haven’t done it all, and done it exactly right. She’ll see it in my eyes.

  So I clump up, towards the top of the Top, wonky with the robe, drunk with cold and misery.

  ‘Keep your thick
head together,’ Mum said. ‘Say it back to me again.’ And she made me say it and say it, the whole long clanging unrhyming poem, tricky as a blade-fish playing the white water, inning and outing and teasing you to beggary. And me realising I’d have to remember it on the bawling Top, with a cowing blizzard at me, with a damn millstone on my shoulders: ‘Get off my back! I know it!’ I shouted at her, and I slammed out of the house past wheezing Flor.

  And now I’m not so sure. Do I know it? Do I know it all?

  I’ve felt savage the whole way. ‘Not my job!’ I’ve shouted at the trees, at the Top’s foot, which pokes out low and flattish to lull you before you hit the hard stuff. ‘I do the hunting, remember? I bring in the food! I’m one of the dogs, going out to fetch!’

  And speaking of dogs, I miss Cuff. I haven’t been out without Cuff at my heel since I was tiny. ‘But there’s no beasts on the Top, not for this,’ Mum said. ‘This is a human thing only.’

  ‘I’ll tie her up to a tree down the bottom,’ I said.

  ‘You’ll box her up like I tell you,’ said Mum.

  The look on Cuff’s face when I put her in that box! Pull my heart into fish-bait, why don’t you? So I was all aggrieved and misbalanced along the way. Cuff would have stopped me shouting, with her worry, with her wet nose at my hand.

  And now I’m in such a rage with this bastard wind, that won’t let me get to any kind of rhythm, that scours my face with coldness and bangs my nuisance hair in my eyes, and with the snow, that crusts up the gold on my shoulders and plasters itself to the front so that the mirrors won’t shine anyway, awful wet snow that’ll soak in and make the wretched burdensome thing even heavier, I tell you—

  And all those years of Mum saying I was thick, and people looking on Flor, with his spindly legs and his moon eyes, as the one to treasure and to butter up and to bring soup and sweets to and little gewgaws from Gankly Market! All those years of jealousy, but of relief, too, for who wants to be carrying all these people’s hope—who wants to be Deep and different? Yet here I am anyway—all the years of putting up with being not the one and getting nothing, and yet it’s me doing the grind, completely without anyone’s thanks, only Mum yelling in my head: ‘Get a word wrong and you’ll know about the flat of my hand, young fella!’