Black Juice Read online

  Mai began to crumble and falter beside me as the tar closed in on Ik’s face, a slow, sticky, rolling oval. I sang good and strong—I didn’t want to hear any last whimper, any stopped breath. I took Mai’s arm and tried to hold her together that way, but she only swayed worse, and wept louder. I listened for Mumma under the noise, pressed my eyes shut and made my voice follow hers. By the time I’d steadied myself that way, Ik’s eyes were closing.

  Through our singing, I thought I heard her cry for Mumma; I tried not to, yet my ears went on hearing. This will happen only the once—you can’t do it over again if ever you feel like remembering. And Mumma went to her, and I could not tell whether Ik was crying and babbling, or whether it was a trick of our voices, or whether the people on the banks of the tar had started up again. I watched Mumma, because Mumma knew what to do; she knew to lie there on the matting, and dip her cloth in the last water with the little fading fish-scales of ice in it, and squeeze the cloth out and cool the shrinking face in the hole.

  And the voice of Ik must have been ours or others’ voices, because the hole Mumma was dampening with her cloth was, by her hand movements, only the size of a brassboy now. And by a certain shake of her shoulders I could tell: Mumma knew it was all right to be weeping now, now that Ik was surely gone, was just a nose or just a mouth with the breath crushed out of it, just an eye seeing nothing. And very suddenly it was too much—the flowers nodding in the lamplight, our own sister hanging in tar, going slowly, slowly down like Vanderberg’s truck that time, like Jappity’s cabin with the old man still inside it, or any old villain or scofflaw of around these parts, and I had a big sicking-up of tears, and they tell me I made an awful noise that frightened everybody right up to the chief, and that the husband’s parents thought I was a very ill-brought-up boy for upsetting them instead of allowing them to serenely and superiorly watch justice be done for their lost son.

  I don’t remember a lot about that part. I came back to myself walking dully across the tar between Mai and Mumma, hand-in-hand, carrying nothing, when I had come out here laden, when we had all had to help. We must have eaten everything, I thought. But what about the mats and pans and planks? Then I heard a screeking clanking behind me, which was Dash hoisting up too heavy a load of pots.

  And Mumma was talking, wearily, as if she’d been going on a long time, and soothingly, which was like a beautiful guide-rope out of my sickness, which my brain was following hand over hand. It’s what they do to people, what they have to do, and all you can do about it is watch out who you go loving, right? Make sure it’s not someone who’ll rouse that killinganger in you, if you’ve got that rage, if you’re like our Ik—

  Then the bank came up high in front of us, topped with grass that was white in Mumma’s lamp’s light. Beyond it were all the eyes, and attached to the eyes the bodies, flat and black against bonfire or starry sky. They shuffled aside for us.

  I knew we had to leave Ik behind, and I didn’t make a fuss, not now. I had done my fussing, all at once; I had blown myself to bits out on the tar, and now several monstrous things, several gaping mouths of truth, were rattling pieces of me around their teeth. I would be all right, if Mai stayed quiet, if Mumma kept murmuring, if both their hands held me as we passed through this forest of people, these flitting firefly eyes.

  They got me up the bank, Mumma and Auntie; I paused and they stumped up and then lifted me, and I walked up the impossible slope like a demon, horizontal for a moment and then stiffly over the top—

  —and into my Mumma, whose arms were ready. She couldn’t’ve carried me out on the tar. We’d both have sunk, with me grown so big now. But here on the hard ground she took me up, too big as I was for it. And, too big as I was, I held myself onto her, crossing my feet around her back, my arms behind her neck. And she carried me like Jappity’s wife used to carry Jappity’s idiot son, and I felt just like that boy, as if the thoughts that were all right for everyone else weren’t coming now, and never would come, to me. As if all I could do was watch, but not ever know anything, not ever understand. I pushed my face into Mumma’s warm neck; I sealed my eyes shut against her skin; I let her strong warm arms carry me away in the dark.

  my lord’s man

  MULLORD RIDES FAST AWAY, to the forest.

  ‘Give me that grey,’ I say to Bandy.

  Bandy hooks the mare out of the stall, and I’m astride and moving before I’ve properly had time to think. Mullord is a small patch of darkness rocking through the dusk. Taking the hill path, as I said he would.

  ‘That wagon will slow them,’ I told Cook and Gerdie. ‘All our master has to do is go over the hills. They’ll camp at Tampton, or at Brittly Spring, under the Seat.’

  ‘Not with that prize aboard,’ said Cook, all in a shiver of delighted horror. ‘Not if they’ve a brain anywhere among their rags and tattles. Bury theersalluvs in a cave somewheres. Magic theersalluvs right off to Arribee, or further. They could do that, theer kind.’

  I can believe it. I can believe Mullord and I are riding out to nothing, to a long night of black nothing, silent country. So outlandish has the day been, and last night, and yesterday, too.

  But now all will be well. Mullord is back from his travels, and he knows. Whatever can be put right, Mullord will put it. We needn’t twirl our thumbs and worry any longer.

  I throw myself low on the grey’s neck as we go in among the trees. I know the hill path, but not branch for branch as Mullord does. I might not catch up with him; I might meet the both of them coming back, like that time she set out for her father’s hold, in that great temper after they were wed. Yes, I’ll meet them like that, hand-in-hand between the horses, their heads together in close-talk, Mullord’s face with the look on it, like a warm hand has smoothed off all the sternness.

  Except it’s night, rushing night, and it hasn’t happened yet. And sternness wasn’t the word for Mullord when he was told, this evening, as he came in the house-gate. Leermonth and Jamey got to him first, the young bletherers.

  ‘Is this true, Berry?’ he said to me as I hurried up.

  ‘About her ladyship? Every word, Mullord.’

  I saw, ’twas as he heard it fall from my lips that he credited it. Time was when that would have given me pleasure, when I was young and learning the ways of lords; nowadays it’s only my due. All it did this time was bring home, like a hammer blow to my chest, how terrible a thing she had done. To all of us through him, to be sure, but mostly to him; what her cruel cold heart had done upon his true one. I saw her for the child she was, for the thoughtless murdering child, in that moment, in Mullord’s fallen face.

  My cheek is against the grey’s mane, my ear listening past our thunder and branch-crack, up to Mullord on the hill ahead. I can hear nothing, but he must not go too fast, must not tire that big black horse, for all it’s fresh and kept trim for just this use. Them rag-tags may have gone hell for leather, taken fright once they got out, once they sobered up and saw they had a lord’s wife with them.

  ‘Did none of ours go with them?’ Mullord had raged, striding to the stables.

  ‘Mullady wouldn’t let us,’ I said. ‘She cast a pot at Minnow’s head, who would go with her. The woman’s been senseless these many hours since, and the leech don’t hold out hope for her. After that, only the little handmaid would go, and she came back weeping, at noon-tide, saying Mistress had spoken harsh to her and would not have her near.’

  I did not like the look of him, the darting eyes, the snarl on his mouth. If she had meant to send him mad by this, I thought she had perhaps succeeded. And I did not want to see such a noble mind turning.

  And then Bandy was before us with the coalblack saddled and bridled, and Mullord walked straight up onto its back, and off he rode.

  I come out onto the bald hilltop, and in the freedom from branch-thwackings I hear him ahead, well ahead, turmoiling up the next hill. He doesn’t need me; his rage and power will alone accomplish whatever he intends. But could I bear to go back to the keep, an
d gaze at wall and window? Better to be out and moving, even fruitlessly, than sitting wondering, stilling servants’ chatter. And I would go after him as I would not go after his wife; I’m his, not hers, as I’ve said to Gerdie many a time.

  ‘Get you,’ says my wife, her eyes laughing. ‘One kind word from her and you’d be theirs both.’

  ‘And I might,’ I rally, ‘but the mistress is hardly one for kindness, is she?’

  ‘She isn’t one for anything much,’ says my Gerd. ‘A flash of fire, a prickly bit of lightning. She doesn’t know what she herself’s about, let alone her lord and his lordship.’

  Night falls while we’re in the hills, a clear night with no moon yet. I catch up with Mullord spelling his horse, walking the Grey Comb, a shadow in the starlight.

  ‘Berry,’ he says as I come up.

  ‘Mullord.’

  He’s walking purposive, has not lost his stride. I dismount and walk beside, as I can here, trotting a little to keep up. But he does not disburthen himself to me, for the full length of the Comb; he watches his footing and keeps moving, as if she has a hook in his breast and is drawing him to her through the night, and all he can feel is the pain of it, and work and work to ease it.

  The Plunge by starlight is a dire place, and not something you hurry. You hold yourself by teeth and ears and your horse’s toenails to that cliff, and promise Nature anything if she’ll let you out the other side. You ponder nothing but getting step to step; there’s no time even to curse the lady who brought you here.

  And then I’m wobbling with relief on the flat, and the paler darkness of the road swings out of the trees and into our path, and I think we have a chance again.

  My cousin the innkeeper is already out, with a lamp and fresh horses ready.

  ‘You’re in luck,’ he says. ‘They needed a wheelwright. I sent them over Yarrow way to Dipsy Wheeler, but I don’t know as they’ll make it as far as that.’

  ‘And our lady was among them?’ Mullord cuts in.

  Cousin’s eyes dart aside.

  ‘How was she conducting herself? Tell me true, man. Was she upright?’

  ‘She was upright and … she was singing, Mullord.’

  ‘Had they plied her with wine?’

  ‘She-she-she gave every appearance of being sober, sir.’ He busies himself with some harness-straightening at my foot.

  ‘Come, Berry,’ says Mullord, and kicks his horse into a trot.

  My cousin stands back and casts me a look that says, Didn’t we all know it would come to this? and it’s off with us into the night again.

  Heaven Seat pushes its stony shoulders up out of the forest beside us. Mullord disappears into the trees, and my mare follows him. I keep my head down and see almost nothing until we reach the place where we leave the horses. Even walking up to the Seat, there’s only the master’s shape striding against tangle upon darker tangle. When we clear the brush, the starlight makes me squint after such close darkness, and the breeze is sudden and cold.

  She always drew your eye to her, did the mistress. There at the edge of the farmlands spilling along the valley floor, in the golden whirl of the rag-tags’ camp, that’s her dancing, that’s the spinning, sparkling skirt of her. There are other women, of course, but none have cause to move so fiercely. Tiny shouts come up to us, miniature cheers, scrapings of music, fine as crickets’ wheezing.

  And Mullord pauses. I thought he would cry her name out and rage down the hill, dagger drawn. I thought he’d be set afire by the final sight of her, after all this riding, after all this strife. But he pauses, and seems blind, the gleam of their distant camp in both his gazing eyes.

  ‘Will we go down, sir?’ I say, at last.

  There’s time for a reel to finish, a round of gleeful cries, the fiddler to tune up and another faster dance to begin, before he speaks. ‘Yes, Berry, we’ll go down. But slowly, silently.’

  ‘You want to surprise them, sir?’

  ‘I’ll do nothing yet.’

  We slip back into the dark brush, and cross the road at the Seat’s foot, into the more open forest. It’s a while of walking before we hear the music stronger, before shards and flickers of fire-orange show among the trees. Mullord moves quieter and quieter, until he’s like a cat stepping silent through the forest, not snapping twig nor rasping leaf. I stay a little behind him and choose the same quiet places to let my foot fall.

  We come up to the camp behind the broken wagon. The music digs fingers into my brain and twirls it like a top. I remember from last night the feverishness of it, fast impatient music that demands new steps of your feet. Those tunes are the only fine thing the rag-tags have—the rest is missing teeth and leathery skin and ruffianly manners.

  They’ve built up a great fire just like the one in the keep courtyard, a great cone twisting to a sparking plume at the top. They’re all dancing, from the old toothless ones to the little staggerers jigging and tumbling at the edges. And the mistress is being passed (or passing herself—it’s hard to say) from hand to hand around the circle, a whorl within a whorl. Her fine blood shows, and her less fine—she has bearing, but she also has their energy, their not wanting to be bothered with courtliness, with subtle talk and after-you-no-after-youmullord ways.

  I arrive at Mullord’s side. He stands like a statue; only the gleams in his eyes move. His hands don’t clench; his jaw is not set with rage. What is the man made of, that he can have such outrage before his eyes and be calm? That he can watch his own wife cavort with the rubbish of the earth and keep his temper?

  More astounding still, that he can smile! I stare at him. Yes, it’s true! It’s not just fire-flicker tweaking his mouth, but—what? Mirth? Joy? I hunt and hunt for wryness or bitterness in his face, for poison, for grief. I find none. He might be watching the children’s tourney on Midsummer Eve, benign—charmed even.

  Rage surges at my throat. Were she my wife—But I chose a good wife, one that would steady me in my youth and companion me in my old age. Mullord, steady in himself from his very beginnings—well, what was he after, taking this wild girl to him? She’s ornament enough, but does she care for his holdings and his duty? Does she mind about his people, like a proper lady? I’d swear sometimes he wed her expressly to crumble his keep from within, to stab his right hand with the dagger held in his left.

  Mullord steps out of the forest, idly almost, lightly. I strain after him, frightened to follow, frightened of the noisy dancers and of what they will make of him. And he walks forward unnoticed, to the ring of dancers. And he joins them, and begins to hand the women along, just like all the others.

  I hold my breath as she comes around to him. I watch for the slight change of his rhythm that will mean he has gone for his dagger. She will slump to the ground; the whole spellbound lot of them will fall into disarray, the music will go on for a little, until fiddler and drummer see the confusion and stumble in their rhythm and stop, and then it’ll be all blood and horror, with Mullord in the centre, dealing out the punishment they so richly deserve.

  She comes to him. She twirls. She passes on.

  She did not even see him, I think.

  And he, he might not care a jot; he reaches for the next raggy woman in her garish dress, with her eye-paint and her brass earrings and her mouth like a hole in her face, and he spins her too, as if she were noble as his lady.

  ‘Strike me!’ I’m saying in the bushes. ‘Knock me down with a goose-feather! What’s the man up to?’

  I keep watching. I think, maybe the third time he’ll have built up rage enough to strike at the minx’s heart. But the third time passes, and the seventh, and the twelfth. All the magic numbers pass, and then the music changes, and a shout goes up, and each man takes hold of the woman in front of him, and some men grasp men and some women women, and the big circle breaks up into many smaller circles. Mullord, he isn’t lost in there—he’s taller, and cleaner of skin, and smoother-haired than any of them—but he’s as lost as a lord can be among rag-tags, a witch in his a
rms and his wife in the arms of a fox-eating thief.

  I don’t see the moment his lady notices him, whether she has the grace to startle, or whether she cries out in joy to see him there, the best of both her worlds dancing at the same fire. But I see them partnered in the dance, just like gipsies, as if they care no more and no less for each other than for any of the mad-caps whirling around them. They move on with no glance back, but give themselves entirely to the next man, the next woman the dance whirls into their path.

  But she deserves killing, for what she does to Mullord’s heart! She deserves beating at least for stupidity, running away from the finest, wisest lord that ever lived. And here he is—he lets her play, lets her have her way, never shows her the pain she causes him. She dances, and he dances with her as if none of it mattered: not her night’s carousing in the courtyard of his keep; not her snuffing out the life, perhaps, of good loyal Minnow; not our long ride after her over the hills and down the Plunge—

  ’Tis I who hold the mattering, the bitterness, on his behalf, on behalf of us all. I hold and stir and carry it back and forth among the bushes, until it curdles into a poor kind of sleep. All night I lie where I can lift my head and see the fire and the dancers, where I can hear a change—though no change comes—in the music or the mood, where I can wait in sick discomfort, for morning and for sanity.

  AS NIGHT LIFTS INTO THE FIRST GREY OF DAWN, I walk the curving road around Heaven Seat. Mullord has gone on ahead to fetch our horses. I’m to walk the mistress—on the keep’s best mount, that she helped herself to—around by the road to meet him.

  I feel as if I’ve breakfasted on grit, as if sand has been rubbed into my eyes, as if moss-clumps have been shaken through my clothes and left them damp and itchy. I’ve dreamed so many endings to these dreadful days, I cannot tell whether this is just more dreaming.