Singing My Sister Down and other stories Read online

  ‘You’re getting good at that flute,’ she said.

  But this isn’t about me, Ik. This is not at all about me.

  ‘Will you come out here some time, and play over me, when no one else’s around?’

  I nodded. Then I had to say some words, of some kind, I knew. I wouldn’t get away without speaking. ‘If you want.’

  ‘I want, okay? Now give me a kiss.’

  I gave her a kid’s kiss, on the mouth. Last time I kissed her, it was carefully on the cheek as she was leaving for her wedding. Some of her glitter had come off on my lips. Now I patted her hair and backed away over the wreath.

  Mai came in last. ‘Fairy doll,’ I heard her say sobbingly. ‘Only-one.’

  And Ik, ‘It’s all right, Auntie. It’ll be over so soon, you’ll see. And I want to hear your voice nice and strong in the singing.’

  We readied ourselves, Felly in Mumma’s lap, then Dash, then me next to Mai. I tried to stay attentive to Mumma, so Mai wouldn’t mess me up with her weeping. It was quiet except for the distant flubber and snap of the bonfires.

  We started up, all the ordinary evening songs for putting babies to sleep, for farewelling, for soothing broke-hearted people – all the ones everyone knew so well that they’d long ago made rude versions and joke-songs of them. We sang them plain, following Mumma’s lead; we sang them straight, into Ikky’s glistening eyes, as the tar climbed her chin. We stood tall, so as to see her, and she us, as her face became the sunken centre of that giant flower, the wreath. Dash’s little drum held us together and kept us singing, as Ik’s eyes rolled and she struggled for breath against the pressing tar, as the chief and the husband’s family came and stood across from us, shifting from foot to foot, with torches raised to watch her sink away.

  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 killing-anger 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.

  WELL BEFORE THEY REACHED the town, Torro smelt children. Warmed dirt and cloth was their smell, turnip breath, sweaty hair. All of him came alert, but he kept his gaze straight and his stride easy. As the path brought the first, lowest houses into sight around the hillside, no one watching from their rough-cut windows or doors could have told him apart from his two companions.

  Up they walked into the town. It was late afternoon; it should have been the quiet hour. But the lanes were infested with the creatures, their exertions, their excitement.

  ‘Why are these young ones out everywhere?’ said Marto.

  ‘Yes, and what’s on their carts?’ said Zand. ‘Little beds, is it?’

  ‘Haven’t they animals they should be tending?’ Torro snarled. ‘Or kindling to chop?’

  A group of them appeared at his elbow. ‘Oh please, sir stranger, have you a coin we could take, to buy some cloth for the princess’s dress?’

  ‘No, I’ve not,’ he said.

  Marto cast him a quelling look and smiled down at the children. ‘Is this the princess’s bed, then?’

  ‘Yes, and here is she.’

  Grubby hands placed on the pillow a rough wooden head, painted with a gaping mouthful of teeth and some glaring eyes. ‘And here’s her hair. Do you like it? It’s made of a cow’s tail.’ The child placed it around the head – and Torro’s mother was looking up at him, in one of her rages.

  ‘That’s an ugly princess,’ said Marto.

  ‘Of course she is – she’s an ogre!’ said the child cheerfully, just like that. Torro’s throat snapped closed on his surprise.

  ‘Oh well, of course,’ said Zand with a laugh. ‘Money for a dress, you say? Well, for certain we want the girl covered up. But we’ve only Plains coin.’

  ‘Plains coin is good! Plains coin is the best!’ the children clamoured. The girl snatched the head from the pillow and jumped about with it.

  Torro’s friends dug for their money, teasing the children, pretending not to find it. It was all he could do to stay with them in t
hat smell, and not stride on up the town. The wildwood above was calling him, in that insistent, dangerous way.

  He tramped behind Marto and Zand, up through the crowding children and their bed-carts and grotesque princesses, breathing through his teeth and trying to smile. It’s important we look friendly, Marto had said as they washed and shaved in the stream this morning. Who knows? This might be the place where we make our new life.

  You might, maybe, Torro had thought. And he’d gone on pretending, as he’d done since falling in with them on the road, that all he wanted was what they wanted – food, ale, a woman, and work to put his shoulder to each morning.

  ‘Why so many beds?’ Marto asked the children. ‘And each with an ogress in it?’

  A stronger-voiced girl piped up among the willing answerers. ‘She lives up in the castle, sir—’ She waved up at the wood.

  ‘There’s a castle in the midst of that?’ muttered Zand.

  ‘—and every spring she wakes hungry, wanting children to eat.’

  ‘So we roast her in her bed!’ a little boy chimed in. ‘All the different dollies of her!’

  ‘Yes, and she smells the smoke,’ continued the girl, ‘and flies down – and eats everything on the fire.’

  ‘Which is only herself, the sticks and ashes of her!’

  ‘Which then she must take her stomach-ache back to bed and sleep another year!’

  ‘And then we have a grand feast, because we are not eaten!’ beamed the boy. Torro did his best not to sneer – not at the boy’s innocence but at the grown people who had taught their children such blather.

  ‘What a tale!’ said Marto. ‘I’m glad we gave that coin, then, to protect you all.’

  At the mention of money all the children began pleading for more, to buy buttons to make crowns with or fine papers for coverlets and robes.

  ‘Show us the way to an inn,’ said Marto, ‘and we’ll see what we can spare.’

  The inn was at the top of the town. The innkeeper greeted them blandly, briefly glancing at each man – to memorise his face, Torro thought, should she need to send the law after them. She warmed somewhat when she saw the colour of their coin.

  She showed them to a room, walking in and throwing open the window. The forest, crowding close outside, was a green wall mottled with shadow, mad-grown trees bound together with brambles and ivy, clotted with fallen leaves from many autumns past. It looked nothing like it felt.

  ‘I won’t be able to sleep with all this looming.’ Zand peeped out at the tangle when the innkeeper had gone.

  ‘I’m glad of it,’ said Marto, fetching his smoking-kit out of his pack. ‘There’s one side nothing can come at us from.’

  ‘Nothing but ogres,’ Torro dared to say from the dim corner bed he was claiming.

  Zand laughed. ‘Ah, but that princess is only after naughty children – tough old brutes like us have nothing to fear!’

  They went down to the snug. There, the townsmen let them know quickly enough that there was no work for them here. They were full of advice and cheer, though, about opportunities farther south.

  Torro ate and drank and smoked his pipe and tried to feel tranquil. But the innkeeper had children, one young boy who ducked back and forth bringing ale and keeping the fire tended, and one very tiny baby, still on the mother’s breast. This last particularly caused him some discomfort, her milk-fed smell reaching for him across the snug. And he never could quite forget the mass of the forest at their backs, or ignore the lick and fiddle of its magic in the air around them, like someone practising music but never quite achieving a tune. He sat, unhappy, determined not to fidget, teeth clamped to his pipe stem, while the old fireside-sitters of the village rattled on about the children’s mummery, about the tales that clustered about the forested castle like vermin in a dog’s creases.

  ‘It’s fifty years I heard it from my dad,’ said a sinewy little fellow, who looked as if famine had wizened him, though those crinkles must only be from age. ‘And he’d sat another fifty on it easily, so that makes it the century that the spell was cast for. So, do you gentlemen happen to have a prince among you?’

  The gathering laughed, at the man’s pretending hopefulness and at the idea that these wanderers-in might be gentlemen.

  Torro muted his own oafish laugh. ‘Even had we brought our prince with us—’ he began with fearful boldness.

  ‘He would be king now,’ Zand murmured. ‘With old Bolto dead.’

  ‘King over nothing but ruins.’ Torro swallowed the sick feeling with a gulp of beer. ‘That he could never return to.’

  ‘Not to mention his mother’s an ogress,’ said Marto. ‘You wouldn’t want your royal line spoiled by that blood, as ours was.’

  Torro tipped his head as if agreeing. As if his own ogrish features were not plain on his face for anyone to mark.

  ‘Come now,’ said Zand. ‘Even before that monstress came along with her fat purse, Bolto was sucking the life from us to keep the northerners off his back.’

  The sinewy man shrugged. ‘I don’t believe the spell is too finicking as to the bloodline. Any son of any king can chop his way through and kiss the girl and claim her fortune.’

  The townsmen burst forth with hearsay and opinions as to the truth of the tale. Under cover of it, Marto leaned his shoulder against Torro’s. ‘I’m so long without a woman, I’m almost tempted to pretend princeliness, aren’t you?’

  ‘You should,’ Torro said mildly. ‘You have the looks for it.’ And he watched the gratified smile as the man knocked out his pipe on the fire-rail. Marto had used those looks to involve them all three in adventures with women. Despoliation and abandonment had seemed his principal aims, as if he must enact on their bodies – at first willing, then passing through noise and struggle to helpless silence – what had been done to his country.

  Now the talk veered back to the north-western wars – who ran them, who ran towards them, who fled. And who, like Torro and his friends, roamed the countryside looking for a new land that would take them in, to replace the overswarmed and ruined one they had left behind.

  Torro tried to doze at the edge of the conversation; he was warm and full of ale and food and pipe-smoke. How could he want more than these comforts, and fellows all around him who believed him one of them?

  He’d returned late to the shanty among the ruins. He’d brought forth the meat from inside his coat.

  Marto and Zand had come to attention, no misgivings in either fire-lit, famine-creased face.

  What is it – goat?

  That’s right. I found it foraging.

  It’s a strange shape. What part of the goat?

  Haunch, he lied promptly. They were all mad with hunger. They’d believe what they wanted to believe.

  Man, you should have brought the whole beast home. We’d have had days of it.

  Are you joking? They were on me as it was. I only just managed to get this. Shall I cook it? He himself had carved out the child’s cheeks, and slipped them into his mouth as he sat over the body in the empty street. The taste had woken in him a terrible delight, and it would never sleep again. No child would be safe with him now but his own.

  I could almost eat it raw, couldn’t you, Marto? Zand had said.

  Marto, hollow-eyed, had looked at the strips of meat glowing across Torro’s hands. Put it over the fire a minute, he’d said. We’re not savages.

  On another night, the time might come when he and his friends left the others at the fireside to take themselves to bed. Instead, a general rousing overtook the company, and a fetching of coats, for on the midnight the children’s revels were to conclude with a bonfire in a field outside the town.

  ‘I’ll stay on here,’ Torro said.

  ‘Oh no you won’t.’ Marto slapped his shoulder. ‘Not when our hosts are so graciously including us in their party.’

  And so he rose too and went with them, wrapping himself tightly in his coat, pulling up his collar so as to preoccupy his nose with its damp-wool smel
l. The fresh air woke him, and the excitement of all the little ones pushing their barrows along the streets. Some of the beds were elaborate with beautiful maidens aboard them, some barely more than faggots with a bound straw head at one end and a bit of sacking for a coverlet.

  In the field the barrows were paraded in a circle and the finest put aside for a little more admiration. Men, women and children took the bedding and the princesses from the others, and piled them on top of the kindling and straw. They stood back cheering as the mayor thrust the torch in. The straw caught. The flames spread. When the blaze was good and roaring, the children danced around it arm in arm, and sang.

  Their song sent the gooseflesh running about under Torro’s coat, so weird a tune carried it. It was years since he’d heard a song so clearly ogre-ish in its origins. His mother’s voice crooned and grumbled in it. How sweet is children’s flesh! she sang. How lucky is Torro, my own meat that will not be eaten! Oh, were he another mother’s, I would crack his bones between my jaws and suck out the marrow. I would lick up his bright red blood, every last drop in the bowl!

  He’d laughed with her as she sang, all the more because she only shared the song with him. He’d scorned everyone – his father included – for never being privy to it. He’d looked down with disdain on those children not lucky enough to be him, the prince, protected by his mother’s blood.

  The beds burned; the princesses’ heads rolled out onto the grass and were kicked back into the fire; the sparks whirled up orange against the midnight. His ogre-ish nature surged in him. Around him the children’s wild energy cried out to be quenched, their soft, unscarred skin glowing in the firelight, the heat of the fire and their dancing bringing out the smell of them. He must not dance, as Marto and Zand were doing, with woman or child. He must stand well back and keep his hands balled in his pockets. His belly was full, and he must ignore this other appetite.