Black Juice Read online

  A mother came forward. A little one toddled after her, but was scooped back by its sister.

  ‘Is that Dot I see?’ asked the mother.

  ‘Why, it’s Winsome!’ said Dot. ‘Samed, remember I told you about—Winsome, meet my friend Samed.’

  ‘I’m sure it’s an honour,’ said Samed smoothly. Winsome looked at him as if he had two heads.

  ‘What has happened here, Winsome?’ said Dot. ‘Has the Bard died?’

  She looked from Samed to Dot, even more disconcerted. ‘No, not yet. At least, he hadn’t when I left his food this morning.’

  Dot looked around at the others, who had drawn forward in a crescent-shaped crowd to listen. He was very afraid of what else might have happened.

  ‘And my mother?’

  ‘She’s in your house, where she always is.’

  The little crowd broke open in that direction. A mother started to speak, but was hushed. None of them would meet his eye. Dot looked uncertainly at Winsome.

  ‘Go on and see,’ she said. Her little one had fixed itself to her leg, and she put her hand to its head.

  Reassured, he went towards the house. His steps slowed at the smell. They’re all mad, he thought. This is some appalling joke, some punishment.

  ‘Mother?’ he said into the smell at the door.

  There was no answer. He folded himself into the house, the collapsing movements coming to him awkwardly in his man’s body. Raw earth, dead fire, unclean flesh—all these underlay the worse smell. Dot moved away from the door to let the light show what it would.

  His mother sat cross-legged and naked. Her hair was clipped back to silver speckles. She watched him as if he were a bantam that had run in by accident, as if her eyes just automatically followed anything that moved.

  Then the thing at her feet came clear to him: not the loom he had thought, but Ardent’s crooked legs. They didn’t jerk or tremble in recognition of him, for there was no breath in her body. That worse smell came from her. The nails of the upstuck, misshapen hand were varnished silver; there was a bangle on the arm. Ardent’s face was turned into the floor.

  Dot’s mouth found some home-tongue syllables. ‘She was never meant to live out a full life, this one.’

  His mother looked at him as if he had said something utterly without meaning. She spoke out of a throat that had not had food or water pass through it for a day or two. ‘My daughter hasn’t ever been sick in her life.’

  Dot blinked away the woeful thought Mother, do you not know me? He nearly laughed. Look at her, he wanted to say, she was born sick! She’s sickness itself, just in the shape of a person. She was never meant to more than lie awhile here, then move on. But you couldn’t say that to the mother, could you? Not to the one who had tended Ardent, from the moment she was born a rubbery knot that couldn’t be untied, to the moment she ceased to be however little of a self. Not to the person who had actually done that thankless, pointless work, with no more acknowledgment than a snuffle, with no more reward than another job of filth to clean up. Especially when you had walked away, yourself, from that work, walked away, without a thought, from that and all the other work of being among the Bard’s followers. Walked away and not properly thought about that mother, or that work, for full years. And when you did think, waited further years before returning.

  He went back out. Samed was seated in a crowd by the car. Children were taking off his rings and bangles and trying on his sunglasses. Mothers were laughing.

  ‘How goes it, Dot?’ he said.

  ‘My sister is dead and needs burying.’

  ‘This is the bent one?’ said Samed.

  Dot nodded. ‘Winsome, is there a pick I may use?’

  ‘Can I give these little ones their treats?’ said Samed as Winsome led the way. ‘Or at least play them some music? ’Cause I’ll bet they’re good dancers.’

  ‘You go on and do that,’ said Dot, relieved. He knew in this state, with this skirmish going on in his chest, he couldn’t toss sweets to children, he couldn’t bring out the Many and make them dance as he’d planned.

  The gardens had shrunk to fit only the needs of these mothers and children. The walled grave compound had once been their centre; now it was their edge and you walked across bone-dry ground to reach it.

  And the earth inside the walls was like concrete. After a few strokes, Dot took off his white-on-white shirt and relaxed into the work. It took a long time; Winsome brought him water and some sweetened cheese to fuel him. The little gusts of Samed’s rich music, and children’s cheers, and mothers’ laughter—these too were like water and fresh blood to Dot’s muscles.

  Winsome came and sat with him. She talked into the grave rather than to him, brushing flies away all the while. ‘Well, first the men left. That was maybe—oh, two years?—after you went away. The Bard tried to keep on. He took on everyone’s wives—I myself have two children of him. But things got quarrelsome, and the Bard, he gave us up, all of us. He lives along the road in the old cow-house now. We take him his food and drink, but he won’t talk to us, and he won’t have us talk to him. He says our high voices give him a pain in the head.’ She smiled to herself, then saw Dot’s dismay. ‘No,’ she said. ‘He’s not who he was.’

  ‘I thought it would stay forever the same,’ said Dot faintly, leaning on the pick.

  ‘You shouldn’t have gone,’ said Winsome. ‘We’ve talked about it. All the puff went out of him. You were the only one he could have handed on to, who wasn’t blood-related, who wouldn’t have caused quarrels.’

  ‘What about Pedder?’ But Winsome snorted. ‘Or Lean Jo—they were the ones in line.’

  ‘A line that never held firm.’

  WHEN THE JOB WAS FINISHED, Dot went to the river and washed. He put his shirt on and walked back up to the houses. Samed’s party died down as he approached. Samed at the centre was the plainest Dot had ever seen him. Every child had some lump of jewel or gold upon it, but Samed’s only adornment was the House of the Many, its crimson clashing joyfully with his yellow and orange robe.

  ‘It’s done,’ Dot said lightly.

  ‘All right,’ said Samed, getting up. ‘Now, children, it’s time to be quiet and sad, isn’t it, when a person has to put his sister in the ground. I’ll play you some sad music, and we’ll all go together, slowly, to the cemetery.’

  Dot returned to his house. ‘Better put on some clothes, mother. I’ve made a grave for Ardent, and we should take her there.’

  Ardent was a lot smaller than he remembered, and lighter than he’d imagined she would be. Dot and Bonneh put her into her carry-bag, but then instead of putting her on Bonneh’s back Dot carried her out of the house in his arms. Bonneh walked beside him, bare-armed in a night-shift, her hand on Ardent’s head, and they proceeded slowly to the grave under the spell of Samed’s music, slow and spare and sad.

  Bonneh got down into the grave, and Dot knelt and passed Ardent down to her. She laid her in there, and drew the bag-string tight closed, and knotted it. Then Dot and Winsome helped her out and there was a silence, except for the low drone of Samed’s music.

  ‘You want to say something, Dot?’ he said.

  Bonneh was between Dot and Winsome, and they each held one of her hands in both of theirs. Dot looked over Bonneh’s head to Winsome. ‘I think you should speak, Winsome.’

  ‘Oh, all right. Let me think. Ardent.’ Samed gave her a little more music to think by, then faded it when she looked at him.

  She began slowly, and left a pause between every phrase. ‘Ardent, she had a short life, and some of us might think it wasn’t much of one. But she felt the sun on her skin just like all of us do, and she tasted her food just fine; she smelt the smell of a good roasting fire, and of fresh rain just like us, and in her ears was the same birdsong. Best of all she liked the sound of people’s voices and to have someone near. Her father died when she was very young, but he didn’t run away and leave her the way a lot of kids’ fathers have done. She had a mother, Bonneh, who was
with her every day of her life. And also she had this brother, Dot; he spent his childhood with her. Sure, he left when he got to his middlehood—but then, didn’t he come back? And isn’t he here now, at her graveside?’ Bonneh’s grip tightened in Dot’s hands.

  ‘We’ll start with the oldest, which is Safira. We’ll each of us put a handful of earth in on Ardent. Then the kids will strip off and push the rest of the earth in, and then we’ll all go down to the river and swim. And then, Dot’s friend Samed says he’s got some treats, so we’ll have something of a feast, and drink to Ardent’s life, and welcome Bonneh back from her place of mourning.’

  Samed swelled the music, and Safira came forward. ‘I knew you would say the right things,’ said Dot.

  ‘Better than the Bard ever did,’ said Bonneh between them, watching the earth fall to the carry-bag. ‘He would have preached all over her and spoiled it.’

  TOWARDS THE END OF THE FEAST, Dot walked away to the cow-house. The sun was lower and the world not so painfully bright.

  ‘Bard Jo?’ he said into the slatted darkness of the wooden hut. ‘It’s Dot here.’ And he went in.

  The boards chopped up the darkness with planes of dusty sunlight. After a few moments the old man became visible on his bed against the far wall. His pale foot-soles pointed to the ceiling, and the pattern of his blanket was interrupted by his thin dark frame. He was lying on his back, breathing out illness from some serious place inside him; the hut was thick with the smell, which was of dead Ardent, with rotting wet lung added.

  ‘I came back for a visit, Bard,’ said Dot. If he called him by name, perhaps he could believe this really was the Bard.

  The breathing worked up to speech, through spittle and twigs in the Bard’s throat, it sounded like. ‘It was Dot, was it, playing that great layer-cake of a music?’ Sweet cakes being things of evil and not proper food.

  ‘No, Bard,’ said Dot, into the horrible withering wind of the Bard’s disgust. ‘It was my friend Samed. But we both play.’

  You must not retire like that, Kooric had told him after his first fight with Samed. You mustn’t bow your head and take it. You must speak back. You must not take Samed’s rubbish. But here in the Bard’s presence—even the failed Bard, even the corruptible Bard—keeping his back straight, and the idea of speaking, felt mannered and arrogant.

  ‘And you’ll have brought some rubbish for the children?’

  ‘A few bits of shine, Bard. Nothing harmful—’ He heard the fatal weakness of apology in his voice.

  ‘What would you know?’ The Bard jolted on the bed. ‘So harmed yourself, so prettied up, so taken in by all the shine and the music and the fun. Did you think it would be fun, to bring your worldly friends here, to amaze them with how spare and poor you used to be? To walk in like a god and scatter gifts, like a father, you thought?’

  The Bard spat into something that had already been spat in many times.

  He’s too clever a man, thought Dot, in the grip of the old fears. He’s too clever and too right. He knew me when I was only myself without any world-trappings.

  ‘The only father I knew never scattered gifts. He came home angry. He washed the town off himself as quick as he could—’

  ‘That’s not your father,’ said the Bard in a scribbly hiss. ‘Don’t try and claim that one.’ He cleared his clogged voice and spat again, and Dot could see and hear him shaking his head against the pillow.

  ‘Like I say, he was the only one—’

  ‘Your father—’ The Bard hoisted himself upon one rail of an arm, that was ragged with either flesh or shirt, Dot couldn’t tell which. A slat of light bounced off his yellow-white hair, and made a faint glow on the wall. ‘You knew your father just fine; he led you away from here as if he had a halter on your neck. He sent you back to us, all hung about and decorated with his cloths and jewels—you may think it’s you, but it’s just Morri Simpsim, making trouble again. All that’s missing is the bullet-belt and the foreign gun. And the soldier mates hanging off him for his money’s sake. The feeble mind is the same. Why could you not have grown up strong, like your mother, worthy of Bonneh as no other man could be—not even I.’ He fell back on the bed, breathing hard. The golden dust above him swirled.

  There was other furniture in the cow-house. There was a wooden chest on Dot’s right. An unlit lamp stood on it, and beside it the Three’s House, hooked closed.

  ‘I am sure my mother has always respected and admired you,’ he said.

  ‘And I am sure she has not, for how could she? I was an embarrassment with my wives and my slave-men and my “wisdom”. I preached purity and lived a prince’s life. Bonneh preached nothing and lived purity. Her vow held her steady, and not all my glamour and power could ever budge that woman. She was before me as my lesson every day, yet did I ever learn?’

  The Three’s House was quite a lot smaller than the House of the Many—but then, everything here had shrunk with the years: the curve of the river, the mothers, the Bard himself. Dot took the House to the doorway where he could see it. Oh, yes—smaller, and so much lighter. So brown, so worn. Even the healing hands of the accordion-man in Port-of-Lords could do nothing for this. It hardly existed as an instrument.

  ‘Take it,’ rasped the Bard. ‘Take the damned thing. Everything else you’ve taken, you might as well.’

  ‘Can it still sound?’

  ‘As much as it ever did. Go on, take its weight off my mind. And your weight, too. Leave me to die in peace and with nothing.’

  Dot left the cow-house and walked back up the road to the village. Samed had got the balloons out; bright dots of colour were bounding and flying at the end of strings. There was a tiny pop as one burst, then a tiny child-wail. Dot held the dusty accordion to his chest, where he knew its ancient concertina-folds would leave long stripes of disintegrating paper. He felt haggard from exposure to the Bard’s bitter breath; his belly was sore from the tension it had carried all day.

  He walked up the rise to the remains of the tea-tent. The tables and benches were weather-warped but still strong, and he sat where the last piece of worn cloth would shield him from the village. The breeze was very soft and steady, the sunlight yellow-gold, the shadows long.

  He undid the catch. It was a while since the accordion had been used; Dot had to open it very carefully so that it didn’t tear itself apart, so that the fragile cardboard didn’t split in several places and take away the instrument’s last breath. He eased it open and closed slowly several times, wondering whether it could play a single note without breaking.

  And as he wondered and worked the house’s hallway, Anneh idled out a side-door of the house just as she always had, her arms full of thatch, three piglets and a chicken following behind. She could go only so far, to the limits of her yard and beyond that to her farm patch, a bit farther, a bit fainter, before she faded from hearing.

  Robbreh took some finding, some odd angles and pressures, but before too long Dot had him singing, and not long after that the two of them singing together, going about their separate businesses. Dot had tried for the same sound on the red accordion, but there was too much juice in it, too much harmony, not enough dust and age. The broken pieces that made the Three alive were missing.

  Then, in the middle of one of Robbreh’s wheezes he heard a corner, an edge of an echo that was high and crazy and said anything that came into its head. He played more of the same part of Robbreh, coaxing and coaxing the little one out from behind the dad.

  What was left of the flap of the tea-tent lifted, and there stood Bonneh, washed and dressed in her white. She came in and perched on a bench, inclined her head and listened. From his years out in the world, Dot read her movements as full of grace, the bones of her face and speckled head as smooth and beautiful.

  ‘Been a long time since anyone took that up,’ she said in a pause where Dot had lost the older Two and was working to find them again among the huffs and rattles. They jumped out again suddenly with Viljastramaratan blaring beside
them, and Dot had to laugh, and his mother too smiled.

  He played until he had all three moving somewhat in the old ways, Anneh busy with her work, Robbreh happy among the rumble of the men.

  But Viljastramaratan came and went as Viljastramaratan pleased. When that one decided to sing, Dot could keep him going a little, but—

  ‘I can’t keep a hold on the child,’ he said to Bonneh.

  She gave the smallest smile in the world, rose and left the tent. And when the fraying flap had fallen closed behind her, he wound the music down and finished. The wind in the cloth and the guy-ropes had more notes in it than the accordion, though it didn’t form what you’d call music.

  Dot fastened the Three’s House closed and carried it down to the village. The shadows streamed away, endlessly long now. A sweet-wrapper tinkled past him. The car stood beyond the huts, its curves gathering the last sunlight into lines and points. Samed was walking slowly towards it like a carnival in his orange robe, the children running up to replace his rings and bracelets. He flirted with the mothers over the children’s heads, and they bumped shoulders with each other and laughed behind their hands.

  But in the car, against the sunset, Dot saw Bonneh’s round head. Like the plainest wooden statue, she sat polished by life’s handling, beautified by the completion of her work. She waited while he wrapped and stowed the old accordion, while he said farewell to Winsome, and warned her children not to put these gifts of rose-scented soap in their mouths. She waited motionless while he went to the fields’ edge and stood over the fresh mound where Ardent lay, which the children had prettied with lolly-foils weighted with stones. When Samed and Dot entered the car, she eyed them out of a deep smiling thought, and then fixed her gaze forward again.

  ‘Bonneh, aren’t you bringing belongings?’ said Samed. ‘Your … your pots and things? Other clothes, maybe?’

  Again she cast him that sideways joking glance and was silent.