Chapter 10
‘This is the hardest part?’ Rhea asks as I straighten.
My spine aches, I’ve been leaning over working for too long. Pressing out a painful hiss of a breath, I nod. Every year it hurts more, so every year the need to do this is greater. ‘I know it’s hard to believe after weeks of stirring that trough, but yes.’
Five days ago, we lifted the sapling from its bath and laid it in the drying room again.
The timber had swollen, absorbed the nutrients of the admixture – a sapling no longer, but a log essentially, its circumference wider than my waist, my shoulders, my hips.
For four days, it lay out to dry, the excess moisture leaching away.
Yesterday, I began the task of carving and reshaping – wood is always harder to change than flesh.
Here in the barn, he’s lying on a table formed of two trestles and another old door, repurposed.
My tools sit on the bench running along one wall, knives, chisels and gouges, the hatchet again, blades and hooks, adzes and veiners, of various sizes and for various purposes.
Rhea has watched with increasing interest as I’ve toiled, roughly at first, splitting the trunk into legs, then higher, two arms, higher still a ball of a head.
At the end of yesterday, a rudimentary man lay before us, then we left him overnight to settle, to prove.
My sleep was dreamless as the dead last night, and I woke refreshed despite the ache in my muscles from the constant labour.
This morning, Rhea’s positively feverish with enthusiasm.
I’ve already threatened to lock her up if she doesn’t stop buzzing about.
Undeterred, she keeps pacing around the table, looking at my creation from every angle.
‘You’re very good,’ she says admiringly.
I shrug.
‘I mean it, Mehrab! And this… this feels like big magic. No one ever taught me anything, before you, and the fire simply came to my call. All the other things you’ve shown me have been – no offence – quite mundane, small.
But this—’ she spreads her arms wide to show the magnitude ‘—this is life! This is grand and great. Creation!’
I can’t help laughing at the unbridled eagerness. ‘No offence.’
She pouts, puts her hands on her hips; those hands, much less pale, a little less plump after weeks of chores; not like mine, though, not yet.
Not until she has to start this kind of activity.
The advantage of the soft young wood is that any splinters are supple.
‘Don’t laugh at me when I’m so admiring! ’
‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry – but no one’s ever seen this done.
I’ve never instructed anyone in this. I’m not used to reactions or an audience.
’ And I laugh again. How far have we come from my unwilling agreement to foster her, to me showing her this secret like she’s my child and this her inheritance?
‘Your first will be the ugliest, unless you’ve any artistic talent?
’ She shakes her head regretfully. ‘Ah, you’ll survive.
A bit of ugly won’t hurt you. You’ll learn, with time, what you like, what you can do, what you can put up with. All mistakes make for experience.’
I shrug, step back to get a better look. The face is still basic because I’ve taken my time with the body – as ever, I have my requirements, my tastes — and I must admit to some pride in this year’s effort.
Stiff as a board in front of us he lies: broad-shouldered, deep-chested, long-legged.
His surface is damp, sticky as moisture leaks from where I’ve shaped him; it will dry into a smooth resin after I rub him smooth with fine sand from the bed of the stream.
Rhea nods at the apex of his thighs. ‘You’ve put some care there. ’
‘And you will too, one day. The trick is to be tender and remember that the length you make it is the only length he’ll ever have so don’t go cutting too short assuming there’ll be the growth of a man of flesh and blood.
Summer husbands don’t work quite that way.
’ It takes some effort to tease the cock free of the swollen trunk – that’s what the immersion in the trough mix does, makes the wood swell, bulk up, even though it’s been cut from its source, so there’s substance enough to work with.
‘It’s an artificial life, of course, eldritch and unnatural, limited, but life nonetheless for a brief span.
’ I gesture, say confidentially, ‘Once upon a time, I used to make the effort to carve a bed of hair, down there, something for it to rest upon. Realistic but fiddly and ultimately unnecessary – who looks, after a while?’
She gives a jerk of a nod. Maybe she’ll do the same thing when it’s her turn. Maybe she’ll learn the hard way, literally, as I did.
‘And do you… you know, just…’
I look at her, blink for a moment, then realise her meaning.
‘Oh. No. No, no. If that happens, it happens. They’re to help with the holding, the harvest, the planting, anything that needs doing around the place.
To make life easier, especially as I get older.
If something else happens, well it happens, but sometimes there’s no…
spirit in that direction. There must be willingness on both sides. Otherwise, no.’
I think about the loneliness that brought about the making of the first one.
I think about the hole inside me left by betrayal.
I think, perhaps, there was madness behind it, at least at first. The wish for company, the need for a labourer, the idea that I was in control of the seasons of such a thing.
That I was creating a tool, so to speak, and nothing more.
‘But as I said, if something does happen, you don’t want to find you’ve made something that… falls short.’
Switching topic, she observes: ‘There’s no stench.’
We’d poured the remains of the soup into a hole and heaped earth over it; it will feed the rose garden, indeed is one of the reasons for the year-round flowering. ‘No. I’m careful about that. The right mix of oils works wonders.’
‘How much longer?’ Rhea asks, taking the ladle from the bucket and carefully sprinkling some water over the body to make sure it doesn’t dry out too soon.
These past days, she’s been much more helpful and biddable, eager to please, taking better notice when I speak about powders and potions, sitting by the pond to practise her art, glaring at the float in the middle of the water, where she can set it aflame with little consequence – an upgrade from the target which finally burst into flame despite all our dampening precautions.
She does things around the cottage without having to be asked; has fitted herself into the life here.
I think, now, she will do well enough, that I can equip her with the skills she’ll need to survive when she goes back out into the world to make her own way.
‘How much longer?’ she repeats, impatient.
‘A few more hours after lunch.’ I’m tired and I should rest or I’ll get careless. I want to see his face, but it needs to be right. ‘Tomorrow morning. I’ll finish then.’
* * *
Even though I sleep deep and dead, I wake exhausted, because the work isn’t simply a matter of carving a thing.
It involves spells and the chanting of them, the cutting of them into the summer husband so they slow what time inevitably brings.
To buy me the months I need for harvest and sowing, for cutting and stacking the woodpile for winter, clearing the undergrowth around the cottage, checking the roof is sound, that the tiny cellar is dry and the stream hasn’t tunnelled its way back to the old leak from years ago when the place flooded and I knew nothing about it until I went down the stairs and found a bath awaiting.
By the time it’s done, I’m almost cross-eyed and can barely stand.
He’s ready, though, and beautiful in his own fashion.
The fine detail is clear and I’ve made his eyes and lips, chin and cheeks, nose, forehead, jaw, ears, the semblance of hair, just the way I want them.
And, as I said to Rhea, if something’s to happen you want this not only to be equipped but appealing.
‘The cup,’ I say and my voice is rough, throat dry.
Rhea’s quick to hand me the clay goblet.
The contents laps at the lip, a viscous mix of rabbit’s blood and sap, with a little nub of living clay dissolved therein (I’ve kept a store for years, purchased from a red-haired travelling woman who had the secrets of mud harvested from graveyards, rich and foetid with the essences of life and death).
The slit I made for his mouth, carved out into a void (but no tongue, never a tongue, never again), is waiting and I pour the elixir in.
And because I’m exhausted, I’m sloppy.
Fumes rise where the liquid meets the wooden lips. I, heedless as Rhea was all those weeks ago when we soaked him in the trough, take a negligent lungful of the vapours. Reeling away, I cough, choking, spluttering, stupid as an apprentice.
Rhea, distracted by the transformation of the block of wood on which I’ve lavished such attention, does nothing more than raise her hands vaguely in my direction.
But she doesn’t come to my aid, stays where she is, transfixed by the summer husband.
I understand, in spite of everything, for even though I’ve seen it so many times, I’m never not enchanted, never not fascinated by what I’ve wrought.
By the fact I managed to turn my skills to this, to adapt.
Yet this time I miss it altogether, the transformation, the becoming, as I try to get my breath back, try to clear the tears from my eyes.
And I forget, as I cough and splutter, the first rule of making a thing (of making any sort of child): always be the first thing it sees; only by this means can you ensure its love.
But I’m not the first thing he sees, am I?
And it’s no one’s fault but mine, because I’m in a corner, throwing up.
So to not witness it even once feels like a grief that will haunt me forever, but it’s not the worst part of it.
The first thing the new summer husband sees – the product of my hands, my sweat, my blood and magic, my tears and spit – is her. Rhea, with her blonde locks and her bluer than blue eyes, her trim figure, peaches and cream skin, leaning over him with wild fascination.
* * *
Sitting outside on the bench in the rose garden, trying to get my breath back.
To clear my lungs, to swill out the taste of vomit with the whiskey Rhea brought me when she could tear herself away from the summer husband.
He’s still in the barn, still supine, too new to know quite what to do until he’s told.
The girl’s beside me, chattering, asking if I’m quite well, and all I can think of is that she’s champing to get back into the barn.
Then she’s tapping my shoulder, hard, and I pay proper attention to her.
‘Mehrab. Look.’
I follow the direction of her nod to where the path feeds out from the forest or leads into it depending on which way you’re going.
The hulking shape of Anselm stands there, hesitating, almost as if he’s hanging, suspended in the shadows, unwilling to step into the patches of sunlight that dapple the way to my garden gate.
I raise a hand to beckon, then wipe my mouth with the self-same hand.
When he’s close enough for me to make out his expression, I say, ‘I know I look like seven types of shite right now, but you look infinitely worse, Anselm.’
Which is probably not the gentlest thing to say to a man who lost one of his children not so many weeks ago, but my stomach is battling with me still and it makes me curt. But he simply nods, refusing to meet my eye. ‘What is it, Anselm?’
He clears his throat, looks at me at last. ‘Our Ari’s back. But… she’s not the same.’