Chapter 84 #2
She feels the refugees gather behind her, a scattered soundtrack of shuffled feet and hesitant coughs. She trusts Shroud to keep them quiet, or to keep them steady if he can’t keep them quiet.
Her almost-host nods slowly, the skin of his cheek brushing the side of her face. ‘Better a kitcast shipwright than none at all. Long it’s been since we heard tell of your kind. There’s plenty you could do for me. A good trade, a fine trade, wind it tight with rope and salt and brass.’
He claps her amiably on the shoulder, inhaling deep, then coughs up something brown flicking the rag apologetically across his lips. ‘What else ee brought from belly of mountain? Stillbirths? Dead things?’ He fixes her with that bright gaze.
She holds his eyes for a second. Says nothing.
He smiles, sticky and yellow, laughs like a toad coughing up a stone.
‘No matter. No matter. We trade on the seen and the held. Leave the questions for the dreamers, eh? May they choke on them.’ He pointedly scuffs the ash at the threshold, beckons with a leathery palm.
‘Come by, come by. I have drink yet. Slung from the white roots, will put a thick on your worries.’
Shipwright smiles and carefully crosses the threshold line, leaving it untouched, before flashing a quick sign back to Shroud.
A taste of meat on strange bones.
Her boots take her deeper into the belly of the homestead. It’s surprisingly spacious, with narrow, scalloped corridors opening out into wide domed rooms, fed by fires tucked into the wall like babes, decorated with twists of rushes and thin-slit curves of graceful, bog-bleached bone.
The first of these is a workroom, tools neatly stretched upon shelves, hung in pegs, by size, weight, blade.
Jars and stoppers come next, honeycombed, sealed with black wax stamped with year, binding, sealant.
Her host’s feet are steady, loping among the stones, sped by the gentle suck of air through the corridors as their looping shapes pull warmth down into the belly of the house, pushed along by the contrast of the bitter cold beyond the walls.
His feet are steady, but he runs a broad hand along each wall, tracing the spirals and curves.
The stone is softened by carvings, hung with stitched sacks dyed bright with vegetable hues, recounting the old legends that had crawled and burrowed their way out from the memory of Luss and Rum, John a’Greenshoes, the Maid of Thriceflower, borrowed-Jim’s wending.
As he relaxes, his chat becomes a low, easy thing, soft as a mole’s burr.
After the work room, there’s a kitchen, with cheeses stacked and rinded in one corner, shadowed by loops of dark bloody sausages.
A drain basin is still scattered with sharpened cutting knives and the remains of the last lamb.
There’s a bucket of hooves, teeth, fragments for charms. She spies brass stamps on some of the flagstones, worn grooves where one might shift and tilt them to allow access to the root-cellars below.
Were there stills down there she wondered, waiting copper-necked and thirsty in the blackness, filling drop by drop?
Were they waiting for the touch of a slow-grown finger, for something to push up into the warmth from below?
Her host hurries her on, into the warmed centre of the house, the floor thicker with rushes, the walls more richly hung.
His family are there, gathered around a pot.
An angle-faced wife with lively eyes, a fat baby rocking on the bones of her knee.
Two older girls are squawking on the floor, battling dolls made of fox-fur and weaseltooth.
She’s greeted by the welcome roar of a tended fire and the smell of a stew rendered over days with root vegetables, marrow and patience.
The woman tosses a handful of leaves in as Shipwright arrives, shucks the baby off her knee and favours her with a bright, fast little smile that warms her heart.
Her husband beckons Shipwright in and sits her down, smiling.
‘A striking deal then. Ee’ll come ben with me, coddle the spinners back t’purring, and thy loose-grimmed shroudturner’ll see t’body.
’ He guides one of his daughters away gently with his foot, sending her scurrying to glower balefully from behind her mother’s skirts.
He looks back to Shipwright. ‘In return, I’ll turn out the bare walls of my home to ee and ee’r kitcast babies, so longin’ as they don’t come ben me or mine.
I have good straw and the walls tight-laced ’gin spring rains.
’ He stares into the fire, picks up a branch from by the side of the chair and whittles it into something slim and curving with long, smooth strokes.
She watches his hands, their gathering of hair and burn and scar.
‘Mark ye,’ he rumbles, waving the stick like a baton, ‘you’ll not be warded in bare-wall byre. Owt comes for ee, ee’ll meet with own steel,’ his voice lowers. ‘Own flesh.’
A careless toss sends the stick into the flames which swallow it whole, licking the soft white wood down to ash. ‘Have thee a deal with me, Shipwright?’
She takes his hand, clasps it, feels the hot blood pulse in his wrist. ‘We do.’
He smiles broadly, his broad gums wet in the light.
Calls over to the woman. ‘Mother, take ee kids behind brass and open the scowrin’ barns to them’s as out of walls.
’ His wife nods, gathering the girls in tight wrists and flitting from the room.
Her husband turns back to Shipwright. ‘You and I ull call on the heart of the house tomorrow. Rest ye. Neither wet nor green’ll touch ye here. ’
He is as good as his word. In short time, the barns and byres are opened, and if settling down next to the livestock in their hay and grass isn’t perfect, it still puts stone and warmth between the refugees and the gathering damp.
The people of Thell fall into each other’s arms, twined like cats, sleeping with the boneless weariness of folk tired beyond reason.
Their hosts bring platters of dried meat, the skin flaked to wafers, scented with berries pulled from the hedgerows and place urns filled with warm stones beneath blankets to bite at the edges of this sudden, unseasonable cold.
Icecaller they won’t come near. The children shy from her, lacing their fingers across their eyes, while their father only pulls his hood to, pressing brass tight against his eyelids, his offerings fumbling the tension between obligation and terror. Shipwright watches him, and wonders.
Later, they bring Shipwright and Shroudweaver inside.
There is work to be done. The children sneak out from behind their mother’s skirts, watching wide-eyed as their father leads his guests deeper into the heart of the homestead.
The heat from the wall-fires becomes an almost physical thing, thickening in the air, carrying strange, unfamiliar scents of hot fur, vinegar, something sharp on the tongue.
Down deeper still into the narrow corridor which runs the length of the homestead’s central chamber, the walls pressing in like unwelcome hands.
Shipwright’s broad shoulders brush the stone, grazing against the edges.
Her mind plays that word, over and over: spinner.
Shroudweaver is chattering brightly behind her, a light in his eyes, curious and lively, for once.
Their host answers sporadically, cautiously, the Midlands burr dragging his answers out into low tones that rumble gently in the positive or negative.
The noise of the house fades as they draw closer to its heated heart. The stones are fiercely warm here, threaded with a sound like soft bellows and something else Shipwright recognises – a brassy spinning, hitched and unsteady.
When their host beckons them into the room, it’s with a shrug that is already half-apology, his voice a husk in the rising heat. He gestures regretfully to a body, stretched out black beneath brass.
‘She been a-sundered and growin’ for nigh on six year now.
Fallen to the green in winter, rising dry in summer.
She ain’t for killin’ so I been keepin’ her steady on t’spinner.
Time was I took it in trade for a full gallon of summer blood.
She’m growing strong now though, with all ee wet fallen on field. ’
His wide, raw eyes tell Shipwright all she needs to know. Whoever’s under that spinner is family. What worse than to keep this at the heart of your home? But where else to hold it? Her heart aches for him. She claps him on the shoulder and moves forwards.
‘Let me see what can be done.’
He ducks his head gratefully, shuffles behind her with haste. Shroudweaver slips back with their host into the depths of house, and she gets to work.
The body of the woman in front of her pulses as she breathes, as the forces within her wax and wane.
Her body flushes and darkens, clearing and then clouding again, like wine through muslin or blood against a cloth.
She looks old, but strong, iron hair scraped back against the skull, muscles corded with a lifetime of use, skin glowing with that tough clarity that only came as a gift from years in the rain, wind, sun and sleet.
She’s laid out on a stone slab softened with furs, her wrists and ankles tied securely with hide, strung with charms of hammered brass.
Her chest rising and falling in slow, steady rhythms, strengthening as her skin darkens and the colour returns.
On the in-breath, her eyelids flutter, and her teeth shine bright in her mouth before they fade again with the hitch and chime of the spinner which hangs over her head, dancing and chucking on the lowest of beams.