Folk Read online

  Shilla’s face is as ruddy and broad as her red forearms, and just as hard-looking. Bryony can’t shrink her ma down to child height in her mind, with that bristly brow and her chin that sticks forward whenever she bellows – and it’s usually a bellow – at her daughters. She tries to slice into the earth in the same rhythm as Shilla’s spade, to keep from being noticed and halting the story, wishing Gertrude would do the same instead of toppling about.

  ‘There were a woman then, lived in that cottage on the far side of the woods that’s a ruin now. Liked to be left alone, and with good reason, they said.’

  ‘What was her name?’ asks Gertrude, already huffing with the effort of turning the earth. She’s two years older than Bryony but a head shorter, measly like the last batch bun that gets made up from a scrap of dough.

  ‘When did your nose get so sharp?’ Shilla turns and Bryony tries not to look up at the swollen blue eyes that fix on her sister, but Gertrude doesn’t even slow at her digging. ‘Merry. Old Merry.’ Shilla returns to her spade and goes on, breathing deep. ‘She had hair down to her knees that she wound up in grey knots around her ears like mouldy bannocks, and just enough teeth to get the flesh from a rabbit bone. She didn’t come round near the other houses much, meaning people had a good stare when she did, and the children hid behind their mams like mice when a cat’s about. Me and my brother were no better, peering out at her and whispering.’

  ‘What did they say?’ Gertrude manages between wheezes.

  ‘The same nastiness you tiddly ones likely say about old Winfrid Plait now. That she ate mice so she needn’t come down to the village for her fare. That she went about at night so as not to show that she had no shadow.’

  Bryony shudders at the thought of Winfrid Plait, and the top of her head that is as bald as an egg, with just a wisp of hair floating above it. She won’t keep it covered, and then she sits by that pool along the river all day, so whenever you pass by you have to pretend you’re not looking at her head or you haven’t noticed. And then when you try to think of something ordinary to say, she looks right in through the fronts of your eyes and laughs at the real thought you’re having, about her head like an egg.

  ‘We were taught better than to say such things, but we knew she were different. People stopped their gabbing when she came near. She never were invited into a house like others, nor mentioned in prayers at church. That were one place she wouldn’t go near at all.’

  ‘Witches can’t go in the church,’ says Gertrude. She flicks soil up into the air with her fork. ‘They turn to ash-dust if they cross the threshold. Piff paff!’

  I heard them coming. Thought I’d slipped up and forgot a festival day. They traipsed along, clanging and clacking. It’s a parade, I thought, coming along to bless their fortune-telling ox at the waterfall, or some such nonsense. They are always on and on with their rituals, blessing this and blessing that. Shouts rang about, but nothing to prick my ear. Children’s voices, little birdie squawks, they don’t sound a thing to fear. I kept right on with my work. Just then it were tying up the new herbs into posies, to hang and dry. I think of them as posies, but where there’d be flowers there are the hints, the glints, of their powers. Shame I hadn’t the time or the insight to use them then. A stronger one than me, a woman with the true sight, might have seen what was coming. I scratched the ashes with a stick, my forked stick for the purpose, and saw only a storm in the grate.

  ‘Who said a word about a witch?’ Shilla swings round and Bryony shrinks back, bumping Gertrude with her elbows.

  ‘Guller did,’ Gertrude replies, quick as a slap. ‘He said she’d been up to mischief, upsetting folk. What is it she did, Ma?’

  Bryony is watching her ma too carefully to be able to give her sister a warning pinch. On their way home, they had tried to guess the mischief, and Gertie had decided the witch must have put a curse on that Webbe boy, Verlyn, and changed his arm. He’s older than them, he’d have been a bab then, Gertie had said, sounding more and more sure of herself. But Bryony knows this can’t be right. Verlyn is kind, not a cursed thing.

  Shilla’s wide red face switches between angry and sad and something else. Her eyebrows bristle. Bryony waits for a bellow, for a palm swinging her way, but instead her ma turns and continues digging. ‘Never mind what Old Merry were up to. You can call it curses, but it’s too long ago to be sure of it, anyway. What’s certain is that she got the wrong side of Ma Guller.’

  The rhythm of Shilla’s spade slicing into the ground goes on. Bryony can just hear the chicks peeping from the tree behind them, the tiny wheedling sounds, so pitiful. She thinks of mandrakes again, screams that happen only in your head. What sounds does a witch make when she is hit? Would it be a roar, or a dreadful squeal like a rabbit’s when its leg is caught in a trap?

  Gertrude is poking her in the bum, hissing something or other about Guller being as cock-eyed as his ma, but Bryony bats her hand away. She wants to keep the cold blood feeling that the scream in her head is making.

  ‘That’s where things went awry. Mark it, the pair of you. If somebody does you wrong, or you find yourself bitter, or jealous, you sit back and ease your mind and puzzle a while. If you can’t make head nor tail of it, you puzzle a while longer and you keep on pondering until you run out of steam. You don’t go with that boiling pot in your head and start scalding others with your own stew.’

  Shilla’s voice is turning crackly, like there’s a leaf pile in her throat and her words have set it alight. Bryony tries to unthink her bad thought, that her ma is hardly the one to be preaching about cooling down before taking trouble to a person. But this burn-hole in her ma’s fierceness is curious.

  ‘Like in that tale about the lady who pushed her sister in the river?’ Gertrude pipes up, grinning at her own sister.

  ‘That was a secret,’ Bryony hisses. ‘Clotha said nobody knows it.’

  But Shilla nods, as if the story is familiar to her. ‘Yes, like that. Only Ma Guller’s failing weren’t jealousy. She were just plain angry. Her carvings were the finest of all the women’s in Neverness, and most folk agreed on that. When the year-turning fair came and her carving didn’t win the prize, she wouldn’t have it. Claimed Old Merry had played a trick, charmed the judge. Said anything she could to make it seem she hadn’t lost her skill. Folk laughed and made it worse, and she boiled up and boiled up until she couldn’t get quiet again. And she began talking, to any that would listen, and especially to the tiddlers because we’d swallow any old telltale story like it was. Her rage was like a new, shining thing to us. Something frightening, but you drink it up, like those ghoulish tales you hear in the bard house in winter. We listened, and with all those ears turned up at her, Ma Guller’s stories got wilder, and her rage became like a spell with all of us under it. We danced like empty-headed puppets for her, just to keep in the fiery heat of it, to feel the power of her rage coursing in us.’

  Shilla’s voice crackles so much that with a snap it seems to break, and Bryony watches her ma take one heavy step away from the furrow and thump herself down on the heap of weed stalks beside them. She looks worn out, like all that talk of fire and rage has sucked the red out of her. She is staring at the furrow she has dug, her breathing still heavy from the work, but Bryony can tell that it is not soil she is seeing with her big round eyes.

  Kelpie is mewing near me somewhere. Perhaps she has found her brother. I named him after a boy I knew, once, when I were a bitty one. Hunter. By name and by nature, for he brought me a catch each night, the rascal. I called for him then. My eyes were already blind with the blood but I could hear. Through all their hubbub of hollering and smashing there was the sound of his cry. Worse than the hurt I felt all through my bones was that cry. My mind turned then, for not being able to bear it. When I woke, it were all silent, just this mush of me left. I am spared the sight of my Hunter, but the mewing of his sister makes him slink through my head. She is licking my cheek, I feel the heat of her tongue, but how it stings. Like a lick from a n
ettle. Kind cat, kinder than folk. Don’t mew. Lick these crusts from my eyes, let’s see what’s left of them.

  Bryony has an urge then, to sit beside her ma and lean on the hillock of her shoulder, but there is a kind of spell cast even now. Gertrude stands still beside her, trying to quiet her gusts of breath, watching the thunder pass through their ma’s face.

  ‘We did her bidding. We followed the force of her will, out of the village and through the wood, so strong it was I believe our own souls were left behind. She wished Old Merry dead, did Ma Guller. And she got her way, with not a drop of blood on her hands.’

  Shilla sits, her eyes covered by her great, grimy fingers, and her daughters listen to the small green leaves of the wych elm, hush-hushing above them, and the tiny cheeps from the nest in its branches.

  Their ma speaks again, as if she hears the questions bursting in her daughters’ mouths. ‘Sticks, they used, that were laying about. Stones from the crumbling cottage wall. There were such a number of us, mad with that woman’s rage, we filled the house like a starling storm. After, the place were so stained, in Old Merry’s blood and her howls, and in the minds of all of us, that they burned it. Old Merry were still inside. No man checked for breath, for a stirring of life, before they piled up the sticks all round and put a flame to the thatch.’

  The flutter of the green leaves turns to the licking of flames in the fast hill winds. The calls of the baby birds become the mewing of a lonely cat – for a witch always has a cat – as it watches its home become a bonfire. Bryony shudders again, seeing at the centre of the bonfire the messy, sticky bundle of Old Merry, clawing away the embers of thatch that drop on to her broken body. She feels a hard nudge from Gertrude, and as the smoke and flames clear from her eyes there is the shape of her pa, stamping across the muddy ground towards them.

  ‘What’s this? Shilla? Girls, what troubles your mother?’ There are little shakes running through Shilla’s shoulders, her huge hands cover all of her face. Pa’s shadow looms over her as his stare slides from one daughter to the other. ‘What have you done, you weasels?’ He lunges towards them, Gertrude swerves and he grabs Bryony by the scruff of her neck, snagging her skin so she gasps. She feels her feet lift off the ground, the fork drop from her fingers.

  ‘Let her down.’ Shilla’s voice comes out snuffly. ‘It’s my doing, they’ve done nothing but listen.’ Bryony stumbles as her feet touch the ground and she falls into the furrow, soil gritting her cheek.

  ‘Listen? To what?’ asks her pa.

  ‘They heard a snippet today of what became of Merry Mort. I told them the rest, by way of a lesson.’

  ‘You told them. All of it?’

  ‘The parts that matter.’

  ‘They’re not the only ones wants a lesson.’ Her pa’s boots step right over Bryony and she peers up from the furrow just in time to see her ma’s head sent flicking to one side by the clout of his fist.

  ‘That tale’s not for the ears of anyone living, least of all our own daughters.’ He stands over Shilla, who stares at the ground. ‘Not for nobody, ever. You learn that lesson and you keep it, Shilla.’ As his boots thud away, Shilla’s blue eyes meet Bryony’s across the broken earth. Bryony stares, and for a moment it is like looking into her own eyes, like seeing another girl just like her. The girl is afraid, even more than Bryony, but most of all she is ashamed.

  Bryony can’t bear to look then. She closes her eyes, and listens to the tree, to its flickering leaves and the sad, sad sound of the lonely witch’s cat.

  The wind drums its song at the door all night, a beat for the devil to dance to, leaving the prints of hooves around the house. Winfrid tugs her stitches tight to keep him out. I watch my needle dive through the weft, the stab and the give, and dream up patterns I’d never stitch, secret rhythms. Crosses for kisses, every girl stitches those. I’ve stitched my name on a ribbon and thrown it into the gorse, same as the rest. But I have a tingle under my skin for more than kisses, and there’s no pattern for that.

  Winfrid, my dear old Granny Win, is sewing for my wedding trunk. She plants luck into bed sheets with witching threads. She won’t be drawn on the slightest thing, not the wind, not the rush of the rain on the roof. Not what’s in her heart, not what’s in mine. We sit here, blessed to be dry, to be warm down one side where the fire glints in my needle, while the world outside is battered to bits.

  Underneath the devil’s palm-beat, warping our wettened door, comes another tap tap tap. It is faster; it has blood behind it. I lift the stitching from my lap and go to listen. Tap tap tap. It is not an evil, nor an animal, noise. I catch the door as it swings in at me and there in the welter of water and wind is a man such as I have never seen. Such hair, such skin, taut across the bones of his face, taut across his limbs. He wears only a rag wrapped round him at the hips. I think of the needle through the weft, the stab and the give.

  ‘Shelter, please,’ he says. That is all, and when I show him to the seat beside mine on the settle his head falls, just like that, into my lap.

  A head is for stroking, hair as soft as waterweed, strokes as soft as I can muster. What else is there to do? All that long, lean body of him curled hard against the settle cloth, his warmth on my thighs, what would I do but stroke? The tingle grows in my fingers.

  When Win comes with a cup for the stranger, the saucer rattles in her clawed old hands, but he doesn’t stir. She bends to catch the growl of his breath and frowns. My hands are deep in his hair.

  ‘Dig in,’ she whispers. My dragging fingers bring up, from the depth of his hair and head and skin smell, tiny shells. They are under my nails like sand, but each with an impossible whorl inside, too tiny and too deep. I rake and harvest, hundreds of them, pinky white or crusted green, some trailing a ghost of hair behind them. I hold a palmful out to Win, but she is shaking, her eyes wet with fear.

  ‘Water bull,’ she says.

  I should feel the cold of fear now, for this is the tale Win tells the most, at the bard house and here on the settle. It is the one she wields to keep me home on nights like this when the dusk falls fast, safe from the river that curls like an eel around the house, safe from the sea that churns below. The water bull, her story goes, leaps inland with the sea surf on wild nights and swims up the river, sensing souls. Then he shakes off his bull-hide and hunts himself a maiden. The only way she can save herself is to cross water.

  I must run for the river, Win urges, and hold my skirts tight up around me so he cannot grab at them if he follows. Gingerly she pushes a wad of wool between his head and my thighs, and I edge out from beneath his warm weight. Win has a look in her eye that says Defy and be doomed, and it is only this that makes me shift, for how it hurts me, of a sudden, to leave his warmth. I long to stroke the dark fuzz that covers his arms and shoulders. The smell of his hair is between my fingers, how a seal pup might smell. I want to rub my face against it and breathe deep. But Win is pushing me with uncommon strength and she hurls me out through the slapping door, into the summer storm. When I turn at the gap in the wall to rub the rain from my eyes, I see Win on the threshold, and the man’s strange, wide face right there above her own wizened one.

  ‘Run, girl!’ she bellows, and I know he is coming. So I do, I lift my knees high and plunge through the mud that was the path, splattering it cold up my legs, the wind twisting my skirts so I am stumbling with it. The trees are bent low, flailing against the night clouds in the fearful gale, as I tear my way up the bank, tugging up handfuls of grass, to where the river is narrow before the pool. There’s no sound beyond the roar and rattle of the wind, but I know he is following by the thrum in my belly, the sense of silver eyes on me. Surely a man of such fine-turned limbs and beast-bearing will run faster than I, weighted down as I am with water? I pant at the top of the slope, hot breath where all the rest of me is shiver. The wind whips wet; it is like being in the spitting mouth of a monster, but when I look back, there are those silver eyes, those dark shoulders gleaming with rivulets.

 
It’s but a few steps to the river now, but he is such a sight and, as he comes closer, the thrum in me deepens. I hear the sound from his mouth, a sort of snort as wild as a bull, and that is what makes my feet move then, but I am slower and slower as in a nightmare, and when I reach the river it is swollen. There is a torrent between me and the far bank, which is nothing but a tumble of mud and roots now. I could wade in but I might be swept right away and I can hear the thrash of all that water as it falls below the rocks.

  So I am standing still, staring empty-headed at the twists of currents, when I feel that brindled arm, strong and thick around my waist.

  I don’t struggle. His body hard against my back turns me limp, quiet. I do not fall. No, we leap. A windblown, flying leap it is, over the edge of the waterfall, plunging down towards that churning pool. The sheer cold rushes into my ears.

  Underneath, swaying in the dark, he turns me easily in the currents and kisses me. It is a hard bruise of a kiss, my first. When it ends, my sigh releases the last of my bubbling breath; the last threads of heat straggle out of my limbs. After that there is no more breath, or heat, for there is no need. I can move then, not as a struggling lump of a girl tangled in muddy clothes, but as waterweeds move in the eddies of a stream. When the water bull reaches out to me, it is a kind of dance that we do, down under the waterfall, and into his cave below. I watch the dark down floating up from his skin. I stroke my fingers across the very surface of it and he shudders, and the cold that has seeped through me turns into the sweetest ache I have ever felt.

  Floating like a rag she were when I found her, my poor Plum, just a shred of a girl down in that hellish black pool. How I howled, for it were too much to bear, she the orphan of parents both lost to the sea. But not a soul could hear me, so there were nothing to do but haul her out myself. Knowing what had got her I thought best to be cautious, so I tugged down on one of the hazel branches hanging above until it splintered off, and by poking it into those rags, barely daring to look as I did it, I dragged her to the bank. It took some heaving and hawing to pull her up, and what with my own weeping I didn’t see at first that, halfway out onto the rocks, water burst from her mouth and her eyes bulged open. When the first retching cough came I screamed, but I got to my wits and began to pummel the water out of her. Brown and gritty it came, and she spluttered against my arm like a puppy taken food too early.