The Gift of Stones by Jim Crace Read Free Book Online Page B

which hung still and then began to flap. A chicken, upside down and twined up at its feet. She walked towards me and my gift of samphire. “Please help,” she said. She handed me the chicken and the child and made me hold the dog back by its neck. “It won’t take long,” she said.
    I stood and watched and she rejoined the horseman. He dismounted and they walked into the longer grass. I watched her as she took her belted smock by the hem and pulled it high and off above her head. She stood there, thin and naked once again, the horseman’s hands upon her waist. With her good eyes she turned and watched me watching her. “Go inside,” she called. “Can’t you kill a chicken?” I did not move. They lay down on the earth. This time it was the horseman who pulled a screen of grass to block my view.’

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    ‘Y OU SEE ? I’ve pulled a screen of grass across the story, too. I’ll not creep up and tell you what I saw. I’ll spare myself – and her. Now you know, you can be sure, that this is truth – no chronicler with any sense would disappoint his listeners so. The narrative would buzz and hover like a gnat above the horseman and his whore. We’d watch his buttocks, double-dumplings, and her knees. We’d follow their duet. Instead, you’ll hear from me a solo of lament. I felt – in charge of dog and child and hen – as if she’d let me down. Betrayed.
    I’ll beat it out as simply as I can. That night just past had been the calmest in my life. I’d found an audience at last. We’d dined on slott beside the romance of a fire. Her dozing baby and her breasts, the dismal meanness of her hut, the dog, the wind, and (more than that) the age of her which made her sweetheart-mother-sister interlaced, a braid, had filled my head with countless expectations. She hadn’t cared about my arm. Or knapping flints. Or stone. She’d said, Do this. Do that. Make sure that pot is safe. Here, take the child. And hold the dog. Can’t you kill a chicken? Could you walk down – take this bag – and pull some samphire roots? Before, I’d only ever idly stared through doors to watch the workers shaping stone, to smell their smells, to watch their lives while waiting for the Scram, Get out, We’ve work to do. And so, you see, the smallest dumpling, cooked with patience, given with a smile, could make a servant out of me, could make me lose my heart.
    I had imagined … naturally, who wouldn’t? … that, given time, the pumping buttocks in the grass would be my own. And not for trade in hens. Now once again the simple sum of my ambition was not to kill a horseman but to be a horseman – though shooting arrows of a different kind. Fat chance.
    I turned my back. I put the baby on her mat. I tied the dog. I released the chicken from its twine. I set it free. The child began to cry; the dog to whimper, then to bark. The hen took off. And so did I. I walked down to the shore and found the overhang of heath where I had sat and smashed the rocks one day before. I waited there. But she did not come. I searched the skyline for a ship. No ship. I set my face against the wind and almost ran. It was not yet dusk when I reached the bracken path above our village. Had I been missed? The plumes of smoke were lifting from the workshop fires. There was the pant of bellows. The air was prickly with the click of stone on stone. My people were at work. I felt as if my life was cursed with failure and misfortune.’

13
    ‘ “W HERE HAVE you been?” my uncle shouted. He had become a trader in the spring of that same year. While his sons and daughters laboured in the workshops – and while his mutilated nephew roamed at will – he had found himself a spot in the circle of transaction at the centre of the village. His flints, arranged upon a mat, were crude and cheap and plentiful. His trading pitch was just as rough. His voice was rasping, his chest was full of chalk – flint-knapper’s lung, they called it. Between the spits and coughs,