The Quickening Maze by Adam Foulds Read Free Book Online

pots arranged. As the voices approached, the children stopped burying each other in leaves and even pushed their hair back out of their faces. The dog, frantic, barked and ran in tight circles to bark again. It ran off to meet the men and returned ahead of the party with a few rangy lurchers and a blurring number of other terriers.
    When John saw the men and the deer slung between two of them, covered in a blanket but still obvious, he knew what all the caginess had been about. He stood up immediately to introduce himself. ‘I’m John Clare, a traveller, and always a friend of the gypsies. I bring cordial greetings from Abraham and Phoebe Smith of Northamptonshire.’
    ‘He’s a good fellow,’ Judith attested.‘Knows the plants and cures as well as we do. He must’ve been long with those Smiths because he knows all our names for them.’
    The foremost man made a decision as quick as Judith’s had been. He answered with the formality of a man speaking for his tribe. ‘S’long as you are no friend of the gamekeepers and don’t fall to talking with them you’re welcome among us, John Clare. My name is Ezekiel.’
    So John was let stay and watched the men, who didn’t seem in any way encumbered by thoughts of transportation and a life of whippings at Botany Bay as they dismantled the deer.
    He watched with great pleasure the skill of the men, their knives quick as fish. They said nothing, only the work made noises, knockings on joints, wet peelings, the twisting crunch of a part disconnected.
    First, a trench was dug to receive and hide the blood and the deer was hung from a branch upside down above it. With sharpened knives they slit it quickly down the middle and found the first stomach. Very carefully one man cut either side of it, and knotted the slippery tubes to keep the gut acid from the meat. This made something like a straw-stuffed cushion, filled with undigested herbage.
    Then the forelimbs were cut through to the precise white joints and removed. After loosening work with a knife, the skin was pulled from the deer. It peeled away cleanly with a moist sucking sound, leaving dark meat and bones beneath a sheeny blue underskin. As they did all this, the men had to kick at the dogs that were crowding round the trench to lap at blood.
    The gullet was separated and the weasand was drawn from the windpipe.They cleared the chest of its entrails. The heart and lungs were snicked out and placed in a bowl, then the long rippled ropes of the intestines were hauled out and dropped into the trench.Working from the back, the chuck, saddle and loin portions were removed from the ribcage and spine in one piece, both sides together like a bloody book the size of a church Bible. They were then cut into pieces, some of which were sliced and spitted immediately over the fire. Other parts were taken away by the women.Then the neck was stripped of meat. The deer looked odd now with its whole furred head and antlers hanging down, its skeleton neck and body, and its breeches of flesh still on. Those too were now removed, divided, and packed. The ribs were sawn through, and all of them were split and set over the fire. The deer now was clean. Its skeleton faintly glowed in the dusk, its sorrowful head merged with the shadows. Another pit was dug and the skeleton was placed inside it, curled around like a foetus. The earth was replaced, leaves and twigs dragged over to hide the spot.
    The dogs jostled round the other trench in a cloud of flies. John could hear the knocking of their empty jaws and short huffing breaths. With the smell of the venison rising in the smoke, John’s own hunger became acute and his guts let out a long crooning grumble like a pigeon’s note. Beer was poured and drunk and soon the air was splashy with talk and voices. John didn’t join in very much, but listened to the flow and switch of it, hearing Romany words he’d almost forgotten he knew.
    Handed his first rib, John was told, ‘Blood on your hands,