Atlan saga omnibus, p.130
Atlan Saga Omnibus, page 130
But as she began to toss and burn, and to reassure me in her calm too husky voice, I begged for permission to go to the Mill and wake them and ask for a doctor—or at least, she knew as I tugged on her sleeve and begged her with my eyes what I wanted to do.
She said No, wait a little, only a little and she would gather strength—until she became unconscious and then briefly wakened to say in a clearer voice; “Yes, Seka darling, go and tell them.”
I hurried to the house. The door was locked. They were proud prosperous peasants, and locked out the world at night. I banged but no one came. I found a side window and slid over the lintel, and found myself in a black passage with an angle to it like a dog’s leg.
The downstairs room of the Mill living-space was still chocked with dirty crocks and pitchers half full of stuff growing scum. It all smelt. The Wife now was saving up housework for my mother to do upon her recovery. I hurried to the upstairs chamber, where I could hear the noises of the sleeping family. The two levels were linked by a whole log set up against the wall, notches hacked in it. At the top of this stair I ducked into a black cupboard in the wall, and here in one milling bed slept the family; hens perched about them, beaks simpering under wings, but the more aware guard-hens outside, roosting on the log-notches, had already given the alarm.
The Wife sat up in bed and against a raucous crowing gobbling she demanded: “Eh? How did you get in?”
The Miller himself stirred and regarded me from under his blanket. He had a woven blanket with a blue stripe in it all to himself. The ‘conversation’ was left to the Wife.
I knew she could see me easily, since the main-room window was behind me. I pointed to the bam, hoping they’d be intelligent enough to make the connection with my mother. Then I pointed to my own puny chest, rocking a ‘baby’ but with failing gestures— dropping my head to show weakness, pressing my hand to it and to my breast and side, then jerking my head to show distress and fever. I pointed barn-wards again and waited. “The little bitch is mad,” the Wife said. “Get out of our room!” she yelled at me.
I pointed urgently again.
“It’s about to have a fit,” the Wife said. “It’s come here to show us its convulsions. You’re not pretty, little bitch. We don’t want to watch you!”
“It’s turned blue already!” joked one of the boys with a hoot.
The Miller smiled, and dug his witty youngster in the ribs.
The Wife, seeing this, suddenly changed her tune. Once the master had indicated his mood, then she must obey it unquestioningly. But she needn’t necessarily have seen his half-smile and nudge, and she was (so far) free to berate the youngster for his wit.
“You!” she clouted her son’s ear. “Who asked you?” And she gathered up her breasts in both arms to keep them out of her own way, eased out of the bed, and came over to me.
“Now,” she demanded standing over me, her presence heavy but no longer menacing, “What I want to know is, how did you get in here? The door is locked, ain’t it?”
I nodded.
“Wouldn’t that tend to mean,” she continued, “that people don’t want to be dropped in on in the way of midnight social visits?”
I took her hand to tug her to the passage and window. She shook off my hand as though it were a wet toad, which I have found to some people a blue hand is; but she followed me, nimbly lumbering down the log with her armfuls of breast and then stopping at the passage entrance. “Not here!” She gazed on me. “You didn’t get through here!”
She held me back, running her eyes curiously all over me as though expecting to find dreadful marks on me. It was a lustful look, odd from her, as though she dreaded to see something and yet would feast her eyes endlessly.
I thought of my mother alone and desperate in nightmare, anxious about me and blaming herself for having let me out of her sight (a voiceless waify unable to call for help if I had fallen). I had had enough of this Wife. I darted from her grasp and down the passage. As I dodged its zig-zagger bend in the blackness, I did notice a certain extra heavy chill in its air, and a certain faint dark tingling too, as though the air were throbbing hopelessly, and I thought, “So the passage is haunted. That’s why they use it like a sort of extra guard against burglars.” I pushed the window again, and hurried through it, darting off again past the hooded well it looked on to, and to the barn.
At the barn the Wife met me. She had a candle in a turnip, and some bandages and a black bottle in the crook of her apron (she slept in her apron, which was woollen and warm).
“All right, What’s up?” she demanded, tramping over the bales to my mother. So she had understood my ‘convulsions’ all the time. I think I’ll take some real ones some time—I’m owed them now.
4
The Haunt in the Well
The good days were the days of fever in the barn. When my mother’s breast abscess was healed, we took up our duties and joined the family. We too slept in the bed—every night, just as the hens all ran in from the yard and up the ‘stairs’, to roost on bed-head and rafters, so we eased with the children and wife and Miller into the rugs and blankets on the straw-filled mattress. My arm was still sore and weak and apt to jump, though I do not think it had been broken. It was now much battered by sleeping partners. It became apparent that we could filch and keep a comfortable space for ourselves just as the others could, so long as Miller himself was in what he reckoned best position. If Miller grunted, Wife was up in bed throwing the rest of us around like chaff, but if she complained she had fallen into a hollow or had lost a covering, Miller ignored her and we could all stay as we were.
“The Army has long passed from within our orbit,” The Saint gravely assured my mother when he visited. “While you were ill, the Army marched on and away.”
My mother looked as gravely at him.
“Riverine,” she said, “you journeyed from the far Northern waterlands to serve in my mother’s Southern slag, and that was less to you than the saddle-leather you wore away. Are journeys now such undertakings in this new parochialism?”
The Saint would not be drawn. “The Army is far away,” he repeated, “impossibly far away, and lost to us. Let us be grateful in our souls that now we are with these good simple folk.”
It meant nothing to him that she had been put into service in the Mill. He too, he said, was in service to these folk, the only service worth while, and in which perhaps he might expiate some millionth part of his former arrogance.
He was clearing ditches with the men of Soursere. “The ditches must be cleaned out once yearly or choke in their own vegetation.” He delighted in these nature-notes.
“Pray Gods there be rain soon,” he added - it was an order.
My mother stared at him.
“There was rain not so long since,” she said. “And you cannot call this drought.” The sky over the mill and village area always maddened and irritated Cija—it hung mottled and striped with dark grey and fleecy lighter grey cloud like some roof, too low and solid, of birch bark—“it’s a sky to murder under,” my mother said through clenched teeth.
It was cold in the Mill during the day with no fire left for us, and I snuggled against my mother and wished she’d think about the General and get a forcefield of warmth going. But perhaps she could never think magnetically again, now.
“We need rain,” repeated the new countryman.
“I cannot pray,” my mother said definitely, hefting to her breast her Despair, and to the other breast one of the sleek grey puppies she was nursing—for as soon as she was well enough, the Miller had given her his prize whelps to suckle too.
“When I was in the tunnel with Seka and giving birth, I prayed harder than ever in my life before. But I received no answer.”
I thought myself that I had been aware, in the birth-tunnel, of our Cousin, our nearest God. My mother maybe had been praying so hysterically within herself that she had not listened for his reply.
“Yet here you are,” The Saint said to my mother.
My mother lifted the puppy a little to the side for mutual comfort. “To be here is an answer to prayer?” she asked, her face white.
The Saint was not thinking of the colours of ladies’ faces. “I need your cooperation,” he told my mother simply and humbly. “…with your reading.”
“I have already learned,” my mother said.
“But never have I learned,” The Saint said. “Will you give me your help, of your good charity? I wish for knowledge. Only thus can I be of help to our folk here. I need discipline. I shall struggle with my letters as with my sins.”
“Then I ask your help in return,” my mother said. The Saint bowed his head submissively to hear her, but she paused before she said stiffly:
“Every morning, before he goes to work, Miller locks his Wife into a chastity belt. And me he locks too.”
The Saint lifted a wary face. “These people’s customs and traditions—” he began.
“I strongly represented to him,” went on my mother, “that this was unacceptable. He allows me now to be locked by his wife from and into this machine, which I think his unhappy ancestresses wore before me. He is adamant that women in his household must wear these things till they lie down to sleep. But if you spoke to her—”
“I understand your feeling,” The Saint said soberly. “However we may sympathise with these folks’ honest taboos, we have not yet thrown off our own culture. I will see what I can do to give you help as you ask.”
It was chilly wooing that my mother now received from Quar, or the beginnings of a wooing.
Quar lived just upriver in the brewhouse. I had never thought of the brewhouse as human habitation; it had no windows. While I rinsed linen in the pond, I stared at the brewhouse. Like all these long low squat houses, it had been built not for but against. They were built against the forest, against the sea, against the elements, against the world. They had roof-beams and walls and doors and hatred—as though in this part of the world an architect always included hatred among his tools, and said to his apprentice: “Mind you’ve brought along enough hatred today.”
These buildings at Sour sere, at Sourditch and Sourbed were not for people. Openings were deep suspicious slits. Holes: you couldn’t call them windows, but the brewhouse had not even those.
I hoped to our dear God we should not spend winter here. Now the water-snail was skating along upside-down under the surface of the pond, since our pond was his floor. The whirligig water-beetles were sliding over the water as though it were a mattress of transparent rubber, springing like acrobats. The water-louse (you couldn’t make out his legs from his whiskers) was searching for decay—he adored to clear up for you. All the pond now was alive with little skimming popping jetting projectiles—up for air, then down again. Now the water was going wipple-whibble. Now if you looked you could see the little springs and fountains rilling up from the fine sand-bed of the stream. The sandy bank was a fretwork—lots of little black holes, swallows’ nests. The millstream was singing high and singing low. Ferns were uncoiling like springs, like busy clockwork. The field-mouse fell into the millpond—he was done for. He was snapped up by pike. Now the hedges were cut down to keep the sun (although the frost too) off the fields; and this was to stop the hedges soaking up the good of the soil: there was not enough good in this soil to squander on hedges. But at least there was sun now, from time to time, enough to make a sunset sky come evening, mottled like the thighs of a fat woman too long by the stove.
And when the winter came down on us at Soursere, we should need that stove, be grateful for those mottled thighs. The clues were everywhere for the seeing. Every door hereabouts had been built short with a gap under the roof lintel; come winter, the allwood lintel was certain to sag under the great weight of months of snow. (The gap in the meanwhile was stuffed with moss.)
In the mill, the old tiny glass panes show permanent scars—the abrasion of savage sea sands carried in Winter blasts.
“You know the taste of your heart in your mouth,” Quar, watchful, said to my mother quietly at the end of the first meal we ate all together when he visited.
The Wife was not a cosy cook. Her soup was chicken wrung out in hot water. A poor little bird—it never did anyone any harm— till now. Her fire was generally out, but a sludgepot hung over it just the same. She called it her stewpot.
My mother did not reply to Quar.
“You’ve travelled,” he said to her under cover of the general meal-babble. “You’ve travelled and you’ve learned to keep silent. I like that.”
He should have liked me then, I thought utterly silently. But he showed no signs of liking me.
“What is this?” my mother said, for he had given her something.
He glanced at her with annoyance from his poisonous eyes. He reckoned that if he had handed something to a woman quietly, while generously flattering her silence, she must be a fool not to know secrecy was afoot.
In her hand lay her ring, which the Miller had stolen from her and which then Quar had appropriated. I saw her gasp as she thought of the money and possible freedom it represented, and of how she could hide it away in the bam with her maps and Ung-g’s necklace. But then I saw another look come over her face. That look with which women say to themselves: “This foolish man finds me attractive. I wonder how I can turn his foolishness to my advantage, while myself remaining cool and in command as ever.”
Quar noted this look, the look he had worked for. And from that moment there was relationship between my mother and Quar.
He continued to flatter her. He was in a sense quite selfless about it, since it was obvious that for him to praise was an effort. He came nearest to liking her when he was rudest with her. But this would not be for some time yet. He meant to have her.
He knew she must be approached very carefully and with all the proper contempt.
So now he lied to her, as though she were some simpleton, about how pretty she looked with a sunbeam on her head. It lit her all too cruelly in fact. She was thin. Her breasts were two pins. After hard work, her hands were mauve with saffron spots floating in them. Her knuckles stood out rather more like elephants’ knees.
My mother smiled at Quar. He was for the time being satisfied.
As the men went out, the Miller knocked over a jug. The Wife, without a look of reproach, stooped picking it all up and my mother joined her. “That’s because you put him there as blandishment,” Miller said meaningfully to his Wife’s stooped back. She did not presume to reply, though she must have been puzzled. “Ah,” Miller grunted darkly. “What was him put sitting there full of flowers for? For you to show off because a visitor was coming.”
“It was mark of respect because Quar was coming,” the Wife quavered.
“Respect to yourself,” Miller told her sternly. “Pride in showing how you can make ‘your’ house full of jugs of flowers.”
Miller waited till the Wife and my mother had cleared up the mess. Then, to make his point, he booted the jug over once more. “And mind when I get back that shit ain’t still over the floor,” he warned as he walked out, free at last to meet other men on business, but having paused as was his tedious duty to have another try at the endless education of his household.
I’d noticed while this was going on how Quar had seized his chance to spit in my mother’s drink. He regarded my mother then, as he left but did not again speak to her, with a grim amused proprietary air: his spit, once she drank it, would impregnate her soul: she would have no inner resistance to him, since something of Quar had already been accepted as part of her. The Wife now stopped clearing the floor, for her husband and Quar were no longer there to witness her. She pulled me forward by my ear. “You heard your master. Get it all up.” She saw me pause because the cloth was already slimy. “Lick it up if you must.”
I didn’t bother in the middle of all this to invent some way of warning my mother about her drink—after all, it wouldn’t hurt her.
I thought I’d keep away from the main riverbanks where people were praying at The Saint’s inspiration for the ‘drought’ to end. But I was sent to the garden-woman at Soursouth to buy vegetables—“and mind nobody see you,” the Wife added, pushing her face into mine. She meant that Miller must not see me. In her pursuit of an image of perfection, she attempted to keep a kitchen-garden for the Mill; it was a scrappy failure. But Miller thought it uneconomic not to ‘grow your own’ when you had ground. (In fact, ‘looking back, I realise now how stony and acid his sandy mud was, but I believe he and his Wife never dreamed their precious Mill-land was not right for everything.) So the Wife would send out secretly for vegetables, and grain for her home-baking, and pretend she’d grown it all herself.
I set out with my basket. Soursouth lay inland. It was uncanny how muffled the land became once you were away from the Mill. There was no longer the grinding of the great stones which I felt permeated the Mill air. Then the pulse of the wheel set the whole building in an ague. The leather grain chutes provided a constant rustle—and a warning bell would ring quite often when the supply of grain stopped; else we’d have been set afire by the revolving stones, the terrible runner stone sparking on the gigantic bedstone if they ran ‘dry’.
Outside, on the shore-wall of the Mill, the air was always a moan. The sea was a way off, and quieter than the sands themselves. The villagers called them ‘singing sands’. The grains were of silicified wood. The dunes here blew all about anywhere and lay sloppily, flabby. The villagers had spoiled their original slant-shape, they could no longer resist winds and protect the shore-houses. For so long the peasants had grazed their cattle on islands just offshore (because that saved them building cattle-walls) and had cut the timber—so there was no resistance left in the shore now. The sand was no longer held together by roots and lob-lolly pines.
