Of talons and teeth, p.15
Of Talons and Teeth, page 15
Sion descends the hill. Over a swell of tufted rock and then he sees the port below him and the mast-forest of its harbour. Rooves and steeples all drawn together of slate and thatch and canvas and thin hammered metal. Smells, as he nears, to which his brain searches for nomenclature yet of past experience and contact there is none. Still they tickle his nose and flood his mouth with spittle. Onions he knows and fish-stink. Oil and grease and smoke. But there are many others that sprint and gambol in his face to which he can apply only one word that he has heard many times on the lips of sailors passing through the settlement and that one word is spice. Big white birds turn circles above the roofscape and cry like children in dismay.
He goes down. Steps onto a track of packed earth then leaps backwards off it again as a man on horseback blatters past. Bellows some words at him through his trailing dust-smudge. Beyond the track are the close-packed backs of hovels and at the casement of one is a watching woman from whom Sion’s wave receives only a scowl in return.
This is the port. Place of new lives and of tongues and skins unfamiliar. Sion enters it as his cat would enter a place of noise newly returned to silence, his tattered boots paw-deft and paw-soft on the cobbles and hard dirt and with his face a-hum with alertness. Vigilance razor-whetted. He turns a corner and is snatch-gulped by a mass of sudden motion and there are skins the colour of coal and skins the colour of toad-belly and skins the colour of curd and skins the colour of soil and skins the colour of ale. Of cheese-rind. Of cox-comb. There are shouts and greetings and curses in tongues that sound to Sion like sounds no human throat could ever make. Faces press at him. Hands reach. Heads in shawls and wrapped bulgings of cloth. Heads shaven and inked, one with a huge staring eye on the top of the skull forever looking to heaven. Metal glints in the flesh of faces. Metal forms hands stiff from cuffs as does wood also and some lower legs have been reconstructed from darker wood and some from whalebone, one with the teeth peaking up the shin like the stem of a rose towards the codpiece made from reddish pelt. Agog Sion is. His bounding senses. Hands thrust things at him, raw meat and dead fish and strips of hide. Coin is solicited. Contraptions of metal and wood. Knives like both hoofpicks and sabres. Flintlocks and shoes and things that steam in clouded paper. It overwhelms. Sion whirls and shudders and escapes into a shebeen where on the beam that serves a bar is a tiny child covered sole to scalp in thick greenish fur. A tasselled cap on its head and a fancy waistcoat of brocade. It bears and chitters its tiny teeth at Sion. Screeches.
- Hoy now! Whisht! A large man pops up from behind the beam and scoops the child up and puts it to perch on his shoulder where it wraps its tiny arms tightly around his head and puts its juddering eyes on Sion. - Tis no way to greet a new customer Edward. A welcome tavern we keep. Heed not my monkey, friend. Merely excitable is he. Tis just the nature of his kind.
- He is a monk?
- A monk? Add on an “e” and you will hit your mark. What is known as a “monkey” is this fellow here and he has been my close companion for quite some time. There to greet him straight off the boat I was. And you. Fresh arrived in the port?
Sion nods. Staring at the creature.
- From where?
- Dros y mynydd.
- Saesneg if you please. The tongue of the interior holds no reference for me.
- Over the mountain I have come.
- And you are here for what? Work, passage? Pure leisure?
Sion sees the creature’s fingernails. The red thread it sports around its neck.
- What is it? asks the man again.
- Pardon?
- Your purpose boy. What is it that has called you to the port?
- A woman.
- Ah a woman. Like so many before. Well you must narrow your options and prioritise your wants lest you lose yourself in the variety available herein. What sort of woman, in the specifics?
- She is called Catherine and she will come with her childer and we will go.
Both the man and his little familiar slit their eyes at Sion. - Now there’s a particularity of detail the likes of which I’ve never hitherto encountered.
- I wait for her and she will come.
The man scratches at his ear and the creature grabs his finger in both its hands and clings. - If you say so boy. And while you wait for this Catherine tell me which libation you will partake of.
- Pardon?
- What would you like to drink, man?
But the barman is speaking to a departing back. Sion has left and re-joined the outside crowd in the brightness unexperienced that brings the lids of his eyes together and puts a heat on his head. Bashed about he is by the passing surge and spun out onto the track and back again by the gritty wash of a cart yanked rattling past by two heavy horses and stacked with bales of branches. Spins does Sion. Battered by a babble and whirled. A small dog snaps at his ankles. From a window above him some waste is thrown and he must skip backwards to evade its foul fall and splatter. In this place are babies born all green-furred about and which communicate through chatterings and shrieks.
He finds himself at the waterside. The harbour. So tall the masts and so many and the hulls swelling above him bigger than any building he’s ever known and hitched by ropes as thick as his waist to the raucous rocks of the sea-walls that gleam greenly thick and somehow meatish. He feels hands squirming into his pocket and he slaps them away and presses his back to a slimed wall and watches a man tip things into a boiling pot, things that clitter and scramble with claws and whiskers and stalked eyes. Grotesque spiders straight from fever and with warty and knobbled armour and with blades and axes grown from their own external bones. A cart passes him and on it is a fish larger than two men laid end-to-end and with a mouth crammed with blades. On hawsers objects sway through the air above him, boxes and items of furniture and machinery in great blocky arcs through the sky. Such noise and what a marvel that anyone here could understand the other. He sees golden teeth. He sees faces tattooed with pitchforks. Objects proffered to him of no shape and every shape and at each of which he shakes his head. He tries to count the various banners that adorn the masts but cannot and nor can he name their colours.
Later on that first day he will hide and bed down in a dockside shack. Poor hutment built from packing crates and sacking probably by sea-gypsies of some sort. He will lie hazily vigilant for their return and kept from deep sleep also by the sounds and activity from without, the cries and calls from throats and the groans and squeals of simple machinery. Windlasses and winches. In the grasped snatches of his slumber he will dream of small skulls. Small skulls disembodied and suspended in a darkness which are of a sudden sucked back into the blurred faces behind them, three faces of scumbled features and three different sizes — that of a woman and a boy and an infant.
For some days he survives on whatever scraps he can scavenge from the boxes of fish and vegetables on the quay and when such pickings are unavailable he eats sea-cabbage and dulse and laver from the rockpools and on whatever pabulum he can take from the rocks and sand, flesh that lives in razored shells or that clings to rocks. The occasional armed spider that he must break open with a stone. At times he begs and in facilitation of that he learns shards of various tongues, some from other lands and also those indigent to his own or at least this littoral part of it — cant and mumpers and parlay and pidjin and Shelta. His mouth whirls and dances and the powering mind behind it often storms. He waits. He waits with the large humpbacked rats and the canny cats that hunt them in hovel and hideaway and there are others like him who he learns to avoid. He watches the sea and sends his soul over it. Emits frequently a piece of himself to a land far away. To whatever shores may await. When the short cold days and long icy nights come he contracts an illness severe enough to put a whisper on the back of his neck and he is forced to solicit succour from the smithy in the back streets of the port who gives him a nest of blankets next to the fire and coaxes him out of his delirium on fish-head soup and oatcakes that rip his throat. With the return of his strength he repays the vulcan with assistance in his toil and his aptitude for the work is quickly assessed and appreciated to the extent that the vulcan’s absences from the forge become more and more frequent until one day Sion realizes that he hasn’t seen the man from full moon to full moon without any deleterious effect on his commissions so he comes to be seen in the port less as the smith’s assistant and more as the smith. Horseshoes they want. Hasps and hinges and buckles and blades. Chains and locks and boots to be hobnailed. Spikes of all sizes. Spring-traps large enough to catch a man. Snows come and go. When not working Sion drinks and thinks of a woman wailing lost and alone on the dank upness of the moors or become bones in the lee of a fin of rock or gulped by the quags so that only a reaching hand can be seen. He drinks and thinks of children eaten by wolves or by wolves in the shape of men. He thinks of skulking nameless beasts. He dreams of spinning in an endless emptiness. He puts coin aside and with it purchases a slice of land on the clifftop on which to build a Ty Nos and this he does one summer’s night when with the first star he digs a footing and with the red rise of the sun he is sitting within four lopsided walls and a crooked roof with a kettle boiling on a hearth. Men appear to proclaim the dwelling lawfully his and he makes a mark on a page at their behest and when they leave he stands on the bluff on which he has built his home and sees the iron filings on the horizon grow into ships as they near the land. He will spend a lot of time watching this happen. He sleeps half of that first day away and wakes in a panic. Within him he will carry an almost palpable air of loss and distraction which he banishes with the endless whack of his hammer when working and with alcohol when not; two short men periodically appear from the hinterland to sell him ewers of their own brew and Sion becomes a reliable customer. Concocted from roots and leaves. Honey and flowers. All of it fiery urinous. And too Sion becomes a known presence in the taverns and shebeens of the port so much so that the little furred mannikins cease to chitter and whoop and show their teeth at his appearance and the big colourful birds cease to shriek. On one occasion at that time of the year when the fast forktailed birds re-appear Sion has a memory of a large and comforting hand so he boils up some fungal broth one morning and drinks it but it transports him not to a place of wonder but of mighty regret during which he sits alone on a rock high above the sea and weeps with such force that he fears for the eyes in his head and he does this until the sun has been drawn back below the waters so he never makes the elixir again. He acquires a woman and her child who turn his hovel into a cramped and loud box so he equips the forge in the port with some items of furniture and it is there that he can nearly always be found and indeed it is where he is one night teasing heated metal ingots into nails when he hears through the greasy sea-fog that has claimed the port a spirit somewhere in it wailing his name.
The walls still ring with the roaring and the sheets they drip drip onto the floorboards. From without is the never-halting kuh-thump of the nodding engines on the ridge and within there is the exhausted sobbing of Catherine and the mewling of the wetly caked infant and the faint whutter of the candles. Such a scene that these hilltops have seen. Time and time over. Soft words from Mari:
- Well done. Oh well done cariad.
Bloodied towels in twists roundabout and a bowl of pink-swirled water as if in this simple room a deer has been butchered. The blue-black tendril of the umbilicus still linking the newborn to the mother.
- A new life Catherine. Another beating heart.
- Which is why I weep, Mari.
Mari strokes Catherine’s matted head and bends and bites the umbilicus through and ties it off and catches the slobber of the afterbirth in her cupped hands and takes the steam and ferric fumes of it to the window and lets it slide away. Outside it splats nearby to the militiaman who looks up at the casement with little interest and then down again with more at the dog that has already started to snuffle.
- What shall I do Mari? What am I to do? Three bellies I have now to feed excluding mine own and no means have I to do so. Lost I am. Further adrift and hopeless I am now than even yester eve I was.
Mari stares. Sees in the candlelight Catherine bow her head to the tiny and streaked and trembling baby she is holding to her breast and how all trauma is held in that form. In the tiny purple foot. The toes already flexing. Shadows cast across like the phantoms or promises of the meat-birds been or to come absconding with carrion or in future search of the same.
Dic Bach enters the room. Stands bouncing on his feet at the side of the bed.
- There is space in my stable for you Catherine and I—
- You will fuck off out of it Little Dic spits Mari. Properly spits; a clotted gobbet from her lips. - Importunate as you are even shattered as she still is. Have respect man. Rein in your appetites.
She wrestles him towards the door and pushes him through and out and no sooner is the door closed is it opened again and Llewellyn advances towards the bed to stand there keen and eager.
- Christ Llewellyn! You fucking men! Allow the woman time to recuperate would you ever fucking not? Given birth she just has! Out of it!
Full head and shoulders taller than Dic Bach as Llewellyn is he must be arrointed with a blade which Mari brandishes swiftly and with the glinting point of it drives him back through the door. Which she slams and leans against. Wash of flamelight momentarily across her face. Catherine’s head still pressed to her newborn and a thin wind blowing at the mullioned window and beneath the crack of the door. Male voices outside and the growling of a hound and still and always the thuds from up on the ridge in the incessant rhythm like the heartbeat of a beast huge and asquat and brooding. Fomenting and overseeing all.
Water level lowering in one of the lofted lakes of the high parts. Ancient stone seen again. Peat-preserved treetops approaching petrification once more in the air. Things turned by time to what they were not. Thump-thump, thump-thump. Far away from their origins, from what they moulded molecules into what manner of existence uncountable mornings ago. As the old stones appear so the newer ones below in the valley are submerged and at this exchange the engines nod and lift and nod again and go on doing this unceasing as if in approval repeated and enthusiastic.
Catherine sleeps. Ianto sleeps. The baby sleeps. The infant sleeps and when awake utters not one sound as the gaze floats around the room searching and unfocussed and seemingly content to be that way.
The scree starts to slip. Like a giant sloughing of skin it starts to shift downwards with the new waters now within it. Stone in motion. Rock on rock as the mountain shrugs with the weight going from atop it. And such a weight. Such a weight. The spread of water where water was not and all that is not water taking on its properties. New trickles and new rivulets. New springs. Skin of stone loosening and starting to slip. Descend. A grind and a groan and soon the inevitable roar. The birds rise up and take themselves away into the grey sky. The machines bow and thump and bow and thump and put the whole mountain into slow flow.
- Why did they put him in there mam?
- Because he’d been a bad man. Come away from him now.
Catherine steers Ianto by the nape away from the swaying ruin of Huw Twp. The two small heads in the papoose on her back nodding loosely in sleep and not for the first time she thanks the hunger of her hollow breasts for the somnolence that results.
- Will they put me in one of them?
- They will not.
- Why?
- Because you’re a good boy.
Ianto turns his head as he walks the more to regard the gibbet and its captive.
- Do not look back bachgen da. Only ever look forward. See where you put your feet for the ground is uneven.
This little caravan up on the high parts. The smell of released water behind them as they move towards a different fluid. Peak over peak over peak and the trudge of their passage. The wind up here. What was at one time a man called Huw is spun by the wind as he hangs and rots to look after them with the picked-empty drains of his sockets.
They flee the settlement on foot and back of beast and on beast-drawn tumbril. The hastening immersion about. Cows lumber and poultry flaps away and cats and dogs bound higher. Earth squelching around boots and bare feet and amassed they are these refugees with what chattels they can strap and have strapped across their bodies and bundled on their backs. The water gulps the stones. The water gulps the walls. The sheds and the huts and the hovels. The water climbs the chapel walls in reach of the punctured roof.
His name in the sea-fret. Sion looks up with a snap as would a cat at a slamming door. Some wind there is so perhaps the sussenance of a collapsing shore-wave sharing the sibilance of his name yet again it comes and louder and it is the voice of a woman calling only his name like a spectre of yearning in the clogged and milky and salty fog. And then taking shape before him.
- How did you find me?
- I asked, Sion.
- Who did you ask?
- Does that matter? Fisherman he was. Dockworker. Something. I do not rightly know. Described you to him I did. Outlined your features and told him you had some facility with metal and here he directed me. You must mean the new vulcan he said and showed me the implements you have made for him. Spoke highly he did of you Sion y Gof.
With scabbed sections of sole and toe bared through the rags they have been shod in to either reinforce or entirely replace exhausted shoes the three children sleep. Cwtched up in the corner by the fire the three of them part-swaddled in the only blanket in Sion’s possession. Fed on fish-tea and black bread they’ve been. Ianto supine between the two smaller each with their heads to an armpit of his and his arms around them. Deep deep under in slumber all three.
