Voice of the Fire by Alan Moore (pocket ebook reader .txt) 📗

stars. Amongst the cinders, blind birds peck and scream. We travel south, some of us walking still.

The track is wider, coming up by way of valley’s edge. How many dead men’s feet does it demand to make it so? It is a fury and misery to think of being one day in my grave and yet this track still here. Its deep ruts, older than our great-fathers. Its flood pools, all the frightening straightness of its line, still here. Still here.

It rises steep before me, firm beneath my tread, and yet the walking’s hard. Sharp pebbles cut my feet, the mud upon them drying to a sun-split hide. Shifting my bag from one hand to other, muttering, telling myself to leave the track atop this hill and walk upon soft grass about the rim, so as to come down upon Bridge-in-Valley from the east.

The day’s light starts to wane, and soon the ditches by the track are speckled brilliant green with fire maggots. Song of bats. Call of a night-eyed bird. My footfalls, slapping in the dusk.

Somewhere downstream it rushes through the dark ahead of me, not swollen yet, but without colour. Snails upon its thighs. Face down, unblinking, sees the river-bottom slipping by below, each stone, each minnow-bitten weed. Cracked shells, and clever, branching lines that unseen currents leave upon the slow, smooth bed. The dead eyes, missing nothing.

East, along the rim. Between my toes cool grass, wet grass, and finally, below me, fires in the valley dark. A ring of sullen lights, too few to be a willage. What, then? Setting down my bag and straddling a toppled log, my eyes fix on the fire lights until they come more clear.

The view is of a hilltop, further down the valley’s eastern slope. A circle given shape by low and broken walls of dirt is risen there, another much alike but smaller set within, and inside that a smaller circle yet. This centre ring is dark, a hole. The fires, a handfull only, burn within the greater round beyond, some of them little more than embers, almost gone.

The brightest has a gathering of people stood about it. Trapped beneath their heels, stretched shadows shy back from the flames, yet do not jump or dance. What are they burning there, so still by night?

My rest upon this log gives me new strength, and once more taking up my bag seems less a task. Stand up. Walk downhill in amongst black stumps where all the trees are burned away. Below the ring-topped hill, downwind of it, come women’s voices, calling, tangled with the smoke.

No. No, not calling, but a lower noise that has less sense to it.

At foot of hill, the ground becomes a bog, yet there’s a raised path running south across the valley floor to where the night above the treeline glows dull red, a cooling metal that betrays the willage fires below. A long walk, from the look of it, but that will give me time to think of all there is to do, and say, and be.

Usin. The sound of it is plain and easy in the saying. Usin, Olun’s daughter. Name like an abandoned shell, a husk. The living creature once concealed within is gone. The name lies empty, hollow and disused. It waits for hermit crabs to crawl inside and try it on.

Usin. Deserted name. Mine now.

Ahead, the path crawls through the weeds into the willage, there to die. Along its length the signs and droppings of this place are strewn, lit one side red by its approaching fires: a broken basin, grey and pricked with spots; a mitten; blunted flints; a little man-in-kind made out of chicken bones.

The settlement is big, half bounded by a ring of blackthorn, heaped into a wall. Its roundhouse squats there at the centre, hulking giant, a necklace made from torches strung about its shoulders, dark above the huts that sprawl against its smoking flanks like sucking-pups.

Stopping to make a piss some way yet from the willage’s north gate, it is my luck to note while crouching in mid flow a torso garden set beside my path. Fixed through, and hung from stakes. No limbs nor head. No doubt they are the last remains of cheats and thieves hung out in warning, heavy flags of meat. It is a common practice now, along the track.

There are as many stakes as legs upon a dog, and all but one have women on. No. No, the one this end may be another man, seen closer to. As eaten by the weather and the wild swine as they are, it’s hard to know. This one has bright red hair about his sex, and this the needle-picture of a snake marked on one breast, her other gone.

Wiping my gill with grass, and pulling Usin’s breeks up high about my waist, there’s not a thing to do but journey on, towards the walls of thorn, sharp black against the fires contained within. A frightful nest, filled not with eggs but embers, smouldering in the night.

Bridge-in-the-Valley. Stupid name. There’s valley all about yet not a bridge in sight. My wager is the willeins in this settlement don’t call it by that name at all. My wager is they call their place ‘The Willage’, as do all the other dull-wits in their dull-wit settlements along the track. ‘Why, life be good here in the Willage, be it not old girl?’ ‘Aye, may it be, but it is better in a place up north they call the Willage, where my mother has her people.’ ‘Well, the Willage is a good place if you’re wanting oxen, but if you want pigs you’re better going to the Willage.’ ‘We must let my brother settle this. He does not live in either place, but in a settlement down south. It has a queer and outland sounding name that’s gone from my recall, and yet it may be “Willage”, come to think.’ ‘You do not