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

She takes a pleasure in their oddity and rears them for her own. They put a scare up people’s arses now they’re grown, and Mag takes pleasure in that also.’

Both of them turn their sand-grey skulls as one and look across the room at me. They have one smile, each wearing half of it. A knowledge comes within me now that makes me look away from them: these are the ones that tend the torso garden. They clip back the limbs and gather up the fallen heads.

Dropping my gaze, it falls upon a ruined figure, resting there upon a pallet made of sticks before the seated queen. The figure speaks, a dry voice lower than the drone of bees, within my ears since entering this hall yet only come to notice now. A man. Once fat, he has a sickness eating him within. It sinks his eyes and dries his lips to figs, shrunk back to show the all but empty gums.

Where all but he are clad in robes, he lies there naked save a fine, strange cloak of blackbird quills beneath him, spread upon the bier. His will is long and skinny, bald about the root. A band of antler-twigs is tied, the bare points circling his brow, skin hanging from his bones in folds, and all of it has marks upon. The wasted body swarms with needle-pictures. Every thumbnail’s width of him from head to heel is pretty with tattoo.

‘That’s Olun,’ comes the stale breath by my ear.

A cold blue line that severs him in twain from balls to brow. A red wheel, drawn above his heart with many smaller rings about. Crosses and arrow points, loop within loop on belly and on breast. The pale green patchwork of his thighs.

An eye may find no sense within the curls and turns, no image of a snake nor of a bear, as favoured by the northern men. Shaped after nothing one may see within this world, it is a madness, wild in its device, and speaks that which we may not know. Star-scalped. The likeness of a womb upon one palm.

The words he speaks are small and dry like beetle husks, spat out as if he does not like their taste.

‘The leaves fall dead at news of Winter.’

(The leaves. Fall. Dead. At news. Of Winter. Every word, he stops to catch his breath.)

‘Now is the sleep of lizards. Now the shortening of the days. The crops is in. The shed is full. Now must we offer thanks.’

Some men are nodding in the crowd. A little boy is led out by his father to make water up against the hut wall, then led back again, picking across the mat of tangled legs. Olun is speaking, sockets staring up into a still, flat veil, the net of smoke cast floating just below the roof.

‘Once, long ago, there is a cunning-man who may make say with all the gods below the dirt. They tell him that he must give up an offering and thank the soil for being good, and full with fruit.

“What must be offered up?” the Hob-man says.

“Your son,” the gods say back.

‘On hearing this he falls to weeping, begging them to spare his child, but they are stern and bid him do the thing they say, for he must show he has more love for them than for his only flesh. And so it is. He binds his son and leads him by the river’s edge, where is a fire built up.’

(The river’s. Edge. Where is. A fire. Built up.)

‘He sets his son upon the wood. The fire’s made ready and the dagger honed.

‘Then speak the gods below the dirt and say that it is good for him to keep his faith and love his gods more than his only flesh. “We are so pleased,” they say, “that we do spare your child. See, yonder is a pig caught in the mud. Take down your son from off the fire, and let us change the pig into a boy that you may slaughter in his place.”

‘And this is done. The pig-boy burns, the child is spared, and from that time we offer up a pig-boy to the fire upon the night.

‘When next the light is come we have one day to stack the wood.

‘We have one day to stalk the pig.

‘We have one night to please the gods.’

He sighs. ‘The gods are good.’ The crowd are muttering a muddy echo to his words, one voice chopped up with morsels lodged in many throats. One day to stack, one day to stalk, one night to please the gods. The gods are good. It seems these mutterings are a sign that Olun makes his say no more this night, for people stand and make to leave. They flow about us like a scum-tide, draining through the door and out into the night, coughing and laughing. Only scattered huddles stay to whisper in the hall.

Black fingers, shuddering, rest upon my spine and push me from behind to urge me on.

‘Go to your father,’ says the gateman.

Father dies of bee stings while we’re passing through the Great North Woods, all wading belly high through hollows deep with wet and shaggy grass. Above us, where the tree’s high branches make a web of twigs against the light, a bird is singing, clear and all alone within the stifling afternoon.

My father cries out, jerks his foot up now to clutch its underside, then topples backwards with a moan, is swallowed in the grass. We reach him, mother and myself, but now he’s twitching, making noises in his throat, the sweat a bright and sudden gloss upon his nose, upon his brow. He wheezes first, then rattles. Both his eyes are open, dull and seeing nothing. One hand clutches at the grass beneath him now and then, but all in all there’s little here for me to look at and nothing to do. Leaving my mother kneeling there beside him, it comes upon