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

thoughts that resubmerges and is gone, unrecognized. Rising up stiffly to my feet it seems to me the spoor is come from Olun’s hut and therefore make my way inside where it grows stronger, thick enough to sting the eyes. How great a dog is this to have a stench so fierce?

Shouldering through the lurid piles and trick-tracks of impediment, the rain-dog smell becomes more overwhelming with my every step towards the centre round, its stinking heart.

There are no dogs.

The fire pit, kindled now, casts up a dance of red across the curves and crannies of the old man’s hut. Across it, Hurna sits and faces me, arms hooped about her drawn up knees and head cocked to one side. There comes the spat and hiss of green-wood from the embers, but all else is silence in the junk-ringed clearing. Something in the noise-shape of the hut is wrong. There is a part removed; some sound no longer there. Listening for a moment, the omission’s plain: it is the rhythm of his breath.

The witch-man lies upon his bier, bathed in the ghosts of flame that shift and tilt the shadow, setting his tattoos to writhe though he is still as stone. Each staring wet and blind to where the fire pit’s smoke is hauled in ragged twists out through the chimney-hole, his eyes achieve a final match, both fogged and frosted now. His breast becalmed, the hands that rest upon it knot and petrify about my hoop of fancy-beads that glitter violet in the coal-light. Piss, his final offering, soaks through the pup-skin robe whereon he lies, from which the scent of dog steams thick and clinging in the fireside heat.

Tell me your secrets now, old man, the way you promise. Peel apart your death-gummed lips and speak to me.

‘It happens when you send me in to talk with him,’ says Hurna. She is calm and smiling, squatted in the hearth-light next to Olun’s corpse. ‘We make our converse but a little while, and then he dies. But do not worry . . .’ Here she notes the anguish in my eyes, mistakes it for compassion. ‘Olun dies a rightly death. His spirit treads upon the bright path now, and best of all he leaves no drudgery for you. His funeral matters are in hand and there are no great tasks you must perform. All things are well.’

All things are well? Gods curse this stupid woman blind! How may all things be well if Olun dies before the secret of his wealth is shared with me? How may she sit and smile and look content when all my schemes are falling down to dust? Beneath my feet the golden tunnels fall away, recede beyond recall. What may be done to bring them back?

A thought comes to me: dragging Olun back towards the village from the dead girl’s funeral, and asking if there is no man alive save he that knows the underpath, the trackways of the dead. The old man’s laughter, like the splintering of snail husks; his reply that bubbles thick with tar from out amongst the whorl-marked shards: ‘Except old Tunny. He knows every turning of the path, but all the knowing’s in his fingers. None of it is in his head.’

‘Who’s Tunny?’

Hurna looks towards me, startled first then puzzled by my outburst, for she may not see how Tunny is connected with my father’s death. She frowns, and when she speaks her words are slow, filled with a gentleness that makes me furious. It is as if she’s talking to a babe.

‘Tunny’s the gateman here, the old one with the shaking hands, but you have other things to think of now. It is the upset of your father’s death that muddles up your thoughts. Why don’t you rest, and leave the readying of Olun’s wake to me? You need your time to mourn, and . . .’

Turning from her, stumbling through the hulks and hinders to the dusking air outside.

Her cries of consolation follow me: ‘Don’t run. You’re just upset, but there’s no need. He’s in a better place. He’s on the bright path now. . .’

A strange excitement hangs upon the settlement as twilight falls and objects lose their shape and edge to merge within the falling light. From every hut the people are emerging, laughing, chattering and firing torches, one from off the other, flares of yellow in the settling grey. In whispering groups they drift towards the northern gate, a great slow swarm of amber lights that travels in the same direction as myself. They watch me dart among them, running hard towards the watch-hut with the sweat of desperation on my brow and yet they do not pay me any heed, caught up in some excitement of their own.

The ancient gateman with the black and trembling hands is nowhere to be seen and it appears his post is empty and unmanned until a muffled grunting causes me to peer inside. At my back the torch-lit throng moves through the willage gates and out along the river path, a thread of floating lights.

Inside the watch-hut, by the wall, the red-haired girl with freckled shoulders sits beside the birth-marked youth whose name, it comes to me, is Coll. They have their breeks let down about their ankles and their lips locked hard enough to bruise. Each holds the other’s sex.

‘Where’s Tunny?’

Startled fingers suddenly withdraw from in between the loved one’s thighs to cup between their own. Their lips part, shackled only by a silver chain of spit.

‘Shank off! He isn’t here. Shank off and leave us be!’ The boy’s spoiled face becomes so red that all its markings are consumed and lost within the flush of blood.

My question, though, is urgent and may not be put aside. ‘Where is he, then? Come, tell me quick and you are rid of me.’

‘He’s gone to watch the pig-night in the Hobfields. That’s where everybody goes tonight, and more’s the pity you’re not gone there too.’ Here, breaking