The Mammoth Book of Historical Crime Fiction

exasperation.

“Can’t have been anything with any sense, or it would have eaten the eggs as well. No, they are bound to be bad. Get rid of them, I’d say.”

“The egg I chucked at Kyle was just fine! I had a good sniff at what was left of it.”

“What a waste, then,” growled Aunty Grizzel. “Is that what you’d prefer me to say instead? And how did poor little Kyle offend you this time, Madam?”

Niav bit her lip. There had to have been a reason for her Aunt not having told her something about the snake rock. “Is it true my mum was washed in down by my snake rock?”

“Yes, she was. And — ”

“Was she all bloated — like a blown up bladder — and blue and green?”

“No she was not. Befind was as beautiful as she always was. I wonder whose lively imagination that was? Pity you didn’t chuck two eggs.”

“And my dad?”

“No, he came in up by the Beast’s Paw”

“Was he all bloated?”

But Aunty Grizzel just looked away. “Diarma floated in quite a while later …”

Niav had stood outside the weaving-hut as Grizzel started to pick through the basket of wools. “It’s all going wrong,” she growled, standing back from the loom to check the colour match of her new skein of wool. “And this one’s wrong too. It’s dyed a much deeper colour than last time — nothing’s going right today — something’s in the wind for sure.”

“A bit of deeper tone will just make the pattern more interesting,” said Niav, trying to maintain a cheerful front in spite of how she felt. She could see little difference in the shade this time, but Aunt Grizzel was much more aware of colour subtleties than she was, than anyone was — a real artist. “I think maybe I will just go for a walk on the clifftop — don’t worry, I will be back before dark. I will leave the eggs on the cool-shelf, and there are some sweeties in the basket too. We can roast them before we eat — that’ll be nice.”

“Don’t go too far then. I think there is rain brewing …” Aunt Grizzel was clearly not for a moment taken in by Niav’s attempted nonchalance. “Like I said, the sea threw your Pa back on to the rock by the Beast’s Paw. Lurgan went out in his coracle and brought him home — such a dutiful man, your Uncle Lurgan.”

* * *

Now Niav looked down at the dark swirling river. Was there truly something in the wind? She wouldn’t have cared to say.

But, suddenly, picked out by a moment’s hectic beam of sunlight, something was scudding in fast ahead of the dark storm clouds that swirled around the eastern headland.

A smallish craft, desperate to make landing before the skies broke — Niav caught her breath in a sort of wondering ecstasy as she made out the symbol clearly painted in brown and yellow, wings picked out in white, right across the square leather sail. A bee. It must be Artin. It had to be Artin. Why did he always swirl in on the bow of a storm? Artin the Smith, maker of dreams, who had returned from the dead. People said that he had defeated the mighty Sea God in an epic battle, and some folk even went so far as to say he was somehow the Sea God himself; but he would only smile and say that he served a power far, far greater than that of the waves, or any other force of nature.

No wonder Aunt Grizzel was acting up. In her few years of conscious observation, Niav had noticed that her aunt was particularly prone to her nonsense when Artin was in the offing — almost like some people’s dogs sensing that their owners were coming before they walked up over the horizon — uncanny! Perhaps this was the time when she might pluck up the courage to try to discover why.

Originally when she had seen her aunt so twitchy, she had thought that it might just be a general dislike of strangers. However, she had soon come to realize that that would be completely ridiculous. Though the strangers always made a reverent visit to the Sacred Howe on the east bank, the chief reason that brought them from far and wide to their river mouth was the trade with the artisans on the western bank. The strangers understood the quality of their weaving and pottery and in particular the value and beauty of their magic black stones — jet.

Jet wasn’t merely something for making jewellery, it had very peculiar magical properties too. It was very rare — a stone, but as light as wood and as warm as wood to touch — even though it came out of the ground. When you polished it against sandstone it would show you reflections of a sunless, secret magic world. If you rubbed jet with woollen cloth, it could be made to pick things up. The fumes from burning jet could be used to test virginity, and they could even be used to drive out snakes. All the headless stone snakes which could be found dotted everywhere about the valley — though few of them were quite as large as the special one where Niav had found the eggs — were often pointed out as proof of this. But why such things were so was really still a mystery, even to the people from the river mouth, though of course they would be the last people to admit it.

Jet could be quite dangerous as well. Though you could collect jet along the sea and river shores, the best jet was mined — often dangling, from an exposed cliff face. This had to be done with caution; if you were not careful, you might awake the hidden spirits that lurked in the rock faces. If they were treated wrong they would get angry and the ground around the mines might burst into fire — to show the spirits’ power and spite — and be of no use to anyone, unless, of course, you were trying to dispose of an unwanted serpent.

People like Uncle Lurgan (and her long chain of grannies stretching back into the past) on the eastern bank inherited the job of taking care of the right ceremonies for this sort of thing. It was time someone explained to Niav how and why she had lost this right when she ended up on the west side of the river.

No, Niav appreciated that her people were very special, and had been chosen by the gods because of their artistic talents and shrewd business sense, and not only for their wisdom and piety — so why this strange divide?

Aunty Grizzel summed the dilemma up. Of all the people who lived on the west bank, she was the most talented, on top of which she could look really beautiful. She might be shockingly failing in piety but she was also amazingly and universally accepted to be wise. For her, not liking strangers just for the sake of it would be particularly unlikely.

But it wasn’t all strangers, she had eventually realized; it was the group of strangers led by Artin.

Looking down at the small, blunt-prowed boat, with its steering oarsman making purposefully towards the eastern shore, Niav remembered another thing said about jet: it could keep away dogs. Aunt Grizzel disliked dogs almost as much as she seemed to dislike Artin — and there was another bit of nonsense.

Kyle had a big half-sister called Estra (she was Uncle Lurgan’s daughter but not with Kyle’s mother, Aunty Helygen. Estra’s mother had died when she was a baby). Estra could tell the most gripping stories — particularly ghost stories. There was one peculiar tale about the very first time that the people of the river-mouth had been visited by Artin. Niav didn’t know how long ago this was supposed to have been. On the few times Niav had seen Artin, he always seemed to her to be quite young.

“It was a really wild evening,” Estra said. “All the boys were up on the west cliff watching the sunset and then the sky opened and the rain came lashing down. Everyone started dashing down the pathway to get home but suddenly they saw this slip of a boat leaping from wave to wave, driven in by the storm. But it never made the harbour and crashed in under the east cliff — as boats do — and it was sucked clean under, all in a second.” Then Estra put on her creepy story voice. “Everyone was stunned. There in front of them, something horrible and dark was fighting its way in through the surge and it leapt ashore — a great black dog — and they all watched it limp out of the water and clamber, really slow, up the path by the east cliff. It seemed to have injured its back left leg.

“But the next day, they found Artin (just a boy) lying out on the hillside with a horribly mangled left knee. The bodies of the other strangers floated in all white and bloated after that.”

Niav was so taken with the story that she had told Aunty Grizzel.

“Now that must be a very old version of Artin’s first arrival — I wonder where Estra got that from?” she laughed.

“But it’s so weird — almost as though Artin’s something evil. Estra’s an idiot — she talks rubbish.”

“You’re happy enough to listen to her. She’s just got a vivid imagination. Poor child, with her mother being drowned like that — you of all people should be a bit more understanding.”

“But I’m not creepy and try to stand too close to people, or say I have got magical powers because my mother was some wise-woman!”