Michael Stewart - Ill Will

We passed the backs of people’s houses, washing pegged and drying on the line, heaps of sticks and wood ready for chopping. I thought maybe we could stop here, but aside from a few houses and outbuildings, there was nothing. Our path narrowed, the clouds thickened. I could hear the braying of cows in the distance. As we got closer I could see the farmer with a stick counting them in ready for milking. The lowing of cattle was soothing. Hooves, bracken, cow parsley, the verdant hawthorn, twisted and prickly. Thick peat smoke billowed from the chimney of a farmhouse. Tentacles of ivy grasped the trunk of a wych elm. A dead grouse in a draining ditch. And still the flaysome wind blew in our faces. I felt a wet drop on my cheek. I looked up at the clouds that were darkening again. Another wet drop on the back of my hand. On the nape of my neck. Then the rain poured down.

‘I’m getting wet,’ Emily said.

‘Keep walking. When the sun comes out you’ll dry soon enough.’

‘This farm stinks of shit,’ Emily said.

There were heaps of horse manure and swine ordure. The air was thick with the rich stench.

‘How do you think farmers go on all the time when it stinks of shit?’

‘You get used to it.’

‘I wouldn’t want to get used to it. Shit should stink of shit, it shouldn’t ever stop stinking of shit just ’cause you get used to it. It stinks of shit for a reason. You’re meant to stay away from it.’

‘Put a peg over your nose.’

‘I haven’t got a peg. Why would I have a peg? You don’t half talk bollocks sometimes.’

Fences, walls, hedges. We climbed over a stile and across another mud-clad field.

‘My knee’s giving me gyp,’ Emily said.

‘What do you mean, your knee’s giving you gyp? How old are you – ten, or ten and sixty?’

‘It keeps locking.’

‘It will be fine.’

‘Then why does it keep fucking clicking?’

I shrugged.

‘Why don’t we stick to the roads? It will be easier on our feet. This isn’t even a proper path. I don’t know what you’d call it, but not a path in any case.’

‘The roads aren’t safe. They’ll be on horseback. This is the only way we can be sure they won’t find us.’

‘Horses can travel across country, you know. We used to do it all the time, me and my dad.’

‘But not by choice,’ I said. ‘They won’t want to risk laming them.’

‘They could take it steady. They won’t lame them if they take it steady, not even on this route. I’m telling you, me and my dad travelled loads of miles over worse than this without laming the horses. You’ve just got to be careful how you go.’

Past birch, beech, bracken and bog, black mounds of molehills. We saw a long wire between two posts and hanging from the wire were the moldwarp corpses, their velvet grey fur wet with mizzle. Their huge white teeth and claws, glittering. Waiting to be skinned.

‘My dad had a jerkin made from fifty moleskins. He got it off a nobleman. Lord so-and-so. Though he didn’t look noble standing in a ditch.’

We walked through more fields until the moor opened out again and below us the river snaked and frothed.

‘You a gypsy?’ Emily said.

‘No.’

‘You look like a fucking gypsy to me.’

‘Well, I’m not.’

‘My dad said that gypsies were thieves.’

‘Did he?’

‘And that they kidnap girls and eat babies.’

‘You’d better watch your step then.’

‘Thought you weren’t a gypsy?’

‘Look, just keep your mouth shut, right?’

A white linnet settled on a prominent stoop about ten yards ahead of us. As we walked on, it took flight again, flitting down the path where it settled, bobbed its tail and watched us approach. As soon as we got within ten yards it flew onwards, and so on for half a mile or more.

‘What’s that bird doing?’ she said.

‘Showing us the way.’

‘No, it’s not. You don’t half talk some tiff.’

We passed a post that a goshawk must have used as a plucking place. Beneath a scattering of feathers was the flesh and elastic of the meat membrane.

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