Jim Crace - The Gift of Stones

He led her through the village and across the market green. The stoneys and the merchants were too preoccupied with worries of their own to pay attention to my cousin or to Doe. All kinds of people passed by them. Why should they notice who went where with whom? You can’t sell gossip — gossip’s free.

When they had passed the moss-packed walls of Leaf’s stone house my cousin paused for Doe to take his hand. It would have seemed a touching sight for simpletons, the awkward, blushing man, the meagre Doe, the fragrance of the bracken and romance. The stoneys seldom passed by here. They were not fond of cliffs or sea. And so my cousin felt emboldened by their privacy. He did not understand what she was trading for his shells. He thought he’d purchased her affection with his trophies from the beach. He thought each scallop would secure a kiss from Doe. He made a nuisance of himself.

“Come on,” she said. “Let’s not waste time. You’ve brought me all this way and I’ve a daughter waiting for me and for food.”

Doe led the way into the bracken and — that painful, reminiscent lifting of her smock — she stood ready to receive my cousin and his shells. She might have been upon the heath once more. Her thighs were punctured water bags. Her breasts were flat. Her face was reddening with hidden sores. Her eyes were beaten and appalled at the prospect of her task which made of her both the trader and the labourer. She was the merchandise as well. My cousin’s role was more clear. His clothes were off and he was holding Doe as if she were as light and worthless as a shock of reeds.

They should have hidden when they heard the horsemen come, but Doe could not distinguish cry from cry or heartbeats from hooves. It was too late to hide once the troop of riders had reached the clifftop path beyond Leaf’s walls and turned their horses. They had been seen, two nearly naked bodies, standing waist high in bracken. Who knows what mischief made one rider pause and loose one arrow at my cousin and at Doe? It was the kind of mischief that makes men kick down toadstools or snub a passing beetle with their thumb. Those chance-encountered things — untouched — seem far too innocent, insubstantial, perfect, to pass and leave unscathed. It must have seemed too good a chance to miss — the prospect of dividing those two lovers by the sea.

The arrow’s flight was even and too swift for Doe to move or sink. She simply joined my cousin in his panic as he twisted her around to shield his naked flesh with hers. The bronze and shiny leaf was like a yellow-throated diver when it hit her skin, the point its beak, her flesh the sea, its fish the kidney in the woman’s back. Its impact was as neat and light as those which open up a flint to show the blade within.

The rider did not wait to see what damage he had done. His horse was separated from the rest and he must give pursuit. Nor did my cousin wait to see. He dropped the scallops, turned and ran. For all he knew the horseman would return to put an end to him. You cannot blame him for his flight. But what he should have done was this. He should have run straight to the market green and told his neighbours there about the woman and her wound. They could have armed themselves with sticks and come to take her home. But he said nothing. He just ran, by routes which took him to his house avoiding stoneys and the market green. He hoped her wound was only slight, that he would spot her, once again, outside her hillside home. What was the point, he asked himself, of letting all the world into the secret of his trade with Doe when she was only scratched or bruised or shocked? When it was dark he’d climb up to her house to check that she was well.

She fell onto the bracken with a pain which came in waves like childbirth. She fell onto the arrow and snapped the shaft and drove the head more deeply in. She was unconscious fairly soon, with shock, fatigue and pain. What were her dreams? We’ll never know. Her face was pale. The earth was damp and dark with blood.

Or else she did not die just then. Or else she did not die like that. The gossip on the green was this, that I’d been spotted on that day. I’d been along the cliffs and come back to the village with my bag full-gutted with the free food of the coast. Who knows what else I hid inside my bag? An arrowhead, perhaps?

Anyone that saw me then, they said, would wonder at the luck and skill which brought the one-armed man through thickets, over rocks, without a wound or fall. I had a purpose. What it was they could not guess. But there was a saying, the agile and the speedy ram is the one with sheep in view. My sheep was Doe. How well they could remember that first night when I had brought the woman and her girl to the village. The refugees had slept, exhausted by the walk, while I had told my cousins and their friends the story of Doe’s life. They’d fled before the tale was done, both bored and irritated by the passion and the anger in my voice. My ailment was too clear. I was besotted with the skinny woman from the heath. It did not take a sage to see that love like mine — belittled, spurned — would turn to poison once the object of that love became the willing consort of all men but me. The gossip made a killer out of me. It seems the stoneys hadn’t got enough to do — already they were telling stories of their own.

So let me pick their story up. They’ve left it as a rough and ready core. The craftsman in me wants to strike it softly here and there, to give it shape and symmetry, to hone and burnish it. Imagine, then, that I’ve been telling lies. I found fresh samphire for Doe’s gift not on the heath but much nearer to the village. It flourished on a stream bank where a shallow valley joined the coast. It was where I’d lit the fire with hair. I picked the samphire and found, too, a colony of scallops in the tidal sand. My bag was full. I had no other tasks. Besides, the fresh hoof-marks in the mud and sand were warnings that there were horsemen close. There were the embers of a second fire, some flattened grass, some rabbit bones, a broken arrow shaft with the smoothest, lightest head which was not stone. That, too, I put inside my bag. I was unnerved by what I found. I hurried home. And so I returned to the village in the early afternoon and not at night as I have said.

Remember what my plan had been? I’d take the scallops and the samphire to Doe’s house. I was as hollow and as brittle as a blown egg with jealousy. I’d stand outside and call, “Doe, Doe, sweet Doe.” And when she came? I’d pay. I’d fall down on my knees. I’d throw her samphire as a gift. I’d be as giddy as a goat. I could invent a thousand reconciliations.

Instead, I heard the sound of calling in the bracken which stood between the sea and Leaf.

“Come on,” she said. “Let’s not waste time.” It was Doe’s voice. And the man that she addressed was my sheepish cousin. He seemed less sheepish for a while. He was shedding clothes as if they were alive and venomous. The Doe I saw was just the same as that first sight upon the heath when she had offered shelter from the rain and we had dined on slott. That was the day I pulled that first and modest screen of grass across my tale. If I’d been wise I would have let the bracken and the grass provide another screen. I should have shut my eyes and ears or run down to the shore. But jealousy is like a moth — it seeks the brightest flame.

I was close enough to see her buttocks and her back, to watch her smock rise up, to witness cousin — erect and tremulous — enclose her in his arms. What might I have done had not the troop of horsemen passed close by? Thrown scallop shells, perhaps? Or crept away? Or strode into the clearing they had made and, with my one arm round Doe’s waist, have said, “This woman’s mine, not yours. I found her on the heath. I brought her here. Who said that you could take my Doe?” Then I might have struck my cousin on his mouth like some possessive stoney beaten to a flint. And he — the soft and cheerful sort — would have simply turned and fled.