Jim Crace: The Gift of Stones

Here I am tempted to infiltrate my own concocted version of those moments in the past. I knew my father and his neighbours. Timid is the word. They could not strike a boy in such a heartless way. I imagine them frozen and hesitant at the very thought of it. The fist drawn back would not unleash itself. The raised mallet would be held back by the force of custom. Theirs was an ordered, working village. Scrapping was for cockerels.

It was at this moment, then (my father cowering but untouched, Leaf’s new knife untested, the dusk upon them), that the horsemen of that morning returned to the village with goods to trade. They left their horses, as requested, in the care of children and proceeded on foot between the huts and workshops to the market green.

It would be an error to imagine that just because a small boy had been injured and that a crowd had gathered for the amputation, that the working life of the villagers had ended for the day. There are those who cannot settle and for whom any occurrence is excuse enough to form a crowd. But there are others, too, who never let their focus shift. The world could split in half and still they’d have their noses pointing down at the work bench or the stall. And so it was that the horsemen found a reduced but busy marketplace on their return and merchants there whose outrage at the wounding of a village boy was swiftly tamed by the usual courtesies of trade. Except, of course, that the crudely struck arrowhead that had caused such hilarity in the morning was prominently displayed amongst the local, finer tools so that the horsemen might understand exactly what debts there were to pay. Yet far from embarrassment at the rediscovery of their arrowhead these men were jocular. They pointed at the head and chuckled. So there it is, they seemed to say. They’d spent a lot of time in vain knocking back the bracken. They expressed no interest in the boy who’d last been seen in flight. In fact these horsemen did not seem reliable, predictable in any way. There was much laughter amongst them, and warmth and swagger, too. Their hair was long. Their clothes were decorated. The expression in their eyes was bold and childlike. They seemed at ease — yet wayward, loud and unrestrained.

Everybody there was drawn towards this knot of men. The villagers were hypnotized, and for a while the trade in borers, burins, sharpeners, harpoons, stone wrist-guards, sickles, fire-flints, sling-stones, scrapers, hand axes, arrowheads and tangs and barbs came to a pause. Women stopped their basketry. Small boys who fashioned string by rubbing buckleaf fibre on their thighs finished early for the day. The man who sold coloured dyes which came, he said, from snails and molluscs, bark, insects, the waste of certain birds (but which, my father claimed, were lightning dust) ceased for once to sing his wares. Visitors from far away who’d come to trade with fat-hen weed or honey, with herbs or decorated bone and slate, cups and birch-wood boxes, with shells, wood, shellfish, nuts, sloes, pears, peas, apples, round cakes, flour, clothes, with frogs and brownies from the stream, forgot the purpose of their journeys. Piles of clay pots, antlers, charcoal, willow fish-traps, nets of hens were left without attendance. Everyone — except the opportunists — came to watch the fun.

We knew that you’d be back, they told the horsemen. We knew that once you’d seen the flints that we make in this village you’d want to talk with us, not fight. Now, what’s on offer?

The horsemen sat amongst the mats. Candles were brought and dishes of curd. A skin bag was collected from the tethered horses and emptied at the merchants’ feet. There were five hollowed lengths of femur bone, cut from the carcasses of deer. Each had been stained yellow and then carved with flower heads in crowded, perfect detail and linked with filaments and lines, so that the surface of the bone was frost and lichen interlaced. It was the sort of pattern, finely traced by insects, that could be found beneath the loosened bark of trees. For the knappers in the marketplace the bonework was the finest they had seen. They crowded round to rub their thumbs along the yellow, decorated shafts. Yet no one was fool enough to speak out loud the price they’d pay for such ornaments. Instead they shook their heads and said, No use to us. What could we do with these?

One of the riders — a man as old and bald as Leaf — gathered up the bones from the rubbing thumbs around him and placed all but one before him on the mat. He took a finger of flat wood and, holding the bone high in the candlelight so that all could see, he scraped a plug of hardened fat from the bone’s hollow. Now he was careful that no one else should grasp the bone. He held it upright at his nose and sniffed. Perfume, he said. Those villagers who stood behind his back could lean forward and see a blinking disc of green fluid and smell the unmistakable fume of orris plus the honeyed redolences of new, dramatic odours. It made their hearts beat fast. It made them blush and pass uneasy smiles. The bone of perfume was passed across to those traders whose flints the horsemen had inspected. They assumed the expressions of experts as they each lifted the perfume to their nostrils and, a little shakily, passed on the bone. Their mouths were watering. Their eyes were cloudy. One, at least, shifted uneasily where he sat to disguise a sudden, unheralded erection. A little touch of this behind my wife’s ear, a smudge between the breasts, he thought, a dab between the thighs. Another, made suddenly breathless and urgent for transaction by the fragrance in the bone, could manage his palpitations and impatience only by sneezing like a horse. Here was something that defied reason. A sneeze and an erection were both appropriate ripostes.

Where is this perfume from, they asked. The horsemen shrugged. They weren’t completely sure. We didn’t ask, they said. We simply saw the opportunity and helped ourselves. There was a caravan, beyond the forests, a dozen days from here. They’d traded horses for some skins. And then, at night, armed only with a knife they had crept up on the sleeping caravan and cut the horses loose. They weren’t ashamed of that. It was reclamation only, hardly theft. They’d found the skin bag with its decorated bones strapped to the blankets of a horse. One had splintered and there was perfume on the horse’s flanks. They spoke what every man was feeling — that even a horse, with perfume like that upon its flanks, could make a man keen-set.

The properties of the goods for barter were now declared. Here was perfume of the strongest kind. Here were vials of decorated bone unparalleled for beauty. Here were arrowheads, spear-stones, tools which, when compared to those made elsewhere (and here a clumsy arrowhead was indicated and tuts exchanged), were sharp, light, fast, strong and shapely. The traders recommended an exchange — five decorated perfume bones for twenty arrowheads, three spear-stones and a tongue-shaped axe with a good thick butt. After some time and some concessions, the bargain was agreed. They clapped hands to bring it to an end. The horsemen put their flints in the skin bag and handed over the hollowed deer bones. Once more they clapped hands — and that would have been the end of that exchange had not one man, barely twice my father’s age, leant forward to retrieve the ugly stone which he had last seen that morning as it dipped and laboured from his bow.

Now that the barter was at an end, the restraints and etiquettes of trade could be set aside. One of the knappers, his head still spinning from the scent, surprised himself and his companions with a sudden, half-considered act. He kicked the arrowhead away — and its owner toppled foolishly upon the mat. Here the horsemen were at a comic disadvantage. They were dismounted. One of their number was face down. They had transgressed, they were reminded, not only in the unseemly efforts to regain the arrowhead, but also in the damage done that morning. (Now everyone was startled at the plainness of the words.) There was a boy, not far away, they said, in pain and dying. It was the horsemen’s fault. They ought to make their bowman provide some recompense. You think we’re fooling now, they said. Come on, we’ll show you what a careless bow can do. The traders and the knappers there, with the horsemen at their centre, amused and hardly fearful, now set off for the place where my father lay. There they joined their unsettled, work-shy neighbours who had formed the first crowd of that day and demanded entrance to the room. The boy was conscious, standing, his injured arm bloodied, swollen and inert. The bowman smiled.