Voice of the Fire by Alan Moore (essential reading txt) 📕

with no rise or fall of feeling, no relief, made flatter yet by this wan, uneventful morning light: the gravewords called in Olun’s failing snake-skin rasp, each phrase cast up but briefly on the shores of speech then dragged back by the undertow of straining and collapsing breath; the women, chanting their response learned long and hard above the holes of mothers, husbands, sons, now lavished on a stranger; Bern and Buri, taking up an earth-axe, one apiece, before the chanting’s over, standing shift-foot with impatience to refill the hole and be away back to their queen, their suckling place.

The call and echo of the bone-chant dies away, replaced by other rhythms. Bern and Buri, each in turn, now stamp an earth-axe deep within the hill of soil discarded by the gravemouth, scooping up the dirt upon their blades to shower in the dead girl’s eyes. The grit-edged chop and bite, the rattling lift and fling, again and yet again. Her body lies unmoving in this sharp, dry rain like some abandoned settlement back in the highland north from which all life is fled, silent and still beneath the steady fall of ash and mud that covers now her wrinkled tracks and bristling gorse, her sinks and outcrops all erased. The breasts and face alone remain. Now nothing but her jaw; her chin. She’s gone.

The grave is filled. The women chant again, and Olun scatters dog teeth on the damp, untrodden mound. The petals of the braided flowers begin to curl and darken. Everyone goes home, with Bern and Buri striding off in step across the fields, the women trailing after them all in one long unravelling knot. We bump and judder in their wake, but soon they are too far away to hail, leaving me and Olun to our own company.

‘Why do you scatter dog teeth on her grave?’

My question is put forward more to break the dismal silence of the marshes than from any great desire to know its answer, yet the old man answers anyway.

‘That spirit-dogs may keep her safe, and guide her through the underpaths into the willage of the dead.’ He seems about to venture more, but now a dreadful coughing falls upon him and he may not speak.

‘There’s none save you and dead men, then, as know these underpaths?’ This is my next inquiry, offered once his hawking dies away.

‘That’s true enough. It seems you must have one or both feet planted in the underworld to know its windings.’ Here he laughs, a brittle noise that’s thick with mucous, very like the crushing of a snail. ‘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. He . . .’

Here the cunning-man breaks off, as if he thinks it better not to tell me more. At least, that’s how it seems to me. A moment passes, then another. There is still no voice come from behind my shoulder where the old man drags, there at my rear. Turning about, the reason for his quiet is plain: his eyes start out like painted eggs. Beneath the crazing net of signs that mark his flesh the skin is turned a slow and ghostly blue.

Not now! Not now before he’s told me everything! Dropping the bier to run, my screams alert the settlement before my feet can bear me halfway there. Out from their huts they waddle, slow at first then faster as they see who calls and understand what must be happening. They hurry in a line towards me through the long grey meadow-grass, wiping their hands upon their coats or hitching up their leggings as they run.

He’s still alive when we get back to him, some of the blueness faded now, his bird-breast settled back into a lurching rise and fall. He tries to speak as one great oxen-shouldered man scoops Olun from the pallet up into his arms to carry like a babe. His lips move, crinkling their coloured scars, but no words come. Across the field he’s borne amidst the buzz and whisper of the willagers that crowd about him in a wavering swarm, towards the far hives of the settlement, already humming and alive with rumour and lament.

Beneath the soil she lies, her yawn packed full with earth, a dry and bitter lace of root-hair snagged between her teeth. She comes here for her father’s leavings, closer to them now than all my cleverness brings me, with secret paths of gold coiled all about her while she sleeps and stinks and falls apart. Jewelled gravel lodging in between her toes, and chewed by silver worms there in the wasted treasure houses of the dead; the dead, alone of all the world in that they have no greeds to satisfy, no fears to salve or needs they must placate. Their sockets brim with wealth more splendid than their living eyes may ever know, and it concerns them not at all. My body, warm and anxious, moves to cruder drums.

Outside, beyond the cluttering strangeness of the old man’s hut, noon comes and goes, marked by the squeals of panic drowned in children’s laughter as the painted pig is killed, off near the roundhouse by the sound of it.

Olun is dying. Sprawled there facing me across the burned-out ember pit he does not seem to breathe at all, but only sigh from while to while, his blinkless eyes fixed on me, blind and sighted both. He sinks into his death and grows remote, unanswering for all my urgent query and demand.

‘Please, Father. There’s so little time and you must give me all your learnings. Teach me. Tell me how to be a cunning one like you before death draws a curtain in between us.’

Olun smiles, a dreadful splitting of the picture-bark that is his face, and tries to speak.

‘The curtain . . .’ Here he coughs, breaks off, recovers, starts again. ‘The curtain’s torn. There is a way we