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

I hunted all that day and yet another day besides, curled in my hide by dark, and at the close of it were many fowl within my sack and many poles of fish, and when another morning came I set out for my home. The air was good and clear that day, as air that follows from a storm, and yet no storm had passed. The blue sky coloured all the pools and puddles of the fen, and vast white clouds passed overhead, piled up into fantastic shapes for which I had not names. My bag was full. The sun was warm upon my back. I sang the only words I could remember of the Old Track Song, about the journey-boy and how he found his bride, and frightened herons off a pond the singing was that bad. It was the last time I was happy.

Now I sit upon the bank and let my wooden legs trail in the current while I eat the fish. When first I came to live for good out in the Drownings, I would cook my food before I ate, but now it seems a nuisance. No one else here cooks their food. I split along the creature’s belly with my nail and feel an odd content at just how large a piece of skin I can peel off in one attempt. (Here, partly flayed, it startles me by flipping once, but then is still.)

About to pull my beak aside and eat, a movement on the south horizon draws my eyes. Red flags. Red, tiny flags that drift apart then draw together as they flap towards me from across the distant fields. I squint, then draw my legs from out the water so as best to stand. I leave my beak in place.

Not flags. Not flags, but capes, red capes upon the backs of riding men. A hand-full by my reckoning. No more.

I know them. Men of Roma, come from lands beyond the sea. Some of the young men in the willage where I lived before said that these Romans had a will to take the land from us, but all this is a puzzle far beyond my figuring, for land is not a thing that one can take, and nor is it a thing that can belong, and so I leave such quarrels to the younger men.

They are much closer now, and have dismounted, leading on the horses by their reins, picking their way between the mudholes and the bright laked silver of the pools. One of them bears a staff crowned with a strange device of gold: there is a snake, a fat man standing, then a mouth wide open with the tongue lolled out, and finally a fat man walking. Metal helmets. Skirts like women. Metal plates across their tits.

Their horses see me first, and shy. While trying to rein in their rearing steeds, the men whirl all about to seek the cause of this disturbance. All in green against the tufted river-bank, at first they cannot see me.

I’ve no quarrel with them. I call out hello, and now they turn and look at me. My voice is sore, unpractised in the speech of men, and from their faces it is plain my greeting sounded terrible and was beyond their understanding. One amongst them starts to babble, high pitched, in their curious tongue. I take another step towards them, rearing high upon my wooden legs, and try again.

The horses scream and bolt. The men run after them. I watch their red cloaks flap away across the fens. The more I call for them to stop and have no fear, the faster do their horses flee, the faster do they follow in pursuit. What must I sound like, after all this time?

They’re gone, and so I sit back down there at the water’s edge to eat my fish. I think of how they’ll tell their friends they saw a bird much bigger than a man, all green, that stalked the marshes on its monstrous legs and uttered dreadful cries. Around a mouth-full of cold fish I start to laugh so that the grease spills out into my beard; onto my feathers made of rush.

After a while the laughter stops, because it sounds bad in this place alone. I eat the fish down to its skeleton.

That day, when I walked home towards my hill camp, I was thinking of my wife, my first wife. It’s a strange thing, but her name was Salka too. I’d known her since we both were small and played at chase-and-kiss out in the Hobfields, which they say is haunted by a murdered boy. Once I told Salka that I’d seen him, standing on the mound there with his throat all cut, his hair all burned. She knew I’d made it up, and yet she made as if she thought it true, and clung to me and let me feel her gilly there inside her breeks.

The hill came into sight, with supper-fires that smouldered on its crest, so that my weary step grew quick to think of being home. I had not had the chance to tell my son goodbye before I left, and thought that I might play with him along the evening paths while Salka cooked the fattest of the fish for us, wrapping our hut about with its delicious stink.

I was halfway uphill towards the camp before I realized that there was no noise.

I throw the slick white fishbones from me, down into the river where they bob for but a moment then submerge. I fancy that I see them swim away beneath the water, and I entertain a river where naught save the skeletons of fishes glide and dart and comb the currents with their naked ribs. I stand and make to wade downstream, back to my family. I feel the sorrow gathering about me, and I want to be with them.

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