The Gift of Stones Read Online Free PDF Page A

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.

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    H ERE THEN WAS the strangest recompense. It was a simple matter for the riders from beyond the hill, much used to drinking, perfume, quarrels, horsetheft, wars, to first give father too much drink from their leather travel-mates of spirit and then to strike him neatly on the chin. The softest blow, not a feather’s breadth too shallow, not a feather’s breadth too deep, flicked my father’s head back on his spine. He spiralled, fell. ‘It was my first encounter,’ father said, ‘with our good friend Hard Drink.’
    They took his arm off, too. They were used to amputations. Their family dead were dismembered and buried in a pot. It was less trouble than digging graves or building chambers under earth. It was not only dead limbs, either, that they were used to cutting. One horseman lifted up a hand with two fingers and a thumb half gone as evidence that they could take a knife to living people, too. They were often fighting, casually with strangers, and there were many wounds. The body held no mystery for them. Leaf was happy to pass on the task and watch the experts with his knife. First they tied a leather strap above my father’s elbow. Clear earthen pus burst from the swollen upper arm. Briefly some colour returned to his limb and then beyond the elbow joint it turned the inner blue of mussel shells. A second leather strap was tied higher on the arm and a slat of wood was rested on my father’s chest as a working surface. They put his arm upon it and strapped it to the wood with ropes. They threw spirit on his arm. His skin was cut and opened with those few sharp scraps that Leaf had gathered from the flake nest on his anvil. An uneven thin red line was cut. My father flinched and moved his arm in sleep.
    Those who expected a scarlet eruption, a cascade, were disappointed. The straps held father’s blood at bay. The horseman with the knife was now impatient. With the strong and even strokes of a deer-hunter stripping and salting meat, he cut into the flesh with Leaf’s new flint. The bunched stem of arteries and nerves was the most resistant, but the three boyish muscles which enfolded it gave way before Leaf’s perfect edge like wet peat. The audience had never seen such colours. With so sharp a knife it was a speedy task to separate the knuckles of the higher bone from the two long bones below the elbow. With a belch of clear and bitter fluid the unhinged lower arm came free. Its bluish tones had paled. It was no colour. It matched my father’s face. Bury it, the cutter said. My father’s arm was gone. Leaf