The Gift of Stones Read Online Free PDF

put out his hand to retrieve the knife. I’ll keep it, said the cutter. That leaves us even on the day.
    There is no need, I think, to embroider this much more. It was dark by now. The horsemen – boastful and jostling with the villagers – had to ride away. They had their flints. They’d paid their recompense. All in all they’d had a lively day. My father was unconscious on the bed, drunk and bruised and dreaming. The bleeding was quickly stemmed with wood smoke. Maggots of the screw-worm fly would be brought and placed upon his wound to accelerate the healing. The skin would stretch and pucker, frown upon the world. And it would drip its poison and its undiminished pus forever like tree sap, like semen, like a punctured boil.
    My father’s story, then, of how he lost his arm presents a village briefly gone awry. We must retain the image of a normal day, the workshops busy with the rhythm of bone and wood and stone, the causeways quiet and empty except for children delivering new flints, the marketplace a murmur of transaction as wheat and skin and pots changed sides with axes, spears and knives. The anthill was at work, measured, skilful, dull, secure. To this we add the day’s disruptions – a heavy arrow, the wind and manes of horses, the trepidations of a dying boy, the perfume and the decorated bones, the taste of spirit on my father’s dreaming lips. How were people on that night? Were there better tales to tell across the hearth as hot, flat stones were made ready for the meat? Were children silent, tense? Was there more passion in the hearts and beds of those who’d watched the horsemen mount and ride off to the night? My father had it so. He drew for us a portrait of our home and village sent skittish by these uninvited guests, their gifts. Children were conceived that night. Subversive thoughts were aired at the expense of traders, flint, the drudgery of work, the slavery of skill. Maybe, even, blows were struck and quarrels made and mended with a hug. The man who’d kicked away the bowman’s arrowhead made the most of that, telling and retelling what he’d done, perfecting every detail. His midnight version was the best: Who said that bowman toppled to the ground? he asked. I plucked him up myself and tossed him there.
    And then, of course, the embers died. The village slept. It woke as usual with the dawn and slowly, painstakingly, more flints were formed; the hammers, scrapers, bellows, chisels were gathered up and put to work. Here was the normal day – except, of course, for one small boy who slept on and on for fear of waking to his pain – his severed arm caked and stiffened by dry blood, his nightmares blustery and full of stone.

7
    ‘L ISTEN HERE (my father said) . I’ll tell you what occurred. I’ll keep it simple, too. I won’t tell lies. So don’t expect some bristling story of revenge, the sort retold in whispers after dark about the boy who killed the lambing wolf or the wife who drowned her husband’s secret friend or the feuding sons. There is revenge to come, for sure. Malice and my elbow stump are twins. But at that moment when – seven years of age – I watched the bowman’s smile, there was no revenge in my mind. Children aren’t like that. They are more subtle. Is that the word? Or is ‘simple’ closer to it? Let’s hear it then, let’s tell the truth: the sum of my ambition at that time was not to kill the bowman for the damage he had done, but to be the bowman, to be on horseback in the wind like him, to let the heavy arrow fly at anything I wished, to struggle loose from stone.
    Let me describe his face as best I can. You’d think it was a leather purse with teeth. You never saw his eyes. He had a horseman’s squint. He was only young, but he was weathered as a piece of bark. Sometimes my memory conjures up a small moustache, sometimes a scar above his lip. I can’t be sure. It was years ago and I have told this story many times and changed it just as often.