Kill the Dead(19)

Dro saw her twice a week, each of the two days that he came to the school, for three years. Then, one day when he was thirteen, he suddenly noticed her. She would play dice games with the boys, which she usually won, and run races with them, which sometimes she won. She would also climb trees, though not in company with the boys, for she expressed the opinion that this would be unseemly. The day Parl Dro noticed her was an evening in early summer. He came out into the field behind the school and saw her sitting in an apple tree. The sun spilled down her hair like molten honey. She was talking to herself, or to the birds, or the tree. He climbed an adjacent tree and sat and looked at her. She did not seem offended or abashed when she saw him. They began to converse quite easily. What they spoke about was unrecalled and meaningless. It might have been books or the state of the crops.

When he came back to the town on his next school day, he arrived early, and walked slowly by her house. It was a tiny hovel, held up mainly by two other hovels at either side of it. Yet it was the cleanest hovel for miles around. When she came out she did not seem amazed to see him. Her only kin was a grandmother, who that morning had been baking. The girl had two slices of warm crackling bread, spread with dripping, one of which she presented graciously to Parl with the compliments of the house.

She had a name, but he never called her by it. Her nickname, which her grandmother had given her for her hair, was “Silky.” Parl and the grandmother, but no one else, called her that.

Through the summer, they spent a lot of time together. Sometimes they played truant from the school. They roved about the hills. They talked of myths, legends bound up with the land, and ancient times when emperors had ruled empires there, and women with hot blood had ridden over it to battle. He showed her how to catch fish in the streams. She told him he was cruel to catch fish he did not need to eat. Later, when the grandmother suffered a setback in her meagre life style, Silky begged him to show her again how to catch fish. They took the catch back to the hovel together, the colour of river pebbles and fine to eat, particularly when starvation was the alternative. He stole bread for them, Silky and the grandmother, from the landowner’s ovens. When times grew fatter, Silky, by way of repayment, stole a knife for him from the steelsmith’s. Parl had a little trouble replacing it in the forge before it was missed. They were very young, and their sexuality was limited by their youth, their situation and their codes of honour regarding each other. But they learned certain lessons of fire together, light fierce kisses, the rapidity of a heartbeat, hands and bodies and the press of summer grass. There would have been more, if things had evolved differently.

When the harvest came due, the landowner called in all his workers to the fields. For three or four weeks, Parl would not see the school, the town, or Silky. They parted gravely, as if for a year, beneath the apple tree in the field behind the school.

The harvest went as it always did, which was back-breakingly, but well. The weather was hot and the sheaves like tinder, and men were posted to keep watch for fires. At night, Parl fell asleep in the open, the stars dazzling overhead. The air smelled of grapes and wine and scythed grain. Fireflies sprinkled the bushes. He hardly thought of Silky, comforted that he did not need to think of her, because she would be there for him when he returned.

In the last week of the harvest there was a storm. Roaring and trampling, it tore down on the fields like a gigantic animal. Great smacks of wind clapped the corn flat to the ground. Lightning drove steel bolts through the earth. A tree blazed up on a hill, exploding with white electric fire and noise.

They worked against the gale and the lightning. When the rain came, they worked against that. Purple and wailing in the wind, the fields surrendered themselves to destruction. The last of the harvest was taken by the storm.

Somehow worse than the material loss, the threat of reduced rations, cut wages, which must inevitably follow, was a primitive distress which fell over all of them. The storm was like some supernatural show of wrath, sent as if to punish them, as if to demonstrate that however settled life might seem, nothing was certain. It was no surprise to Parl when the landowner, riding by him through the sodden ruin of the stacks, tapped his shoulder. “No more school for you, boy. I’m sorry. I’ll need you here.”

It was another month before Parl could find the space or energy to make the two hours’ trek to the town. And then he had to set off two hours before sunrise, hoping he would not be missed when the other boys and men turned out soon after dawn. Probably he would get a beating. The idea of it seemed very distant. There had begun to be a feeling of depression, almost of fear inside him. In the swift importunate way of the young, he knew where salvation lay, and had come to care less and less for anything else.