Night of the Firstlings
Hickory came down with it, same as all the big boys. One minute he was sitting at prayers around the table, the next he hardly looked like himself, he was blotched so red and in between so white.
"Augh." He sounded as if he had no teeth. "It's like something thumped me."
Dawn beside me was suddenly a little stone boy. I took his hand and we sat and could not blink, while the fuss was made of Hickory and for once we didn't mind, so long as they got that livid-patched face out of our sight soon, those swollen-up lips. The blokes are always full of bravado; you cannot tell from them. But Mum with her sharp commands and then her tight silences told us well enough: we ought be very frightened. And we were.
We sat there in the silence of the broken-off prayer. The prophet's children were there too, though his oldest, Nehemi, was home with the same horror.
"Yer," they said. "It was just like that for ours, too."
"'T in't any less awful the second time," whispered Arfur. "They looks like monsters."
Then the prophet himself was back down among us, and he saw their faces and he went to their bench, gathered up little Carris and allowed the others to cling to him. He laughed across at Dawn and me. "Don't worry," he said. "We have the protection. This is what we done all that for."
It didn't help, knowing how serious it had been while we hurried about that day with our secret and our buckets of blood. If anyone asks you, Dad had said, Tell them it is a Dukka festival, nothing more.
What kinda festival requires good blood slopped about everywhere? I'd said.
It's lamb's, Dad said patiently. So a spring festival. But only some springs, tell them, because none of them will have seen it before.
I hoped some of the messier signs we had painted would still work. I remembered adding a few dabs to one of Dawn's efforts while he ran off down the lane calling back the Ludoes were down there, with their only one boy—but still that made him the eldest, didn't it?—and unable to afford a lamb of their own.
Everyone but Mum and Dad came back down, some of them quite scared looking and sweaty. "It is just like with my lad," I heard one say in the stair. "Oh, what a night!"
"Come, people," said the prophet in his prophet-voice. "Let us pray thanks that we have the Lord's protection, this fearful night." And they all slid and clambered to around the tables again, and bent their heads.
While he intoned something special and beautiful, nearly singing those words and quite loudly, I bent my head, too, and Dawn leaned against me and I took his hand into my lap. But my attention, which should have been upon God, was wandering up the stair and dabbing about there like the tip of an elephant-trunk, sensitive to the least movement. It was unusual that Dad had not come down to play the host while Mum took care of sick Hickory. It was too too strange that Dawn and I were the only people of our house besides Gramp by the door, while the gathering swayed and responded and clutched its fingers and its brows. I prayed too, because now I could see there was something to pray for and it wasn't thanks, it was please-please-please. Don't let Hickory's face explode. Please unflop him and roll his eyes back down so as we can see the colour in them again. I could not think how Mum and Dad would be if Hickory died; too much was possible, too much awfulness.
Once the prayer was sung to a close, the prophet said, "Very well, all youse go to your homes. And those with sons take the peace and strength of Our Lord with you."
And very doubtful and frightened—but not muttering anything because hadn't the prophet seen us correctly through that other stuff, the rust and phylloxera, and the nekkid-lizards all over the place?—everybody shuffled out. Last of all went the prophet himself, who put his thumb to our brows and winked at us, and said, "Don't you fear now, through this long night nor no other. For he is with us, God Our God."
"Very well, sir," I said, my mouth obedient though my head boiled with horrors.
Once they'd gone, Dawn looked to me for some answers, but I had none. "I am afraid anyway, whatever he says," I said. "I've never seen anyone so crook as Hickory tonight."
He climbed right into my lap then, though it was a hot night, and put his sticky arms around my neck and his sweaty head against my chest. "What is coming?" he said. "Something is coming. I won't be able to sleep."
"Ushshsh," I said and held onto him and rocked him as I used to when he was littler. "Don't you worry. Your face is the right colour and so is mine."
"For now," he said buzzily into my breastbone. "For now."
"Well, now is all we've got and can know about." I hoped I sounded as wise as Mum did when she said it. I knew it was all a matter of the right tone, and the right rhythm of the rocking. Did Mum ever feel so lost, though, as she spoke and held us? Was the world ever so big and dangerous around her?
"Has they all gone!" Dad stumbled out of the stair at the sight. "Where is everyone? They went without their teas!"
"The prophet sent them home," said Dawn quickly in case Dad felt like dealing out trouble in his worriment.
"Oh." He sat to a bench end and looked about at the nothingness. "I was rather hoping they would stay and console me."
"Got their own lads to un-fever," creaked Gramp from the charpoy, "and their own wifes and children to keep calm. How is the lad?"
"He looks dreadful," said Dad. "I have never seen such a thing, to uglify a boy so."
Gramp wheezed—you cannot tell whether he is coughing or laughing most times. Laughing, it was, now, because then he said, "When I think the prettiness of the Gypsy prince, all hottened and spoiling."
"I wouldn't wish it on him," said Dad. "On that bastard king himself I would not wish this, watching his boy melt away on his bed. Why can we not just stay as we have done, and work as we have done, and all stay healthy and uncrawled by vermin?"
"What are you saying, son?" says Gramp. "You know well why."
"Oh, I know. Only—" And he sat a moment with his head in his hands like a man praying. "I am tired of the dramas, you know? I never thought I would hear myself say such a thing. But I have children now. All I want is settlement and steadiness in which to watch them grow."
"Which is the whole aim," Gramp said like a stick whacking him, a heavy stick. He was drawn up in such a way, I wondered what was holding him up—just his cloths there?
"I know, Gramp. I know." Dad waved Gramp back down, with his big hands. "I will make us teas," he said. And he closed his mouth and stood.
"Yes, you do that," said Gramp warningly. Dawn looked at him and he glowered back.
Sickness throws out the air of a house; you cannot do what you would usually do. Plus, the prophet had told us to stay in off the streets after sunset, when usually we would be haring about, Dukka and Gypsy together, funneling and screeching up stair and down lane until we got thrown or yelled at, and then in someone's yard, playing Clinks or learning Gypsy letters. But you cannot be told one from the other like that, he had said to us. You must stay to your own houses, you children, with the sign upon the door.
Mum came down after a while. "I must make our dinner," she said, and she sent Dad up to do the soothing and sponging of Hickory. Which I was grateful for; I had thought she would send me. But he must be seriouser than that. Oh, I didn't want to see him—and at the same time I wanted it very much, to see how much like a monster he was growing. I was very uncomfortable within myself about it all. When I remembered to, I prayed, stirring the foment there for Mum over the fire. But face the truth of it, praying is terribly dull, and who would be Our Lord, sitting up there with the whole world at you, praising and nagging and please-please-please? He must be bored out of his mind as well with it. Some days he must prefer to just go off and count grains of sand. Or birds of the air. Like he does. Like the prophet says he does, who gets to talk direct to him.
We ate and it was almost like normal, but after that, the light was gone entirely from outside and the usual noises—music trailing down the hill from the Gypsy houses and their laughter from their rooftop parties, and tinkling of glasses and jugs and crashing of plates sometimes—there was none of that.
Every now and again someone would tap-tap on our door and whisper to Dad, someone very wrapped—women mostly I think, who were less likely to be stopped and asked their business flittering about so in the evening. Dad would close the door and say, "Baron Hull's boy has it, and all in that region." Meaning, by all, only the biggest boy each family, we came to know. It was an affliction of the heirs and most precious—very cruel of God, I thought. Dad would go up and tell Mum, and come down again before long, and be restless with us.
Gramp lay abed but did not sleep; there was always the surprisingly alive glitter of his eyes in the middle of his wrappings and covers. No matter how hot the weather, he always was wrapped up warm. It is because he does not shift his lazy backside, Mum said, so his blood sits chilling and spoiling inside him.
And I've a right, he would say. I've run around enough in my life at barons' becks and calls.
"Come, Dawn, lie down by me," he said when Dawn drooped at the table. No one wanted to send the boy to bed, or to go themselves. No one wanted to leave the others. Something was coming, and no one wanted to be alone when it came.
Dawn went and curled up in the Gramp-cloths, and before long slept, and the three of us stayed there, listening to his breaths, which normally would send me to sleep quick smartly, but tonight only wound my awakeness, tighter, until my eyes took over my face, my ears took over my head, all my thoughts emptied out in expectation of the thing that was on its way. All I had left inside me was Dawn's breath, softly in, softly out, trusting us to look after him while he slept.
I was leaning almost relaxed, making letters in a mist of spilled flour on the table. Kowt . . . beerlt . . . hamidh. One day I might have enough to make words, to read Gypsy signage, to get a job writing for them. Opposite me Dad knotted his hands together on the table, watching my clever finger in the flour.
Everything shook a little, that was the first thing.
"Oh, God." Dad looked at the ceiling. "Please do not harm my family, please—" But I ran around and put my hand to his mouth. I climbed up into his lap as Dawn had climbed into mine, because it is comforting to have a child to look after, and even when he dropped his prayer-gabble to a whispering I stopped him with my fingertips.
"Shush, Dad," I said. "Just listen."
Which he did.
How can we sleep, other nights, with that enormous darkness all about, going on and on all the way to the million stars, with all that room in it for winds and clouds, dangers and visitations?
A noise began, so distant at first I wasn't sure of it, but then Dad and Gramp turned their heads different ways, same as me, so I knew it must be: a slow beating, that sucked and pushed the air at our ears.
Dad held me tighter as it grew, and Gramp curled smaller around Dawn on the charpoy, and his eyes glittered wider. The beating grew outside, and my own pulse thudded like horse-galloping in my chest, and then Dad's heart thumpa-thumped in the back of my head, until I was quite confused which sound was the most frightening. The three of them together, maybe—the two frightened and the one almighty, not caring about either of us, about any of us, four beasts of the town happening to have life-times when this thing decided to pass.
Then an air came, gusts and punches of it, with stench upon it and with something else, with a power. It sent through my mind a string of such visions that next time I glimpsed the real world I was under the table, and Dad was clutched hard beside me crying out, and Gramp up there on the charpoy, a lump hardly bigger than Dawn himself, shook over my little brother, his forehead buried in Dawn's sleeping shoulder.
The air of the room was clear, though it ought to've been black, or green and red, beslimed, chockablock with limbs and bits, a-streak with organs and tubing and drippings and sludges. Fouled fleshes and suppurating, torn bodies and assaulted, faces dead or near-dead, stretching in pain, greased with fever or a-shine with blood—the smell, the gusts of it, blossomed these pictures before me. Bury my face in Dad's chest as close as I could, still the air got in, and like a billowing smoke the scenes built one another and streamed and slid and backed up, and gaped and struggled at me.
Next Mum was there with us, Hickory across her lap, sodden, burning at the centre of us. Then Gramp too, and we were a solid block under the table, all wound around Hickory, keeping the thing off him, keeping the air off, which whap-whapped through the room, which beat outside in the streets, over the town, shaking the night, shaking the world. Our house would fall down on us! We were all as good as dead! Thank God, I thought, at least we are all together. And I kissed Hickory's hair which was like wet shoelaces tangled over his head, and I sucked some of the salty sweat out from the strands. He was so hot; he was throbbing heat out into us as if he were made of live coals. Gramp was whimpering in my shoulder now, and Dawn's head lay sleeping on my hip. I grabbed for Mum's hand and she held mine so tight in her slippery one, it was hard to tell who was in danger of breaking whose bones. The noise blotted out every other noise, louder than the wildest wind, and composed, in its beatings, of beating voices, crowds shrieking terrified or angry or in horrible pain I could not tell, and the groans of people trampled under the crowds' feet, and the screams of mourners and the wails of the bereaved, all the bereaved there have ever been, all there will ever be, torrents of them, blast after blast.
* * *
I woke still locked among their bodies, my dead family's bodies, still under the table. Outside people ran and screamed still, but they were only tonight's people, only this town's. And they were only—I lay and listened—they were only Gypsies. The only Dukka I heard were calming Gypsies, or hurrying past muttering to each other.
The room still stood around us; it was not crumbled and destroyed or bearing down on the table top. The air—I hadn't breathed for a while and now I gasped a bit—the air was only air, carrying no death-thoughts, producing no visions.
Dawn sighed on my hip. His ear was folded under his head; I lifted him and smoothed it out, and laid him down again. None of them were dead; what I had thought were the remnants of the beating wind were all their different breaths, countering and crossing one another. Hickory, even. He lay, his normal colour so far as I could tell, in the lamplight-shadow of Mum and Dad, who were bent forward together as if concentrating very closely on Hickory's sweat-slicked belly, that rose and fell with his even breathing.
It was still hot under there, and so uncomfortable. My right leg, pressed against the floor-stones that way, was likely to snap off at the hip, any moment. But it was safe—we were all safe. And it didn't sound safe outside, and I didn't want to know what awful things had happened, to make people make those noises. So I put my head down again, half on Hickory's wet-shoelaced skull and half on Gramp's rib-slatted chest, and I closed my eyes and went away again, there in my place in the tangle and discomfort of my family.
"I hate this place," moaned Dawn, stumbling at Mum's side.
"I know, my darling. Not for long, though. Not for long."
Strange breezes bothered us, hurrying along the channel, dipping from above. The sea had become like a forest either side, with upward streaks like trunks and froth at the top, dancing like wind-tossed leaves. Shapes moved in it; these were what terrified Dawn. They terrified all of us, and we hurried; we ran when we could, but it's hard to run with all your belongings bundled on your head, or dragged in a sack behind you, all the gold and silver you've talked out of the Gypsies.
Did you know there are chasms in the sea? Did you know there are mountains and deserts, just as on land? God had granted us a dry path across, but he had not flattened it out for us, had he? The worst had been where we were forced to make a bridge of cloths and clothing, over that bottomless cleft where things churned on ledges and fell away into the darkness, where those clamlike creatures had progressed across the walls, wobbling and clacking.
Dawn tore his hand from Mum's and stopped dead. "I hate this place and I hate the prophet and I hate it that we left Gramp behind!"
"You need a beating," said another mum, hurrying past, a child under each arm.
"Move it along, son; don't get in the people's way." A gran swiped at Dawn with her stick.
"Stand to the side at least," gasped a bloke bent under a bulging sack.
I ran back and scooped Dawn up. He fought me, but I held on. "We didn't leave Gramp," I said. "He told us to go, remember? I hate it too, but look—would he have kept ahead of that?" I pointed Dawn's screwed-up face to behind us, where the channel was closing like a zip, fitting its teeth back together, swallowing its own foam and somersaulting slowly along itself.
The sight of that set him flailing worse. "Lemme down!" he shrieked. "I can run! I'll run, I promise!"
"You better!" I dropped him, and managed to smack his bum before he ran off.
Ahead of us Hickory turned, and quailed at the sight of the channel. "Hurry!" he cried.
"We are hurrying. Aren't we, Mum?" Mum was hurrying in a dignified, Mum-like way that wasn't very fast.
Steadying the bundle on her head, she flashed me a smile. "Have faith, daughter; He hasn't made this escape just to drown us all in it."
"Look at it, though!" The advancing foam was tossing up shapes: fishy giants, trees of seaweed, something that looked very much like a cartwheel.
"I will not look," she said. "I will only hurry and keep my faith."
"We are coming last, Mum! Come on!"
She laughed at me; I could only just hear it over the thunder from behind us, the roar of foam above. "I don't care if I drown now!" she shouted. "At least I will not die enslaved!"
I ran on, a little way ahead of her. Whenever I turned, there she was, proceeding at her own brisk pace and calm. The wall of green-white water caught up to her and tumbled behind her, churning sharks and rocks, dead Gypsies and horses, tentacled things and flights of striped-silver fishes, but never touching her, not with fish nor bubble-wrack thrown from its thrashings, not even with a drop of water from the violent masses it had to spare. It towered over us, for we were in the deepest depths of the ocean now. But it did not hurry Mum or overwhelm her, but crept along behind her, a great wild white beast tamed by her tiny happiness.