31_days | [SEPT 27] [ORGINAL] GREEN GLASS BEAD

Title: Green Glass Bead
Day/Theme: September 27: ‘In any case, try many things'
Series: Original
Rating/Warnings: PG.

The girl followed her lover up the hillside, walking behind him up the narrow goat-path, across root-tight earth made crumbly by summer. Around them close mats of heather stretched out across the sway of the land. Ravens flew above them, one at each end of the sky.

She should have been weaving wool and he should have been weaving willow, but the older men were mostly away on a venture and the village was bright and dizzy with the smell of herbs, laid out to dry in bunches on the lower roofs. The wives were busy and it was no weather to stay and make blankets or fences. So she followed him out through the trees, tall and humming with heat spirits as the morning lifted the dew off the ground in a great sheet, filming the ferns and moss of the valley floor with wet and furring her skirts with moisture, and up and out into the great roll of hills that made a pathway and a promise from the land to the sea.

We’ll show you what we’ve got.

And people came along the hills, with strange things or dried fish or some blood and tears. They traded for things along the way, sometimes, food or safe burial for one of their party, a bed for a birth. When her grandmother had been a girl, she had known old women who remembered when men from far away had been instructed by the gods and by great men, and had come for the bones of the land, the strong blue stone. They had come and gone, and now the markers for the quarry, tall lines drawn up against the blue sky, were worn white as beach-wood, their carvings smudged down by the rain. They still stood, though; dead men and deep places still needed the stone.

Now the girl and her lover looked out and down across the land, sharp in the sea air, the near reaches a little worn with heat, wavering up over the hills. At their feet the hill hollowed down into bog, pocks of brassy clear water, little slumping tussocks and spiky reeds. Over the far slope of the hill, tatters of yellow and ochre streamed against the sky, grave-markers rising in a flaggy forest from the humped back of a great grave, the wind carrying the tinny clang of clappers from the ghost-nets which hung before the entrance. Men came from far around to lay their bones here.

She moved to sit, rock warm and rough under her, scaly with small rings of yellow lichen, rich green ferns deep in a crevice at her back. The heather around them rang with bees.

Her lover sat beside her, his arms around his knees. He had gone with the men on their last venture, a bloody one. This time he was here with her. They had found a trading party with too much to take and too few guards, had made, the old men joked, a bone fire.

They had returned with strings of dried meat and fine, fine axes, bone spindles and white squares of hide with neat rows of writing all over it, from one side to the other with no kind of break, clever curved shapes and one big one at the start. A box of stiff honeycomb, a box packed with goose-grease. A parcel of cloth in new patterns.

A broken arm and a wide curving wound over her cousin’s ribs, flesh and fat and bone swelling with the rise of yellow pus in the week afterwards, a short sharp fever at the death when red snaked across his skin from the wound.

A good raid, all in all, to be remembered. She had yelled herself hoarse with the other women over the grave, but her lover had stood and bit his lip until his teeth were rimmed with red.

"I want to show you something," he said now, half turning back to her, dusty fair hair and the duck of a wind-red cheekbone.

"Oh, my heart?" she said.

She would never be a wife. The women said she was made wrong for childbearing, her blood had never come. In fiercer times she would have been made a boy, or left for the gods.

"Come here," he said.

In the raid he had killed two men.

"Here," he said, and he kissed her. Their teeth bumped together and she felt something new and hard on her tongue. She felt his mouth pulling up into a smile, pulled back to see him looking like a boy who’d found a honeycomb. He mimed spitting.

It was a rough-smooth ball, a stone. But when she spat it into her palm it shone bright green.

"I took it from the second man," he said. "It was in with a lot of other beads, but they were only bone."

She grinned back and pulled him in again, bead in her fist at the nape of his neck. They were strung together, he thought, on the long run of the hills, high over the graves and the green valleys.

Later she held the bead in her fingers, warm and a little wet. She held it up to the sky, against the sun. It turned small and black against the blaze, her eyes holding a ring of fire even when she looked away. But she thought of the sun shining through the green not like it did through the busy membrane of a leaf, but clear and still and even, casting a strange light on things.

She lay back, rested the bead in the hollow of her throat. Just under it her skin glowed green.