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Sometimes he speaks as he strokes.
My Ha
She ca
It is very deep in the night. I have done my best to be invisible, to make no noise, but now the mudwife pants,
He's not asleep.
Of course he's asleep. Listen to his breathing.
I do the asleep-breathing.
Come, says Gri
After some uffing and puffing,
No, she says, very firm, and there's a slap. I want that boy out of here.
What, wake him so he can go and listen at the window?
Get him out, she says. Send him beyond the pigs and tell him to stay.
You're a nuisance, he says. You're a sexy nuisance. Look at this! I'm all misshapen and you want me herding children.
You do it, she says, rearranging her clothing, or you'll stay that shape.
So he comes to me and I affect to be woken up and to resist being hauled out the door, but really it's a relief of course. I don't want to hear or see or know. None of that stuff I understand, why people want to sweat and pant and poke bits of themselves into each other, why anyone would want to do more than hold each other for comfort and stroke each other's back.
Moonlight. Pigs like slabs of moon, like long, fat fruit fallen off a moon-vine. The trees tall and brainy all around and above- they never sweat and pork; the most they do is sway in a breeze, or crash to the ground to make useful wood. The damp smell of night forest. My friends in the firmament, telling me where I am: two and a half days north of the ford with the knotty rope; four and a half days north and a bit west of "Devilstown," which Gri
I'd thought we were the only ones not back in their beds! he'd stormed on the road.
They must have come very quiet, I said. They must have been accomplished thieves.
They must have been sprites or devils, he spat, that I didn't hear them, with my ears.
We were seven and a half days north and very very west of Gadfly's camp, where we had, as Gri
And what'll you use those for? I said foolishly, for we had managed up until then with moon and stars and our own wee fire.
I did not take them to use them, Ha
Anyway, it was new for me still, there beyond the mudwife's pigs, this knowing where we were-though I had lost count of the days since Ardblarthen when it had come to me how Gri
So if we came at the cottage from this angle, whereas Kirtle and I came from the front, that means… but Kirtle and I wandered so many days, didn't we? I filled my stomach with earths, but Kirtle was piteous weeping all the way, so hungry. She would not touch the earth; she watched me eating it and wept. I remember, I told her,
No wonder you are thirsty! Look how much water you're wasting on those tears! She had brown hair, I remember. I remember her pushing it out of her eyes so that she could see to sweep in the dark cottage-the cottage where the mudwife's voice is rising, like a saw through wood.
The house stands glittering and the sound comes out of it. My mouth waters; they wouldn't hear me over that noise, would they?
I creep in past the pigs to where the blobby roof-edge comes low. I break off a blob bigger than my hand; the wooden shingle it was holding slides off, and my other hand catches it soundlessly and leans it against the house. The mudwife howls; something is knocked over in there; she howls again and Gri
Once I've eaten the mud I'm ready to sleep. I try dozing, but it's not comfortable among the roots there, and there is still noise from the cottage-now it is Gri
You love it, he says, with such deep disgust. You filth, you filthy cunt. And she oh's below, not at all like me, but as if she really does love it. I lie quiet, thinking, Is it true, that she loves it? That I do? And if it's true, how is it that Gri
I get up and go around the pigsty and behind the chicken house. There is a poor field there, pumpkins gone wild in it, blackberry bushes foaming dark around the edges. At least the earth might be softer here. If I pile up enough of this floppy vine, if I gather enough pumpkins around me-
And then I am holding, not a pale baby pumpkin in my hand but a pale baby skull.
Gri
The skull is the colour of white-mud, but hard, inedible-although when I turn it in the moonlight I find tooth-marks where someone has tried.
The shouts go up high-the witch's loud, Gri
I grab up a handful of earth to eat, but a bone comes with it, long, white, dry. I let the earth fall away from it.