Will's place for things

On the fallow, the scarecrow had died. Two men walked up to it. The one on the right held a hand over his brow to shield his eyes from the low spring sun. The sheep got out of their way. The post was still standing but the stuffed sack that had been tied as a head to the top of it had slumped down. It was swaying to and fro. "Ay Miller, don't rush it." They paused a few yards away. The man on the left toed the frost and inhaled. At this distance, they could see the pole vibrating. "Is it... ?" The other nodded, touched his face, glanced up at the empty sky. The two men sidled up to the scarecrow. Then they plucked it from the ground, layed it over their shoulders and carried it off up the slope. * The old structure was unassuming from the outside. A mass of hawthorn pressed close to its mossiness. The whole thing slouched into the hillside on ancient, weather-worn walls and the wooden parts of it had been bleached a sandy grey, like the stone. "You have to go all the way in - touch the other side." These were the instructions Arthur had given Jeth at the crumbling dovecote, in the half-shade of the trees. There were others stood around, grinning like wolves, leaning against the stonework. Someone clattered around the inside; it was possible to get in through a hole in the back and they sounded like they were running a branch over the inside walls. Arthur had pierced him with a stare then, small eyes in that wide face, until Jeth had turned clumsily and started down the track. Someone behind him tried to flail his ankles with a branch they'd been holding. He sped up. They called, "Jethro - you're not allowed back until you've done it." As if he didn't know that. He rubbed his hands together as he went, wishing it was warmer, thinking about that place called summer that seemed so impossibly far away. His shirt was too big for him; the linen hung down and flapped and the cold snaked its way in. In the breeze across the scrub, Jeth mirrored the fence posts with his stick-arms. He walked in the direction of the village, down the final sigh of the ridgeway, out of the copse. However, before he'd made it halfway to the thatched roofs, he turned right along the track by the trees. He went along the ox-way, where the men led the animals to work the steeper fields, the fields that confused the whyme engines. He plucked a bud from a tree to distract himself from the task ahead, rolled it over in his fingers, dropped it. He glanced at the village to his left, peeking over the orchard's skeleton. It would be easy to run back there. For a moment, Jeth wished he could still hide under the smocks of the women as they filled the quiet with words about their crafts; he'd hug their legs, like tree trunks, and they'd lean against walls whilst their drop spindles went up and down forever. But then he'd risk losing favour with the other boys. And he was almost eleven; a collection of eleven small things cupped in your hands was nearly liquid. There was a crook in the track where it wound around the base of an oak. Jeth stooped to pick up a stick, something to hold out infront of him. He looked up at his destination. From here you could see a lot of things; you could convince yourself you could see the longbarrow amongst the forested peaks of the slopes in the east, or the flanks of Barbury Hill in the west. But closer, just beyond the haymeadow, "the cave", as it was known, was nestled in a dip at the base of the ridge. There was a copse of hawthorn to conceal it. It was a crumbling stone building, with heavy wooden doors and no windows and nobody had ever paid it any attention. That was, until the other day; Martin, the bailiff from the Lydiard Manor, had ordered a village forum and instructed the children to give it a wide berth. In the boy's next meeting at the dovecote, Horace had named it. "It's a cave," he said. Most of the others didn't even look up. Horace lied pathologically and he wasn't very tall. He raised his voice, his face going red, and he continued, "I heard it's an old mine. An old cave. The building is just a rain-cover." "Shut up." someone said. Arthur grinned and punched Horace in the back with a thick-fingered fist. But it didn't take much time for the name to catch on. Jeth stopped on his way to the cave to let a whyme engine cross the path ahead. Its small chassis moved clumsily over the grit on tall thin cartwheels, and its hoe was lifted up to stop it from making a trench in the path. The seed hopper leaked a few grains as it went. Jeth bid it "mornin" and watched it rattle by. It joined its fellows in the field; ornate, spindle-thorned, rattling pieces of carpentry. In merry unison, they drew out perfect furrows. It didn't seem like it had been long since Greatgrandma had told Jeth about the whyme engines. She'd said they never used to have them, that it used to be oxen that did all the farmwork. Now the machines tilled and planted. She seemed happy with that, in her smileless way. Now everyone had more time to work on other things. Jeth thought back to a cold morning when he'd had to get up to learn how to cut firewood. On the way from the woodshed, the sky barely light enough to see by, he'd passed Greatgrandma coming back from somewhere. She had been cocooned in so many woollen blankets that she was almost spherical. She had moved slowly, dark eyes glittering under her shawl. He'd asked her something that he'd later regretted. "Greatgrandma - I was wondering - can I learn how to make whyme engines?" She'd craned her neck at him as if she hadn't heard. Then he was about to open his mouth again when she spoke; she reminded him that it was a girl's job to work the threads of whyme and that boys grew up strong so that they could lift and dig and harvest and repair. He'd made a face at her, but really he'd known that it was just a passing thing. Sometimes he watched the old women, the engines open infront of them, turning those ephemeral shapes in their hands. Their fingers picked at something that was always just a little out of sight. Intangible colours. It seemed so tedious. He couldn't fathom the grammar of those tiny fibres, how they could move the engines in such animal ways. Jeth would leave the threading to others. The path through the haymeadow hadn't been trodden in months and Jeth found that he had to lift his legs high to press down the tall grass. Soon his trousers were wet, and then his stockings. By the time he reached the dip in the earth that was his destination, he felt as though he had almost been swallowed by the wilderness. Before the cave, a marshy lawn glistened under the white sun. He put a hand down on the moss as he sidled onto the flat. The hawthorns that leant out over it were no good for stability. A woodpigeon whistled up into the air from the undergrowth and the dew from the branches shimmered as it fell. Jeth stood up once he'd reached the level and brushed some mud from his ankle. What would happen to him if he were caught? It might only be a slap on the wrist from his father. What about Morgana, though? When she'd been caught in the dairy, almost sick from curds, she'd been put before a tribunal of grandmothers, tall in their creaking thrones. She'd cried for almost two days. Horace said that they'd made her throw up all the stolen cheese. Then later, he'd said that they'd cursed her; she'd never again enjoy the taste of milk. Jeth thought that both of these were made-up. Either way, her pink face had been even puffier than usual. Jeth picked his way over the bog and came before the doors of the cave. They were towering over him before he looked up. Tufts of grass crowned them. After pausing, he reached out and pushed the doors to see if they would open, but they stood firm. He tried pushing at a few different angles before stepping back. The relief he felt soon became apprehension; he had to get some information or else he wouldn't hear the end of it. So he pushed himself between the hawthorns and the stone, at the side of the structure, and moved up the slippery hill on all fours. He was small enough to avoid too many scratches. Then, high up where the green earth swelled up to engulf the tail end of the structure, he found an opening. When he got closer, he couldn't be sure whether the hole was part of the cave's design or not; some dusty slabs jutted into it. Someone had wedged a broken plank into the opening to stop people getting in. When he pushed at it, it held fast, and he was nervous about kicking it. What if it fell in and made a noise? Although he couldn't go all the way, the gaps on either side of the plank were still big enough to fit his head through. So Jeth twisted closer, held his breath, and threaded himself into the opening. Halfway in, he noticed the noises; there was a rhythmic thumping coming from the darkness, like something heavy knocking on a wooden surface. Jeth tried to force himself to crawl further, but the thumping noise was all around him and the tunnel felt heavy and he found himself drawing back, nails on stone, pushing himself out of the opening, falling backwards. He tumbled over himself once, down the hill, and sprawled on the soft ground. Then he was on his feet, running, the thorns of the trees biting at his arms. * The daisies on the tracksides had opened and were purple-tipped. The girls of the village were out after luncheon, snatching them up and chaining them together for a dozen coronations. The week was unusually warm; someone overheard someone else saying that the hayfield would be burning by August. "I reckon the ridgeway will brown over." On Sunday, there was a consensus that the last frost had passed. Then Monday came and men were already out sowing. In stripes, radiating from the village, they set off the whyme engines with sacks of smooth flaxseed, barley and clover. In teams, they dug the machines out of the ground when they got stuck. They took the boys out with them. The ones who were new to working crouched at first next to the machines, offering out their hands like they might to calm wild animals. Others tried to talk to them. The men laughed and told them, "They're just stupid boxes - live as a spinning wheel - clever as a pair of shears." A group of women, garbed in their travelling linens, came walking into the village of Uffing from the west, where the ridgeway's chalky spine curved south to Avebury, bringing news from the equinox. The old women, who were too tired now to go on such journeys, came out eagerly to meet them. At the edge of the village, a girl in a pink linen dress broke away from her huddle in the lee of a barn and wandered along the track that divided the fields. "See if you can find the big ones, Morgana." She was looking for fresh crops of daisies, three chains already gripped in her chubby hand and another worn as a necklace. Sinking to her knees on the grass, she reached around her. The field across the path was a pale brown and speckled white with teeth of chalk. Grass sprouted like thinning hair across its surface. It hadn't been turned since the autumn, though it would not be long. That morning, some of the men had been at work removing the more stubborn weeds in preparation for sowing. Now, in the afternoon, the field stood empty, all except for one proud scarecrow, wearing a wide straw hat. Someone must have sprinkled seeds around the scarecrow, because it was interesting the crows. Morgana watched the same theatre happen three times; a squawking flock would rise in unison from its seat in the row of poplars which divided the field from the haymeadow, then it would pour down towards the seeds. Some of the birds would land, but not for long, because the scarecrow would suddenly start moving, flailing its arms, and the crows, in a great cacophony, would lift off and return angrily to their nests. Morgana became transfixed. She decided that finding daisies was too much work - her mind was already busy from that morning's lessons - and so she lay down and propped her chin up on her arms so that she could watch the scarecrow shoo away the birds. Eventually the crows seemed to learn the logic behind the thing's movement and their raids grew sparse. When they stopped altogether and the field grew quiet, there was just the tufts of grass amongst the dirt and the scarecrow, little more than a statue again. Its pose in stillness was leaning slightly to the left, brown hemp trousers and shirt flapping in the breeze. Someone had fastened two rusting, mismatched forks to the poles in its sleeves for hands. Some time later, when Morgana was beginning to feel the hardness of the earth, from lying on her front for too long, she saw a black shape crawl up the pole of the scarecrow. It was a tiny brown shrew and her toes clenched in discomfort. The rodent pulled straw from the opening at the base of the scarecrow's stuffed head and scurried away with it. When the shrew returned for more, the scarecrow shuddered, shaking the creature loose and sending it off into the field. Morgana thought that he was a poor scarecrow; he didn't like pests either. Rising to her feet, she stepped out onto the loam, legs a little unstable, dress a little dusty, and plodded over to the scarecrow. From below it was tall, and above its head the clouds span in the blue. Morgana raised a daisy chain up in offering, "Hey mister, do you want this?" It looked as though it were watching the ridgeway. Or maybe, since it was faceless, it was looking the opposite way, watching the turning sails of the windmills astride the village. The thing stood silent and the clouds moved in the sky. She tried again, "Hey mister. Hey. Mister, it's rude not to answer, don't you know?" Morgana frowned and looked at her feet. Then she noticed some of the others had come up behind her. "Come on now Morg, we've got to get back to lessons." Eliza touched Morgana on the top of her head, where her greasy hair parted. Morgana complained, "I was trying to give the sir a daisychain." "I don't think he wants a daisy chain," Eliza said, "What gave you that idea?" Someone else piped up, "I think he'd look lovely with a daisychain." "I don't know, Eliza," Morgana looked at her feet, "I like daisychains." Eliza, tall with her sunhat precarious, reached for the others' hands. She began to lead them back towards the village. She said, "Whyme engines don't like people-things, Morg. Remember?" "But they don't like pests?" "What? Oh." "Sometimes they like people-things." One of the girls had wrapped her finger with a stem of grass and she lifted it for Eliza to see. Eliza gently pushed her aside and said, "But not for the sake of it, Morg. Remember?" They came to the boundary of the village where an old millstone lay, propped up against a drystone wall, sinking into the mud. A scrawny girl who'd been quiet until then softly murmured, "Greatgrandma said it's called instrumental convergence." "Do you want to explain that to Morg?" The girl's eyes went wide and she shook her head. They stopped to let some workmen pass on the cobbled street. "Afternoon." Then they marched up the road to the old linhay, tiled roof sagging and green. On the cobbles they met Misses Collins, coming up from luncheon at the dairy. Her skirts and bonnet shone in the sun, white layers cascading from her roundness. Morgana broke free of Eliza's hand and rushed at her feet. "What's up with you, rabbit?" Morgana's tiny fists held fast to the spray of fabric. Eliza said, "The scarecrow wouldn't have her flowers." Misses Collins tutted. "Oh the grandmas' new scarecrows? Butter wouldn't melt. Don't you worry girls." She beamed in a way that only Misses Collins was capable of. Eliza thought you might be able to say anything to her and she'd respond with a smile. Nothing seemed to stifle it. At lambingtide, when Eliza had brought a train of girls through the rains to the barn, their woollens soaked through by the time they got there, she'd met Misses Collins in the doorway, drenched to the bone, cheeks bright red and beaming. The sound of the births had filled the darkness behind her. She'd laughed, "Nice weather for ducks." Most of the lambs had died, and still she brought them home to the village humming Old Man Savernake. Something in lieu of tiny bleating. Now she led them inside the old linhay, where the others were already getting settled. They sat on the straw-covered stone, in the sideways light from high openings along the right wall. Eliza placed Morgana, who seemed a little vacant, in her lap. A moment later, grandma Joan stepped into the old linhay. The muttering died down. She stepped into the middle of the room, crossing the place where the light slanted in. Her perfect cloud of white hair glowed and she was staring at her hands, where a thimble sparked silver. She moved the loose threads at the top of a scarf of transparent fabric, a raiment of whyme. One girl, and then a handful of copycats, bid her afternoon. Misses Collins, deeming everyone settled, asked the room whether anyone had noticed the new scarecrows. There were murmerings in response. Someone said that they were whyme engines now - they could move. She said yes, "They're whyme engines. Very clever ones. They're going to help with all sorts of things." In a meek voice, someone called, "Are they nice?" Misses Collins leaned in, smiled, opened her mouth, but before she could reply grandma Joan cut in, "That question is malformed, Susan." Grandma Joan drew her attention away from her hands like one might draw wool from a distaff; it strung out her gaze before snapping. She folded the transparent threads gently and dropped them, along with the thimble, from her long thin hands into a pocket somewhere in her linens. Eliza recalled the feel of the whyme; she'd first touched the raiment sitting at the swollen feet of grandma Denise, when the old woman hadn't been paying attention. It had passed through her fingers like a ghost. Later, she had found out that it only moved if it was concentrated on and, even then, it was weightless dry water in your hands. Grandma Joan gestured vaguely at Misses Collins, "Agnes, would you fetch the girls some water please." Then she turned to the audience and it seemed as if she were growing infront of them. She drew her presence in, moving it from wherever it had been, saturated the room with it. "Girls, you must learn not to liken them to people," she began, "It'll do no good for understanding how they work. If you must, you've got to be careful! If you compare them to how a person acts, make sure you know why a person acts like that. Grace, pass the thimbles out." A tall girl with a mass of curling hair went to the side of the room. "If a whymeman wants to protect itself from harm, it's not doing that because it doesn't like being harmed. It does it because it would not be very useful for its aims. In the same way that a person protects herself from harm because otherwise it would not be so good for her aims of being comfortable." Some of the smaller children were staring off into the corners of the room. "Actually Grace, come sit down," she sighed, then addressed the room, "I suppose you're all very well acquainted with the basic weaves used in whyme engines by now." Some of them nodded. "These new whymemen are machines just like the other whyme engines, with raiment in them which tells them what to do. Although a whymeman can rethread some of its own raiment." Misses Collins stepped back into the room with a pail of water and a clutch of cups. She hovered behind grandma Joan, tilting to and fro to see if she'd stopped talking. The girls watched the dance play out, studiously. Grace spoke up, after first glancing at Misses Collins, "I thought... I thought whyme engines were stupid." Grandma Joan looked behind her and ushered the water onto the ground. "Not so close, Agnes." Misses Collins repositioned. The old woman looked down at the girl. "They are. They are stupid." She clasped her hands together, "They only know how to do two things; how to do exactly what we tell them to do, and secondly how to do something at the roll of a die, randomly. "But don't be deceived - this is enough for a lot of things. There's a final piece that's needed as well; we call it the needle. It controls what the whymeman tries to do, and we can connect it to something external. "The whymeman tries to make the needle glow and spark - tries to make it light up as bright as it can. It tries to rethread its mat of whyme so it's better at lighting the needle. It's always changing it a little, randomly. And when it finds that its needle is glowing brighter, it keeps the way it's changed. That's the way the whymeman learns." She gestured outside, "For a scarecrow, we've made the needle get brighter, the fewer crows it can see around." The girls were taught to tie knots in threads of whyme. Simple things to hold it fast, so it wouldn't fade back into irreality. At the start of a lesson, the girls would each be handed a thread in turn. Then they'd use thimbles to push it clumsily around. Someone had once wondered where it was the grandmas got it from. "You can find whyme anywhere. It's in your hand now if you know how to touch it." Grandma Joan had lifted her hand up, twitched her fingers, disturbed the fabric of the world and brought its fibres into her hand. Normally invisible, when they were warped they were glassy. But whyme was fickle; sometimes you would lose a thread completely. Without concentration, a bundle of fibres could slip like a cat's tail from the pink fist of a baby. The girls learnt nandweave, norweave and notweave. The push and pull of the fibres could be combined that way. But their clumsy chains could not be compared to what the older women did; they made incomprehensible textiles. They were stitched together with rows of pin-precise loops, intricate like the seeds in a flowerhead. Seams flowed together in rivers. * "Did you do it?" "What's in the cave?" The boys held a meeting in the forest to the east of Uffing, up from Halson on the top of the ridgeway. There was a sunken longbarrow there, by the name of Wayland's Smithy. The place to them seemed to be at the centre of things; the Kingbridge Hundred spread flat to the north, White Horse Hill with its earthworks and chalk beast, etched enormous into the ground, were a little further along the ridge. Behind everything, to the south, the body of Wilt Shire fell across rolling hills. The children stood in clumps around the clearing. The trees were almost black in contrast to their new green leaves. Arthur stood on the head of the barrow, where stones stood marking an opening, blond hair gleaming from the sweat of climbing the hill, face pink. He threatened to knock over anyone who challenged his stance there. Maurice tried it, stepping up onto the grassy mound, only to be sent tumbling down again by Arthur's shoulder. Arthur bore a bruise over his eye that day, like a blackberry stain. At some point, someone made the mistake of mentioning it; Arthur spent a while after that trying to trip them over, hoping they'd hit a rock and crack their head open when they did. He said it was from a fight that he'd had with one of his older brothers. Of course, in his story, he'd started the fight and he had won. Jeth came up the dust path from below, head low, tawny curls bobbing. The crowd was around him immediately, pulling him up by his shirt onto the mound. Arthur said, "I bet you never even went to the cave." Jeth stammered out half an answer. "See!" Maurice said. He smoothed back the rodent of brown hair on his head and stepped towards Jeth, "You can't say anything." "I saw in, I did." Inconceivable, this caught everyone off guard. The boys grew quiet. Arthur's face pinched into a scowl. Even Maurice was disarmed. "The door wouldn't open but there was a hole and I looked in and there were things moving." "Things like what?" Arthur blurted. Maurice's eyes flicked to the left; Arthur was betraying an unspoken agreement not to let the lesser boy have any slack. Jeth paused, eyes wide. Maurice shouted, "See, you didn't really look in did you? Little coward. You didn't really see in. I bet you didn't even go to the cave at all." Arthur's face cracked into a sneer. He forgot his curiosity and swung his foot at Jeth, who jumped back. "Little coward," someone echoed. Maurice continued, getting louder, "You didn't even go to the cave. You just ran home. You went home to your mother's chest." He shoved his face right up to Jeth, so Jeth could smell his mouldering breath. Then Maurice pinched him on the shoulder. He was calculating; he aimed for the most pain whilst leaving small enough a mark to claim innocence over. Arthur tried again to kick Jeth in the shins. Jeth couldn't compete with the crowd. The truth had been changed, by popular agreement; he was a coward after all. Maurice spat his words like he could taste his own tongue, "We're going to go soon. All of us together. So we can watch you go in." Somehow the group reached a consensus about when they'd make the trip; it would be in three days' time. Jeth stood by whilst they talked, trying not to make eye contact, lest he provoke someone. He tried to stand up straight, to pretend he hadn't been beaten. He'd just prove to them next time that he was a coward. They'd be the cowards. He'd make himself indispensable. Arthur turned to Jeth. "Go on a loop." Jeth held his position. Maurice joined in, "Yeah, go on a loop around the woods. To the big oak and back." "Why?" The big oak was the first place that the boys had found, before they'd stumbled into Wayland's Smithy. That was back when they'd been half their height and when they weren't so polarising. That game was one they'd learnt later, from watching the men. Arthur explained, "It'll prove you're not such a coward." "You're going to ditch me." "No. Just want to see that you're not a coward." "Alright." There was an uproar of laughter. They stared Jeth down as he made his way out of sight, jeering at him, slinging profanities. The ritual would go as it always did; he'd return to an empty clearing. Sometimes the boys wouldn't disappear completely at first; that way they could watch him return, cackling, and wait until the last minute to bound away over the meadows. They'd be giddy with the pointlessness of it. Maybe he'd catch the backs of their bare shins in the slanting light, through the green, treading the new snowdrops into the earth. * The first of the village meetings about the scarecrows was unexpected. On the morning of a still day late into March, a trail of girls made their way out of the old linhay to their luncheon. Shepherded by Eliza along the cobbles, they came upon a commotion in the village centre. At the crossroads between the general store and the bailiff's house, a small crowd gathered. "How do we know these things are well-meaning?" It was Miss Williams, sleeplessly up before dawn, who first saw the hole in the fence. The sun was still yet to precipitate out of a milieu of orange behind the windmill. She was making the short walk from her door to feed the chickens at the back of the house, a bucket of kitchen scraps in one hand and distaff tucked under the other arm. She looked out over the field where the whyme engines lay sleeping. Part of a dividing fence had been flattened by something, posts snapped clean in two. She tutted, reached into the chicken coop. When she reemerged, there were already four straw hats at the scene, and men underneath them, talking. "Early for Fools' Day." Someone nodded sagely. They wandered away from the fence, across the rumpled earth, to gain a better vantage. "Some little scoundrels. Bet it was the Midwinters' boy." Someone, they noticed, had put a metal bucket on the head of the scarecrow. Probably the same boys that had broken the fence. The birds had taken the opportunity to scratch around for flaxseed. Impressions in the soil, leading from scarecrow to the fence seemed to confirm this at first. Then someone realised, "Ain't shoeprints, Foster." "Aye? Wouldn't be anything else." "Unless it's the blooming whymeman, Foster, rest its soul." The other squinted up at the still scarecrow. "Nah." Someone reached up and plucked the bucket off the scarecrow's head, laying it at the foot of the pole. There was a moment where nobody breathed. Then the thing moved, twisting like a branch in a gust of wind; it lowered its arms and picked up the bucket between its jaunty twine-fastened forks with a rattle and a scrape. Then it placed it back over its head. Someone muttered an apology and the men stumbled back to the path, glancing over their shoulders. Out of everyone, Susan remembered the village meeting the best. She relayed it to the other girls later. They spoke after luncheon, out on the grass amongst the new dandelions, and there was a slight wind passing over the fields. Everyone had to crowd around because Susan couldn't be made to talk loudly. But she did talk. And even if she spent the whole time clutching handfuls of her fine blond hair, she raised herself up when there was technical information to relay. She said how grandma Denise had come out of her house to calm everyone down. She'd managed to do so, if only by using complicated words that put everyone to sleep. She had appeared from the gloom, huge and statuesque, looking like a festival - that morning, the girls had laid garlands of thyme and daisy around her broad shoulders. She squinted, eyes puffy and myopic. She mumbled all of her words like they were tangential; it was as if they were flavour for a context that had just been missed. Afterwards, the older women had gathered round her and talked in low voices. Grandma Joan, grandma Frederick, Misses Tull, Misses Cobbler. Susan had somehow deciphered the explanation. "It's because they only used one needle. One needle that glowed when it couldn't see any birds. It went to find a bucket. It crashed through the fence. It put the bucket on its head. That way it couldn't see the birds. That's all it needed to do to make its needle bright." Susan sniffled as she spoke. It wasn't because she was terrified of the attention - which of course she was - but because she was perpetually ill. She was one of those skeleton girls with paper skin, who spent the winters cold, pale and bedbound. "The grandmas are going to make a new needle, out of three different needles," she said, "One's going to measure how many birds it can see. The other will be about birds it can hear. The other will be about how many birds are in the air compared to on the ground. That way it will be harder for it to trick itself." Someone said, "I didn't think the grandmas' whymemen would be so rude." "I think that's a malformed statement," said Susan, but she refused to elaborate. * The modifications immediately caused another problem. The third needle had been weighted too heavily, the one that was to reward the whymeman based on how many birds were in the sky. No sooner had a new dawn risen, than the villagers found that a seed drill had been tipped over in the night. The whymeman had been in search of grain. Then it had brought the seed back to its post and scattered it around its feet. It had discovered that it could make its needle glow the brightest by attracting as many crows as possible and then scaring them, again and again, into a screeching flurry. The villagers lingered on their errands to watch it. Sometimes they'd group together in twos or threes. "I could not get Penny to stop barking last night." On their rounds, Frances' mother clipped her on the ear for staring. Then she found herself stumbling over a cat, eyes glued to the field. Later, the girls were brought in to watch the old women change the whyme. It was thought that, even if they didn't understand everything, they would benefit from seeing the process. They sat in a huddle in Greatgrandma's cottage, in a low room with a grumbling of heavy rocking chairs. The floor was a place they had all spent a lot of time, idling, learning, falling asleep. They all knew the knots in the floorboards like the grazes on their knees. Each corner, smooth and splintering. They all knew the chairs could catch your finger badly if you were careless where you lay. But on your front, an eye placed next to the boards, you could watch the candlelight on the wall and the way the bits of dust made a plain of standing stones that stretched out and out. You could whisper to the others, "My brother's found a cave of monsters in the hawthorn." That was, at least, if you kept it short and quiet. The grandmas were sat in the chairs, moving them slowly so that their woollens were a dripping, swaying, dusty foliage. Grandma Joan sat hunched over. Grandma Denise lay back, sides spilling out over the rungs. She breathed like she was dragging herself up a mountain. Greatgrandma's chair was a little back from the others, in the corner, where she was quiet. Her long white hair hung down over her shoulders. "Three more strawheadings." grandma Joan said, not looking up. Denise nodded. Greatgrandma flicked her eyes to the side. They each moved their hands in complicated ways, pulling the threads of whyme into loops, twisting them together, snapping them off with little jerks of the wrist. Grandma Denise, looking up, mumbled, "Pass me a silverpin." The girls' attention came and went. They rolled about on the floor, or rocked upright, crosslegged. They could squint at the wicker baskets hanging on the walls and try and make new shapes of them. Grace, watching through her thick curls, made an audience of the wooden things that leant against the walls. "I sometimes think we should incorporate more needles at once," said grandma Joan, "Like the Avebury Fellowship." "We could do more tests at once," grandma Denise replied, "but we'd have less certainty." Greatgrandma said in her deep whisper, "Have a little patience. We'll be more precise. You're both starting to sound like the men." Joan exhaled. "Watch that fellowship," Greatgrandma said, "Always fast fast fast, always lazy. Makes for fickle whyme." Then grandma Joan turned to the girls. "Don't mess with that, Grace!" Grace froze and looked up frowning, holding a glinting thimble. Leaning across the floor, she placed it back into a ceramic jar in the corner. Then she watched the grandmas' faces instead, restless. Were they born with so many folds of skin? Grandma Joan's cheeks fell loose about her mouth, dappled with darker spots. Grace couldn't see why it was any use keeping her hair so perfect if her face was so ugly. She turned to grandma Denise, whose fatness tightened her skin. She had lumps instead, little grey warts along her huge arms. Grace looked down at her own, smooth and pale. There was one day, perhaps a winter ago, that someone told her she'd get those someday. She imagined them appearing suddenly, like the chamomile in June. "Their science," Greatgrandma said, and her pottage breath carried swede and salt, "moves quickly and is full of itching. It's all impatience and competition. It's all steel and lightning and airs and humours and black and white." Greatgrandma had a face like the pale ploughed clay, waxen and rolling. The whites of her eyes had yellowed. The girls, during their indoor games in the winter, had tried to work out what she must have looked like before time had remoulded her. A tiny one had asked Eliza, "Do you remember?" If Eliza had been older, she would have laughed. Instead, she looked down and frowned. She had only dim memories, even from five years ago. Sometimes she felt she had lived no time at all. Grandma Joan said, "Have the men cleared the north field yet?" There was no reply, so she continued, "We'll have to test the impact regulariser somewhere else." Eliza listened to the grandmas' conversations with the most focus of anyone. She was waiting patiently for something useful to say. Any small suggestion would do. But it never happened, and she wondered if it ever would. Would she ever be quick enough to contribute to the adults' conversations? It felt like she'd already waited so long. The whymework carried on. The modifications had been made and the grandmas set to work winding the raiment back onto the spindle that was the scarecrow's mind. It was a thin wooden thing, turned and polished, small enough to clasp in your hand. Their talk turned to people in Uffing. Grandma Denise said, "Misses Tull has been suggesting we build a loom. Like the great loom under Silbury Hill." Grandma Joan held the loops of raiment, like a bundled, dripping scarf. Far to her right, Grandma Denise clutched the spindle and wound the raiment onto it. It stretched across the room between the two of them like a wisp of smoke. "Her manner is very presumptuous," Grandma Joan said, "That's a ridiculous suggestion." Greatgrandma huffed, "Come now Joan, don't you judge Mary. Maybe she's presumptuous, but she's a fine whymeworker. She just needs to learn how to be wrong." Grandma Denise wrapped the raiment around the spindle, twisting it as it arrived, looping it over itself again and again. Greatgrandma sat back with her eyes closed. In the end, it took up no space at all, all pressed, glittering, into the surface of the spindle. As they worked, they went through everyone they could think of, reckoned that their behaviour could be improved and, in that warm room, prescribed them the kind of humility they'd need to change it. * Fools' day comes with a brightening sky and here and there a mockery of cow parsley flowering on corners and roadsides. Someone has put a whole parsnip in their brother's pottage. Rich helpings of pompion, with cream, in the old linhay. Someone rolls a wheel of cheese down the street and, by the afternoon, the men forget they have decided not to be children anymore, and run rampant after it. There are old petty rivalries to awaken. The boys watch in horror as they realise their fathers have been pretending this whole time. Is there nothing solid in the world upon which to depend? No, there are no pillars. Look! There is master Cook with a stick and a wooden crown. The women come to him, giddy and sick with ale and lift him up, shrieking and cackling. The grandmas are constant. Afterall, they are a different kind of creature entirely. * On the afternoon of the second day of April, the boys went to the cave. They moved in a clump, shouldering and elbowing, shouting and making profane faces. They approached the structure from the south, coming down the ridgeway through the low hawthorn, which was beginning to bloom white and delicate. They did this to avoid attracting attention from the adults. It was a plan that Maurice had come up with and Arthur had claimed as his own. Maurice had scowled, but he'd stayed silent; today he was the focus of hostility. This had been instigated by Isaac. He was a greasy child, the kind who would soon be going bald, and today he had a personal quarrel with Maurice. One year ago, Maurice's mother had become the town bureaucrat, a servant of the new legislature from Lydiard. "All these new numbers," old James had said, "We've never needed to know the numbers of things. It were alright just to work a summer and have as many things as you had." The woman had muttered something about changing with the times, something quiet and disarming. Now Isaac had witnessed the breaking of quiet behind closed doors; spilling ink on a stack of records, he had suffered his fathers's wrath, and the accident had acquainted him with the unseen pressure of the new bureaucracy. Isaac began the trip to the cave by knocking Maurice over; it took one solid push from behind. The other boy had taken two clumsy steps and fallen on his hands and knees and Isaac had raised a clamour. Then they had set off, Maurice still lying in the dirt. From the hill, you could see the whole of Uffing behind the orchard, with its ploughed rows radiating like the kind you might draw in the sand with your toes. In the midst of the red-grey, three whymemen stood against their long shadows, raising their arms and waving away the birds. Horace had once said, stood on top of the ridgeway, that he could see all the way to the Lydiard Manor and that the others could have too, if only their eyes were as unnaturally sharp. As the group grew closer, it became more unstable; the pack, sometimes tight-knit like a single creature, would other times shatter into laughter and shouting and spread out across the field. It would completely disperse before falling together again. The frequency of the state change was increasing and, by the time they had reached the pit and the low hawthorns, they were drifting apart as quickly as they were collecting themselves, no direction left. A boy with mannish arms was first to the marsh infront of the cave. He leapt through a gap in the trees and landed on the soft earth with both feet. The others filed in after. Jeth was the last one in, trying to stay unnoticed. He had no intention of telling them about the hole high up in the wall, around the side. He'd rather they didn't find a way by which to push him in. Arthur walked up to the wooden doors and, while the others shrunk away in anticipation, he banged his fists on them. He was not afraid. He would hide his fear. Or at least he would grimace through it, baring his teeth at the door which bared its planks. Then he span around, "You're all cowards! Bang on the door if you're not a coward!" Stepping aside, he shrunk back like the others. Alone or in pairs, some of the boys hopped forwards and tapped on the wood. They were lifted by jeers and praise. When more of the boys had touched the cave than hadn't, they began to push the remaining people towards the structure. Some escaped, slipping out of grasp by turning and rolling and jumping into the undergrowth. Some were thrust against the wood where they clattered, horrified. "You're a cave coward!" Those who had been pushed sometimes managed to take a brave step as they hurtled, to make it look more purposeful. Jeth was amongst them, thrust against the slats. He caught himself, took a step, and knocked a loud "hello" against the wood. The crowd's noise swelled at the act. Suddenly, someone shouted above the noise, "The men are coming!" and the pit was charged with a new repulsion as everyone scrambled as far away from eachother as possible. They made it onto the meadow before anyone could have seen that they'd been at the cave, spilling out across the grass, panting. Four men in straw hats marched in from the low corner. The boys shoaled away from them, not wanting to be the first. Those that were closest and slower to react were named by the men, fully and sharply. Named, they were forced to precipitate out of the mass and stand frozen, heads hung. Arthur stood at the top corner of the meadow, scratching his large white arms. Maurice hung nearby and waited for the news to move its way up the field. "Someone jammed up the mill. Look, it was turning and now it's not." "Who jammed up the mill?" "I don't know." More people emerged from the orchard, on the path up towards the ridgeway, coming to talk and watch the stillness of the windmills. Women, more men, older boys. Jeth recognised Arthur's older brothers amongst them. Arthur grew uneasy and looked around him. He sneered, "Bet it was Isaac." Then a man in a red shirt appeared at the bottom of the field. It was the bailiff Martin, "Martin of Lydiard", so everyone knew it was serious. He moved stiffly and everyone stopped and waited for him to speak. He said something out of earshot, and the adults started moving back towards the fence again. The boys, thinking they had escaped, spent the rest of their lunchtime wandering the fields. Then they came back to their lessons and found an ambush. They were detained in the nearby barn and the men waited for one of them to come forward or make an accusation. But the boys kept quiet. Finally, someone arrived and announced that the boys were innocent. Instead, the scarecrows had been misbehaving. The current consensus was that one of the whymemen had again been meddling in the night. Though the men looked tense, the boys breathed a sigh of relief and went back to work. The rest of the day was the same as any other. A magpie stood on the eave of the dairy and chatted. The sun started to set and, without clouds, the sky fully shed the heat of the infantile spring. A chill settled upon the fields and the whyme engines, which trundled ceaselessly over them. The next days were wet ones. Rain glinted from the garlic leaves in the forest. Children were busy with their lessons and their work. In the daytime, the boys shared the burden of learning the physical crafts. Some went to the woodshed to learn carpentry, to watch the veins on their fathers hands under small black hairs. Others were instructed in masonry. Some were led to the river north of the village, that wound on the bristling floodplain. There where the plantain grew, their heads seed-pod catapults in mischievous hands, the boys dredged the rich red clay. It was a mud that stinks of all things that new rains fall upon, wood and leaves beneath grey clouds. While they were still young, they were allowed to explore different crafts. Some would drift between them for a year or so. Some would fasten themselves to one thing, or be shackled there by a parent, who might tell them bluntly what they were and were not good at. Occasionally one of them would change stone and aprons for thread and skirts and, shaving their face, go on to learn to weave flax and whyme. And, when they were good at nothing at all, the adults would look at them with silence and they would have to follow their friends. "The scarecrows just didn't like looking at it turn." It took time for word to spread about what had happened to the windmill. Most people came to understand that the rotation had irritated the whymemen somehow. For most, this was satisfying. The girls however, in their huddle, unpicked the simplification; the grandmas had replaced most of the needles in each whymeman with a single new needle, designed to work more generally. This had caused a new type of problem: Though no more fences had been destroyed, people had been reporting strange behaviours. Little, unnerving things. "They keep turning the earth with all their waving. See this divet? Can't have that." Each time someone came to the grandmas with an observation, they had added one or two additional needles to their design. "We've added a needle that's tied to a measurement of the flatness of the soil." There came a day where somebody different stood outside of Greatgrandma's cottage every other hour, waiting to make a complaint, while the pigeons on the roof watched them and warbled. The grandmas eventually decided to implement a new principal. "Most change is bad," grandma Joan said, "That's the assumption we'll work under." She shrugged like it should have been obvious the whole time. "They should only be willing to change things about the environment when it's strictly necessary. A random change to the environment is - more often than not - a bad thing." Susan told the others that they had technical ways of assigning a weight to how much the environment changes. "They make this dim the other needles," she said, "It's like an un-needle. Then the whyememan wants to keep things together. It will do its job in the way that keeps the most stuff around it the same." It had worked perfectly, at first. One whymeman was seen delicately reshaping a molehill it had squashed. Another sidled around a patch of flowers as it approached a pair of crows. "They've made them awfully well-mannered. To think we thought them unruly!" Then one had jammed a wooden chair into the gears of the windmill. "See?" grandma Joan said, "The windmill is part of the scenery. It's not anything to do with the crows. We didn't think about it. The whymeman noticed that the sails were always changing position, always messing up its aim for the world to stay as stationary as possible." * The days grow warmer quickly and the fields green over with new growth. There is the new flax, little pairs of leaves littering every third strip of land. Then the turnips send up their own rougher greenery. The days hold the kind of warmth that allows you to lay on your back and not get cold. You can turn your head and, in the stillness, pretend you aren't there; all there is are the spiders marching ineffable journeys between the tufts of grass. In the dryness, the dust and dead leaves of winter collect on the surfaces of roads and blow into the bays between roots at the feet of trees. You can cup it in your hands and throw it up into grainy clouds, so long as there are no adults watching. On the ridgeway, nettles spill into the waiting pools of ancient hill-fort moats, and fill the nooks between longbarrows. All this green is damp in the morning and buzzing with insects in the afternoon. Each day, a little winter comes at night and melts into summer, like a rehearsal of the season to come. Earlier and earlier, the sun touches window sills. Your white-stockinged feet are illuminated at the end of long cots, whereunder wool you are buried. * Horace stood rubbing his heel against a jutting stone. "They had babies' hands. If you don't use your hands, they don't grow. That's how it works." The children stood debating the spectacle of visitors. A group of them found themselves under the orchard before lunchtime, where the canopy was white and pink with blossoms. It seemed to glow under the gloom of an overcast sky. There were both boys and girls, united by their shared curiosity. "They'd never seen the sun neither." Three ladies and their children had passed through Uffing, on a tour of the western shires. They had come to this corner of Wilt Shire to see the white horse, scratched rugged into the hillside and had stopped briefly to water their horses, which dragged a wooden wagon through the hedgerows. Some of the children had seen them get out to stretch their legs. They were from London, so naturally wore too many layers of clothing and painted their faces white. "Like ghosts." A boy and a girl had stood by the roadside for a quarter of an hour, stitched up into colourless suits, watching the village watch them back. One man, emboldened under the cover of a straw hat, walked up to the mother of the children. "What living do you make in London?" he said, and his teeth had never looked so crooked. When she told him what they did, he couldn't fathom it. It was something about fractions and shares and pushing paper back and forth and back and forth until, with sleight of hand, a penny or two dropped out. It was something new, something magic. One of the Uffing girls found a scrap of white hair on the ground after the wagon, from one of the snowy mares. Later, they would incorporate this into their alchemy. The girls would gather the hoods of premature ferns, tight, unspooling slowly. Together they had recipes for everything; they made potions for brightness of the eyes, for the scent of milk, for surefootedness in dances. It was a knowledge restricted to their exclusive circles, and it faded from the mind into womanhood. They were forbidden from this experimentation, but that only made it more potent. The potency was also derived from its danger: Once, they had fed a girl, Theresa, a soup made of garlic flowers. They covered parts of the forest floor in the late spring. She had become so sick that the others had had to feign illness too so that the adults wouldn't ask questions. The year before, they had steeped too much lavender in a pail of water and, in the sun, it had become a syrup. It had soon been full of spiralling larvae, which became clouds of those long-legged flies that draw blood and leave welts. That day, the girls prepared a soothing balm of dock and birch, with the horse hair to imbue it with the otherworldliness of the strangers. They used a chipped bowl and the silver spoon they'd found lying on the street one day. Grace applied the balm to her wrists. "It's for my arthritis," she said. Someone turned to her and she explained, "Mother has arthritis - I'll get it one day. I can feel it coming on already." "You're just making it up." "I can't lie, I am pathologically truthful. And I have a weak heart, like father. If I lied, my heart would stop." She looked down at her wrists. The others couldn't see anything, but Grace could feel it, sometimes, if she concentrated. Later, like clockwork, the boys found themselves back at the cave. This time it was easy to go unnoticed, since the blossom in the orchard was so heavy. The sun appeared and the sky warmed. Under the yellow light, the cave seemed smaller than before. Some of the boys pushed against the door. Others hung around the sides, bored. There were some trying to reignite the fervour from before, the spectacle and the ecstasy and the fear of the great wooden door. They shouted, "Cave cowards! Cave cowards!" "I've already touched the door. And there's no way in," someone complained, "I'm not a cave coward." "You're a cave coward! You wouldn't say that if you weren't a cave coward." But in spite of a few, the group became uninterested with the cave itself; instead, they spent their energy working out who was and wasn't a cave coward. It was almost scientific. People were honorary cave cowards for associating too closely with cave cowards. Jeth was a cave coward because he'd displayed cowardice on that first lonesome trip and, obviously, cave cowardice was an incurable affliction. During the last weeks of April, the cave finally lost all of its terror. It became the meeting point, replacing the ridgeway and the mound at Wayland's Smithy. That was all a previous kingdom. The place took on a fantastic quality. Hemmed in by low, thorny trees, it had greened over. Being there was forbidden, so it was an adventure. On the other hand, no adult would go searching for a child outside of Uffing without cause for concern, not now the labour of the new year was gathering speed. In that way, it was an untouchable haven too. Even the girls came there on their breaks after lunch. None of the boys knew how they had found out about it, but the girls arrived, in their own closed circles, talking about foreign things, gathering the red clover. Their rituals drew the eyes of the boys, though they were embarrassed to associate with them. The girls staged elaborate weddings, with confetti of leaves and ferns, marrying eachother in rows with secret words exchanged. It seemed that, by the end of the summer, each possible pair of girls would have been married. Horace kept his eyes low. He had proclaimed a love for Eliza a year before, under the same white canopy. She had towered over him then, mysterious and talking with someone nearby about things he couldn't hope to understand. She hadn't heard him. Now he had grown into a longer, more awkward shape. He had not forgotten that heart-racing, but she moved through different meadows. Out of the corner of his eye, he watched Eliza link arms with some girl, who grinned at first, and then together they walked, somberly beneath a rain of debris. Horace wondered if something else flickered between them as they walked. Eliza's eyes betrayed nothing. She walked upright. Her hair was tightly braided, a gilded pendulum. Was their marriage really a ritual or was it more like the marriage of Misses Tull and Misses Leach, who emerged from the same door in the mornings? Eventually, the tiny children found their way to the cave. The undifferentiated mob. They appeared in twos or threes, chanting nonsense, sometimes naked, daring eachother to pester the older ones. Their cults rose up and fell apart as quickly as they could be understood. At one point, a tiny boy with a halo of ginger curls jumped out of a bush infront of two older boys and curled up by their feet. "I'm an egg!" it shouted. This was the first in a contagion of similar assaults. At another point, bands of speeding children would scream past, whipping the calves of the older ones with ferns and branches, then disappear back into the undergrowth. On one day, when the air was still, there were so many children gathered by the cave that they were forced to spread out through the hawthorn and into the copse rising up the flank of the ridgeway. Faces wove through the trees. A boy had painted his face white, like the visitors. Through the chalk, the ridicule he suffered left its salt tracks on his cheeks. As the day wore on, the majority of children came to mill about under the beech trees in the taller part of the woods. So the cave was left quiet and only the shouting bands, on their way between other places, passed close to it. That was except for Susan. For a few minutes, she slipped away from the others, unnoticed, to press herself against its great wooden doors and listen to the things moving inside. Noises that nobody else had been still enough to notice. From the edge of the copse you could see the radiating fields and the figures of the whymemen, stood over the flax. More than once, people could be seen approaching them, never too close. The people would wave their arms in exasperation, then retreat. One whymeman's movement became erratic. The people stepped back. It flailed its long pole arms around, fell forwards into the dirt and, writhing, dug itself under. Each turn of its ridgid arms sent a dusty spray into the clear air. When it was covered, it stopped. Someone ran off to fetch something. The other adults clung together in a huddle, staring. From their vantage, a little girl turned to Eliza. "Why's it doing that?" Eliza shook her head. It seemed complicated. The whymemen had just been put to work weeding the fields; they pulled up the dandelions and pearlwort and took them to compost on the edge of the village. This had come with a whole host of new problems. For one, the vegetable gardens were between the compost heap and the flax fields; they ran around the southern side of the village in an arc. The villagers had watched in horror as one whymeman after another wound its route between the raised beds. They didn't trust the machines to mind their crops. Then one snagged a pea plant and almost knocked over the willow frame it was attached to. The men came out then, to guard their delicate vines. They stopped to stare at the tall machines, stumbling, balancing on the poles that jutted out of their trousers, swaying, dandelions ragged between their red iron fingers. The pea frames stood in rows, tall, conical and precarious, set barely a person's width apart. The whymemen strode, nonchalant, between them. As the men stood watching, they weren't really sure what they'd do if real damage started being done. But before they could find out, all of the machines had been recalled into the old linhay. Grandma Joan had said, "Another needle, girls. We're going to add another needle. It's as simple as that." She had explained that the whymemen didn't understand the risk they were taking. They were happy, or rather their needles were bright, because they weren't actually causing very much damage. "They can't conceive of catastrophe," she said, "They don't intend to knock the whole row of pea frames over - so their needle is bright - but what if they do it anyway, accidentally?" Grandma Joan placed her hands together, "The new needle will measure the capacity for influence that the whymeman has over its surroundings at any point. It will be dim when the whymeman is in a position where it could quickly and easily break something." It was understood that this would make the whymemen take a wide route around the pea frames, even if it was more efficient to go through. The dimming of the needle would incentivise taking a longer, more careful route. So the girls stood on the slope, overlooking the scene and were confused at the whymeman for burying itself. They were about to turn away, back to their business in the woods, when Morgana said, "They made it too scared." Eliza nodded, understanding slowly. The grandmas had given the new needle too much weight. Now the whymemen sought to render itself incapable of changing its surroundings. It was immobilising itself in the ground. Jeth found himself picking his way over the litter in the woods, looking for a noble-looking branch. He turned to Arthur who was walking next to him and heaved a piece of birch from the ground. They pretended to spar. Today Arthur and the others had softened in the light and were calm and receptive. Jeth said, "Wait. I have an idea." and soon he had constructed the kernel of a game. "You have to go back to the edge of the copse if you get hit three times." All the boys were pulled into the game almost immediately, and divided into two battling sides. The woods were loud with shouts of war and cries of anguish. Peeling branches splintered as they struck eachother. There was Frances too, who had renounced her dress in favour of a plain smock. She lifted a twisting lance of poplar, bared her teeth, and was absorbed into the fray, tangled hair streaming out behind her. All the boys were reduced to their physical selves, laughing and playing and cheating the same, their ankles bramble-torn, their knees gritted, grazed. Jeth thought back to a previous summer, when things had been easier; he had staged a similar game and had stood infront of a crowd, burning with excitement, delineating his plans for a kingdom. When they were grown-up, he'd declared, they would march to the great forest of Savernake, south of here, in the body of Wilt Shire. There they would start a kingdom. Jeth had seen Savernake once; it was a place of endless giant trees and mushrooms bursting from the tangled earth. There was a fallen trunk, huge and sleek where its bark had been worn away. It felt like stone, an island in the sea of dim bluebells, under the clouds. In their planned kingdom that day, of course Maurice was going to be the king; his eyes were filled with a hunger. He'd explained how they were going to conquer their neighbouring kingdoms, and exactly how they'd torture their dissidents. "We'll drive them into pits of nettles and tear out their nails, one by one, like in The Wotton Beast." Then he'd yelped because someone had whipped his calves from behind with a branch. Jeth, staring at the canopy, hadn't been listening to Maurice, and he didn't care that the other boy had asserted himself as ruler. He was content just to be the inventor of places and things. In the forest by the cave, the sun grew lower and a wind picked up. The boys still shrieked between the trunks, whose edges glowed bronze. The girls stood on the edge of the woods, watching the sun, except for Frances who bellowed with the others. They looked north towards Uffing, to the striped ground and the whymemen who watched the flax, and the people that argued and inspected them, out of range of hearing. On the way home, as the air grew cold, the boys returned to Uffing in a loose group, legs aching warmly. Arthur, in their midst, placed a sprig of cow parsley in Maurice's hair, where it stuck. Maurice turned around and pushed out his chest. "Who am I?" he said, in a mock nasal voice, "You mustn't go near the cave. I'm so important. How many bushels? I'm so..." But he was turning red as he spoke, stuttering. "Martin of Lydiard sounds squeakier than that," someone said. The rest of them nodded in agreement. * There were two unusual days at the end of April. Everyone's work became in service of festival preparations. Then May Day dawned and everyone was gathered, waiting in the streets while the sky paled. They were all dressed in their best colours. Then the sun wrote the village onto the dewy grass, in bright yellow and dark green rectangles. Through the street, the procession began, and doors and windows had been decorated with burgeoning greenery, wreaths and weaves. Men with mallard feathers in their round black hats carried wooden batons, striking them against one anothers' to mark time. One, and, two, and, one, two, three, and. In their midst, penned in, was the oss. It was a tall figure, cloaked in black, with a horse's skull balanced on an impossible neck that reared and clacked. When May had burned the dew away, the procession left the street and spilled onto the meadow, where the maypole had been driven deep into the dirt. Then the whole place was moving, the pole at its centre and the girls spinning their ribbons onto the pillar in a symmetric dance. There was food and laughter. Children screamed and sang. The heat of the day melted the prescribed order of things; men wore flowers in their hair and women were kings and old folk became young and youngsters made their rules. The richer ones filled their hats with bread and coins and offered them to everyone. Martin of Lydiard, tied up in a bright red corset, was caught up in the fray, distressed, disapproving. There were new customs to dash too. A woman brought out sheets of ledger-paper from beneath her skirts. With the air of someone tending a garden, she tore them into shreds and sowed them about. The sky was clear and a kestrel span above the ridgeway. The thumping of feet in bright white stockings made the earth pliable. Pastel greens and pinks and blues, moved over the grass like petals stirring in a river. The day grew hot. Then later, from an unshaded corner of the meadow, a boy with ginger curls watched the oss with bated breath. It seemed to him to sway like the whymemen did; it had their fumbling gait. Though he knew that it was someone's father underneath the costume, in the heat of noon it seemed to take on an agency of its own. The teeth clacked out of time with the batons. Its black ribbons writhed like so many disturbed black feathers. There came a point where the oss seemed to look directly at the boy, eyes empty. There was no human analogue underneath that, only the severe logic of the whyme. The air was thick with heat. The boy didn't feel himself falling backwards until his back hit the grass. Then he was flush with the glaring green. Someone stood over him and told him to drink water. "Best watch it in this heat." From the ground, the woman stood like a mountain against the sky and the boy had to pick himself up against the vertigo of it. Then she turned and looked around her. "Has anyone seen Susan?" Heads were shaken. "I haven't seen her since the morning." People's thoughts were quickly caught up in the festivities again. There were two layers; the children weaved amongst a woodland of legs and the men and women underwent their own festival, in the canopy. The crowd was dense and shifting. Someone was shaking bells and the men with the batons were dancing now, with a fervour, sweat on their brows. The sound of the batons became the metronome for every action. Then a commotion passed through the heart of the crowd; people turned to and fro, muttering. Someone had realised Susan was missing from the dancers. Some of the baton-bearers stopped moving and the whole system crystallised until everyone had stopped and was whispering. They glanced around. "Where is she?" "Have you seen the girl?" The crowd stood still as the afternoon light slipped between them. Motion began again, but this time sour and pointed. A few people were dispatched to find the girl. Some of the movement returned to the crowd but people looked down into their drinks and talked more quietly. Someone turned to someone else and said, "You know, James - these are odd times - the flowers seem a little too bright this year and these automata are proper strange." Then one by one the people returned, shrugging their shoulders. They couldn't find Susan. The men frowned and the women shifted from foot to foot. "She'll show up." Someone mentioned that she might be in the orchard. Wasn't she usually in the orchard? People turned to eachother and explained how she would be fine. But still they gathered together and held their breath and stole glances at the grain fields where the wicker sentinels stood, motionless. Then someone, who afterwards nobody could recall, suggested that a search party be sent out. May had already slipped stars into the undergrowth; wild thyme and red campion were little bursts of purple. Things were definitely flowering earlier this year. Into the meadows, the festival disbanded, their ankles brushing the new drab blossom of nettles; even if a single search party was enough, it wouldn't have satisfied the crowd's anxiety. The whole field of people parted to look for the girl. And above it all, like lanterns heralding the night, the horse-chestnut trees made their pyramids of pink-white blossoms. The low sun set them on fire and they toppled onto the streets. Children followed eachother in rows, eyes wide, clutching sticks and laughing with uncertainty. Some followed tracks into the forest and found themselves out of place in their starched clothes amongst the dusty tangle of the vegetation. Grace looked down at the line of buttons on her blouse and saw them changed under the scrutiny of the twisting vines. On one of the buttons, there was a mistake with the stitching, and it hung loose. In fact, if you stared closely enough, all of them had been placed imperfectly. Some of the boys came to the cave. They followed spoors between the hawthorns and found that the place was giant and filled with gravity again. Horace, somewhere in the back of the group, stopped suddenly and the others turned to him. His face, red and blotchy in the heat, jumped out against the luminous white of his shirt. "Listen," he said. The boys listened. Somewhere a hollow noise was ringing out. They followed it, though it was almost inaudible. They scrambled up the smooth grass slope at the side of the building and, near the top, they found a hole in the brickwork, the one which Jeth had found but told nobody about. It was now behind a hydra of nettles, broad, dark and hairy, and the boys beat it back with sticks, saying nothing. Then someone small was selected to go. No sooner had they placed their head into the opening, than they turned around, face pale and mouth open in exclamation. "She's in the cave! Susan is in the cave!" It only took fifteen minutes for the man with the keys to reach the cave. He was easy to find; information travelled fast in that network of groups, vibrating and muttering and exclaiming, running into eachother again and again on the street. He walked up to the doors and clicked a large iron key into place. Then he threw them open. At first, it was too dark to see into the gloom at the back; the cave faced east and the sun did nothing except make a halo of the grass on the edge of the roof. But in the dust and straw of the doorway, a figure was curled. Susan lay sobbing, face pale and, for a moment, they didn't know what kind of creature they were seeing. Then they remembered, and stepped into the doorway. The gloom at the back resolved into contortions of wood and straw. It was a pile of disused whymemen, broken and stacked on top of eachother. They were half-alive still, shivering and turning. Susan was scared sick and, when many arms lifted her away, she couldn't speak. Night started falling, the crowds returned to their homes, drunk from the sun and wine and disoriented. Susan's parents put her to bed and forgot to tell her off. Her silence weathered the rest of the evening. Only later would she tell them about how curiosity had drawn her into the opening amongst the nettles, and she'd slipped through on the loose stones, in the pressing darkness. * The meeting started after lunchtime on the second day of May. People weren't happy. Some were scared enough that they called for an end to the whymemen; others wanted to see the end of the whyme engines in general. "Why lock the broken ones away like that, if they aren't dangerous?" someone had asked. Though most people calmed down, rolled their eyes, shrugged the night off, it had still been enough to warrant a meeting. All but a few of the children were in lessons at the time, but they were present anecdotally, after the fact. They rendered it in their own dramatic retellings. "Martinoflydiard had grey around his eyes he was so tired. He said they had to get a handle on the whymemen - that someone should be in charge of them." "Yeah but the grandmas are in charge of them." "He said there had to be a legal framework." Nobody really knew what that meant and nobody had seen Susan since she had been put to bed that night. Without her they fumbled; she would have been able to explain something like that. In their retellings, they told how things had escalated; Martin had been pushed out of the circle at first by the acolytes of the old women. They wanted to proceed as normal, stressing that the whymemen had nothing to do with Susan falling into the barn and that nobody had been hurt. Then the martyred bailiff and his supporters had returned, louder, gathering support. "What about the whyemen in the cave?" someone asked, "I heard they were still alive." "It's a kind of sickness they get sometimes," Morgana explained, "Greatgrandma called it strawheading. They sometimes find a way to make their needle glow without doing anything. By messing with it. That's called strawheading. Then they just lie there - twitching - and nothing more can be done." Before the evening, the functioning whymemen were arrested from the fields and locked in a barn with the strawheads from the cave. Some people contested but the majority were in favour. At least, temporarily. There was shouting and name-calling. Some of it in jest, some of it tinged with a little more spite. Everyone was sluggish and dazed. Nobody had slept well. Children had been asking questions and refusing to settle. The night had been filled with noise. "The poor old dish rag barked until it was sick." Under the low sun, Eliza found grandma Joan at the corner of the bakery, pausing to brush something off her thigh. Maybe it was that Eliza was growing, but she'd remembered grandma Joan being taller. The old woman turned to the girl and shrugged once, clenching her jaw like she was holding something back. Then she'd turned and walked stiffly away. What followed were some of the most abnormal days. There were meetings almost every morning; public ones in the streets and private ones in alleys and pantries. Leaning against a fence in the sun, women stood and talked and puppeted their drop spindles and adjusted their skirts. They didn't talk about whyme, notweave, nandweave, needles and loops, but instead about the politics of the village. Men worked, but they worked distractedly. Every other hour was spent pretending that life went on as normal, but things were undeniably strange; the adults found the children harder to control than usual. They sometimes didn't show up for scheduled lessons and work. After chopping wood one day, Arthur halted in the street and raised his arms from his sides and started shaking himself. "I'm a strawhead. I'm a strawhead. My needle is angry." He swung his arms at the nearest person and knocked them to the ground. The boy got back up and swung a punch at Arthur, who jumped back. Arthur howled, "I can't help it! I'm a strawhead." Wayland's Smithy became a meeting place again. This time not just the boys, but for the girls and the tiny children. Nobody returned to the cave; that place was still haunted by the pale ghost of a little girl, curled on the ground. Susan herself though, had returned to the others and seemed back to normal, in her own wide-eyed way. To Arthur's horror, Maurice appointed himself the king of the longbarrow. "Fatty," he said, "lard-boy." Arthur was red-faced and scowled to stop himself from crying. In the village, there was a shifting mass of opinions, but from the ridgway, the village of Uffing was compacted into a fistful of thatched rows, a single bushel, and the children pointed to one division. To them, there were two factions, Martin's and the grandmas'. "Martinoflydiard doesn't like that the grandma's let the whymemen explore on their own. And he thinks that the grandmas could make them cleverer but they won't." "Clever people can be reasoned with - and taught things - that's what Martin said." "Don't be silly." Later, gathering decorations amongst the thick ferns, Morgana turned to Susan, "Things are so complicated these days. This is what growing up must be like." But Susan couldn't reply, not even with all her knowledge. She wasn't sure whether this was just a trick of perspective or not; somehow she thought that times really were becoming strange. On a hot day, someone decided to build a city. Maurice was enamoured with this, and he used his position on top of the barrow to move people. They would build a wall with sticks, ferns woven between them to make it opaque. "We can make it ten foot high," someone exclaimed. It would be complete with a citadel and a ditch to collect rainwater; that way, they could camp out away from Uffing, away from dependency. Jeth imagined the sun, golden, slanting into a walled market and, over the wall, on all sides, the trees burgeoning with fruits. In this place, he would not feel drawn back to his home and the fabrics and the low candles. No, here he couldn't get cold or ill; this place would have endless summer. People were assigned jobs, which they took gladly and ran into the undergrowth. The cave cowards were told they would be the diggers. "Because you're all worms," Maurice said. They didn't care; the ecstasy of shaping the dirt was not a punishment. That day, Maurice wore a long shirt and a red ribbon around his waist, setting him apart from the other children's smocks and linens. Everyone eyed him with apprehension. There was something new in his gait too, and in the manner of his speech. "Horace is my bailiff," Maurice said, "He will oversee the work and collect the tithe. Fourteen bushels per gross." Children pushed dirt into rows and laid branches, longways atop the ridges for walls. The boundaries were not as square as they'd hoped at first, because they had to wind between the trunks of the trees. They weren't ten feet high either. But to them, the city grew magnificent. "Here is the throne room." "Here's where we'll dig a dungeon." "Here's the marketplace." Already the girls had gathered flowers to pile upon a tree trunk, selling their wares in the specified places to a bustle of imaginary merchants. Jeth used his hands to make the outline of a building more rectangular. Frances knelt nearby, performing the same work. They placed a stone either side of the doorway. "We'll need to dig a ditch for water," Jeth said, "In each house." "I'll mark that out," Frances said, and they both worked to score the outline of a basin in a corner. "That one over there should be a barn," Jeth said, pointing to another rectangle, "and this can be our house." Frances looked up and eyed Jeth. Then he knew he'd crossed a line. There were certain ways a friendship between boys was meant to be and there was a closeness you couldn't have. Jeth swallowed and stared at the ground and they went on in silence. At the edge of the copse, two boys were shoving dirt with the heels of their shoes to make two mounds. These would be the gatehouses. One of the boys toed the ground next to a stretch of wooden fence, its end jagged and rotten. His foot caught on a small hole covered with twigs. "Hey, have a look at this." Then the pair was running over to the others, where they lay scattered through the woods, gathering them, telling them of a burrow of a ‘creature' at the edge of the copse. To the overseers' dismay, the crowd was drawn away from their work. Eliza stood still as the others moved. She watched Isaac haul a rock from the ground and run with it towards the edge of the copse. Her stomach fell; what kind of cruelty was he intending? She had hated Isaac ever since an autumn two years before. He'd sat by the door of the barn and caught daddy longlegs as they were drawn in out of the gloom. She'd watched him sit there, in the corner, pulling off their legs, one by one, her heart quickening. Too timid to do anything, a rushing had filled her ears and she'd been unable to breath. The children collected around the hole. "Let's see!" There were too many people for anyone's bated breath to sound above the chatter. Some waited, watching those who were nearer slide twigs into the opening. "It's got six eyes! I can see them!" The ones who were nearest took it in turns to reach into the hole. Then, when Grace's turn came, she shrieked. "It bit me!" The crowd was charged with movement. Those close enough could hear her lamenting, "I can feel the poison already - in my hand - it's coming up my arm - I'm going to die." Within fifteen minutes, someone had brought an adult to the copse. The children fell quiet, this tall foreigner in their midst. She had hurried across the fields, one hand lifting her white skirts and the other drawn by a little girl. Another child ran ahead, her tether to the woman visible only in her glancing back. She leaned down to Grace, who was curled on the ground, muttered something, then stood up and dispelled the turbulence. "Look," she said, pointing at the hole, "this is the hole a fencepost was lifted from - look where it is - it's at the end of this old fence." When they got back to their city, the children found that it was just scraps in the dirt. Something had changed the moment the woman had stepped into their midst. Two boys set to kicking down a wall. They were attacked by some of the others, who still clung onto the dream. But nobody, though they tried, could stir the same frenzy of creation again. * In the warmth, you can swim in those shallow pools that the river makes, north of Uffing by the retting fields, while the men lay bundles of last-year's flax across the grass. It will drink up the morning dew and soften into fibres, ready for drying and breaking. There are bees, abounding, played forth from the trumpets of flowers. Someone says they saw a pair of turtle doves crossing the reed bed. "We all agree the whymemen must stop being so unruly," Martin says, in the street, while you scrape the dust from your shoes on the millwheel. Work will begin again soon. There will be clay on your father's hands, peeling, like the crust of bread, while he throws a pot. In another place, there will come splinters, a moving saw in the heat of noon, the scent of pine resin. "We're going to forbid them from exploring on their own," Martin says, "No more knocking around in the night." This year's flax is tall above the dry earth now, and interlaced with the crumpled heads of poppies, yellow and red. Its dusty stems are straight and populous with white flowers. The earth is so dry that there is someone making charcoal in a pit on the other side of Uffing. A plume of smoke lifts above the thatched roofs. "We're going to properly discipline them." Some of the workbenches in the woodshop are too high to see over. Maybe the flax will be that high soon. You can't remember what it was like last year. "Avebury has developed more powerful whyme-minds. We're going to purchase some. An intelligent whymeman can be reasoned with. You can't reason with a stupid whymeman." One of the willows by the river looks unwell, like it's too dry. In fact, the river itself is drying up. Some of the men stand around on the bed of it, at luncheon, between shifts, clutching their bread and cheese and pushing their boots into the silt. "An intelligent whymeman you can punish and reward. We'll teach them some manners and dignity." After work, the light coming through high-up windows makes your shoes patterned and complicated. The leather has a sheen like still water far away but so close and warm. The legs of the chair, as you're looking down, slant in and plant themselves against the floor, which is solid. Glancing out of the door, you see the ridgeway is beginning to brown over, already. * The alley between the dairy and the bakery was small, and a tangle of goosegrass heralded the summer. It attached itself with a lonely grip to the hems of trousers and dresses. Some of the girls picked up handfuls of it and chased Misses Collins down the cobbles. They chanted, "Goose back, goose back!" and covered her in the clinging ropes. "You're all devils," she cried, "what's got into the air?" She made sure they all felt sick with guilt, in her own way; she picked off the prickling weeds, sighed and beamed with instant forgiveness. It would have been easier if she'd been angry. Out of sight, in a small lot behind the old linhay, new work was being done with the whymemen. Instead of being left to find their own way in the open fields, they were being trained in a pen. This was one amongst several changes that had been imposed by the Lydiard manor. The village had reached a consensus to turn over control and, as soon as they'd done so, the new legislation had been pinned to the door of the town hall. There it remained for three summer Sundays in a row, in case anyone had an objection. Then it was quietly implemented. "If I were a bookish type, I'd have something to say," old James had said, peering at the curling paper. "What's not to get? It's all very simple." But in the quiet of the night, Grace had heard her parents' dissent. "This was how they lost Overton common. And the Wrights - thirty years back - lost their pen. This is how things change. Three summer sundays. This is how things change." The Lydiard Manor had also decided that the whymemen could be made to do more; there was no reason why they couldn't harvest as well as weeding and scaring the crows. Some of the turnips were fully grown already and, to harvest them, the men would have to drop tools for days. It would be much more profitable to get the whymemen to do it. Two senior women, a handful of girls and grandma Denise were dragged out of their routine to make the machines do this task. Denise was the only grandma that Martin's bailiffs could persuade to help. Grandma Joan wasn't there; she was refusing to follow orders. The other grandmas had claimed that they were feeling too weak or too busy. And nobody had dared to give Greatgrandma any kind of instruction. In the pen behind the old linhay, the scarecrows were supervised. They were allowed to behave more erratically there, more randomly. This was necessary for learning. Then, in the field, they had their desire to explore and try new things manually reduced. Grandma Joan had warned, "They are not very robust to distributional shifts." but this didn't seem to mean anything to anybody else. Then she had pursed her lips and responded to anyone by glazing over, stony and resigned. A whymeman poked across the square of grass, bending over and lifting stones that had been painted to look like turnips. A white band and a red band. This time, one needle was held by grandma Denise, who stood sweating under a broad straw hat. It was in a tiny ornate box, and she held it out infront of her with both hands, brightening it manually when the whymeman behaved correctly. That was, when it dropped the mock turnips into a wicker basket. "There's a small whyme-mind in this box, see." she said, "It's separate from the whymeman's. I'm training it to train the whymeman. The box controls the needle in the whymeman. I control the box's needle myself. I make the box's needle bright when it brightens the whymeman's needle at the right times - when the whymeman performs well. "At the end of training," she took a strained breath, "we'll put the box inside the whymeman's head, so it can carry it round the field itself." Over the afternoons, they devised ways to get the whymeman to dust off the dirt and the worms too. Then they copied the mind into two other whymemen. This was a process that ate away another long day; the young women sat together and meticulously patterned two more minds in the image of the first. In the fields around Uffing, the whymemen were set to work. The first night, all three of them filled hoppers with round white stones, delicately missing the turnips in their furrows. The villagers recalled their machines, laughing and crooning over them like they were children. Something had changed; something about this mistake was endearing. Or maybe people were finally getting used to them. The whymemen were trained again, and worked beautifully. Under the sun, they hobbled and stooped. Three sweatless brows. Martin had made them all so polite. Here and there, they stopped to wave their arms at the crows. They sometimes reached down with their forks and lifted a weed from between the crops. People developed a certain deference to the whymemen; the men would tip their hats on their way by the fields. Others would nod their heads. The children found this behaviour strange and shot the men sideways glances. And when people reported that the new whymemen sometimes seemed to avoid recapture in the evenings, shivering out of the way of workmen's hands, everyone was able to forget about it. "Have you noticed they seem to act different when they're not being watched?" "Ay? I don't know, Cooper. Maybe I don't know because I can't watch them without watching them." "I'd watch it though." "I'd watch your mouth, Cooper. We keep polite with them and they'll keep polite with us." Martin commissioned more scarecrows from the carpenters and, from Avebury, the finest raiment. * The old linhay became a place of furtive words in light-dark corners. The opening and closing of doors. The summer made the air yellow. The girls' lessons were secondary. Morgana found herself losing the whyme in her hands. It ran over her fingers like silk and she pinched at it, though she knew that haste would only make it more slippery. When it had gone, she looked up, expecting help to drift over in a linen skirt. She found only the silhouettes of the grandmas in the doorway. "What does she think she's doing?" "Denise is just trying to hold things together." "She's completely silent - you know - she just stands there, mute and does what they tell her to." "Lend her some slack, Joan. Lesser of evils." The shape of grandma Joan shifted uncomfortably. "It's dangerous. They're pushing things too fast too far. We need a chance to slow down. We need a chance to learn. To make small mistakes." Morgana found the whyme again. Eliza showed her how; leaning close and holding her hands and easing the threads out from where they nestled, underneath the surface of things. Together, they looped it over itself. A perfect pearl of almost nothing. * The undergrowth became laden with weight. On the roadsides, giant hogweed impressed itself on the sky and bloomed dusty white alongside the cow parsley. Then between, woven ridgid, teasel grew. Its ends were dipped in the kind of blue that shines brightest in the burning of the evening. When a week of rain interrupted the summer at the start of June, the young barley in the fields was thankful. Its leaves had been turning yellow and papery along the edges. A thousand foxgloves lit up like lanterns amongst the green of the forest. Nobody could recall such decadence and, in the following week under the blinding sun, yet more appeared to crowd the glades. On the cobbles behind the bakery, Morgana stooped to pick chamomile from a raised wooden bed. The noon fell heavily on the back of her neck. Each flowerhead she lifted to her nose with her right hand, drinking in the scent like an expensive syrup. After smelling, she passed them to her left hand where the bunch was kept. Around the corner, where the buildings were close enough to provide shade, Morgana found grandma Joan talking to Greatgrandma, who was wrapped in a green and blue shawl. Only her nose protruded. It was unusual to see her outside and, seeing Morgana she frowned, eyes glittering like jet. She moved past Morgana onto the street, as if she was amending some trespass. Grandma Joan, who had been facing away, then turned around and stood to watch Greatgrandma go. She didn't seem to notice Morgana standing there. Instead, her eyes were fixed and red. In the brightness, Morgana watched a convulsion shake her; she sobbed, a pair of tears dropped onto her skirts. It was then that Morgana saw the paleness of her hands and the blue veins, so bright in the shade of buildings. And she saw that grandma Joan was a little girl, except creased and misshapen. Maybe in the rain it would have been alright, but the apathy of the daylight made it unbearable. Morgana fought the urge to cover her eyes. Grandma Joan broke out of her stiffness and started walking after Greatgrandma, down the road. The solstice approached, and it was heralded by a further smothering of flowers. In the low and covered places, bindweed's white and pink trumpets played for the gathering heat. Upon the bald head of the ridgeway, the air was still and submarine. Some of the boys raced to the white horse and back on a day without work. Their faces were red after the sprint, their ankles torn up. They made it back to the fields just after the sun had passed its climax. Someone tall and athletic was first, of course, and reserved the right to boast for the rest of the afternoon. Horace came last, swaying and stumbling. They met the others coming up the road by the copse, who were fresher and had spent the morning paddling in the river, looking for artefacts. They tried to compose themselves infront of the others, but they wanted to clutch their sides. Horace gripped a lone fencepost for support and looked at the ground. Jeth was with the boys who had come from the river and, when they came near to the boundary of the woods he paused. Arthur picked up on his hesitation and stared at him as if he'd said something incriminating. Someone else clarified, before he could ask, "Jethro's father told him not to go outside the village limits." Jeth looked at them, pleadingly. Then he quickly flattened his expression and started walking again, as if nothing had happened. "Thought your father told you not to?" Arthur jeered. Jeth pretended not to hear. The treeline was a few paces away. Before he could plant his foot on the dusty earth of the woods, Arthur was on him, pushing him back with his broad chest, standing over him. Jeth tried to sidestep but couldn't make it round. Some of the others joined in, their many hands jabbing at him as he tried to get past, laughing. He pushed again and this time managed to slip underneath, between the boys until he was on the other side of them. They shouted and grabbed at his shoulders. "Your father will slap you Jethro, is that what you want?" He was drawn back into the mob. Arthurs thick arms were round him and he was pressed up against his chest, where the air was dense with sweat. Jeth swung a punch at Arthurs stomach. It barely grazed him but Arthur jumped back and shrieked to draw attention to the disobedience. "Little bastard," he spat and swung his leg at Jethro, missing. Jeth turned and leaped towards the treeline, running. He felt hands tugging at his shirt and feet swinging at his ankles. There was shrieking and shouting, unintelligible. Still the sun grew more punishing. The boys fell upon a place where the trees opened and the ground was thick with bracken and foxgloves. A group of girls was marching there, looking for ingredients for their alchemy. They startled when they saw the boys running towards them. "Look out!" Then in the midst of the fray, Horace, who had been following the chase, meandered to a stop and fell forwards into the ferns, quietly, like something mishandled and spilt. Someone let out a laugh, then cut it short. Everyone forgot what they were doing and crowded around, treading down the ferns with big steps to make a place to stand and see. The first to react was Frances. She leant down to make sure Horace was still breathing. Someone suggested that he be moved to the shade. Some of the boys grabbed him by the shoulders and dragged him towards the trees. Jeth told everyone that he was going to get the adults and ran off. Morgana, who was gripping Eliza's hand tightly, asked, "Is he dead?" "No Morg. No Morg, he's fine." But the little girl stared up with wide eyes in her glistening face. Her stillness drew in and quietened the other small children. Eliza looked up across the sunny patch where Horace had fallen. The boys rushed around, blood on their knees from where they had thrown eachother on the ground. The taste of it was almost palpable in the heat. Somewhere in the village, to the north, a man was shouting at another man about something, no-doubt something out of proportion. Their voices carried to the copse and made Eliza's children shiver. Someone was trying to drag Horace back towards the village, shouting about it. Others were telling them that he should be kept in the shade. Someone grabbed hold of Horace's leg and tried to resist the pull towards the village. He splayed out like a rag doll. Eliza resisted the urge to shout something herself, to move towards them, fearing that her protectorate might fall apart and lose themselves in the ocean of the angry summer. * Two men walked up to the scarecrow on the field. They trod over the cracked ground in heavy shoes and wiped the sweat from their brows, readjusted their hats. One carried a small wooden spindle, a mind imbued with a raiment of whyme. The other carried a ball of twine and a pair of shears. The scarecrow stood still. They took off their hats. The man with the shears stepped forwards, muttered "excuse me", and cut the twine that held its sack-head together. He drew out the old spindle that was buried in the straw. Then he passed the new mind in, set it gently in its nest and began to tie up the sack once again. The one who wasn't working slouched onto one leg and looked at the copse. From the trees, a scattering of children were running, shouting and stopping and starting. Two boys dragged another, who seemed to be unconscious, towards Uffing across the bumps of the field. "Ey Miller, is that boy all right?" The other man was too engrossed in his work to look up. "One minute." He looped the twine around the bunched end of the sack one last time and tied it off with a bow. The boys disappeared into the village, but others still crossed the field, following in dribs and drabs. Some of the girls passed close to the scarecrow. One of them, chubby and gripping an older girl's hand, strained towards the men. The older one tried to keep her moving towards the village but she resisted. She let the older girl's hand go, and walked over to the men. "What are you doing?" she asked, frowning. The one tying looked up, "Putting in a better mind. One of the new ones from Avebury." The older girl put her hand on the smaller one's shoulder and tried to steer her away, but she turned back defiantly, "Grandma said you shouldn't, mister." "Well what grandma doesn't know can't hurt her," the man said, "These scarecrows are Manor Property now, and Martin's got a handle on it." Finally, the older girl managed to wrestle the smaller one away and the men returned to their work. Morning came again, and it was clear that the day would be just as stifling as the last. Horace's parents forbid him from leaving the house, in case he was felled by the heat again. Grandma Frederick said that they shouldn't worry so much, that it wasn't serious. But what did she know? She was old and her speech came slowly. Eventually, people turned out of their beds, sticky, hazy. Then there was a commotion in the street before fewer than half the people had opened their doors. People bubbled out of their homes, hair tangled and babies screaming on shoulders. They had all found their chicken coops empty. Undisturbed straw and still-warm eggs. The more they realised they were not alone, that everybody suffered the same mystery, the more anxious they became. The sky was a perfect blue and totally empty. At the crossroads in the centre of Uffing, a crowd gathered. Someone pointed to the fields. The whymemen had vanished; the green earth was unbroken, all the way to the shallows of the ridgeway. A man confirmed that the whymemen were missing from the storage barn too. Then the crowd set out to check the cave, a string of people from the square across the field, towards the meadows, like a grasping limb. The place was as empty as it had been after the grandmas had cleared it out. The children found themselves in the woods around the dovecote, on the flanks of the ridgeway, aimless. On the edge, by the field, Jeth marched and kicked at the white chalks that littered the soil. The barley had almost perished in the heat and a cloud of flies gyrated above a strip of turnips. Somewhere in the background, the others loudly debated the events that were unfolding in the village but, from where Jeth stood, they were far-away. Noises, animal and stripped of meaning after passing through yards of burning light. In his kicking, he found a stone that cracked as he touched it. And another push from the tip of his shoe broke it in two. Jeth bent down. It was a tiny skull. It had a beak, curved and corvid. When he extended his arm to pick it up, he noticed a littering of other bones around it, some of them half-buried in the dust. Then he saw that half of the chalks were bones. He was about to call out to the others when he lifted his head and again saw the sky, its wash of unbroken colour. There were no kestrels hunting there, in the blue. And there were also no magpies on the birch branches, no woodpigeons cooing on the eaves of the houses. Jeth turned once around then, stumbling for a moment. Then he steadied himself against the earth with an outstretched palm. There was a fire in the meadow two days after. The men shouted and ran and put it out with pails dredged from a thirsting well. Then, a week later, greatgrandma fell ill, pale and cold; she couldn't be made to speak. In fact, all of the grandmas were quiet. Perhaps they couldn't tolerate the heat, the pressure of the sky and its perfection. The birds had gone, and people held their breath. When each new morning came, the people of Uffing could not be sure what kind of world they woke up to, nor how far that eerie stillness extended. While they waited for contact with the towns nearby, nothing was certain. But they had the concrete sense, however, that no matter how things had changed, they would be waking up into a world without any crows. END