Bones

Bones. He knew all about bones. He knew about bones in the living because he knew about bones in the dead. He knew about bones in the dead because they were the part that lasted. He helped to make them last. He collected them. He preserved them. There were some who said the body had to be burnt, to let the spirit fly free. He said, the spirit flew free with the last breath that left the body, because the spirit was breath. The baby didn't live until it breathed, until it was slapped and drew in that first great gasping lungful of air, of spirit, that it turned into noise, into self, into self that battled with the world, until it had no more breath, no more spirit. But the weapons with which it battled with the world were its bones.

Two arms, with bone at their centre. Two legs, with bone at their centre. Ten fingers, for cleverness at counting. And the head, where all the thinking went on, and the seeing and the hearing, the smelling and the tasting, all those senses to scout out the world, kept safe in a fortress of bone. And he was the one that kept the bones safe.

He saw how they fitted together, so that if they had come awry in a living person, he knew how to put them back. They said it was magic, or witchcraft, or some strange cunning, but it was only knowledge gained through the eyes and the fingers. They brought him men, women and children, twisted and screaming, unable to walk for pain. He ran his fingers over them. He felt, he pushed, he kneaded, he eased and squeezed, and the pain left them. Not always suddenly. Sometimes only slowly. Sometimes not for ever.

Running over their bodies, piercing through their soft flesh with his sharp mind, his fingers found the subtler pathways of pain, the strings that held the bones together, found them twisted or strained, and he eased and loosened them. Where there was hard and soft together, he knew about the hard and guessed about the soft, and guessed well, because he knew it had to be obedient to the hard.

Sometimes they thought he could heal anything, and he had to explain that it was only the hard to which his will was attuned, that he had no power over the soft insides of men that spilt on to the ground when sharpness opened the sack that contained them. What broke, he could mend. What poured out, he could not gather up again. They cursed him for that, but he knew what he could do, and saw no sense in telling lies. Better be disappointed before than after.

What was liquid terrified him. He had heard tell of men who could make metal run as if it was water, and he did not want to meet them. He did not want to know how gold was made. Let it be hammered into shape, hard on hard. Let flint be chipped, flake by flake, to an edge that could cut anything.

He feared the sea. He feared the idea of it. He could see it, in his mind's eye, washing everything away that he thought of as permanent. Bodies cast into the sea might never return, or if they were found again, then with limbs missing, swallowed for ever, who knew by what. He had a dread of incompleteness.

He had been to the sea once, taken by the king to tend the tribe's workers as they moved a heavy burden of stones mile after mile. He hated its ceaseless, senseless motion. He loved his own landscape, that swirled and curled into great waves and crests and troughs of hills and valleys, like some sea that had long since been frozen so that one could walk on it: a sea turned into stone. He loved his landscape, that was white underneath, like bones. He hated the sea's ceaseless noise. Here, in his landscape, there was the wind through the grasses, rarely if ever still, but when it died down, silence covered the land like a mantle.

That had been one of his tasks, serving the king in the present. But his essential task was to serve the past, to guard all that remained of it. When there were important ceremonies, he made sure the ancestors attended them. If the ancestors needed to be consulted, he was the one who consulted them. The future, he said, was written in the past, and he spent many an hour looking at the bones of the dead, to see if they had shapes or patterns on them that could hint at what was to come.

Those were the times when he set free his imagination, like an animal that was only partly trained, whose strength and fury you needed to help you in your fight, but of whom you were not sure if it would return to you when you called, nor even always whether it would not turn on you, its master, and rend you instead of the enemy. Imagination: strong, but dangerous. Best confined by bone.

There were others like himself, he knew, who did not keep their imaginations under such tight control, who wandered through the World beyond the World without any guide, without, as he thought of it, any weapons. Sometimes, he knew, they did not return to their bodies, that sat, staring and slavering, for a few weeks longer in their fetid huts, until decay that overtakes all things overtook them too, and the tribe tossed a lighted brand into the dry sticks and heather to purify the place.

That fire, he knew, did not always take all the bone, and at night, when all others avoided the place, he would sift the ashes for a little talisman belonging to these foolhardy venturers, a little piece of solid, perhaps charred, magic, to add to his collection. Bones were power. The more, the better. When his tribe conquered another, or overran some settlement, the bones of their ancestors were added to his tribe's store, though never mixed indiscriminately. More power in the other world. More ghost warriors, should the need arise. More past, to give more future.

By the same token, he had to guard his collection against marauders ' not always whole tribes, but single individuals who roamed and did magic, or promised to do magic, and needed the impressive tools of their trade that were hard to come by. When he felt the need, he would set up the fence of lighted skulls. Not that he was such a fool as to use real skulls for the purpose. They were far too valuable, and could be damaged, or stolen when the tallow-dip died, or was blown out by a rogue gust of wind.

Anything that was round and could be hollowed out served the purpose. If he found a friendly potter about to fire his kiln, he would persuade him to make a few: an ordinary pot, with holes for eyes, nose and mouth was quite enough, with a tallow-dip inside. At once, the barrow was guarded by a ring of severed heads with fiery eyes and flaming breath, and only the morning's grey showed the deception.

Oh yes, skulls were powerful ' powerful, but dangerous. When he needed to dream, and walk in the World beyond the World, he tried to avoid using skulls. Arm-bones, leg-bones, amulets made of teeth or small vertebrae ' animal bones, for instance ' these were all good guides, that gave strength, and a little bit of shape and character to the wandering spirit. Skulls had too much of their owner about them. If you weren't careful, you could end up seeing things through their eyes, and that was most definitely not what was wanted. So he would set himself to sleep holding one or two bones, perhaps crossed in his arms, like sceptres, and be ready to recall his dreams.

But his recent dreams, though vivid, for the men whose bones had been his guides had been warriors and had died in battle, had not prepared him for what had happened today.

A king, down by the southern sea-coast, had sent a great gift to his king here, the king who controlled the great temple. Gifts, he thought, like axes, are generally double-edged. They show the wealth of the giver, when they are meant to show the power of the receiver. He had hovered on the edge of the nobles' circle, and heard the conversation at the handing-over. The king had been genuinely amazed at the size of what he was being given, and had seen it as a mighty sign of how much the sea-coast-king valued him, but when he protested, in all politeness, the emissary from the sea had said there was a cliff in his master's land where such treasures lay around for the taking, where they tumbled on one's head by accident, and many more were taken by the sea than found their way into the king's collection. The man's boastfulness and lack of subtlety had appalled him. Had he not seen that he was making the gift completely worthless?

Apparently not, for he had continued the forms of submission, and was even now discussing with the king and his nobles issues of territory and access and trade. A matter of give and take. A soft, yielding business. Not something for the man who dealt with bones.

It was his job to make sense of the gift. To feel what luck it brought, good or bad. To see how it might be used. He took it in his hands and turned it over and over, shuddering as he did so. The shudder was not at the unknown. It was all too obvious what this bone was: a lower jaw, set with teeth three finger-breadths high that ran in a line three times the height of his own head from neck to crown. That was not all: the jaw was broken, and had not yet reached its pivot-point. Who knew how much more toothless power there was still to discover? Stuck, no doubt, in the sea-king's cliff, ready to tumble on a passer-by's luckless head, for no especial reason.

Down by the sea, this would be commonplace. Here it was valuable. He had a place for valuable things, where they were safe. But he did not think it would be wise to go there now. The emissary had travelled with a group of warriors, and they had given their protection, as was the custom, to other lone travellers, fearful of being robbed, who even now were spreading about the camp, hawking their wares, selling their services. He did not approve of this kind of thing, nor, he was certain, did his king. Who knew what kind of people you were letting in? Yet, to have protested, or subjected them to questioning or a search would have been churlish and offended the emissary who had brought this ' threat. That was what it was, he had decided. Not a gift, but an insult. A warning. A menace. But one that he had to protect. No time now for all his precautions. Glowing skulls in the middle of a camp fooled no one. They had to be out in the Lands of the Dead, around the barrows.

For want of anything better, he lay down to sleep in the Hut of Royal Divination with the immense bone cradled in his arms.

The landscape steamed around him. Gigantic ferns waved over his head. The earth trembled with the tread of giant creatures running in herds, squealing and screaming as other creatures with enormous jaws bit and ripped them. Dragons, huge lizards, like centipedes and earwigs writ hideously large, scaly hides, great bright eyes gazed down at him, teeth, teeth, teeth, and in the air birds with vast leathery bat-like wings and beaks like daggers. He screamed and screamed and screamed until he had lost count of the number of times. Finally, he sat up sweating and breathing as hard as if he had been running for his life, which, in his dream, he had.

No one had come to see what was happening. It was the Royal Divination Hut. Whatever went on in here was meant to happen. If the diviner did not survive, then it was for others to interpret. He sat, recovering his breath, and looking at the remnants of the fire. Under the feathery wood ash, there was life. He blew on it, giving it some of his spirit, and embers began to glow through the grey and white. There was, he thought, a current of air in the hut that he had not noticed before. Had something, or someone, made their way through the walls, that were, after all, only withies covered in turf? He pulled some dried herbs from a pouch at his belt and cast them on to the embers where they spat and smoked. As he did so, he held his breath and closed his eyes. He heard a cough behind him, and turned at once, raising the mighty jaw in both his hands, with the teeth pointing downwards.

If the man had not been concentrating on trying to kill him first, despite the fact that his eyes were watering and he could not see properly, then, by putting his hands and arms above his head he might have saved himself, at least in the first instance, at the cost no doubt of a broken bone or two. But as it was, several of the large teeth penetrated his skull with a satisfying crunch, and he pitched forward without any meaningful sound, stone dead.

The face, glimpsed for a moment, had been familiar: a shifty trader he had seen before, who had tried to sell him curios robbed from other tribes' barrows, and had indeed come with the emissary's party, though not, he assumed, really part of it.

Taking care not to dislodge the jawbone from its firmly embedded place in the dead man's skull, he dragged the body away from the narrow hole the intruder had made in the hut wall toward the entrance, and pushed it so that it lay half in and half out of the hut, clearly visible to passers-by.

He was pleased by the effect. He had transformed the gift into a real and public statement about his own king and himself: bone wins. He had made the strange jawbone with its frightful visions into his own thing, by using it as a weapon. It had served him and was bound to him, having fulfilled his purpose and not its own.

Moreover, when the birds and the worms and time in general had done their work, he would have a real skull lantern to use, with holes in the top to send light defiantly up into the sky, as a gesture to the world of spirit from the world of bone.

Written from 9.20 pm to 11.30 pm, July 25th 2006

For those who want to know where things come from, I have had a deep relationship with West Kennet Long Barrow near Avebury since the early 1970s, and as a resident of Wessex for 34 years its prehistoric monuments hold a more than intellectual fascination for me.