A Single Stone (2 page)

As she twisted through the opening, she allowed herself to hope. They had been four days without a harvest, returning to the village with empty pouches. But surely today would be different? The signs were stronger now, the stain spreading through the rock like sinew. Soon enough it would appear – the soft blue glow with which the earth revealed its secrets. She would come to a stop and press her back against the stone, letting the others fall in beside her.

They would strike their lights, bring forth their blades, perform their slow, methodical work. Perhaps they would rest awhile – eat a mouthful of leathery meat, take a drink from their flasks. Then offer their murmurs of gratitude and turn for home. To the village that nestled, like all else in the valley, in the mountain’s vast shadow. As they approached through the fields, people would rise to greet them, eager for news. Glances would fall upon their pouches, hopeful, expectant.

But none would ask. It was to the Mothers that Jena would deliver the harvest. To the dark room in the back of the Stores where it would be weighed and measured into rough hemp bags. Mother Berta would make her spidery notes in the ledgers, thin fingers running down one column after another. This much for a baker, that much for a carpenter; two scoops for this family, one for the next. To each according to their service – and their worth.

The thought was a comfort. That quiet room. A bountiful harvest. Berta at her desk in the pale blue light, approval shining in her eyes.

If the rock allows it.

The words echoed in Jena’s mind, natural as breathing. It was the mountain that would decide. In this, as in all things.

The bones sat smooth and cool in her palm. Her fingers curled about them as if they were a treasure, something she might keep – or take back to the village and sink in the graveyard beside her many sisters.

No. She let her fingers fall back like a flower opening. Whoever it was, let her rest here. Was it not, for a tunneller, a fitting place to lie – folded into the mountain, her bones crumbling eventually to become one with the stone?

In the dim light, Jena watched her shadow flash across the rock. She set the bones to one side, then eased her way through the narrowing hole.

Somewhere secret, Lia has her back to stone.

It is a secret because she should not be inside the mountain. It is a secret from Father and Mother and from everyone else too. No one is supposed to come here but she cannot resist. Not since the very moment she found this place. What was it that made her look up that day? The shadow of a bird? Some unexpected shift in the light?

It is years ago now. She doesn’t remember. What she does recall is the sudden thrill of surprise. It was almost nothing, and that was the charm of it. A sliver in the rock face, nearly – but not quite – concealed behind bushes. It was so unlike the other gaping wounds in the mountain’s side, the great caverns people had hollowed out all those years ago.

Those are the spaces Father has told her to avoid and she does so gladly. There is a violence to them, a wrongness – the jagged rock like torn flesh that has solidified.

But this place is different. It is like a slot that has opened to receive her. The stone walls fit snugly about her, in a kind of embrace.

This is a way in, just for her. Even if she were not forbidden to come here, she would not tell anyone. The other girls are friendly enough but they are different somehow. They are not the kind of girls who want to explore and find out, who want to follow paths and passages and ideas to their distant ends. If Lia showed them this place, they would wrinkle their noses and say she was strange.

Nothing about this feels wrong or strange. If there is anything odd, it is that it feels familiar – a return to a place Lia has never been. After the first time she came in, her limbs buzzed for days with something she could not explain.

She has been here many times since, has sat for hours inside the stony walls, has clambered and crawled through their endless forbidden crevices. Sometimes a flash of bluestone catches her eye and she turns her lamp’s flame to the wall, trailing her fingers across the flaking surface. People split the mountain open for this once but there is no need for that now. The plain that sweeps down to the sea is studded with it. It lies in rich, open veins right there on the ground.

Lia smiles at the thought. She reaches for the bracelet at her wrist and rubs the smooth blue bauble between her fingers. It is the first present Father and Mother ever gave her; she will never take it off.

She sighs as she leans against the curve of the stone. People say the mountain is dangerous, that the stone is unstable and can move without warning. It did so once, many grandfathers ago, exploding and collapsing in a calamity of tumbling rock. Though none among Lia’s ancestors saw it, the aftermath was clear enough. When they landed upon the shore, they saw the fresh scars upon the land, the gaping holes scoring the earth. And they knew that the wall of water that had taken their own tiny island, sweeping them into fragile boats on the wild sea, had visited here too.

But it was land at least. This place was bigger and the waters had drawn back, leaving it high and dry, livable. Their home was gone but here was somewhere to begin again.

Lia cannot imagine the mountain behaving in such a way. It is not, she thinks, in its nature. The stone walls around her feel solid, an immovable mass, unbreachable by any force she can conjure in her imaginings.

She sets one hand upon the rock. It is cold and warm all at once. It is solid. It is always.

You mustn’t go there
, people say.
It is treacherous.

And yet, it feels nothing like that. It feels like opening the door on a winter night, stepping across the threshold to a waiting hearth.

It feels like coming home.

First there was light. The darkness eddied around Jena, then receded.

There was sky up ahead, the faintest smudge of blue. A wisp of white drifted past. Cloud. Autumn breeze. The promise of outside.

She crawled towards it. Because they had a harvest and this was what came next.
Make the harvest. Find the light.

It was close now, the tunnel sloping upwards as it approached the opening in the mountain’s flank through which they had entered shortly after dawn. Where stone ended and sky began, there was a narrow lip, a ledge that sat between the two like a shelf. There was headroom here, and more. Jena loosened the knot at her belt and then patted herself down, sweeping small stones and dirt from her hair and clothes. Perhaps it was silly but it felt like something, a gesture – to do what you could, to leave what belonged here to the mountain. A trade, of sorts, for what they had been given.

When she had finished, she squeezed her eyes tightly shut. This too was a habit she had acquired over the years – closing her eyes as she emerged so she would be out suddenly rather than gradually. So it felt less like a choice and more like something already done, to which she must simply adapt. She felt her way forwards and brought her legs around, swinging them over the rim of the ledge.

When she opened her eyes, the sheer walls towered above and all around. She was at a slight overhang; a few feet below the lip of the rock, the mountain sloped down into the clotting dark of the forest.

Even as Jena had led the others up here this morning, she had known they would have to be careful going back down. The slope was steep and the surface was an unsteady scree of rounded stones, any one of which could easily turn an ankle. She moved forwards a little further. Her legs swung freely at first, dangling out into space. Then she hooked her knees over the ledge and shuffled to the side, making room for the girl behind.

“Oh! You can see everything.”

Min.
The name came to Jena as if something had clicked into place inside her head.
A first daughter
, Mother Berta had said. A first daughter, but a sixth child. Jena winced, thinking of the hunger, the cold. The weight of a whole family on those fragile shoulders.

Min edged into the opening, craning to see. It had barely been light when they came in and in any case a girl on her first harvest would have had more important things on her mind than the view.

She squinted in the light, swivelling left, then right. “It’s so different from up here.”

Jena followed Min’s gaze across the treetops. The whole world was laid out before them. On the far side, the village nestled in a sheltered corner, bordered by rock wall in the north, the fields to the east, and the spreading forest in the south and west. And all of that by the towering ridges of the mountain, the strong stony fingers that encircled the valley, cupping the land in the palm of its hands.

It must have been around midday for there was a wide shaft of sun upon the valley. With the season drawing to a close, there was hardly any heat in it, but the light alone was almost warming. The mountain’s soaring peaks meant the valley had only a few hours of full sunlight each day; each beam felt precious, worth savouring.

There was little movement below, with most of the village and its fields shrouded by the surrounding trees. The tops of the tallest buildings were visible, along with the spindly ventilation pipes that protruded from each house. When the winter snows fell, these would allow them fresh air, at least for a time. They put Jena in mind of the reeds that clustered along the banks of the spring; she couldn’t help imagining creatures hidden below the water, mouths pressed hopefully to the ends.

Although the valley looked peaceful from here, the old wounds were still there. Remnants of the time they called Rockfall were everywhere, ugly outcrops of stone dotting the ground like tumours. There was no way to repair such assaults on the earth – the way the ground had split itself open as if it were being carved by an invisible knife. These things could not be undone but the passage of time had softened the transgressions of the past: the deep green moss coating the low ridges that radiated through the forest from the base of the mountain; the tangle of ivy covering the massive boulders that had shaken loose all those years ago. From here, you could set history aside and see it as nothing but beautiful.

That was, if you didn’t turn towards the Gash, the jagged wound in the mountain’s side where everything had ended. Everyone knew the story of Rockfall. It was a tale that had shaped their lives, whose aftermath they lived every day.

Before Rockfall, their world had been outside. People lived on the plain that sloped away from the mountain, a narrow band of undulating land that lay between it and the edge of the island. Back then, the valley was just a place people came to from elsewhere. Though the ring of mountains formed an almost-closed circle, there had been a way through, a single point where the stony hands tapered down to form a natural passage. Every day, people walked through the place they called the Pass, coming here to pick herbs and berries or trap the landbirds that favoured the shelter of the forest. Or to spread out a blanket and eat lunch in the shade by the spring that bubbled up from the valley floor.

People did other things here too, things that seemed beyond imagining now. Men worked side by side to split open the mountain. They blasted holes big enough to stand in, then swarmed inside with shovels and pickaxes. They hacked at the rock, taking whatever they wanted – some things simply because they were shiny or pleasing to the eye. The mountain’s deepest secrets were shaped into baubles and trinkets; the translucent blue of the mica dotted earlobes and hung in windows.

The Gash was not the only place their ancestors had wronged the mountain, but it was where the rock fought back. Where it finally said
enough
. It opened its throat and swallowed their world, and them with it. Of those digging, only a handful survived. And did so to find themselves trapped, along with everyone else who had come to the valley that day. When the rocks finally stopped falling, the Pass had closed; what had been sheer walls on either side were collapsed upon each other in a tight jumble of stone. Those in the valley were encircled by rock, utterly enclosed, the mountain soaring above and around them, its treasures sealed deep once more, beyond reach.

Mother Berta’s grandson, Luka, said she had a necklace with a mica pendant, a teardrop of luminous blue stone that had been passed down to her. That she kept it in a chest, snug between layers of heavy fabric.

Jena had scoffed when he told her. When the snow grew too deep for chimneys and hopeful reeds, mica was the only fuel the village could safely burn. It was the difference between life and death and there was little enough to spare. None among them would hoard a trinket while others froze.

A shiver ran through her. How terrible that first winter must have been. The Rockfall survivors could not have anticipated how deep the snow would fall – that the mountain’s peaks would act as a funnel, the small valley as a basin, building it up and up, above and around them, the stone walls that ringed their world seeming to intensify the cold. That their choice, snowbound inside their huts, would be between starvation, freezing and suffocation.