When the girl knocks on a door…

When the girl knocks on a door now and the door opens people see a vagabond and a thief. As soon as they see her they know they don’t know her.

There’s a lot of being looked at like she’s a liar and Egyptian, the occasional milk or porridge or egg given at the door, mostly out of fear.

There’s a lot of closing doors, a lot of people trying to steal her tools from her, but only one time when a man tries to steal the bird and it only takes that chase and escape for the bird not to sit on her shoulder any more when she’s anywhere near the world of people and to start travelling separate instead, alongside her, at a distance, catching her up when she settles in whichever hedge or hole in the ground they’ll sleep in that night.

If anyone approaches them when they do find somewhere they can get some rest, the bird wakes her to warn her with its what what what coming through its chest and into hers.

But the world with people in it is a kind of filth compared to this afterlife she did not actually need to die to find.

So as long as there’s something to eat and it’s not yet autumn, or cold, she’s not yet a person in need of a welcome near or from people.

—

One day there’s a fair happening in the town the girl is passing. There will be a lot of food around on the ground. Drunk people have no idea what they’re eating or not eating.

People have gathered round a platform to watch the juggler. The juggler is a woman dressed like a sailor and she is throwing knives in the air and then catching them and throwing them again, all without cutting herself. Eight knives. As she catches the eighth, takes a bow and rises from it with the eight blades fanned in her hand, the juggler-sailor, who must have seen her approaching over the field and seen the bird fly off her and away, points at the girl and says,

now this fine bird-girl will sing her song. Won’t you my darling?

I do know a song, the girl says.

She gets up on the platform.

She sings what Jack Shaklock taught her about the blacksmith and men’s deceit. When she’s sung its last line about living for ever the people round the platform roar. They start throwing coins. She picks one up off the planks and looks at it. She’d forgotten about coins. She hasn’t seen or held a coin since they dumped her in the ditch.

Sing it again! the people are shouting.

The juggler gets back on the platform and stands beside her, takes her hand, makes her bow like they’re working together. Then the juggler tells the people watching to bring this juggler anything they choose, anything at all, and after the bird-girl sings to them one more time, whatever it is they’ve brought her she’ll juggle with it.

A woman holds out her baby. Juggle with this!

In twenty years’ time I will, the juggler calls back.

When the laughter dies down the girl sings the song again. Even more people come. They sing the parts they know. At the end they throw more money at her.

Sing another!

I don’t know another.

At the front of the platform there’s the pile of things the people have brought for the juggler to juggle: a broken pot, a spoon, a broken piece of scythe. A ball made of rags, a rusted key, the handle from a churn, a wheel, a bucket. As she gets down after her song the girl takes the broken scythe piece and weighs it in her hands.

I want this, she says to the juggler. If no one else wants it or its owner doesn’t want it back.

It’d take skill to keep just four of those things, never mind all of them, all their different shapes and weights completely new to her hands in the air like that and in a rhythm that stays steady against the oddness of the pieces.

Never mind the dipping down to pick up and toss a new piece in the air with all the other pieces still above her in their rising falling arc.

This juggler would keep a good forge, the girl thinks.

I kept you your blade, the juggler says with her arm round the girl’s shoulder after the juggling. We’ll go and eat some of our money, come on, Strange News, I’ll carry you.

It’s because of the words in the song she sang. Strange news is come to town. Strange news is carried. Strange news flies up and down. The girl

doesn’t sleep with the bird that night. She sleeps in a pub leaning on the juggler whose arms and wrists and hands, she sees, are all scars and weals from the sharpness of the throwing-knives, and with others leaning on her.

It is like when the bird is with its own kind.

The next morning the traveller players wake early and are on the road early because there’ll be trouble otherwise.

The juggler says,

come and do the fairs with us for the rest of the summer. You’ll win them every time, singing like that. I know songs. I can tell you the words for them. You could make enough to pay through winter.

It’s far from winter right now. The girl knows this’ll pass as fast as the sparks off metal do. But when she comes out of the pub door into the light with the others she sees something moving in the high teasel across the road and it’s the bird.

We have a new story to play to people, the juggler says. Come and be a boy player. You could play a girl who goes mad at her father’s murder and gives people different herbs and tells them what they mean.

Then what happens? the girl says.

Then she drowns herself, the juggler says.

The girl laughs.

I’m not that, she says.

You can be it and still be you, the juggler says. We’ll teach you.

The girl promises to meet them further up the road. She waves her hand when they reach the bend in the path. But as soon as she turns away she’s on her own path.

She’s going to mend this scythe. Then it will be worth a lot more and she’ll sell it.

Then she’ll find the bird, hide the coins she’ll make today with the ones from yesterday somewhere for the winter. Then it’s back to the moors where the bird needs to be.

She asks a woman slapping washing against a stone which direction to take for the smithy.

She walks to the edge of the town though there’s no smoke visible.

The forge isn’t even lit.

It’s well past six!

So she crawls through a window at the back of the place, a small window but she’s thinner than it, and lights it with moss and sticks and her

firestones. She looks for the place this smith keeps the offcuts. She sorts through the pieces. Her hands are happy to be back in the heat and they do the work without her even having to ask them.

Furious! He comes running at noon, she can hear him coming through her own hammer music. He crashes through the doors with his hand raised and a piece of iron in it to hit a thief and usurper with.

Then he sees her.

Small girl.

He stops.

He takes the piece she’s working from her. He examines the place where the old blade meets the new-made blade. Then he looks at her again.

Are you the horse-healer? he says. From Shaklocks?

What if I am? she says.

They said you were dead, he says.

I’m not that, she says. I’m living in happy vagabundance, though occasionally hungry and cold.

She can see from his face he is not a man who likes these words. Not every smith is a Shaklock.

Perhaps he lost horses to Shaklocks because of her.

Too known is much worse in some places than not known. Now they’ll learn in her town that she’s still alive and those men who thought they’d killed her will come to try to do it again.

The smith makes her take off his apron. He takes her by the shoulders to a door in a tall house in the heart of the town. They wait while the locks get unlocked one after the other all the way from the top of the door to the foot.

You’re with the travelling players, the overseer says. You sang the strange news.

He looks haggard, like he’s drunk and was a moment ago still asleep.

Then she recognizes him from the fair.

He’s the man who gave her a small coin and expected her to fornicate.

She’d looked at the coin in her hand then held out her other hand as if to take his. He’d put his hand out and she’d taken the hand, turned its palm upward, opened it and put the coin he’d handed her back into it. She’d closed his fingers round it and told him she wasn’t for sale.

Fuck you to hell then, the man (she now knows is the overseer) had said. Rather fuck anyone or anything in hell than you, she’d said and the

juggler and her travelling friends had closed a circle round the girl and laughed him off.

It turns out, the overseer says to the smith now over the girl’s head, that the travellers this girl is with are wanted for several kinds of sedition.

It turns out they’ve been inciting trouble and violence telling people about the poor law being a law to keep people poor. There was nearly a riot in the market square of the workers from the farms grumbling about what they’re paid, or at least the ones who didn’t get drunk enough or fucked enough were grumbling, no one fucked enough or drunk enough cared so much.

Fucked enough.

The girl knows she’s in trouble.

She’s one of their tribe, the overseer says.

No, she’s no itinerant, the smith says. She’s trained as a brother. She knows the skills.

I’m not from a tribe, she says. I met them yesterday, and by chance, and they were kind to me. And I can tell you both myself what the tale-teller said last night verbatim.

Verbatim’s not a word they expect from her. They both stare at her like she’s shocking.

And how well and persuasive, she says, and how angry any people will be about it here today whose power has been questioned by what truths he spoke.

The man she is calling eloquent, the juggler’s friend, the tale-teller of the players, had been dressed in the women’s clothes still, in which he’d been playing the story to the crowds at the fair about the woman who travels across a river to try to wake the spirit of a dead child she’s heard is buried there.

In this story a woman is looking for her own dead child. She is so desperate to find him that she crosses the country from side to side raising the spirits of all the dead and gone children to see if any of them is her boy.

She’s not yet found him. She’s near mad with the looking and not finding.

But the children’s spirits when she raises them have soared into the sky crying their thank-yous down to her like birds.

The man on the platform became a woman beating a stick on flat beaten bronze. The spirit of the child will rise to the sound of the beating.

The woman crosses a river on a boat with a ferryman and a holy man, both

of whom fear this woman is mad, to a place where a child is under the ground. This time it is her child.

It nearly kills her to see him rise up dead out of the ground.

But the child doesn’t stop rising, he rises and rises into the air and floats there like a sun above everything.

The people at the fair had gone wild for this story. They’d lost a lot in the plague year. They cried at the end and stamped their feet. They followed the travellers to the pub afterwards, caught up in the story like something had melted all their bodies into one body.

At the pub the tale-teller stood on a table still in the woman’s clothes and he spoke to the people there with words coming through him as naturally as water from a source. Your wages are low on purpose so that you can’t prosper from working. It’s prosperous for some people to keep other people starving. You make them rich by it. But what if you withheld your work so that the people you work for could learn the work’s worth?

And why is it a crime for you or me to want to move from one place to another place? And why is it a crime to have nothing? These aren’t crimes, he said, and this isn’t a story in which we can live freely.

Now, next day in the overseer’s hall, the smith is looking at his feet and the overseer is looking at the girl and listing the letters over her head with which she can be burned.

For sedition. Roguery. Vagrancy. Affray.

But look, the smith says.

He goes over to the table where the overseer’s servant has placed everything belonging to the girl, her tools, her money. He picks up the scythe blade and presents it to the overseer, points to the mended places on it. The overseer comes to the table and flicks his hands around the girl’s things. He picks up the hammer and weighs it. He takes it, the pincers and the firestones and holds them out to the smith like he wants the smith to take them in his hands, which the smith does. The smith holds the girl’s things, looks at them like he doesn’t know what to do with them.

The overseer picks up the mended scythe, puts it down behind the woodpile next to the fire. He’s keeping it.

The girl can see now that her money’s also gone from the table.

She doesn’t care. She knows other worlds.

The tools were stolen from you, the overseer says. She’s a thief too.

No, the smith says. They’re her tools. They belong to her.

They’re yours now, the overseer tells him.

The smith puts the things in his hands down on the floor. He steps back from them.

Take them, the overseer says.

You should, the girl says to the smith. Someone should get the use of them.

The smith shoots the girl a shamed look. She gives a slight shake of her head.

Worse things happen.

—

The overseer keeps her in a cellar for three days. But he doesn’t dare touch her.

Good.

After three days in the dark he has her thrown by his manservant into the back of an open cart and delivered all the miles back to her old place to be dealt with. It’s the law. Many of the people here look amazed she’s still alive when they see her driven through the place sitting up rope-tied in the back of the cart. She’s meant to be dead.

Word goes round that she’s a kind of risen avenging saint-child.

Something like that can go either way for her.

Also, she speaks too much for a woman. She’s been trained in the ways of men, which is a ruination. She’s a discord bringer. Rumour says she walks about in the world with a bird on her shoulder, which gives rise to a lot of devilry rubbish.

But while she’s locked in the back room of the bakery, which is where they hold the people waiting for judgement to be passed and announced, the baker’s daughter brings her plenty of things to eat. Other people bring gifts for her and pass them anonymously under the gap at the bottom of the locked back door. The lock would be piss-easy to pick. But what’d be the point? Flowers, one at a time, come under the door through the gap. Wool clothing and blanketing, flattened and persuaded through.

Blinded is another thing she can be, if they want, by them holding a hot brand near her eyes.

That woman there, she thinks as she’s led through the crowd to the judgement, I hammered out her man’s pain in his back with my hands when

she brought him to the forge. I helped them over there too with the child who had the sick legs, I was bringing him the cooling water for half a year and look, he’s nearly as grown as me now and looking pretty strong.

She knows the hoof of every horse, knows the horses by sight, still, and maybe the men at the Shaklock smithy now are less good with these people’s horses’ feet.

She is this town’s good worth, lost.

That can go either way for her too.

Then they read the judgement:

and she isn’t to be sent for witch trial thank God. So she won’t be hanged or tied to a stake and set fire to.

She isn’t to be sent to the tobacco fields. Thank St Eloi.

All that happens is she’s locked in the stocks for one day and night.

In the stocks she’s abused by no one, not even the drunks, because people don’t want to anger a risen avenging saint-child.

Then she’s pulled to her feet and taken, before noon next day, which is market day, and bound at the wrists in front of the crowd with thin iron bands made by Ann Shaklock and burned at the collarbone by the overseer’s son with the V of a brand she knows as soon as she sees it is the one she made herself.

The overseer’s son looks grim as he does it.

A lot of women in the crowd turn to look away when he does, which is a sign of public disagreement.

There’s no general cheering and laughing, which there usually is at such entertainments.

This visible dissent means she knows now to get herself out of here as fast as she can or she’ll be bound to get the blame for something she isn’t to blame for, so they can do this all again with proper enjoyment as a taking of revenge on not being able to enjoy it enough the first time or having been made to feel bad about it happening at all.

When they free her hands she takes her burn straight to the well. But it hurts too much to reach over to pull up the water.

Three girls push through the crowd to help her. She lies down flat on her back on the ground and tells them what to do.

One pulls the bucket up and pours the water into the pots. While the others pour the water on the burn the first pulls more water up to fill the emptied pots again.

One of the girls is Christine Gross.

This is my cousin, Christine Gross says pointing to the girl hanging much of herself over the side of the well to drop the bucket. And this is my sister.

Christine Gross and her sister sit with her on the wet ground in the spilled and spilling water and pour water on the burn until after the people go home and the overseer’s men come to move them on. They go to the Gross farm. But Christine Gross’s father says she’s a witch and she can’t come into the house.

Christine Gross takes her to the stable instead where the horses know her, they nod to her, they should, she’s helped shoe them seasonally every year of near half her life. Christine Gross slices the onions and places the pieces on the burnt place. She and her sister and cousin sit with the girl under the legs of the grey horse Thunderclap and teach her, until they’re forced to go back into the house, the words of the song about the burning of that town to ash back in history nearly twenty years ago long before any of them was alive.

She leaves as soon as the light’s up. She finds a cloth with two pies and seven apples tied inside it waiting for her at the farm gate.

As soon as she gets far enough off the road the bird appears, wings wide, silent, coming towards her under the sky and over the top of the harvest.