The Gift of Stones Read Free Page B

shallow the fracture would surface too soon. The knife blade would be shorter than a thumb. It would be chisel-shaped. Or, if the impact were a feather’s breadth too deep, the fracture would plunge so that its blade end curved in a lumpy hook, a talon, a beak, a keel. Who’d want a poisoned arm removed with that?
    For Leaf himself there was no tension. He knew what to do. He’d done it many times. One blow and the blade blank broke loose, spiralled for an instant on the anvil and fell into the apron on Leaf’s lap. There, on its underside at the point of impact, was the distinctive raised tump of stone, like a tiny bulb or a winkle shell. Beyond, in the foothills of the tump, the flint feathered and radiated like a slow tide on a flat beach. It was a good, long blade, still warm from the fire.
    Once again Leaf and his daughter returned the stone to the flames. Leaf exercised his hands and – half exultant, half impatient – blew out his cheeks to match the working of the bellows. He chose the best tools from his workshop for turning the blank into a finished blade. He sat, with a different, lighter anvil on his knees, to receive the hot stone. Again he worked with antler tines but with no hammer. A little sideways pressure removed the tump, the shell, the bulb. More pressure produced a mounting nest of fine and shallow flakes on the anvil as the blade was patterned and reduced.
    Enough, you say. A boy awaits. The afternoon has almost gone. There is no need to detail the patience and the expertise with which Leaf etched a pattern of shallow facets along the cutting edge, or how the flint’s parallel flaking scars were ground ice-flat with grains of sandstone, or how the stoneworker reconciled his quest for beauty, symmetry, utility with the urgency of his task. If there had been time he would have cut a block of ash and made a handle for such a knife. He would have fixed the blade into the ash with birch resin. It takes two days to harden. He would have worried at the flint until it had lost all resemblance to stone. As it was he simply rubbed the blade in grease, to boast its natural colours and to catch the light, and – picking up a few sharp scraps from the flake nest on his anvil – delivered his newest tool to the crowd who waited at his gate. He was not patient with their flattery. The blade was good, for sure. It’d do the job. But he was aggravated by the thought of what the new knife might have been were there time to finish. It would have been a tool too fine to use. It would have been an ornament.

5
    T HOSE OF US who have kicked an anthill will understand the chaos in the village. The dreaming ants, so used to patterns and to chores, had been sent wild and spirited by the unheralded disorder of the day and by this thin excuse to shout and smile and swagger. In the causeway between the huts and workshops, where normally at that hour in the afternoon there were only hens and children, the crowd was advancing with the amputation knife. Faces, which usually were white with dust and concentration from the shaping of the flint, were flushed and restive and keen to play a part. Voices were high and unrestrained. There were wars of jostling and of tripping in that crowd. It was as if the sober stoneys were all drunk and far too blithe to care exactly what it was that brought them there but only glad to be involved.
    There was a mood of unexpected celebration, too – not because the wounded boy – my father – was considered careless, indolent, untrustworthy, the sort who only had himself to blame for any ill-luck in his life, but because their rigid working day had been disrupted by the horsemen, by the making of the knife, by the prospect of a bloody afternoon.
    Who would carry out the operation? There were no volunteers. There was no man or woman among the villagers who could boast experience in such matters. And there was no time to fetch some expert from the outside world, some butcher-herbalist or adept