Free The Gift of Stones by Jim Crace Page A

strands – between his pointing finger and his thumb. He pulled to test its strength – and then he snapped the hairs out from his head. He was surprised how easily they came, how little pain there was. He tried again. Another skein came free. Quite soon he had a nest of hair – and a head that looked chewed up by rats.
    Consider now how hard it was for him to break his cousin’s knife in two, to trap the one half with his toes and strike it with the other. Producing sparks was simple – but they were haywire, shortlived, futile. What he needed was ignition, a spark which had the force and foresight to settle on the nest of hair. To simmer, smoke. To smoulder, flare. To blaze.
    Depending on his mood – and on the age and temperament of his audience – my father would invent new ways of making fire. A firefly came and settled on the hair. A lizard that had flames for breath. A fireball. A fire bird. A glow stone. Even with a pair of friction sticks and the dryest moss we know how hard it is to summon fire. With stone and wind and hair? What chance? The truth is this, that father was just lucky. A spark obliged. A few hairs curled and shivered at the thorn of heat.
    Fire is determined. Once it has a pinch of life, it flourishes, it thrives. The hairs sent up the sour fume of burning flesh, part crab, part cheese, part gall. They smoked and melted, flared and shrank, became one piece of brittle, sticky tar. Their blaze was strong enough for father – his hand unsteady from the cold – to light the wick of a scallop candle from his store of gifts. He lit them all. Their flames winked and guttered in the wind. My father placed one scallop in the pot to save it from the weather. Its flame reflected on the clay and, from the pot’s mouth, released a single watery pillar of light in which my father thawed his hand.
    There were enough dead twigs, damp reeds, dry pith, seed masts, plant waste, bark close by for father to build up a fire with the scallops at its base and the wooden spinning top – his youngest cousin’s treasured toy – at its summit. At first it was all smoke – but the wind took that away and coaxed flames to startle on the twigs. My father was at a loss, he said, to comprehend the depth of pleasure that a fire can give.
    He soon was warm, but not all of him at once. That’s the trouble with an exposed fire – it scorches cheeks and noses while necks and backs and buttocks are left freezing in the night. My father had to turn himself, a chicken on the spit, to make quite sure that he was thawed right through. And then he sat before his fire and sucked the emmer grain and ate the nuts. Their shells were fed into the fire. And while he sat there, making shapes and stories out of flames, the sun came up behind his back. If he was at a loss to comprehend the depth of pleasure that a fire can give, then what could he make of dawn? It dulled the cutting edge of wind. It brought my father’s shivering inhalations to an end. It silenced father’s teeth; the knappers’ conference of stones was suspended for the day. His wattle now had daub. The logan-stone was still.
    My father threw the broken knife and the scorched remains of pot into the ashes of his fire. He wrapped the now-warmed goatskin round his shoulders and set off again upon his travels. He knew the way and climbed up from the valley through the mallows and the brambles – now thickening with promises of leaves and buds – until he reached the high clifftop of bracken. There was no ship upon the sea, just a rosehip sun with fleshy canopies of cloud. Already shags and waterhuggers were flying off for the day’s first fish. Fronds and frost and cobwebs gleamed with dew. Giant slugs were on the path. Rocks steamed.
    Father thought then of his cousins and his uncle’s hut at dawn. It was still dark inside. Grey slates of light squeezed past partitions, curtains, screens, to rest in tapered oblong slabs on walls. If there was movement it was rats or