Sod's Law
Pip Rippon. The Palm on Palm Street, Walkley. You're buying. You're always buying, and you always pick the stories where I come off worst, and I've stopped pretending I don't know why.
I rent. That's the first thing you need to understand about this one. Digs, a back room in a guest house in Walkley, with a window that doesn't shut and a landlord who comes up the stairs on a Besd'y with a book. I own a bag, a coat, the notebooks, and a spoon I'm fond of. I don't own ground, and until the newshoot just gone I'd have told you that was one of the few things keeping me safe.
Van came in on a Toid'y.
He doesn't knock. He's just sat on the end of the bed when I come in, like he's been there since the building went up. He said the milting were owed. I asked him owed what. Ground, he said. I asked owed by who, and he looked at me the way he looks at a gutter he's deciding whether to step over, and said: by us.
You need to know what the milting are. They're small and they're old, older than the idea of old, with skin so thin over the nose and ears you can see the murklight through it, and teeth like grains of rice. They guard the Hinge. And more than anything in this world or the other, they want land, not to farm or build on, just to have, the way some people want a clock collection. They'll talk you out of it. That's the method. They don't take, they talk, and they talk the way the murk comes in, slowly and then all at once, until you look down and can't find your own feet.
There'd been an arrangement, Van said. Years back. He didn't say how many, and when Van doesn't give a number it's because the number would upset me. He'd needed something off them and he'd got it, and the price had been ground, to be paid later, and later had come round.
I said, well, pay them then.
He laughed, which is not a nice noise when Van does it. The milting, he said, had been trying to get a signature out of him for four hundred years, and he'd never once put his name to so much as a pub slate, and they'd not take ground off him now because they'd never trust it. They'd think it were a trick. (It would be a trick.) They'd take it off me, he said.
I said I rent.
"They doan't care who owns it, Pip. They care who sleeps on it."
So that was the job. Lift a board under my own bed. Scrape up a tin's worth of whatever's down there, clinker and old dust and a century of other lodgers' dropped pins. Bedsod, the milting call it, the ground from under where you sleep, and it's the only coin they'll take off a renter, and they take it gladly. Carry it up to the elder on Rod Moor before murkrise. Tip it in the roots. Say the words. And from then on the square of floor under my bed would belong to the milting, and I'd be sleeping on it by their leave.
I know how that sounds. It sounds like nothing, a bit of dirt in a snoughweed tin, and I thought the same right up until I was on my knees with the board up and my good spoon in my hand and found I didn't want to. Not scared. Just didn't want to. I'd never once thought about that floor as mine in any way the landlord's book would recognise, and it turned out it was, and I only found out because somebody asked me for it.
I filled the tin anyway. Put the board back. Went out at murkfall with the tin in my inside pocket and a head full of thoughts I didn't care for.
Rod Moor. You've not been up. Nobody goes up. You get off at the top of the Rivelin, walk past Hollow Meadows where the last lamps give out, and the road just stops trying and there's the moor. It's flat, is the thing nobody expects. They expect hills, and Rod Moor isn't hills, it's a lid, cotton grass and rush and old wall lines going nowhere, with the murk sat on it at knee height like it's been poured and left to set. The hivemind gives up about where the road does. Past Hollow Meadows my head went quiet, the chatter thinning to the odd advert for biofeed and then nothing at all, and I'll tell you, murker, you don't know how loud the city is in you until it stops.
There's a farmstead in the middle. Was a farmstead. The maps don't name it and I won't. Four walls down to waist height and one gable end still stood, and out of what used to be the kitchen hearth grows an elder, a big one, bigger than elders are meant to get, black against the murk and leaning, with that smell coming off it that elders have. Sweet and a bit off. Like a cake someone's forgotten in a drawer since Windstrom.
You'll know the milting are frightened of elders and drawn to them, both at once. It sounds like folklore until you watch one stand under an elder, shaking, and not leave.
I set off across the flat toward the gable end about an hour after murkfall, and I'd gone maybe two hundred yards when the peewhits started.
It was newshoot, which I should have thought about and didn't. Rod Moor is peewhit ground. They nest right out on the open in scrapes you could fit a boot in, and you can't see the scrapes, and in the murk you can't see the birds either until they're on you.
You hear the call first. That rising, wheeling pee-whit, which off-worlders find charming. On Rod Moor at murkneet it means you've walked into somebody's nursery and they've noticed.
The first one came out of nothing. I heard the wings fold, a sharp little tuck of air, and then something went over the top of my head like a thrown slate. That's the spur. There's a spur on the wrist of a peewhit's wing, hooked like a rose thorn, and the field guides leave it out because the field guides are about a different bird. It opened my scalp from the crown to above the ear. Not deep, but scalps bleed like they're on piece rates, and by the time I'd got a hand up there was blood in my eye.
I did the right thing, and I want that noted. The field note says keep walking in a straight line away from the nest, so I did. The trouble was that the straight line away from that nest ran into the next nest, and the one after, because the whole moor is nests, and I was walking at the elder because the elder was where I had to be, and every peewhit on Rod Moor had decided I was after the eggs.
They don't give up. They follow you, a quarter mile some of them, down and pull out and up and wheel and down again, and each time you get the call and then the tuck and about one breath to get an arm over your head. I went down on one knee twice. I put my hand in a scrape once by accident and felt the eggs, warm, warmer than eggs have any business being on a moor in the murk, and ticking faintly against my palm like a watch left in a coat, and I've never moved a hand faster.
And the tin, the whole way. I kept touching it. I'd catch myself thinking, if it went out of my pocket in all this, well, nobody could say I hadn't tried. Then I'd think about what Van would say, and stop.
I got to the wall with blood down one side of my face and my coat torn at the shoulder and the peewhits finally going up and off behind me, calling it quits, and I stood with my back to the stone getting my breath. That's when I heard the barking.
A sly, on the far side of the ruin. And it didn't stop.
You know foxes. A sly barks, it's a contact call, a scream that'll have half a street out of bed thinking someone's being murdered two gardens over, and then it moves on, because a sly never uses the same route twice. One bark means nothing. What you worry about is a bark that goes on and on from one spot, past where any sensible animal would've left. Something's cornered it, or it's cornered something, and it hasn't decided which.
This one had been going the whole time I was crossing, under the peewhits.
I went round the gable end low and slow, and I saw her. A vixen, stood square in the hearth-gap at the foot of the elder with her hackles up and her mouth open, screaming. Behind her in the roots was a den, the dark of the hole and two little pinpricks of eye in it. And stood in a ring round the elder at about ten paces, not coming closer and not going away, were the milting.
Seven. I counted. It seemed important.
They were milling, which is where the name comes from, I'm told, and it's a daft name and exactly the right one. They shuffled and swapped places and talked in low voices all at once, like a parish committee that's lost the minutes. Every time one of them took a step toward the elder the vixen screamed at it and it stepped back, and then another one tried, and she screamed again. She was holding them off her den. They couldn't bring themselves to leave the elder. By the sound of it they'd been at it for hours.
I'd love to tell you I had a plan. I stood there bleeding, holding a tin of my own floor, and what I thought was: I have to get to those roots and that fox is stood on them.
The milting saw me before the vixen did. All seven heads came round together and the murklight came through their ears. The one at the front, the oldest, if you can call one of them older than another, looked at me, and looked at my pocket, and smiled with all those little rice teeth.
"Tha's brought it."
I said I had.
"All on it?"
I said it was a tin. "A tin o' bedsod's a start," it said. "I's milting, murker. We've 'ad this ground afore. We'll 'ave it again."
And then they started talking.
I can't give you all of it, and the bits I remember I don't trust. They talked about when the moor was sea, and about the farm that stood here and how they'd come by it in the end, which was talk, it was always talk. Then they talked about Walkley. They knew my street. They knew the guest house. They knew my landlord's name, and his father's, and they said, gently, that his claim on that building was a lot weaker than he thought. There was a question over the deeds, going back a way. Somebody who slept there, somebody with a small claim of their own, might be well placed to sort that out. With a bit of help.
And I was nodding.
That's what I'm ashamed of. Stood on Rod Moor with blood drying on my cheek, nodding along while seven old things explained how easy it would be to hand them the whole building, and after that the street, and each next bit sounded like the obvious end of the bit before, the way the stairs in a dream keep going.
It was the vixen stopped it. She screamed right through whatever the old one was saying and it was like being slapped with a wet cloth. I looked at her. She was stood on her den, on her bit of ground, and she wasn't giving an inch of it to anybody. And I thought, I brought a tin. I'm giving them a tin.
Getting past her was the worst of it and it wasn't dramatic. You can't fight a sly on its den, not properly, not without being somebody I don't want to be. So I went down on my knees, slow, and crawled, face turned away, with the tin held out in front of me low to the ground so she could see it wasn't a hand. She screamed at me from three feet off, the loudest thing I've ever heard, and I kept going. She went for my wrist once and got the cuff of the coat and not the arm. And then, I don't know why, she stepped back onto the den and let me put the tin down at the roots, off to one side of her hole.
I think she understood I wasn't after her ground. I think she knew exactly what I was doing and that it was nothing to do with her. I think that. I don't know it.
I opened the tin and poured the bedsod in among the roots, clinker and dust and a century of pins, and I said the words Van gave me. I won't repeat them in here. They're nothing special, more or less what you'd say handing someone the keys.
And something went.
You know when you're going downstairs in the dark and there's one less step than you counted? That, inside. Some bit of me I hadn't known was holding on to anything let go, and there was a gap, and the gap's still there. I checked it on the way in tonight, the way you tongue a missing tooth.
The milting didn't cheer, or thank me. They stopped milling, all seven at once. Then the old one nodded, once, and they turned and went off into the murk, not in a line and not together, like people leaving a meeting that's gone on too long.
The vixen stopped barking. First time in hours, it must have been. The quiet came down over the ruin like a lid on a pan, and under it I could hear the kits shifting in the den.
The peewhits had me twice more before Hollow Meadows on the way back at murkrise, which I took personally. I got home. Went up the stairs. Stood in the doorway of my room and looked at the bed, and couldn't get in it.
I've tried every murkneet since. I lie down and I know, in my back and in my teeth, that the square of floor under me isn't mine. Nobody's said anything. But I'm on it by leave, and I don't know the terms, and I wouldn't know who to ask if I did.
So I sleep in the chair by the window that doesn't shut.
Van thinks it's hilarious. Van says I've gone up in the world, I've two landlords now. The one with the book comes on a Besd'y.
I don't know when the other lot collect, and I've a feeling that's the point, or part of it, and that's what keeps me in the chair.
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