The Stone Book Quartet Read Online Free Page A

trampling each other, hundreds pressed in the clay where only a dozen could stand. Mary was in a crowd that could never have been, thronging, as real as she was. Her feet made prints no fresher than theirs.
    And the bull was still dying under the mark, and the one hand still held.
    There was nowhere to run, no one to hear. Mary stood on the Tough Tom and waited. She daren’t jerk the thread to feel Father’s presence; he was so far away that the thread would have broken.
    Then it was over. She knew the great bull on the rock enclosing her, and she knew the mark and the hand. The invisible crowd was not there, and the footprints in the Tough Tom churned motionless.
    She had seen. Now there was the time to go. Mary lifted the thread and made skeins of it as she went past the white dimension, foxbench and malachite to the candle under the fall.
    Father had moved to make room for her.
    ‘Well?’
    ‘I’ve seen,’ said Mary. ‘All of it.’
    ‘You’ve touched the hand?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘I thought you would.’
    They went back to the shaft, and up, and out. The sky seemed a different place. All things led to the bull and the mark and the hand in the cave. Trees were trying to find it with their roots. The rain in the clouds must fall to the ground and into the rock to the Tough Tom.
    ‘That’s put a quietness on you,’ said Father.
    They came over Glaze Hill.
    ‘Why did you set your mark on?’ said Mary.
    ‘I didn’t. It was there when I went.’
    ‘When did you go?’
    ‘When I was about your size. My father took me same as today. We have to go before we’re too big to get past the fall, though I reckon, years back, the road was open; if you knew it was there.’
    ‘When did you go last?’ said Mary.
    ‘We go just once,’ said Father. ‘So that we’ll know.’
    ‘Who else?’
    ‘Only us. Neither Leahs nor Allmans. Us.’
    ‘But there were ever so many feet,’ said Mary. ‘The place was teeming.’
    ‘We’ve been going a while,’ said Father.
    ‘And that bull,’ said Mary.
    ‘That’s a poser. There’s been none like it in my time; and my father, he hadn’t seen any.’
    ‘What is it all?’ said Mary.
    ‘The hill. We pass it on: and once you’ve seen it, you’re changed for the rest of your days.’
    ‘Who else of us?’ said Mary.
    ‘Nobody,’ said Father, ‘except me: and now you: it’s always been for the eldest: and from what I heard my father say, it was only ever for lads. But if they keep on stoping after that malachite the way they’re going at the Engine Vein, it’ll be shovelled up in a year or two without anybody noticing even. At one time of day, before the Engine Vein and that chap who could read books, we must have been able to come at it from the top. But that’s all gone. And if the old bull goes, you’ll have to tell your lad, even if you can’t show him.’
    ‘I shall,’ said Mary.
    ‘I recollect it puts a quietness on you, does that bull. And the hand. And the mark.’
    Mary went to wash the Tough Tom from her boots in the spring when they reached home. The spring came out of the hill and soaked into Lifeless Moss, and Lifeless Moss spilled by brooks to the sea.
    Father sat with Mother for a while. Old William had picked up his usual rhythm, and the loom rattled, ‘Nickety-nackety, Monday-come-Saturday’. Then Father collected his work tools and sat down at the table and sorted through the pebbles.
    He weighed them in his hand, tested them on his thumbnail, until he found the one he wanted. He pushed the others aside, and he took the one pebble and worked quickly with candle and firelight, turning, tapping, knapping, shaping, twisting, rubbing and making, quickly, as though the stone would set hard if he stopped. He had to take the picture from his eye to his hand before it left him.
    ‘There,’ said Father. ‘That’ll do.’
    He gave Mary a prayer book bound in blue-black calf skin, tooled, stitched and decorated. It was only by the weight that she