Black Juice by Margo Lanagan

and Winsome, and they each held one of her hands in both of theirs. Dot looked over Bonneh’s head to Winsome. ‘I think you should speak, Winsome.’
    ‘Oh, all right. Let me think. Ardent.’ Samed gave her a little more music to think by, then faded it when she looked at him.
    She began slowly, and left a pause between every phrase. ‘Ardent, she had a short life, and some of us might think it wasn’t much of one. But she felt the sun on her skin just like all of us do, and she tasted her food just fine; she smelt the smell of a good roasting fire, and of fresh rain just like us, and in her ears was the same birdsong. Best of all she liked the sound of people’s voices and to have someone near. Her father died when she was very young, but he didn’t run away and leave her the way a lot of kids’ fathers have done. She had a mother, Bonneh, who was with her every day of her life. Andalso she had this brother, Dot; he spent his childhood with her. Sure, he left when he got to his middlehood—but then, didn’t he come back? And isn’t he here now, at her graveside?’ Bonneh’s grip tightened in Dot’s hands.
    ‘We’ll start with the oldest, which is Safira. We’ll each of us put a handful of earth in on Ardent. Then the kids will strip off and push the rest of the earth in, and then we’ll all go down to the river and swim. And then, Dot’s friend Samed says he’s got some treats, so we’ll have something of a feast, and drink to Ardent’s life, and welcome Bonneh back from her place of mourning.’
    Samed swelled the music, and Safira came forward. ‘I knew you would say the right things,’ said Dot.
    ‘Better than the Bard ever did,’ said Bonneh between them, watching the earth fall to the carry-bag. ‘He would have preached all over her and spoiled it.’
     
    T OWARDS THE END OF THE FEAST , Dot walked away to the cow-house. The sun was lower and the world not so painfully bright.
    ‘Bard Jo?’ he said into the slatted darkness of the wooden hut. ‘It’s Dot here.’ And he went in.
    The boards chopped up the darkness with planes of dusty sunlight. After a few moments the old man became visible on his bed against the far wall. His pale foot-soles pointed to the ceiling, and the pattern of his blanket was interrupted by his thin dark frame. He was lying on his back, breathing outillness from some serious place inside him; the hut was thick with the smell, which was of dead Ardent, with rotting wet lung added.
    ‘I came back for a visit, Bard,’ said Dot. If he called him by name, perhaps he could believe this really
was
the Bard.
    The breathing worked up to speech, through spittle and twigs in the Bard’s throat, it sounded like. ‘It was Dot, was it, playing that great
layer-cake
of a music?’ Sweet cakes being things of evil and not proper food.
    ‘No, Bard,’ said Dot, into the horrible withering wind of the Bard’s disgust. ‘It was my friend Samed. But we both play.’
    You must not
retire
like that
, Kooric had told him after his first fight with Samed.
You mustn’t bow your head and take it. You must speak back. You must not take Samed’s rubbish
. But here in the Bard’s presence—even the failed Bard, even the corruptible Bard—keeping his back straight, and the idea of speaking, felt mannered and arrogant.
    ‘And you’ll have brought some rubbish for the children?’
    ‘A few bits of shine, Bard. Nothing harmful—’ He heard the fatal weakness of apology in his voice.
    ‘What would
you
know?’ The Bard jolted on the bed. ‘So harmed yourself, so prettied up, so taken in by all the shine and the music and the
fun
. Did you think it would be
fun
, to bring your worldly friends here, to amaze them with how spare and poor you used to be? To walk in like a god and scatter gifts, like a
father
, you thought?’
    The Bard spat into something that had already been spat in many times.
    He’s too clever a man
, thought Dot, in the grip of the old fears.
He’s too clever