the girl with a stone Heart

chapter 8

What she saw was a flat stony city, house after house under humped ripples of earth, marked by flat stones, standing stones, canted stones, fallen stones, soot-stained, dropping-stained, scum-stained, crumbled, carved, repeating, repeating. She walked along the silent pathways, past dripping yews and leafless birches and speckled laurels, looking for stone women. They stood there—or, occasionally, lay fallen there—on the rich earth. There were many of them, but they resembled one another with more than a family resemblance. There were the sweetly regretful lady angels, one arm pointing upward, one turned down to scatter an arrested fall of stony flowers. There were the child angels, wearing simple embroidered stone tunics over chubby stone knees, also holding drooping flowers. Some busy mason had turned them out to order, one after the other, their sweetly arched lips and apple cheeks well-practiced tricks of the trade. There was no other living person in that place, though there was a great deal of energetic organic life—long, snaking brambles thrust between the stones for a place in the light; tombstones and angels alike wore bushy coats of gripping ivy.

Ines looked at the stone people. Several had lost their hands, and lifted blind stumps to the gray air. These were less upsetting than those who were returning to formlessness, whose fists seemed rotted by leprosy. Someone had come and sliced the heads from the necks of several cherubs—it had been done recently; the severed edges were still an even white. The stony representations of floating things—feathered wings, blossoms, and petals—made Ines feel queasy, for they were inert and weighed down; they were pulled toward the earth and what was under it.

Around the edges of the vast field of stones, within the spiky confines of the wall, was a shrubbery, with narrow paths and a few stone benches and compost bins. As she went into the bushes, she heard a sound, the chink of hammer on stone. She stood still. She heard it again. Thinking to surprise a vandal, she turned a corner and came upon a rough group of huts and a stack of stony rubble.

One of the huts was a long open shelter, wooden-walled and tile-roofed. It contained a trestle table, behind which a man was working with a stonemason’s hammer and chisel. He was a big muscular man, with a curly golden beard, tanned skin, and huge hands. Behind him stood a gaggle of stone women, in various states of disrepair—lipless, fingerless, green-stained, soot-streaked. He made a gesture as if to cover up what he was doing, which appeared, from the milky sheen of the marble, to be new work, rather than restoration.

Ines sidled up. She had almost given up speech, for her voice scratched and whistled oddly in her petrifying larynx. She shopped with gestures, as though she were an Eastern woman, robed and veiled, too timid, or linguistically inept, to ask about things. The stonecutter looked up at her, then down at his work, and made one or two intent little chips at it. Ines felt the sharp blows in her own body. He looked across at her. She whispered—whispering was still possible and normal—that she would like to see what he was making. He shrugged, and then stood aside, so that she could look. What she saw was a loose-limbed child lying on a large carved cushion, its arms flung out, its legs at unexpected angles, its hair draggled across its smooth forehead, its eyes closed in sleep. No, Ines saw, not sleep. This child was a dead child; its limbs were relaxed in death. Because it was dead, its form intimated painfully that it had once been alive. Ines said what came into her stone head.