The Bluestone and the Heather
A lightly-amended version of a story longlisted for this year's Oxford Flash Fiction Prize, about a stonemason working in the Preseli Mountains.
This thousand word flash fiction was longlisted for this year’s Oxford Flash Fiction Prize, although I’ve made some light alterations to publish it here. A second story of mine was shortlisted, and will appear in the prize anthology later in the year - more details on that one in due course!
The heather had lost its colour.
He wondered idly whether what they were doing was causing it. They'd told them the stones had spirit in them, that was why they were carving them out and carrying them away. Were they taking the life with them?
As he walked up towards the stones he kicked at the shrubs with his boot. So dry and brown already, it truly was like the life was being drained from the land.
Usually the colour swept across the land at this time of year, and stayed for weeks yet.
The wind picked up as he walked up the shallow hill. He was a stonemason, and the hill was his place of work. There was an old man in the village who knew how to align the stones with the sun and the stars. The bluestones helped the dead pass, and helped the living understand the earth.
People were idiots, he thought, when they tried to dominate and conquer the elements. Pushing into the wind, eyes watering, skin stinging. Better to know it and work with it.
He kept walking.
From this angle the bluestones erupted from the ground, three huge plots, like they had grown and grown until the earth could not contain them.
From the other side of the hills it looked different, like the earth had fallen away from the stones, a great cliff of blueish-grey which nothing but the wind and the birds could climb.
The birds always amazed him, the little ones zipping about like they did, somehow never bumping into each other or the stones, the big ones - buzzards and falcons - circling high above. Even in the worst gales they’d be around, using the gusts rather than fighting them like the people did. They might swoop wider, or climb more steadily, but they never deviated far.
It was still today though, and clear, and as he reached the point where the ground levelled out, the view stretched to the sea in one direction and almost to the bay in the other.
He’d never been to the sea, often so grey, but today a bright, shimmering blue, but he had been to the bay.
When his brother and his wife had moved down there to fish rather than cut stones and keep animals, he’d gone with them.
It was a day’s walk, and he’d stayed until the weather started to turn. It was fine, but it wasn’t for him, he found his soul wanting. Wanting to be higher, exposed to the air not the water. The water of the bay, like the wind of the hills, made noise in the dark of night. But he was used to the hills’ noise, and the sound of water and the way it echoed up the valley made him uneasy.
The world was thicker down there too, somehow stodgier and harder to get around. It shaped people differently, and they could tell he wasn’t one of them. Or maybe that was just in his head, it never bothered his brother. Either way he had come back to the hills, the stones, and where his head was amongst the birds.
The sheep scurried away as he walked through them, forgetting the scraggly grass which had been keeping their attention. He didn’t think sheep were capable of playing, but it sometimes looked as though they were when they ran, bouncing off each other. They looked like the children in the village when they played between the houses, games with no rules, just running and screaming.
When do you lose the energy for that? Grown men and dogs play their own version, fighting and rolling in the mud. Maybe that’s where the energy goes.
He stood under the big stones now. Perhaps toil was where the energy went too.
Some people worked with copper and iron, using fire to make the tools he carried, and others, he’d heard, were working with gold to make pretty things to win favour.
He worked with stone.
He made things which were of the air and of the ground; of now and of then; things that were full of time, and timeless.
He worked with whatever presence there was in the ether.
He made things which, if you shaped them right and found where the membrane was thin, could help you touch the other side.
Speak to the gods, speak to the heavens, speak to the dead.
But, he didn’t know how any of it worked. He was just a cutter.
He climbed the stone and hammered at it, asking it politely with sweat and grunting to move, until it decided for itself it was time.
When it did, the old man who seemed to know what to do decided where they’d go.
You’d see him walking around the hills, long robes vibrating in the wind, then he’d stop and stare at the sky or the soil for minutes, sometimes hours.
Some of the other men laughed at him, but the cutter didn’t, because the old man had shown him how to talk to the stones.
He told him to look for the lines, hit with them, not across them. Look for where the water or the cold had already got in, that was where the movement had already, imperceptibly started.
Persuasion, that’s what it was.
Usually once the great pillars slid down the hillside, they’d be taken and put back in the ground not far from where they’d grown.
These stones were different. A stranger had come spoken to the old man, and the bluestone was going wherever he was from. It would take a healthy man a week to walk, and it would take months or even years with the stones.
Someone important must have died. Someone adorned with gold. They needed the bluestone spirit to help them pass. And so they were taking their bluestone.
This made him nervous, but he didn’t know why.
Maybe it was the heather. It was so dry.