My sleep was dreamless as the dead last night, and I woke refreshed despite the ache in my muscles from the constant labour. This morning, Rhea’s positively feverish with enthusiasm. I’ve already threatened to lock her up if she doesn’t stop buzzing about. Undeterred, she keeps pacing around the table, looking at my creation from every angle.
‘You’re very good,’ she says admiringly.
I shrug.
‘I mean it, Mehrab! And this… this feels like big magic. No one ever taught me anything, before you, and the fire simply came to my call. All the other things you’ve shown me have been – no offence – quite mundane, small. But this—’ she spreads her arms wide to show the magnitude ‘—this is life! This is grand and great. Creation!’
I can’t help laughing at the unbridled eagerness. ‘No offence.’
She pouts, puts her hands on her hips; those hands, much less pale, a little less plump after weeks of chores; not like mine, though, not yet. Not until she has to start this kind of activity. The advantage of the soft young wood is that any splinters are supple. ‘Don’t laugh at me when I’m so admiring!’
‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry – but no one’s ever seen this done. I’ve never instructed anyone in this. I’m not used to reactions or an audience.’ And I laugh again. How far have we come from my unwilling agreement to foster her, to me showing her this secret like she’s my child and this her inheritance? ‘Your first will be the ugliest, unless you’ve any artistic talent?’ She shakes herhead regretfully. ‘Ah, you’ll survive. A bit of ugly won’t hurt you. You’ll learn, with time, what you like, what you can do, what you can put up with. All mistakes make for experience.’
I shrug, step back to get a better look. The face is still basic because I’ve taken my time with the body – as ever, I have my requirements, my tastes — and I must admit to some pride in this year’s effort.
Stiff as a board in front of us he lies: broad-shouldered, deep-chested, long-legged. His surface is damp, sticky as moisture leaks from where I’ve shaped him; it will dry into a smooth resin after I rub him smooth with fine sand from the bed of the stream. Rhea nods at the apex of his thighs. ‘You’ve put some care there.’
‘And you will too, one day. The trick is to be tender and remember that the length you make it is the only length he’ll ever have so don’t go cutting too short assuming there’ll be the growth of a man of flesh and blood. Summer husbands don’t work quite that way.’ It takes some effort to tease the cock free of the swollen trunk – that’s what the immersion in the trough mix does, makes the wood swell, bulk up, even though it’s been cut from its source, so there’s substance enough to work with. ‘It’s an artificial life, of course, eldritch and unnatural, limited, but life nonetheless for a brief span.’ I gesture, say confidentially, ‘Once upon a time, I used to make the effort to carve a bed of hair,down there, something for it to rest upon. Realistic but fiddly and ultimately unnecessary – who looks, after a while?’
She gives a jerk of a nod. Maybe she’ll do the same thing when it’s her turn. Maybe she’ll learn the hard way, literally, as I did.
‘And do you… you know, just…’
I look at her, blink for a moment, then realise her meaning. ‘Oh. No. No, no. If that happens, it happens. They’re to help with the holding, the harvest, the planting, anything that needs doing around the place. To make life easier, especially as I get older. If somethingelsehappens, well it happens, but sometimes there’s no… spirit in that direction. There must be willingness on both sides. Otherwise, no.’
I think about the loneliness that brought about the making of the first one. I think about the hole inside me left by betrayal. I think, perhaps, there was madness behind it, at least at first. The wish for company, the need for a labourer, the idea that I was in control of the seasons of such a thing. That I was creating a tool, so to speak, and nothing more. ‘But as I said, if something does happen, you don’t want to find you’ve made something that… falls short.’
Switching topic, she observes: ‘There’s no stench.’
We’d poured the remains of the soup into a hole and heaped earth over it; it will feed the rose garden, indeed is one of the reasons for the year-round flowering. ‘No. I’m careful about that. The right mix of oils works wonders.’
‘How much longer?’ Rhea asks, taking the ladle from the bucket and carefully sprinkling some water over the body to make sure it doesn’t dry out too soon.
These past days, she’s been much more helpful and biddable, eager to please, taking better notice when I speak about powders and potions, sitting by the pond to practise her art, glaring at the float in the middle of the water, where she can set it aflame with little consequence – an upgrade from the target which finally burst into flame despite all our dampening precautions. Shedoes things around the cottage without having to be asked; has fitted herself into the life here. I think, now, she will do well enough, that I can equip her with the skills she’ll need to survive when she goes back out into the world to make her own way.
‘How much longer?’ she repeats, impatient.
‘A few more hours after lunch.’ I’m tired and I should rest or I’ll get careless. I want to see his face, but it needs to be right. ‘Tomorrow morning. I’ll finish then.’
***
Even though I sleep deep and dead, I wake exhausted, because the work isn’t simply a matter of carving a thing. It involves spells and the chanting of them, the cutting of them into the summer husband so they slow what time inevitably brings. To buy me the months I need for harvest and sowing, for cutting and stacking the woodpile for winter, clearing the undergrowth around the cottage, checking the roof is sound, that the tiny cellar is dry and the stream hasn’t tunnelled its way back to the old leak from years ago when the place flooded and I knew nothing about it until I went down the stairs and found a bath awaiting.
By the time it’s done, I’m almost cross-eyed and can barely stand. He’s ready, though, and beautiful in his own fashion. The fine detail is clear and I’ve made his eyes and lips, chin and cheeks, nose, forehead, jaw, ears, the semblance of hair, just the way I want them. And, as I said to Rhea, if something’s to happen you wantthisnot only to be equipped but appealing.
‘The cup,’ I say and my voice is rough, throat dry. Rhea’s quick to hand me the clay goblet. The contents laps at the lip, a viscous mix of rabbit’s blood and sap, with a little nub of living clay dissolved therein (I’ve kept a store for years, purchasedfrom a red-haired travelling woman who had the secrets of mud harvested from graveyards, rich and foetid with the essences of life and death). The slit I made for his mouth, carved out into a void (but no tongue, never a tongue, never again), is waiting and I pour the elixir in.
And because I’m exhausted, I’m sloppy.
Fumes rise where the liquid meets the wooden lips. I, heedless as Rhea was all those weeks ago when we soaked him in the trough, take a negligent lungful of the vapours. Reeling away, I cough, choking, spluttering, stupid as an apprentice.
Rhea, distracted by the transformation of the block of wood on which I’ve lavished such attention, does nothing more than raise her hands vaguely in my direction. But she doesn’t come to my aid, stays where she is, transfixed by the summer husband. I understand, in spite of everything, for even though I’ve seen it so many times, I’m nevernotenchanted, nevernotfascinated by what I’ve wrought. By the fact I managed to turn my skills to this, to adapt.
Yet this time I miss it altogether, the transformation, thebecoming, as I try to get my breath back, try to clear the tears from my eyes. And I forget, as I cough and splutter, the first rule of making a thing (of making any sort of child): always be the first thing it sees; only by this means can you ensure its love. But I’m not the first thing he sees, am I? And it’s no one’s fault but mine, because I’m in a corner, throwing up. So to not witness it even once feels like a grief that will haunt me forever, but it’s not the worst part of it.
The first thing the new summer husband sees – the product of my hands, my sweat, my blood and magic, my tears andspit – isher. Rhea, with her blonde locks and her bluer than blue eyes, her trim figure, peaches and cream skin, leaning over him with wild fascination.
***
