Adlaid Dunlop was at chores when the soldiers came. That time of morning was the pigs, feeding them and cleaning the pens. With her arms and nose straining at a couple of overripe slop pails, she turned her head toward the road for a sniff of fresh air and espied the greycoats marching into her mountain village of Fifty Lashings, gunmetal swaying at their shoulders.
She ran into the house. “Mama, soldiers headed this way. Where’s Daddy?”
“He and Willy went to help switch the point on the Ralliths’ plow. Supposed to be back for supper.”
“You think they’re looking for war refusers?” asked Adlaid.
“Most likely, if they’re seeking anything besides our food. Henry!” her mother called to Adlaid’s nine-year-old brother, “Fetch some wood for the stove.” Her mother chopped some potatoes for the pot. “Maybe they’ll leave the rest alone and move on.”
But upon their arrival, the soldiers moved across the farmstead taking inventory of stores, animals, and people. Finished that, they crowded into the sitting room on the first floor of the Dunlop home, leaving their rifles propped against the plank walls.
“We’ll need our one part of ten,” said the lieutenant, a young man with cloudy gray eyes. He handed Adlaid’s mother a sheaf of scrip, useless for buying anything outside the cities. “The trip through the mountains depleted us, so thank you for your service to your country. Speaking of which, you told my sergeant you haven’t seen your husband in how long?”
“Since strawberry season,” said her mother. “He fixes tools and travels round. Never came home. We’ve been on our own since and now getting ready for winter. Might as well be a widow.” Her mother produced a tear, which Adlaid found a bit overwrought.
The lieutenant said, “Your mountain men play at war dodging and have no fellowship with their countrymen. I’m not one for wrath though. If Mr. Dunlop were to appear, we’d just induct him and move on.”
Her mother nodded. “I sure wish that fickle man did love his country.”
Adlaid rolled her eyes, just slightly.
“We stay overlong, and you might find these men eating into your winter stores.” Then, lower, the lieutenant added, “And maybe finding things they shouldn’t. That what doesn’t belong here.” Her mother’s eyes widened, but she remained silent and looked after the stewpot.
Adlaid’s mother served cider to the soldiers in their own tin cups. Her little brother Henry watched wide-eyed, hanging close to his mother except to fetch and refill cups. Adlaid had imagined soldiers joking, laughing, maybe telling dirty tales when women weren’t around, but hardly a word passed these men’s lips. Each sipped his cider, stiff-backed, gazes cast at the floor. A grey-haired corporal with an empty cup snapped his fingers at Henry or attempted so; the sound was more fingertips rubbing. Adlaid grabbed the pitcher from the boy’s trembling hand, filled the cup, and pushed it back at the corporal. A slosh hit his cuff, drawing a scowl, but Adlaid turned her back and walked to the door.
She put on her overcoat and work boots. The corporal followed, too closely and said, “Where you going, girl?”
Adlaid’s mother’s hands fluttered toward her chest. The sergeant cleared his throat. The corporal looked at the floorboards and shuffled aside. The lieutenant looked up and asked Adlaid, “So where are you off to?”
“I got to feed the pigs we still have,” said Adlaid. After a moment, she added, “and the ones you took will be hungry, too.”
The lieutenant turned a faint smile. “Considerate of you.” He gestured at the door. “Don’t take a chill. If you happen to find your daddy, tell him to come on in. The war wants fighting, even from mountain men who want to hide from it.” He turned to Adlaid’s mother, a grin pulling lips from teeth, “I’m afraid I forgot to tell you that this cider is splendid. You make it with apples from that orchard I saw coming up the road?”
Her mother issued some terse but polite answer as Adlaid opened the door. A step over the threshold, Adlaid slipped a hand into her coat pocket, and her fingers came to rest against a coin, an iron viaticum her mother had given her the year she’d first bled. She’d retrieved it earlier from behind a wallboard in her room just before the sergeant had knocked at the door. The viaticum had been long ago blackened with a mixture of beeswax and linseed oil to protect it from rust. According to her mother, all viatica coins had crossed the oceans on the ships that had borne all their Yaghda race to this country, clenched in the fists of Yaghda women in the hold. From the coin flowed memories of Dunlop homelife: flour-caked pieces of chicken, crackling and adance in the fry-pot; her daddy’s cheek, rasping against hers as he tucked her in; stripes of fire across her backside and her eyes stinging with salt tears, but her face sticky and sweet with an apple pie ill-gotten.
Adlaid pushed her mind free of the iron’s reverie, and turned back once toward her mother’s sitting room, toward unspeaking men and unwashed bodies in a closed space. She stepped outside and pulled tight the door.
The villagers of Fifty Lashings had a rule about the roads and footpaths: They kept to them. The wood beyond the paths stayed intact, the trees unfelled and the soil unplowed. “Our neighbors are prudent to keep off the deep wood,” her daddy had said, “but we Yaghda who work iron are even more unwelcome there.” Live discretely was the Dunlop rule. Frivolity was for the yard, and only on Mondays, the day her family discretely rested. But from the time she could run errands, Adlaid had disobeyed her parents’ stricture and on errands forged shortcuts off the road, scavenging sparkly mica and other treasures among the trees and ridges.
Adlaid flew through the wood, running when the ground permitted. She slowed when she reached the wet leaves and crumbling mountain near the ravine.
And yet, improbably, she slipped and went down anyway, rolling, banging and scraping all the way to the bottom. She lay a moment limbs atangle, then checked herself for injury but found none. Not even her pride was damaged, for she was alone.
Or so she thought until she heard someone say, “You hurt? Come sit a minute.” A man’s voice, gravelly and used-up sounding. From above, Adlaid had seen no one, but here an old man sat atop a flat, broad rock rising out of the puddles and tree litter. He wore a long oilcloth coat that trailed across the rock.
“I’m fine, mister.” Adlaid said, shivering in her wet dress.
“Sure you don’t want no help for your daddy?”
Adlaid squinted at the man’s face but couldn’t see much beyond his hair and beard. “I don’t know you,” she said.
“A pleasure to meet you, too,” he said. He grinned, splitting the beard to show a row of yellow teeth. “I’m John Mountain.”
“I got somewhere to be,” said Adlaid. “What did you say about my daddy? We haven’t seen him since–”
“He’s at the miller Rallith’s fixing a plow with your brother Willy. Teaching him the ferrous craft. You’re on your way to warn your daddy of those greycoats taking up all your food. So he can run or turn himself in. Bad choices either way, seems to me.”
Without realizing, Adlaid had drifted closer to the man John Mountain, perhaps within arm’s reach. She saw his face better now. John Mountain wasn’t as old as she’d thought. Forties, maybe, but aged by hard living.
“Want me to remove those soldiers from your mama’s sitting room?” said John Mountain.
“Mister, who are you?”
“I told you what I go by.”
“‘John Mountain’ doesn’t sound like a name. Be like I called myself ‘Adlaid Farmstead’.” Adlaid moved back and attempted to still her feet from drifting toward the man.
“Well, Miss Adlaid–and it is kind of you to give me your name–I have been denied the name of my fathers,” said John Mountain. “Traded it for other knowledge, you might say.”
“I don’t know what that means,” said Adlaid. She gave up fighting her feet a moment and asked, “How would you clear those soldiers out then?”
“I’ll get to that. It so happens I misplaced a book. A bible that belonged to my wife. I need someone like you who knows the wood to fetch it of her own free will.”
“Wood’s big. How’ll I find it?”
“I know exactly where I left it. Do folks still call that rise off the road to the mill Jonas Ridge?”
“Yep.”
“The outcropping atop it is split open. Reach in as far as your arm will stretch, and you might brush the cover. Thing of note, it’s a bible, but written in Yaghda, so it might not look like the good book I’m sure you know. Only book in the crack though.”
It was as if Adlaid had jumped in one of the freezing streams that came off the mountain. “Yaghda?” said Adlaid, feigning disgust.
John Mountain smirked at her a full three-count, making it clear he knew exactly what she was before he answered. “Yep. Never could read a word of Yag, though I learned to speak it passably in my line of work.”
The epithet Yag heated Adlaid’s ears, but her parents had instructed her on saying nothing that named her Yaghda, so she kept quiet.
She chewed the inside of her cheek. The longer the soldiers stayed, the more likely they’d find hidden things, such as the olive oil and Roman lamps tucked away in the cupboards. Maybe other viatica. She decided against more conversation as she wanted the daylight to make her way to the mill and home. “Well,” she said, “I’ll keep an eye out for that… Yag bible. It was nice to meet you, Mr. Mountain.”
“We’ve a deal then, it sounds,” said John Mountain. “Spit.” He ejected saliva onto the leaf cover. Adlaid hesitated, then spat as well, mixing their fluids.
John Mountain made a flicking gesture with the first two fingers of his left hand. “Done.” Adlaid’s ears popped as the air pressure dropped. The wind picked up and dirty grey clouds scudded between the earth and sun.
The weather change was uncanny, but Adlaid wasn’t sure what she’d gained beyond time wasted. “Bye!” she said. She dashed away.
“Wait, now,” said John Mountain. Adlaid felt her feet slide back across the scree, well past the point where gravity was the motivating force.
“I need collateral,” he said, “especially when our outlooks on trading come from such different moral traditions.”
“You worry about your own honesty! How’m I to know those greycoats are gone?”
“They came at my suggestion, and they’ll leave the same way. Your brother Henry will meet you at the mill and tell you so. Now–what weighty valuable of yours shall I hold?” He spoke as if thinking aloud. “Eyes? No, she’ll need those to find my bible. Name? No, people and dogs both answer to whatever they’re called. Tongue? Tempting, that…” He cleared his throat, and said, “I claim your brother, little Henry. Not much I can do with him when I am drawn from here, but take him with me, I shall.”
Adlaid stamped her foot, as much to wake it from the spell as to express her anger. “I agreed to nonesuch, ‘John Mountain’!”
“No? You took my help. Binding, that. We were dealing over souls. Mine, to be specific. The collateral, therefore, must hold equal value.”
John Mountain held up his left hand and pushed at the air three times. “Go to your father, check to see I spoke rightly, and then bring me my bible.” Adlaid felt her feet freed from whatever pulled them, and she left John Mountain yelling after her, “Bring me my bible!”
Now Adlaid kept to the road. She wondered whether John Mountain would execute his threat against gentle Henry, who’d cried when she’d shown him how to wring the neck of a chicken, the one he’d named Tessa. She speculated, then hoped, then almost believed that she’d hit her head and invented John Mountain. The farther she ran, the more plausible she found that explanation.
She flew over stick, stone, and wagon rut and before long, she came to the millrace that brought water to push the wheel. This was next to the Ralliths’ house, where she located her daddy and brother Willy.
“Daddy!” she called, then stopped to catch her wind.
Her father turned from instructing her brother Willy on the proper way to set pins in the plow point. “Adlaid! Thought you were going to see to those pigs!”
She told the tale and finished to see that behind their horse stood little Henry, also panting and sweaty. He’d run to warn their father against taking the main road homeward, for the lieutenant had abruptly ordered all his men out of the house and onto the road toward the lowlands. As Henry piped away, Adlaid fancied she could see a shadow move across his face and down around his neck. He finished, and Adlaid hugged him tight.
They planned it out. Willy, Henry, and her father would leave the cart and take the horse to a neighbor who would put them up for a night or two.
“And get back the way you came, Addie,” said her father. “You did good coming to warn me, but I want you safe with your mama.”
Adlaid headed home but slowed when she reached Jonas Ridge and stood facing the path up. She stuck a hand in her pocket, brushed the coin, and remembered John Mountain’s dark face and words: The outcropping atop is split open. Reach in as far as your arm will stretch. So she climbed to where the bare rock jutted from the earth. Sure enough, it was fissured. Adlaid peered into the crack, but the light didn’t reach far in. She thought better of sticking her arm into that blot and instead thrust a stick of suitable length into the fissure. When she came up against a blockage, Adlaid worked the stick back and forth at an angle until she felt movement. Into view slid a tied bundle of oilcloth, which she extracted. With it fell dry leaves, dust, and a few shiny black and reddish rocks. These she recognized as hematite. Unlike the mountain path and the wood, this entire rise was riddled with it.
Adlaid set the cloth on the ground and selected the largest rock, which had enough iron in it to reveal events past. It unspooled these memories into Adlaid, fainter on her senses, not like those in the pure iron in her pocket. Clear enough though, she saw a man on this hill. John Mountain, his beard darker, his back straighter, his lines sharper against the world. His clothes were bloodied and face fearful, and he kept watch all round as he shoved a bundle into the crack in the rock. He sought protection from the iron in the ridge. The wood below was blankness, unregistered in the ore’s remembrance, but in that dark space, things moved, circling, darting in and flinching away from the ore in the ridge. They wanted the man John Mountain, who’d done something terrible, who sat unsheltered from the rain and sun and who grew hollow-cheeked and dead of eye, who finally left the protection of the iron ridge and stumbled into the wood where those beings awaited him.
She shook her head to free it of the reverie and pocketed the rock. She bent to the bundle and was unsurprised to discover a book inside the oilcloth. The leather cover was webbed with cracks, and an earthy, woody smell wafted up when Adlaid opened it. The backing of the cover inside was yellowed with age and contained the handwritten names of John Barrow and Desdemona G. Barrow and a date, followed by curly, slanted Yaghda print she’d never learned to read. Adlaid guessed it a translation of scripture, the sort carried by missionaries to make converts. She wrinkled her nose.
Whatever the language of the text, Adlaid knew the name Barrow, as did everyone in those mountains. He was a murderer and long disappeared. She wrapped the book again and stuffed it right back in that crack, then set off home, moving fast and hard and staying clear of the ravine.
She stepped over a fallen tree only to find John Mountain again, sitting as before, oilcloth coat puddled across the rock and fallen leaves. Somehow, without realizing, she’d walked back down the ravine. Adlaid let loose a little scream.
“You have my book, Miss Adlaid? I smell that old paper on you.”
“I haven’t got your bible,” said Adlaid. She walked away, but her feet tricked her again into moving closer to John Mountain.
“Them soldiers are heading toward the lowlands even now,” said John Mountain. “You need a reminder to keep our deal?”
“Folks will hear me scream for miles if you lay hands on me.”
“Hah! Been awhile since I made anyone holler.” He turned serious then, voice bubbling out in a growl. “But back when I did, didn’t they ever.”
“Mister,” said Adlaid. “I know who you are. Is it true what people say you did to them Yaghda families in the valley? That you killed them?”
John Mountain chuckled. “I helped soften this land for settlement. Saw the indigene nations marched into the hinterlands. Always someone new overstepping though, isn’t there? So me and my men saw to the Yag trespassers.” Again, he winked. “Most of ’em anyway.”
Scenes from stories her daddy had told her flashed to mind: the Yaghda families driven before fire and gun, the land soaked with blood, the smoldering ground where farms had been.
“There’s worsen me up here though,” John Mountain continued. “Them what dwell in living rock and oak. Spirits some call indigene, but my daddy knew of them from the old country. Came to learn that they abhor blood spilled before them. Like it a dozen times less if it’s done with iron.”
“Are these powers of the wood scared of iron? Or bibles?” asked Adlaid, curious despite her situation.
Another mirthless chuckle. “They were old when them bible stories was written. No, when they got me, they took my name. Born with it, called it all my life. Some even screamed it, in love and in other matters. Now I can’t remember it. By their law, every ten-year, I rise from the dark to see the sun dappling the same rock, same leaves, all turning under the same sky. They let me see the stars come out. Then I hear them whisper, ‘What’s your name? Give us a name.’ By their law, they take a name, they keep the man, until he makes proper atonement.”
Adlaid trembled, but the shake of her body had a lot of anger in it, too. “So the spirits just forgive you after you get your wife’s bible then?”
“I said atone. Forgiven go to heaven, but atonement might shorten my stay in hell. This one, anyway. I couldn’t hear my real name if you were to say it hundred times in a row. But I have discovered my letters are unaffected. Thank the dei filius my mama made me do grammar school. Way I figure, if I read my name from the bible, my soul falls free from their law.”
“I thought atone meant saying sorry and making up for doing wrong. Doesn’t sound like you’re going to do either,” said Adlaid.
“Sounds like you’re thinking about dictionaries when you should be getting my bible. Don’t worry about the particulars. Can’t do that, then you think about little Henry swimming in the mountain deep.”
Adlaid’s daddy had raised her on two kinds of stories about their people. Back in the old world, the Yaghda had taught the ancestors of the proper settlers to weave, to write, and to work the forge. That was the first kind of story; in the other sort, mobs burned Yaghda houses and threw babies in wells, all for the crime of living where they pleased like the proper folks.
Her hand slipped to her pocket and brushed the viaticum. It fed her a memory of a voice, her daddy’s, a story he’d once told her about the man John Barrow.
“In my grandparents’ time, Barrow hunted these mountains for those of us Yaghda who fled the cities,” her daddy had said. “Kept a dog he said sniffed us out. Wasn’t his dog finding us, but his wife.”
“She was…?”
“Yaghda. One of us, may the ground swallow her blood-polluting soul.”
“Daddy! Not nice!”
Her daddy had sighed and rubbed his bristly cheeks. “Murder’s a business dirtier than marrying outside your own kind. That woman was helping him kill our kind–her kind–for bounties. She converted to the church of the dei filius, forgot herself but not our ways. She taught him our tongue, where we hide.”
“So what happened to her?” Adlaid had asked.
“Villagers found her dead, throat cut. It’s said she tried to escape Barrow after he burnt them families in the barn.”
“Then he ran off?”
“I expect not. The mountains hold tight. The villagers came up here to escape the proper world, too, and they brought more than their old ways. Not as old as Yaghda ways, ‘course,” her daddy had added, “but more so than some upstart dei filius. No one here holds the ‘son of god’ in high regard, not us Yaghda and not our neighbors, and everyone minds their business. John Barrow did not follow the rules. We do. We were born natural to them fitting-in kind of rules. And that’s why they shelter us here.”
Adlaid ran her fingers over the lump in her pocket, thinking of the iron vision she’d had of the man John Mountain atop the ridge in bloodstained clothes, stuffing the book in the rock.
“Nevermind, I’ll get your bible, John Mountain,” she said. She climbed the ravine, and started toward Jonas Ridge, atop all that iron ore. She knew iron. She was born to it. Didn’t her daddy fix the tools the villagers used? Didn’t her people bury their dead with an iron coin sewn into a lapel?
Again, Adlaid climbed Jonas Ridge. Again, she retrieved the bible and opened its cover. She took the black and red sparkly rock from her pocket. Chips along one side gave it an edge. This she used to score the names John Barrow and Desdemona G. Barrow, obliterating the only words in the book either John Mountain or Adlaid could read.
“What’s keeping you, Miss Adlaid?” the man John Mountain said. His voice carried up the ridge but did not echo.
“I’m coming, John Mountain!” Book in one hand, rock in the other, Adlaid trotted down the ridge, across the road, and down the ravine. She slid twice but did not fall.
There John Mountain awaited her. His oilcloth shroud had come undone at the waist, and Adlaid now saw he had no legs–or rather, they were sunken into the living rock of the mountain. He reached out, grasping with dusty hands and broken fingernails. “Give it now, girl!”
“Take it!” Adlaid tossed the book, its pages flapping like wings in the dark, and John Mountain snatched it from the air.
He held it up, scored cover swinging askew. Seeing that Adlaid had erased his name, he howled, “You Yag bitch!”
She started to run. She figured the things inside the mountain would soon enough work their hands up John Mountain and draw him back into the rock.
But what would happen to her brother Henry? What would happen in another ten-year when John Barrow reappeared?
So, she spun round to face the half-man, who screamed and clutched and tore at the earth. Operating on instinct, Adlaid leapt forward. Pressed the edge of her viaticum against John Mountain’s forehead. Pushed it past parchment skin and into rough bone until it stuck fast.
The coin broke the magic that had brought a man into the mountain. The ground beneath John Mountain convulsed and coughed him out entirely. He flew forward, right past Adlaid, leaving the stone in which he’d been ensconced as unbroken as when it was made.
John Mountain’s withered legs scissored across the leaves as he pulled himself toward Adlaid, but before he’d made it even a yard, he stopped. The smile he loosed could have lit the ravine like the midday sun.
His body drew into itself like a deflating bladder, skeletal outline pressed against his skin. He settled further as his bones crumbled like chalk inside him. That which remained was flat and still, the weight of the mountain replaced by that of years. Of the coin, she saw only red powder.
She left it and found the road. This she followed all the way home. She stumbled into the yard to find but two soldiers remaining, pushing a cart full of pilfered stores toward the drive.
“What are you still doing out here?” asked one.
“Chores,” Adlaid said.
The soldiers left Fifty Lashings entirely that night. Her daddy and brothers came home the day after that.
Far as the mountain went, the final accounting stood one jot higher, Adlaid eventually was to find. She had offended the powers of the mountain by wielding iron in their domain. Never again did she explore the wood, for the one time she stepped off the road to forage mushrooms, the air grew dark and heavy, and her head rattled and buzzed until she once again resumed her place on the road.
Frank Baird Hughes is an educator and anthropologist who lives in Philadelphia.