The Castle

They woke me with iron teeth.

The castle had been crumbling since the year of the long winter, yet it still held its bones high on the ridge above the river, squared Norman stone against the Northumberland wind. Men had chipped at it for centuries. Reivers prised out steps to repair their byres. A justice of the peace took the lead from one turret and blamed the Scots. Lovers bracketed their names in the mortar with penknives. None of that reached me. I slept beneath the motte, inside the clay that remembered older gods than the Christ these walls learned to house.

Then the excavator came with its bucket, all pistons and appetite, and it bit the last of the gatehouse. Vibration carried down the keep’s buried spine. Lime dust sank like snow. My cocoon split, and I breathed again.

It is wrong to say I inhaled. There is no breath to me. But there is a taking in. The air tasted of diesel and ground stone. It tasted of oak long spoiled and a smear of flint that had once been fire. I rose as a draft rises from a church floor when the nave is opened after years of neglect. The roof was gone. The sky arched like an empty cup.

The operator sat in his glass cabin with headphones pressed to his ears. His name was Callum. His mother would soon ring him to ask if he wanted shepherd’s pie for tea. He would not hear the phone in his pocket. He believed this was a good commission. The council had sold the ruin to a developer who promised cottages with slate roofs and parking for two cars. Callum liked that the job was clean. Old stone breaks well under an unforgiving bucket.

He did not know that the first stones were set here by men who spoke French and prayed in Latin. He did not know those men found Roman slabs in the riverbed and worked them into the vaulting, that the slabs themselves had been stolen from earlier graves. He did not know of the boy who hid in the buttery while raiders drove away the cattle in 1318, nor of the mason who set a corner true while a priest murmured that the north would never settle. He did not know of the summer when plague walked the lanes with quiet feet. He did not know of the winter when Parliament’s men slighted the wall and laughed. He did not know because the ruin had turned to scenery long before he was born, and scenery does not demand memory.

I knew. I was the memory that would not die. I existed before the first facing stones met mortar. I lay with the burial urns, with the gnawed bones of a dog, with a bronze pin that fastened a dead woman’s hair. I have carried a taste of her hair for a thousand years. When the Norman lord raised his hall, I learned the shape of firelight on oak. When monks came to ask for alms, I learned the scrape of sandals on grit. I learned war, feast, marriage, the tug of a bell rope. I learned names and let them go. My sleep is not forgetting. It is waiting.

The bucket swung. The last arch shattered. Callum’s mouth formed a simple cheer, the victory you give yourself when a stubborn thing yields. He did not see the white owl that came out of the rubble and flew straight into the afternoon glare. He did not see because the owl was not an owl. It was an old thought given the form of a creature he had seen in childhood on a hedge by the A68. I showed him what he understood.

I did not want to show him anything. I wanted stillness. But the wound was open, and open wounds require attention. My attention is not a choice. It is a thirst.

Callum climbed down from the machine. His boots left clear prints in the dust, each tread marking chevrons like the Norman carvings that had stood over the chapel door. He stepped into the gatehouse where the floor had fallen away and paused at the edge because the river ran thin and brown below. The castle had guarded a ford here. In spring the local children still walked to the shallow and dared each other to lie in the current until their ribs ached. Callum peered down, then across at the far slope where gorse scratched at slate sky.

“Keep back, mate,” someone called. Another man, high-vis vest, orange hard hat. “Unsafe.”

Callum waved but took another half step. His heel slid on powdered lime. He corrected, quick, a neat little dance. I reached without arms and steadied him. Not out of kindness. Out of habit. All those years, all those edges, and I have kept more than one careless boy upright by the simple will to keep the pattern from breaking.

He straightened, rubbed his hands on his trousers, and laughed. I tasted his laugh. It had a metal note. He was the sort who left shopping trolley coins in his glove box because he liked the feeling of being prepared.

He looked into what had been the undercroft. Pigeons clattered in a burst from a dark pocket of stone and old beam. He flinched and swore. Then he saw the bones.

It is true there were bones. There are always bones. The work had opened a cavity that had never been a cellar yet had kept the shape of one. In the earth a long white curve lay like a smile with broken teeth. Callum thought at once of a cow, and his mind wanted to care about nothing more than reporting the find so the job would pause. That was when I spoke.

I do not have a voice. He heard me as if he had remembered what his grandmother said the day she died. A simple sentence. Leave it be.

He froze. He looked left and right. He would tell himself later that a draught through a slit in the wall had made the words. He would not tell anyone, not at first, that the words arrived with a weight in his chest, a pressure like standing in the river with winter water pulled to your middle and the silt sucking your boots.

Leave it be.

Callum took a step back. The high-vis man shouted again. A gull cried on the wind. Callum swallowed and raised his hand to say he was coming. He was not made for superstition. He was made for breakfast at six, the football on Saturday, a small joy when the number at the bottom of an invoice came out even. He climbed into the cab and pulled the lever that swung the bucket. The arm moved, and I moved with it, drawn as iron filings are drawn to a magnet. He touched stone. I poured through the fractures and found places I had not touched since a woman’s shoes with slashed sides moved across a rush-strewn floor and left wet imprints from rain.

Memory crowded me. A marriage feast. A red ribbon around the bride’s wrist. A jug chipped on the rim that had never poured clean. The taste of barley in air. Burned tallow. The shock and rattle when Scottish riders hit the outer gate in the black of the night. A child under the table with a rag doll that had buttons for eyes, one missing. Jackdaws in the belfry. The bell itself, cast too thin and always a little dull. The steward, drunk, naming taxes. The old lord praising a piece of venison as if it had been his own work. A girl quick with a needle turning the hem of a widow’s dress to save cloth, her thimble worn smooth.

I could hold it all and more, but I could not hold back what rose in me. The ache. Long hunger. The place had become a picture for calendars, then a hazard report, then a set of survey pegs. No prayers. No use. No gratitude for shelter. No fear either. Only beer cans in the ditch, initials carved with a multitool, a boy who fell from the wall in 1954 and broke his ankle and told his mates he had flown.

I am not kind. I am not cruel. Those are names for human weather. I am a shape made from everything that has happened here, and the shape had been denied. When Callum brought the bucket down again, I shook the glass of his cab. His headphones slipped. He heard his mother’s phone at last. The tune was some song about a summer thirty years gone. He reached to answer. I pressed, and the phone died.

He swore again. He lifted the arm and brought it down and the arch gave way with a groan that woke jackdaws in the solitary ash and sent them circling. Behind the ash stood the little Roman altar someone had fished from the river in 1823 and set against a wall for ornament. The altar toppled and split. Dust rose in a slow column that reminded me of incense. I had not had incense since the last chaplain said Mass before the Crown stripped the chapel bare. The scent was lime and diesel and something sweet under it like crushed thyme. It tasted of everything that had ever fed a fire here.

Callum coughed. His chest hurt. He felt a pressure as of a hand laid flat over his sternum. He pressed his palm there and rubbed. The high-vis man climbed to him and shouted that he was white as a sheet. Callum waved him off. He had pride and it would not let him be hauled down from a machine by a mate who would mention it for months. He brought the bucket down once more.

In the ribs of the wall a small space opened and made a door. It had been there since the beginning. A mason knew of it, a priest used it, a boy hid in it with a pear. It was not for light. It was for a quick way between rooms when you wanted to be unseen. I went through and found the stair. It had broken, but not in the way stone breaks when only frost works on it. It had broken when a man ran with trampled candles guttering in his hand and the rushes caught fire and smoke laid low and thick and he went down with his head turned, trying to hear his daughter’s voice under the roar. I found what was left of the charred rail. I found the curl of iron that had been a hinge. I found the cold that has nothing to do with air.

Callum took his hand from his chest. He looked toward the stair as if he had heard someone speak his name there. He had not. He had only felt the moment when a greedy thing wakes and realizes it can feed. He shut off the engine. The sudden quiet lifted the hairs on his arms. He was half ready to laugh at himself and half ready to call the office and say there was a problem with human remains. I let him take one more step toward the stair.

He did not see me. No one ever sees me, not truly. They see what they can manage. He saw a pale child with ash in her hair. He saw a monk with a broken bell rope around his wrist. He saw a woman with a ribbon. These were my masks, and they are always enough.

I moved toward him with every year inside me. The ground remembered the path. My thirst is not blood and not heat. It is acknowledgment. Speak my name, it says. There is no name to fit me.

Callum opened his mouth. He did not scream. He said, very softly, I am sorry. He did not know why he said it. He might have said it for the broken altar, or for the old wall, or for the boy in 1954, or for the girl with the ribbon, or for nothing at all. He might have said it for himself, for the fact that he had never looked up when he crossed the river at dusk and seen the bats flick like small knives against the last light.

Sorry can be a prayer. It can be an offering. I took it as both and drew back.

The job was halted the next day. The bones proved to be medieval. The council wrote a careful notice about archaeology and consultation and rescheduling. There would still be cottages, only later. The ruin was already half gone. That did not matter.

I am awake now. I will not sleep while men walk here. The ridge still holds the shape of the keep against the sky. Children will cut across the site on their way to school when the fencing sags. A fox will den under the spoil heap. Callum will change jobs and tell the story once in a pub, then not tell it again because the telling will wake the pressure in his chest and he will prefer to forget. He will not forget. He will cross the river sometimes and feel the water tug his legs though he stands on a sound bridge, and he will not know why.

It is enough. I do not need them to know I am both keeper and ruin. I do not need their fear. I only need what all old places need. I need to be carried in the mouth like a well-worn word.

I am the castle’s last room. Enter if you must. Leave if you can.