The Accidental Cursologist: Sheep Shenanigans And Slightly Singing Sheep

sheep cleared its throat.

Bramble Hockspur looked up from the pneumatic diagnosis apparatus, a wrench frozen mid-turn in his grease-stained fingers. The contraption hissed softly, its brass valves catching the afternoon light that slanted through the grimy windows of his shop on Tallow Lane. Three shapes filled the doorway. The largest was a man built from mud and stubbornness, his cap low over a face carved by decades of wind off the moor. Behind him huddled three sheep, their fleeces a patchwork of cream and grey, their eyes wide and wet with what appeared to be terror.

"Sheep," Bramble said.

"Aye." The farmer's voice was gravel and thistle. "Tha' heard right."

Mulligrew emerged from the back room clutching a teacup balanced atop a stack of unbound folios. His spectacles sat askew on his nose, and his cardigan bore evidence of at least three breakfasts. "Oh, lovely," he breathed, setting everything down on the nearest cluttered surface with the practiced grace of a man accustomed to creating small disasters. "Smelling of lanolin and something herbal. Camomile, perhaps? No, no, not camomile. Yarrow. Fresh yarrow."

Bramble set down his wrench. The pneumatic apparatus gave a small, disappointed sigh. "I take it this is a consultation?"

"This is the bloody Bureau, innit?" The farmer, Otwell Gallows, if the letter Bramble had received that morning was accurate, glanced around the shop with an expression that suggested he had expected something more impressive. His eyes lingered on the jarred specimens lining the shelves: a tongue preserved in amber fluid, a glove that occasionally twitched, a glass sphere containing what appeared to be a very small thunderstorm. "I was told someone here could fix what ails 'em."

"And what does ail them?"

The farmer opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.

It was the sheep that answered.

The first one stepped forward on hooves that clicked against the worn floorboards. Its fleece was immaculate, carefully combed, and its expression carried an earnestness that Bramble had never before associated with livestock. It drew a breath that seemed too measured for any animal, its flanks expanding with theatrical precision. Then, in a voice that wobbled at the edges but held its rhythm with surprising steadiness, it spoke.

"Now slides the silent petaltide, and leaves

The hollow-rounded hill."

Silence.

Bramble's wrench slipped from his fingers and clattered against the workbench.

"That's Tennyson," he said, before he could stop himself.

"Oh, it's worse than that," the farmer growled.

The second sheep shouldered past the first, nudging it aside with a gentle bump of the head. This one had a dark patch over one eye and a lower lip that trembled with each consonant. When it spoke, its voice was slightly higher, breathier, but no less determined.

"The splendour falls on castle walls

And snowy summits old in story."

Mulligrew made a small sound. It might have been delight. It might have been a cough. Bramble did not turn to look, because the third sheep had begun to advance, and something in its bearing suggested it intended to deliver the closing stanza.

"The long light shakes across the lakes,

And the wild cataract leaps in glory.

Blow, bugle, answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying."

The shop settled into a hush that smelled of cold tea and old paper and the warm, dusty musk of three anxious sheep. Bramble could hear his own pulse in his ears. He could hear the pneumatic apparatus ticking softly as it cooled. He could hear Mulligrew wheezing gently behind him, the old man gripping the back of a chair with both hands.

"That's the Princess," Bramble said. His voice came out smaller than he intended. "Tennyson's The Princess. 1847."

"Aye." The farmer's jaw worked. "That one, and In Memoriam, and bloody Maud, the whole bloody time. They start when anyone approaches. Can't feed 'em, can't shear 'em, can't bloody sleep near 'em on account of the bloody midnight recitations. Lost two ewes to it. Found 'em cold in the morning, eyes open, brains addled by Tennyson."

"That," Mulligrew said, with the careful diction of a man picking his way through a particularly treacherous puddle, "is certainly not a standard presentation."

"No," Bramble agreed. "No, it is not."

He took a step closer to the nearest sheep. It regarded him with enormous golden eyes, its wool rippling slightly as it breathed. The creature took an involuntary step backward, hooves scrabbling for purchase on the smooth boards, then rallied. It squared its shoulders, insofar as a sheep has shoulders, and opened its mouth again.

"O Sorrow, wilt thou live with me

No casual mistress, but a wife..."

"Mabel," the farmer said, pointing. "That's Mabel. She's the worst of the lot."

"Mabel," Bramble repeated. He crouched down, bringing himself closer to the sheep's eye level. The animal's breath was warm against his knuckles, smelling faintly of grass and the sharp green bite of something medicinal. Yarrow, Mulligrew had said. Or perhaps plantain. "Hello, Mabel. Can you understand me when I speak normally?"

Mabel blinked. Her wool shifted as her ears twitched forward, then back. She seemed to consider the question with great seriousness.

"Companion none," she said, softer now, almost plaintive. "Is this the fated end of every human breast?"

"I think," Bramble said slowly, "that she is answering me. In In Memoriam. Section LXVII, if I'm not mistaken."

"You're not mistaken," the farmer said. "She does that. Answers back. Gets the meter wrong sometimes but keeps the sentiment. Damn thing tried to argue with me about the price of oats yesterday. Quoted Byron at me."

"Byron?"

"Don Juan. The whole canto. I had to leave the field."

Mulligrew had produced a notebook from somewhere, and was scribbling with the fierce concentration of a man who had just discovered that the world still contained surprises. "Cumulative incantation," he murmured. "Rhythmic compulsion. Possibly a mnemonic hex layered on top of a compulsion. The animals retain awareness, see, they simply cannot stop the recitation once it begins. Like a sneeze that has learned to read."

"That's horrible," Bramble said.

"That's Tuesday on a Yorkshire farm, apparently."

Bramble straightened. He looked at Mabel, who regarded him with the mournful dignity of a creature who had read far too much Victorian poetry and would very much like to be left alone. He looked at her sisters, who had clustered behind her, their bodies forming a small defensive crescent. He looked at their farmer, who stood in the doorway with his arms folded and his jaw set in the particular configuration of a man who expected to be disappointed.

He thought about cures. He thought about the Bureau's formulary, the bottles of counter-essence, the powders and tinctures and the small, precise instruments that sat in their velvet-lined cases. He thought about how to isolate the compulsion, how to break the rhythmic cycle, how to return three sheep to the blissful ignorance of grass and cud.

And then Mabel opened her mouth again.

"Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,

Tears from the depth of some divine despair

Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,

In looking on the happy Autumn-fields,

And thinking of the days that are no more."

Bramble's hands, which had been reaching for his reagent case, fell still at his sides.

"Bramble," Mulligrew said quietly, from somewhere behind him. "Bramble, my boy."

"I know," Bramble said.

"Sheep," the old man continued, "are not, traditionally, a literary people."

"I know."

"There is a formulary. There is a process."

"I know."

The afternoon light fell across Mabel's fleece in ribbons of gold. Somewhere outside, a cart rattled past on the cobblestones. The pneumatic apparatus ticked. The farmer shifted his weight from one foot to the other, his eyes flicking between Bramble and his animals with the wary patience of a man who had seen too many clever answers prove useless.

And Mabel, sensing perhaps that she had an audience, lifted her chin, and prepared to continue.

Bramble did not reach for his reagent case.

Not yet.

The road to Gallows Farm wound out of Thornbury along a cart track so deeply rutted that the ruts had acquired their own weather. Bramble walked in the left one because the right one was full of standing water from the previous night's rain, a fact he did not discover until his boot had already discovered it first. His left sock, by the time they passed the milestone at the second bend, was developing opinions.

Mulligrew, who walked as though the earth were personally apologizing to him for existing, ambled along in the middle of the track and narrated.

"There used to be four Gallows brothers," he said, adjusting the strap of the reagent satchel that kept sliding down his shoulder. "Owain, Edric, Piers, and the youngest, Tom. Owain kept the sheep. Edric kept the bees. Piers kept to himself, mostly, which was a kindness to Piers. Tom kept the books, which is where your filing annex self would have liked Tom."

"Did any of them keep a grudge against the Bureau?" Bramble asked.

"All of them kept a grudge against the Bureau. It was a family tradition, like turnip cake. You're wearing it now, by the way." Mulligrew gestured at Bramble's trouser leg. "The mud. Tom would have been sympathetic. Tom muddied everything he owned."

The track climbed a low rise. Bramble's breath shortened before his legs did, and he was annoyed at himself for it. He had spent ten years in the filing annex, and the filing annex had been on the ground floor. He had been very fit for ground-floor activities.

Above the rise, the land opened into a long fold of pasture bordered by drystone walls and wind-bitten hawthorn. A barn hunkered at the far end, slate roof patched with tin that caught the early light in small, hurting flashes. The farmhouse beside it was squat and whitewashed, with a chimney that had been repointed in three different centuries' worth of mortar. Smoke rose from it in a thin, reluctant column.

Sheep dotted the nearer field in pale, drifting clusters. From this distance, they were ordinary. Bramble felt his shoulders drop a quarter of an inch.

"There," Mulligrew said. He pointed not at the sheep, and not at the barn, but at the grass between them. "You see it."

Bramble squinted. He saw grass. He saw the small dark blot of a tussock. He saw the glint of something wet in a hoofprint, which was probably just the morning dew catching the light.

Then the wind shifted, and the light shifted with it, and the tussock resolved into a hundred small tussocks, and each of those resolved into a small dark shape set flat against the soil. Stone. Dozens of them. Scores of them. Laid out in a pattern that only made sense when he stepped sideways and let his eye unfocus, the way you might unfocus on a pointillist painting to find the subject.

A smile. A vast, gentle, slightly lopsided smile, curving across three acres of pasture.

"Oh," Bramble said.

"Yes," Mulligrew said. "Oh."

They did not go through the gate. Mulligrew, with the careful reverence of a man entering a museum after hours, climbed the wall at its lowest point, found a foothold, and swung his other leg over with a grunt that turned into a small laugh at his own expense. Bramble followed, less gracefully, tearing his coat on a thorn that had been waiting for him specifically.

The stones were small. Each one was perhaps the length of a thumb, no thicker than two stacked pennies. The same dark grey. The same oblong shape. They had been set into the soil with care, flush with the turf, as though someone had wanted them to be invisible to anyone who wasn't looking.

Bramble crouched over the nearest one. His knee found a cold, wet patch of grass and accepted it. He brushed the stone clean with his thumb and felt the tiny scratches on its upper surface.

Runes.

Not the ornate, flourished runes of ceremonial workings. Not the bold, loud runes of Bureau-issue curse-markers. These were small, tight, efficient. The kind a curse-breaker carves when they want the working to last. The kind that mean the carver knew exactly what they were doing and resented the time it took to do it.

He turned the stone over. On the underside, in script so fine it looked like insect tracks, a sigil he half-recognized from some annex manual he had read while pretending to alphabetize.

"Mulligrew," he said.

The old man was already beside him, already crouched, already peering over his spectacles. He made a small, pleased sound, like a hen that had found a particularly good worm.

"Stygian chalk," Mulligrew murmured. "Bureau standard, third decade of last century. We stopped issuing it when the quarries ran out. Lovely stuff. Held a charge for forty years if you didn't get it wet." He glanced up at the sky, which was busy being unhelpful. "Well. We'll see."

Bramble slipped the stone into his coat pocket. The fabric sagged a little under its weight, which was nothing, and a lot, which was everything.

"A curse-breaker," he said.

"A curse-breaker," Mulligrew agreed.

"Working on a sheep field."

"On a sheep field, yes."

"For years, by the look of it. The grass has grown over the edges of some of these. That one there, the lip of the smile, that's been down a long while."

Bramble looked. Mulligrew was right. The lip-stone had a collar of old roots creeping over its corners, patient as rope. That stone had been placed when Bramble was still in the filing annex learning the proper way to fold requisition forms in thirds.

A curse-breaker had been working this field for years. A curse-breaker had been laying stones in the shape of a smile across three acres of Gallows pasture. And a curse-breaker had, presumably, also been doing whatever it was that had been making the Gallows sheep die, or sing, or both.

He stood up. His knee made a sound that he pretended not to hear.

From the farmhouse, the sound of a door. Heavy boots on packed earth. A figure emerging from the shadow of the porch, squinting against the pale morning.

Farmer Otwell Gallows was broader than Bramble had expected, and shorter, and more weathered, in the way that a fence post is weathered. He wore a waistcoat the color of old gravy over a shirt that had been mended at both elbows with patches from different shirts. His hands were the hands of a man who had been pulling things out of the ground for fifty years and intended to continue until the ground pulled him out instead.

He stopped at the top of the three stone steps that led down from the porch. He did not come closer.

"Burroughs," he said.

"Hockworth," Mulligrew corrected gently. "Mulligrew. We wrote ahead."

"You wrote ahead," the farmer agreed, in a tone that suggested writing ahead was the kind of courtesy he had learned to mistrust. His eyes went to Bramble. They stayed there.

"Bramble Hockspur," Bramble said. "Bureau of Curses, Quirks, and Unsightly Marks."

"Cursologist," Mulligrew added, with the small, fond pride of a man introducing a nephew.

"Cursologist," Bramble repeated, because the word still felt like a coat he was wearing inside out.

Gallows looked at him a long moment. Then he looked past him, at the field, at the hundreds of small dark stones arranged in their enormous, terrible grin.

"You can see them, then," the farmer said.

"Yes."

"Good. Saves me the trouble of convincing you." He descended the steps, each one deliberate, and crossed the yard to the wall. He did not climb it. He leaned on it, forearms folded on the top course, and looked out over his pasture the way a man looks at a wound he has stopped expecting to heal. "Started two winters back. First just the one stone, where the ewe died. Then another. Then more. Always the smile. Always the same shape."

"Always the same shape?" Bramble asked.

"Always the same shape. I'd pull them up. I'd throw them in the ditch. I'd burn them in the hearth. Next morning, more of them. Always the smile. Always watching."

Bramble's hand went, involuntarily, to his coat pocket. The stone sat against his palm through the fabric, cool and dense and faintly resonant, the way a tuning fork is resonant before you strike it.

He was very aware of Mulligrew at his shoulder. He was very aware of the farmer's eyes on him, weighing him, deciding. He was very aware of the field beyond the wall, three acres of grass and old stone and quiet, patient malice, shaped into a face that looked, if you let it, delighted.

"Somewhere on this farm," Bramble said, and his voice only wavered a little, "there is a curse-breaker with a great deal of time and a great deal of chalk and a great deal of feelings about sheep."

"That," said Gallows, "is the first sensible thing a Bureau man has said on this land in my lifetime."

From the field, faintly, on the still morning air, came the sound of one sheep, alone, beginning to hum.

The hum drifted across the field like a single sustained note on a wet fiddle string. It was not musical. It was not unpleasant. It was simply there, the way chimney smoke is there, the way the smell of wet wool is there, the way fear, in a flock of forty-three remaining sheep pressed together at the far fence, is there.

Bramble stared at the flock. The sheep stared back with their wide yellow eyes, all of them facing the same direction, toward the long ridge where the smile-stones stood in their neat rows. One of them, a small grey ewe with a torn ear, had begun to paw the turf. Another, larger and darker, lowed once, a sound more felt than heard.

"Now then," said Mulligrew, very quietly, and tugged Bramble's sleeve with one gnarled finger. "Now then, now then. We have what we came for, lad. More than we came for. Let us away."

Gallows had not moved from the wall. His forearms were still folded on the stone. His face, when Bramble glanced back at him, was the face of a man watching something he had waited a long time to see, and finding it worse than he had feared.

"I'll come," Bramble said to the farmer. "I'll come back. Soon. Within the day, if I can."

"You do that," said Gallows. "You do that, Bureau man." A pause. "Bramble, is it?"

"Bramble Hockspur."

"Hockspur." Gallows tasted the name, rolled it behind his teeth. "I'll mind it."

Bramble climbed down off the low step and followed Mulligrew back along the path. The old man set a pace that, for him, was nearly a gallop. His knees clicked in a complicated rhythm. His walking stick left a tiny furrow in the dust, and his eyes, when Bramble caught them, were bright with a thing that was not quite excitement and not quite dread.

"The hum," Bramble said, once they were through the gate and onto the lane. "What was that?"

"Ah," said Mulligrew, and sucked in air through the gaps in his teeth. "Ah. Humming. Humming in sheep is, generally, not a good sign. Humming in sheep means, generally, that they have begun to resonate. Humming in sheep, in my long and various experience, has preceded, on three occasions, a breach, on one occasion a wedding, and on one occasion, very memorably, a pie of quite exceptional quality, though that is, I think, a different sort of hum entirely."

"Resonate with what?"

"With the thing that is humming to them, lad. With the thing on the hill. There is a conversation under way out there that we are not equipped to overhear." He stopped, too, at the stile, and turned. "We have the stone. We have the field. We have the farmer's grudging permission to return. We have, most importantly, the smile."

"Smile," Bramble repeated.

"The smile, lad. The smile is the lead. The smile is the throat to be gripped. A curse without a face is a mist; a curse with a face is a man. We have, somewhere in the Bureau's files, the face this smile belongs to. I am almost certain of it. I have a feeling in my old knees that I have seen that particular shape of tooth."

The walk back to the shop took the better part of an hour. The lane wound between drystone walls and hawthorn hedges still heavy with late blossom. A thrush sang in the orchard they did not pass. The air smelled of cut hay and, faintly, beneath it, of something metallic and bitter that might have been the stone in Bramble's pocket, or might have been the road, or might have been his own sweat.

He did not take the stone out. He did not need to. He could feel it through the cotton of his coat, cool and deliberate, as if it were breathing against his palm. He resisted the urge to wrap it in something, to put distance between his skin and its surface. The Bureau's first rule, learned in his third week, was that an artifact should not be touched more than necessary. The Bureau's second rule, learned in his fourth week, was that an artifact, once taken, should not be left. The Bureau's third rule, which nobody had ever told him in so many words but which he had inferred from the pattern of who came back from field assignments and who did not, was that an artifact, once it had decided it liked you, would not necessarily take no for an answer.

Mulligrew chattered all the way. He chattered about the lost sheep, the ruined ewe, the farmer's late wife, the farmer's late dog, the breed of sheep that the farm had favored in his great-great-grandfather's time, the precise shade of green that the moss on the smile-stones had been in his youth. Bramble let the words wash over him the way he let the lane wash under his boots. He was thinking about the journals.

He had, in the back of the shop, in a tea chest under the counter, eleven of his old Bureau journals. They were not the proper Bureau journals. The proper Bureau journals were bound in red leather and stored, under lock and ward, in the annex where he had once sorted receipts. These were his own notebooks, his private copies, the ones he had kept without permission and smuggled out under his coat on his last day at his desk. They contained, in his own cramped hand, every curse-signature he had ever catalogued, every sigil he had ever been asked to identify, every sketch he had ever made of a marking he did not understand.

If the smile belonged to anyone he had ever seen, it was in one of those books.

The shop bell rang when he pushed the door. The smell of dried lavender and old paper rolled over him like a warm quilt. He set his hat on the counter, took the coat off his shoulders, and, with the careful deliberateness of a clerk who has once misplaced a single receipt and spent three days finding it again, unwrapped the stone from the handkerchief in which he had bundled it on the walk home.

He set it on the counter under the lamp. The smile looked up at him.

It was a small stone, no bigger than a hen's egg. It was the colour of wet slate. The markings had been scratched into its surface with something very sharp and then rubbed with something very dark, so that the lines stood out against the grey like ink on a page. There were seven lines in all. Six formed the shape of the mouth. The seventh ran through the centre of the smile, vertically, from upper lip to lower lip, bisecting the whole shape the way a pole bisects a tent.

Bramble stared at it for a long moment. Then he went to the back room, lifted the lid of the tea chest, and began, one by one, to lay the journals on the counter.

Mulligrew had followed him in. The old man lowered himself into the reading chair by the stove with a grunt of effort that turned, somewhere in the middle, into a grunt of satisfaction. He produced a pipe from somewhere in his coat. He did not light it. He held it between his teeth the way a soldier holds a rifle he has no intention of firing.

"You will know it," he said, around the pipe. "If you have seen it before, you will know it. The hand gives itself away. The hand is always the same. The hand has a posture, lad, the way a face has a posture. Some hands are short and stabbing. Some hands are slow and curving. The hand that drew that smile is, I would wager my last cup of tea, a hand that knew how to wait."

Bramble did not answer. He opened the first journal.

It was the oldest, the smallest, the most battered. Its cover was warped. Its spine had been broken and mended with thread of three different colours. He turned the pages slowly. He had been young when he had filled this book, and his sketches then had been tight and uncertain, as if he had been afraid of committing too much ink to a wrong answer. He passed the pages without stopping. He did not expect to find the smile here. The smile, if it was anyone he had known, was from later. From his years in the field, when he had been allowed out of the annex and into the proper work of the Bureau, under proper supervision, with proper paperwork.

The second journal. The third. The fourth. The lamp hissed. The tea in the pot on the counter grew cold. Mulligrew, in the chair, began to snore, very softly, with the pipe still between his teeth.

The fifth journal. The sixth.

In the seventh, on a page near the back, the page dated three years before Bramble had left the Bureau for the last time, there was a sketch.

It was not a smile. It was a sigil, full page, drawn in his own hand from a rubbing he had taken of a gravestone in a village he had been sent to in his second year of field work. The gravestone had belonged to a curse-breaker who had died, officially, of his own miscalculations. Unofficially, the Bureau had suspected darker work. The rubbing had been taken at the request of his supervisor, a man whose name, on the page, was written in Bramble's own careful script.

The name was Eusden Marsh.

Beneath the supervisor's name, in Bramble's hand, was a note. He remembered writing the note. He remembered the lamp in the village inn, the rain on the window, the smell of wet dog from the pub kitchen. He had written, very precisely: "Supervisor E. Marsh requests full sigil comparison with archive holdings as of 14 Sunwane, year of our Bureau 814. Note: smile-mark variant present in lower third of stone. Comparison requested against any filed curse patterns recorded to Bureau signature E.M."

Below that, in a different ink, in a hand that was not his own, a single line.

"Not found. Recommend resubmission in standard format. Signed, E. Marsh."

Bramble read the line twice. He read it a third time. Then he set the journal down, very carefully, on the counter, and put both hands flat on either side of it, the way a man puts his hands on a table when he has been told something very bad and is deciding whether to believe it.

Marsh had been his supervisor. Marsh had been patient, with Bramble, in a way that none of the other supervisors had been patient. Marsh had taught him to read curse-signatures the way a fisherman reads the weather. Marsh had signed off on every one of his early field assignments. Marsh had written, in the margin of his first proper report, the words "talent, watch this one" in a green ink that Bramble could still, if he closed his eyes, see.

Marsh had also, in his final year at the Bureau, been the subject of an internal inquiry that Bramble had never been told the outcome of. Marsh had also, in that same year, retired, suddenly, without farewell. Marsh had also, in the seven years since, never replied to the single letter Bramble had sent to his last known address, asking, simply, whether the old man was well.

And now, in a Yorkshire field, on a stone the size of a hen's egg, drawn in a hand that any cursologist with eyes could recognize as patient and slow, was a sigil variant that Marsh himself had once asked to have filed, and then, when the file had come back blank, had signed off on as if there were nothing more to be said.

The lamp hissed again. The stone on the counter smiled its patient smile. Mulligrew, in the chair, snored on, the pipe still unlit, the old man's face smooth as a folded napkin in sleep.

Bramble closed the journal. He did not close it all the way. He left his thumb between the pages, the way he had once been taught to leave his thumb in a ledger, so that he could find the page again.

He looked at the stone. The stone looked back.

"Well," he said, to no one in particular, to the lamp, to the shop, to the smell of old paper, to the memory of a green-inked word in a margin. "Well. That is, I suppose, a complication."

From somewhere on the counter, the Bureau pigeon, who had been asleep in her nest of receipts since before they had gone out, lifted her head, regarded him with one bright eye, and said, in her small flat voice, "Hockspur. There is a man at the door."

Bramble turned.

There was, indeed, a man at the door. He had not heard the bell ring. The man stood just inside the threshold, his coat dusted with the dust of the lane, his hat in his hand, his face in the shadow of the doorframe. He was not young. He was not old. He had the kind of face that is hard to remember an hour after you have seen it, which is, Bramble knew, the most dangerous kind of face there is.

The man smiled.

It was a small smile. A patient smile.

"Mr. Hockspur," said the man. "I have come about a sheep."