The Snowmelt River

by Frank P. Ryan

  The ramshackle outer city gathered itself about them, the dispersed farmsteads condensing into villages – viper pits of gossip, as Milish took care to warn him – then dirt-lined streets, their meanderings too higgledy-piggledy to owe anything to any architect’s pen.

  Alan disliked these slum-warrens, devoid of clean water or sanitation, where desperation bred greed, cruelty, and disease.

  There was no longer any possibility of being ignored. Sharp eyes in unwashed faces watched their every step. More intrusive still were the outstretched hands of beggars, the sight of deliberately blinded and maimed children. Here he saw a mixture of peoples, much as you might see in a shanty-town around some developing city back on Earth. But a great many of these people looked distinctly feral, with downy or frankly hairy faces, a medley of furry skins, claw-like hands and scaly bare feet.

  They had to pass a gauntlet of offerings: unwholesome sweetmeats and alcoholic drinks, as well as trinkets, often gaudy and increasingly vulgar. In one section, where the proliferating shanties hung back in the shadow of the massive city walls, the offerings were a good deal darker. Here, in the frames of rickety doorways, the most perverse of fantasies were openly advertised. Sadistic deviations of pain and pleasure were paraded before their averted eyes.

  ‘Stop and indulge your wildest dreams!’ a man with black stumps of teeth wheedled, running among and about them. ‘What could be more tasty than these fruits of the secret passions?’

  ‘None, I grant you.’ Milish concocted a smile. ‘And perhaps we shall have time to dally after our business is done.’

  Alan struck out at the clawing hands, or the beckoning fingers, but Milish, with a squeeze of his arm, maintained her calm. ‘Keep your distaste to yourself. There is much at stake. Remember your friend, Mo, and endure it.’

  For what seemed the hundredth time, Mo explored what appeared to be a corridor of ivory-smooth stone. She stopped and looked up high in the wall to one of the tiny circular openings that was the source of daylight. The light diffused rather than fell into the featureless space. There was no clear angle where the floor met the walls or where the walls met the vaulted ceiling, high above. Everything seemed to melt into a blur of whiteness. When she held up her hands to examine the effects of the light falling on them, her flesh looked too bland to be real, as if her presence had no more substance than a ghost. Even her dress – what should be a lovely dress, from her throat to her ankles, made of what appeared to be gossamer-white silk – couldn’t possibly be real. And when she tried to remember where she was, how she had come to be here, her memory too was blank, as if her very personality had been stolen from her.

  She cried her thoughts aloud, into the white-glowing air. ‘I’m not some doll, or puppet in … in somebody else’s imagination!’

  The worst thing, the very worst thing of all, was the fact that she could not sleep. Oh, she felt so tired, so needful of lying down and abandoning her aching limbs to rest! But there was no bed, no rug on the floor, not even a simple chair to sit on. She inhabited a world of utter blandness, no more than an endless circular corridor made out of faintly glowing smooth white stone.

  Nothing appeared to make sense – unless, of course, it made an altogether too perfect sense.

  ‘There should be windows!’ she cried.

  Abruptly, as if she had willed it into being, a tall narrow window, like an arrow-slit in a castle, appeared in the outer wall. When she ran over and looked out through the slit, she saw a sunlit garden, a garden which, the more she looked into it, was broodingly still, with a mirror-like pond in its centre. On one side of the pond was a rounded grey stone on which a large white bird was perched. The bird was as big as a grey stork, with long spindly legs and a bright yellow beak. It was perfectly motionless. Its head was averted so the face was in profile and it was peering fixedly back at her with one huge yellow eye.

  Mo’s hand reached up to her throat. Her fingers searched for something that should be there, but whatever they searched for was missing.

  Mo panicked. She began to run down the circular corridor, stopping to peer out of one window slit after another. In every window she saw that identical view, the garden with the large white bird. She retracted her gaze, sensing the awful malice that looked back at her in that single great eye.

  ‘There should be a bed, or a rug, or a chair – and food!’

  But no bed, rug or chair – or food – appeared.

  She flopped down listlessly on the featureless white floor, sitting upright, with her legs crossed. Her hands brushed her face, touched the skin of her arms, and felt nothing substantial. Nothing was real. A frantic restlessness invaded her, causing her arms and legs to jump and her mind to wander, as if her very thoughts as well as her memories were trapped in the white labyrinth.

  She took a deep breath. With a trembling voice, she tried to calm her fears by speaking aloud a new riddle:

  ‘What is eternal

  Yet everywhere dies?

  Its skirt of many colours

  Bewitches the eyes.

  Its home is the earth,

  Yet its birth is the skies.’

  Into her mind crept a voice, like a whispered secret at the very edge of consciousness, ‘The answer, pretty one, is the rain!’

  Mo gasped, whirling from one side to another, to try to find the source of the whisper but there was nobody near her. The voice appeared to have washed into her consciousness through the very glow in the air.

  ‘Who are you?’

  The reply came again, like a breath in her mind:

  ‘For some they are barriers,

  Like the encircling moat.

  For others they are comforting,

  Like a familiar old coat.

  In its pockets two trumpets

  That play not a note.’

  Mo easily solved the riddle. The barriers and old coat were walls that keep some out while keeping others safe within. And the trumpets were ears.

  The riddle was a warning: These walls have ears!

  She climbed to her feet, dashed to the nearest slit window and stared out again: that same bird was watching her with its huge yellow eye. She thought that the walls had eyes as well as ears!

  She returned to sitting down in the corridor and she murmured, ‘So I must be careful what I say.’

  ‘Very careful indeed!’

  She hesitated, attempting to think this through. ‘Since I can’t see you, how can we be talking to each other?’

  ‘In a world of magic, everything is possible.’

  Her heart leaped. Was this truly a world of magic? ‘Where is this place?’

  ‘You are the prisoner of one who calls itself the Mage of Dreams.’

  Her heart lurched. She had to swallow a moment and her head dropped. ‘You said “itself”, not “himself” or “herself”.’

  ‘It is not human, though it takes human form when the need arises.’

  ‘But why – why should this Mage of Dreams want me?’

  ‘You are the honey in its trap.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Can you not imagine for yourself?’

  ‘I have lost my memories. I know little more than that my name is Mo. That and the fact that this – this Mage of Dreams – will not let me sleep.’

  ‘Ah, now, there is the puzzle.’

  ‘But surely my dreams could not threaten one who calls itself the Mage of Dreams?’

  ‘How clever you truly are, pretty one. And no wonder the Mage fears something about you!’

  She paused again, her mind as bewildered as ever. ‘But you never told me your name. Who are you?’

  ‘I’m afraid that I’m not yet ready to tell you that. Though you may freely set eyes on me.’

  Into her imagination came an image of a squat but very heavily set little man with shoulder-length hair the red of copper and eyes as green as emeralds.

  ‘Are you a … a dwarf?’

  ‘Indeed I am, from the distinguished warrior race
of the Fir Bolg.’

  Even in her tired mind, his words evoked a memory. Mo blinked, trying to recall … There was something familiar about that name, the ‘Fir Bolg’ … Why couldn’t she remember what it was? Now Mo studied the face still hovering in her imagination. It was a strange face, heavy and brooding, with bronze-coloured skin and a broad flat nose, and lips as proud and wide as an African’s, yet now fiercely sad. It was a face in which she sensed great strength of character as well as pride and determination.

  ‘Are you breaking some rule in talking to me like this?’

  ‘At the risk of my life.’

  ‘Oh!’ She sat back with another jolt of fright.

  ‘But who cares for risk when a companion is so pretty, and so resourceful, as you!’

  ‘You must be very brave.’

  ‘No braver than you, little one! You see, in your mind I have discovered a little of your journey and purpose here.’

  ‘My name is Maureen Grimstone, although everyone calls me Mo. And I don’t understand what you’re saying. Can you tell me what I’m doing here?’

  ‘Mo it is then. And I should explain that you have been imprisoned for a single purpose – to lure another to the Mage’s chamber.’

  ‘I – I still don’t understand. Who am I supposed to lure?’

  ‘You know who – but you try not to think of it.’

  ‘I try not to think of it?’

  ‘It is your own mind rather than the will of the Mage of Dreams that has suppressed what might be unpleasant, even dangerous, from your memories.’

  ‘My mind would never suppress my memories, no matter how unpleasant or dangerous they were. If you can help me, please help me now. I can’t bear another moment like this.’

  ‘If you so wish, pretty one – Mo!’

  Suddenly memories flooded her mind. Terrible memories. The dwarf was right, and it might have been better to have remained forgetful. She now recalled everything about coming to this world. The cave with Granny Dew, the desperate series of journeys through the snow, the Snowmelt River, the attack at the rapids where she had been picked up by some terrifying bat-creature and cast down into the violent rush of water …

  Alan!

  She almost called his name out loud, but only stopped her tongue with a major effort of will. She remembered the pit and the horrible thin man – and Snakoil Kawkaw, who, of all people, rescued her but only so that he could sell her like a slave girl in the marketplace of Isscan. She remembered Shikarr …

  Terror almost made Mo faint as she recalled the journey within the coils of the great serpent, during which Shikarr questioned her relentlessly about who she was and where she had come from, and about her three companions, especially the one who carried the ruby triangle in his brow.

  When Mo had refused to answer her questions, the serpent tried many tricks and strategies, from mockery to hypnotic mind-power, in which she allowed Mo to peer into her many senses, including the second sight that allowed her to see the warm heart of every living creature within devouring range, or at least the warm-blooded ones, and the sense of smell that could paint a picture every bit as detailed as Mo’s own vision and which came not from her nostrils but from the blue-black forked tongue. There was a deep, wild wonder in feeling as well as seeing new colours, even tasting colours and the shapes of things, and sharing a great proud memory of ancient triumphs and humiliations. But here too, in every sigh and brush of contact with the great serpent, Mo had sensed an abiding hatred of all warm creatures, and of humankind especially, that was as deep and raw as blood.

  Infuriated by her resistance, Shikarr had finally shrieked, ‘Do not think to escape me, child. Wherever you go, I shall follow. For in your wake isss great opportunity. Blood, flesh and bone will be my reward – in certainty and plentiful. For an innocence such asss yours leads inevitably to battle and ssslaughter.’

  Mo had understood nothing of this.

  When, in the first light of dawn, the serpent had eventually pulled in close to the bank and deposited Mo and Snakoil Kawkaw a few miles from Isscan, a small rowing boat had come up and beached itself next to them. Kawkaw just lay on the bank in an exhausted sleep. Two desperate-looking men had jumped out and encircled Mo, one with an oar upraised as a club and the other with a sharp-bladed knife, both their faces leering. They had their backs to the river and didn’t see the great shape that suddenly lunged out of it. Mo had screamed in terror and squeezed her eyes tightly shut …

  There had been barely time for two screams of terror, causing birds to clatter out of the trees. When Mo opened her eyes again, the great serpent was gone, and so too were the men. And the boat, now empty, offered itself to Kawkaw, who had been roused by the screams. ‘Get in there, and be quick about it. For there’s one in this marketplace that will pay me a pocketful of gold for a witch’s brat such as you.’

  With her memories restored, Mo readily understood her role as the honey pot. The trap was intended for Alan. And that thought frightened and oppressed her, so that she whispered fearfully through her mind: ‘Are you still there?’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘I remember now – I remember where I heard about the Fir Bolg. Padraig talked about you. When we were in the barrow grave.’ Mo recalled the feeling of dread, as the four friends stood before the mortal remains of the terrible warrior prince. She remembered the Ogham inscriptions cut into the walls, which were a ward against great evil from the distant past. The inscriptions told the story of a warrior tribe who were not native to Ireland, a tribe of little people, yet the fiercest warriors. Padraig had called them Fir Bolg.

  ‘Please – oh, please, Fir Bolg, or whatever your name really is – can’t you just help me to go to sleep?’

  ‘My name is Qwenqwo Cuatzel.’

  ‘Qwenqwo Cuatzel – that’s a very strange name.’

  ‘No stranger than Maureen Grimstone sounds to my ears!’

  ‘Will you help me?’

  ‘This I cannot do.’

  ‘Oh, Qwenqwo Cuatzel, if that is really your name, I’m so exhausted and frightened. And …’ She stopped herself suddenly, aware that she had nearly exposed her secret. She had nearly blurted out to this supposed new friend and helper the secret she had sworn to keep with Granny Dew. And now that she thought of it, she understood at last why it was that she was not permitted to sleep. Qwenqwo was right: it was her own instinct that was preventing her from falling asleep. In sleep, the big yellow eye would see all, and the Mage of Dreams would know her secret – her real name.

  ‘I’m so weary, and you’ve already been so kind to me. Surely, if I can’t be allowed to sleep, is there not something you could do, at least to help me rest?’

  ‘I could tell you a story.’

  ‘What kind of story?’

  ‘A dreamtime rather than a bedtime story.’

  ‘Would you – please?’

  ‘Do you have a request?’

  She remembered Padraig’s stories about a magical place known as the Wildwoods. ‘Do you know any stories about the Wildwoods?’ she asked, rubbing at her eyes.

  ‘A tale of the Wildwoods it is.’

  ‘A long story, long enough to help me pass the hours?’

  ‘Your wish is granted. But on one condition. Will you sing a little song for me as I tell it? Your song will distract the Mage while it entertains me.’

  ‘What song shall I sing for you?’

  ‘A song that comes from the purest of hearts. A song of innocence, such as the thrush or the blackbird sings to greet the sun in the morning.’

  ‘I’m really tired, but I’ll do my best,’ she yawned, blinking slowly.

  ‘And as you sing, I will tell you the tale of an epic battle of wits between the last little wren and Gorra, the earwig.’

  Mo sensed the song growing in her heart, like a tiny harp tuning its chords, and then suddenly the first notes were born from her lips, as if from the magic of her true inner being, and its magic echoed in rills and rivulets through the never-end
ing corridor, with its fusion of light and air and stone. Qwenqwo’s voice also tuned itself to the same wonder of need, so his words bathed her spirit like a calming potion.

  ‘Of course the Wildwoods, as we both know, were the home of a great king of magic, known to all the fairy creatures as Ree Nashee. And today they are filled with the most beautiful blossom of flower and shrub, and the air trills with the lovely sweet songs of the birds. But it wasn’t always the case. For the new king was conceited and gullible, unlike his famed and less arrogant father. He would admire his reflection in mirrors they made for him out of sand-polished quartz. And do you know what it was about himself he was most proud of?’

  ‘No – do tell me.’

  ‘His ears.’

  ‘His ears?’

  ‘His ears, indeed! You see, the king had ears so tall they reached quite to the top of his head, and they were wonderfully pointy.’

  ‘He had pointy ears?’

  ‘Indeed they drew out to tips as fine as the finest pine needles, and were capped with little tufts of golden hair that he would wax and twirl, like others wax moustaches, until they curled high above his head, like the feelers of a butterfly.’

  ‘Oh, you’ve drawn such a lovely picture that I can see him – he is here quite clearly in my mind!’

  ‘Sing then, Mo Grimstone. Sing your song of innocence while I continue my story … For now I must inform you that the conceited king, Ree Nashee, was married to the most beautiful wood sprite, Nimue Guinevere, who wove dresses from daisies and the summery blue of the brightest flag irises, and she pranced through the Wildwoods on Dovera, her gold-maned unicorn.’