This Water

by Beverley Farmer

  Now is that any dress for a child your age? she cried, far too gaily. Whatever was he thinking?

  It fits, said the girl. See?

  The stepmother shrugged.

  It will do well enough, I dare say, under the black mantle. She swung around. Come on, she said to them all, I have ordered the chariot. Hurry up now and get ready! Let’s give your foster grandfather a surprise.

  We are! they said.

  She had never offered to take them by herself before, and they were all taken aback at her vivacity.

  Not you, she told the girl. Go and change if you are coming.

  Why?

  Do you think a dress worth a king’s ransom is for romping around in?

  But the girl would not hear of changing.

  Grandfather gave it to me, she said, and he will want to see how it looks on. You know he will.

  Red was the colour of that most royal of royal houses, and he was a red man himself, and even nicknamed so. Everyone knew that the high king was a lover of all things red.

  You will boil in it in this heat. She bit her lip. Very well, bring it and you can change when we get there.

  Since I already have it on –

  Then take it off, do you hear?

  Why?

  Do as you are told.

  For the first time the girl went so far as to say aloud what she had always thought and never dared say.

  Why should I? You are not my mother.

  The stepmother drew herself up.

  You dare answer me back once more, my girl, she said, and you will be sorry.

  The skin of their faces had gone to ice, and their charcoal eyes were baleful, so that they might for once in their lives have passed for mother and daughter. The girl stood her ground, mute. It was the stepmother who gave in.

  The way was long and passed by a green hill with the lake at its foot, deeply shaded under beeches and oaks trickling with water light and leaf shadow like rain, where in summer the family would often stop to rest the horses and, on fine days, have a swim. The green waterlily pads had a spattering of clots like snow on them that were petals opening, closing, afloat at the swampy edge, where they caught the afternoon sun as it flowed down the green hill behind the other shore, and down the other green hill underwater, the mirror hill, no less solid, until a white speck, a swan, drew a slow line across from one reed bed to another. There were dragonflies here, and quick birds, each in itself a blur. All this the girl took in as she ran with the boys down to the shingle beach. The stepmother came up behind, biting her lip. She knelt down and dipped her hand in with a shudder. We are too late in the day, she said. The water is cold, and, look, murky. There were frills of some thick bloom of murk in the sedge, but otherwise the shallows were warm enough, and transparent only a few steps in. She might have gone in herself, had it not been that, for the first time in years, she was bleeding that day, a sign to her that all her strength was surging back, her womanhood, that she was coming into her own at long last. She could not go in for fear of staining her clothes and the water with her blood. The boys were frantic to go in, leaping and pleading. Even they were defying her now! She was faint, hot and yet shivering in her fever and her heart banged hard in her ears.

  Go on, take your clothes off then, she hissed, and hurry up. Go on. Keep close to the shore.

  The boys stripped. But for a second time that day the girl baulked. There would be no third.

  What now? said the stepmother, smiling hard at the dazzle of flame in front of her. I suppose you mean to go for a swim in it now!

  The girl had not been meaning to. But she rose to the taunt.

  Why not? It will dry fast. And it will keep me cool on the way.

  Ha! Do as you like! You and your insolence!

  The girl kicked off her shoes, gave her nearest brother a playful shove and went in barefoot, laughing, with all three splashing at her heels, and dived and lay floating in the blood red of her silks as they clung rippling and belling around her and the boys circled her and pelted her with water. They made a whirlpool of facets of red, of black, of sky, like an animal being torn open underwater. Then the girl broke free into a shady patch where, treading water, she could see herself, as in a mirror, against the deep flood of red where her dress swam in the black lace of the reflected leaves. She looked up and they were ragged, fiery, edged with red and gold over the sun. But a fierce current washing over had clamped her, so cold that she was numb in a moment, and was sweeping her to shoreward to where the boys were; only she could not see them for a blanket of mist that had blown in and lay low, smothering the whole lake and the shore where she came waddling out.

  Once they were far enough out in the water the stepmother had raised her arms and brought the mist down. By then she had woven her spell.

  What happened? uttered the girl who was a swan, to the other three at her side.

  Something that will break your father’s heart, said the stepmother out of the mist, and serve him right. You would be dead if I had my way.

  You will be sorry. You will pay for this. Hag, save your skin. Take back what you have done. Put an end to it while there is time.

  An end you shall have, never fear, said the stepmother, and time, like it or not.

  It is in your hands, hissed the swan, fighting for breath, to undo this.

  No hands on earth can undo what mine have done and no time either – and, as you and I well know, nothing will save my skin. As for yours, be thankful that you will live long lives, just as you are, swans with the power of speech, though that was no doing of mine, much good may it do you. You are to pass three hundred years bound to this water of your spellbinding, and three hundred on the narrow strait between this land and the white lands in the east, on either coast and on the islands and skerries of the wild waters, and three hundred on the outlying shores and islands of the west, your mother’s birthplace and my own. Nine hundred years shall you endure hardship and hunger and pain without end. Never more shall you be housed on land, not one night more. To water you are bound, on water you stay. As for your blood red dress, stepdaughter, go forage for it, go on! It is deep in the belly of the lake where you will never find it. You will wait an age of the world until one day far out to sea you will hear the toll of a bell and the end of the spell. A king in the north will take him a southern bride and he will send far and wide for you four. To sing to her majesty! Sing your hearts out in your craving to be free!

  She was babbling now, shrieking with laughter, her mouth scarlet in the sun and her hair flung wild. To the girl as she fell and lay there sprawled on the ground, her feathered head drumming, the very air dripping red with her wild screeching. Blood, the girl thought. Her blood. Her blood. Her blood for our four lives.

  I was arrayed in fire like the lake at sunset, in a flame of fire.

  I was a hot whirr and dart, a vortex of thin air, a dragonfly.

  The stepmother, well knowing what was in store for her, would yet stave it off for as long as she might. No one had passed by and seen, and no trace remained, but for a red rag far out on this water of secrets, mocking her to the very end. Hastily she bundled up the boys’ clothes and hurled them too into the lake, waiting while they drifted out in the wake of the dress and sank, waterlogged. Last to sink was the dress itself, bobbing in blisters of light far along the water, in curdled skeins, and one high bubble, a blown heart like a hollow egg with the sun in it. Of the children themselves there was no sign, only drops of blood in the grass, more blood threading the shallows, and a writhe of light a long way out where they had risen into the clouds.

  Betrayed by her own fury, she had sprung her trap too soon. Now she was caught with nothing but what she stood up in and nowhere in the world to go. Rather than return home she fled to the only other place, the castle of her foster father the high king, while there might still be time to get away. The high king, surprised to hear she had arrived in the chariot alone, was not unduly alarmed, not having seen the white blaze of her face as she dro
ve in. But when he welcomed her by asking why, on this day of all days, the children were not with her, she lied, saying her husband had forbidden her to bring them for fear they might come to harm. Not believing a word of it, he sat her down and sent messengers out in haste to their father’s castle and to their father, who was still away. Alarmed, he returned home, only to be told that she had left with all the children. Setting off in haste to the high king’s castle to solve the mystery, he passed by that same dark lake with its oaks and beeches; and there the swans, his lost children, who had only flown in a circle, waylaid his chariot and told him everything. Distraught, he thundered off to the high king and denounced his wife. Now she could stave off her downfall no longer with her lies. The high king in his fury worked a spell of his own that turned her into a fiery wraith of thin air, formless and harmless for all time, and so the stepmother was undone. But there was no undoing the spell. No power on earth could undo it.

  Crying out, clawing, panic-stricken, they have beaten their way out of the toils of the water and the blood red dress, emerging naked and bloodied into another life in flight, swooping and circling, and in the lightness of foam over water.

  At first there was nothing but terror and pain as their bodies thrashed and contorted in a mist as thick as swansdown. When it lifted, each arm was a fledged wing, and the smooth white skin of each body was lost in thick plumage. On each hoop of neck there grew a black-masked head with a red bill and eyes that glinted in the late light. They were heavy, weighed down, and so clumsy, bruised and bent that they could barely pull themselves upright, necks reared and wings spread wide, on legs of rough grey leather and clawed feet with webs. But in the water, weightless, and in the air.

  If they are not mute, nor do they have the voices of winter swans. She has left them the power of speech and song so that they may wail their sorrows to their hearts’ content. And wail they will in song after song in woven airy strands and skeins, a matchless music to swell the hearts of all who hear it, as if their song were in their wings, like a harp high in the wind, and not only in their throats; and for all that, their wailing will be in vain and there will be no help for them.

  The sun is low on the hills and the day’s work done. Streaks of silver shimmer in the distant reaches, where it is night already, and silent in the trees. Aghast and abandoned alone on the lake shore, they take to the water and are lifted, paddling, drifting in pairs, turning from time to time to face each other’s masked profile, rigid, in a world of red sky and water. Under the red glow, under their own shadows and reflected images, interlaced, they press close; the lake is fathomless, black. So is the sky, as the red stain fades and the stars spark and dangle in the trodden water all around, more and more stars. Four furrows over the water are their four wakes of starlight. Not until moonrise do the swans dare struggle up, clumsily scudding and clambering up as one, until they are lightness itself in the night air.

  Their fate will be a bedtime story told at the fireside in many a cottage that the swans sail over, unrecognised. There go the king’s children, some will say, catching sight of swans in the air and thinking to hear a high echo, and will shake their heads for the pity of it.

  We four swans, born of a swansdown of wet white mist on the milk white lake

  They are of an ancient race neither mortal nor immortal but in between. Born to a life of endless youth, they have not been wholly robbed of their birthright. Swans in form but not in nature, they are and are not of this world. They dip their heads down and forage in this other dim world of water, eyes wide, among roots and weeds, eels, otters, fish in shoals, mud lifting like mist, under this second sky that is the skin of the lake. They void their excrement, sleep their sleep and wake only to drift and forage again. They will never take a mate and raise young in the reed beds as other swans do. They will never grow old. They will stay as they are for nine hundred years, whatever scars they carry from the hardships of their life on sea and land. They will not die while the spell holds. A bell – what is a bell? – will be the sign that the end is near, when a king of the north will take him a southern bride. And then where will the swans be? There is no knowing. The hag had nothing to say about that. They will only know themselves when the time comes. Meanwhile they will stay together always. They will live one life.

  The change is a long time sinking in. The eldest is the slowest to adapt. A swan by day, night after night she will find herself walking with white feet on grass alone with her shadow under the sun in another world all the way down to the lake through trees full of the green gold of leaves whose every vein and cell is sharp on the sky and on to the pebbles and sucking mud at the lake lip. A sheen comes off the water, a haze, a breath. In the sun and shadow are arching blackberry brambles and creamy meadowsweet in full flower and grass halms shrouded in spiderweb. The shallows are swollen and shifting under the flakes of sky, the drooping skeins of leaf and feathery tuft and wisp, the lily pads and reeds and rushes in the coves. She barely notices how her skirts are lifting away and her legs taking on the dapple of the water in scroll on scroll of deepening light, deeper and deeper as they darken, as they fall out of sight; her skirts billowing up under the mirror of her face have broken it, they are spread out around her in a beaded cloth of silvery bubbles and she is treading water, afloat, naked, white all over, steadily paddling as she dissolves into no more than shreds of broken water.

  Her songs are all of flight, of floating, of soft white ruffles and a red skin that clung like fire until the water put it out, and of mists like swansdown, and of the comb that is each feather, preening. What child has never dreamed of flying? Now they fly, their arms beat and sail, in the grip of the invisible winds. Shadows on the sky, they soar and hang, their hearts drumming, high over the paths of the sea, the paths of the sun and moon.

  Their highflown songs are seldom in unison. Sometimes only one swan will sing. When two or more sing, it may or not even be the same song, but they will interweave their words, strings of syllables slowly looping over and under, until whatever they sing folds into the one song, the music of the moment, spontaneous and unrepeatable. To them it will ring clear and as loud as a peal of bells. Those few on the ground who hear them, though never quite catching the words, will describe it ever after as haunting, and ethereal.

  Anyone chancing on them in the reeds, or out on the open water circling and doubling back, labyrinthine, and in the air, will see nothing but four swans, inseparable, among all the countless thousands of winter swans. But no swan of all the generations that live and die afloat alongside these four will ever see them as fellow swans, let alone as kin or anything more than turbulences of air and water, misty apparitions, visitants.

  Their father in his bitter remorse has sworn that he will never marry again or father a child who might take their place in his heart. For love of them he moves his whole court for half of every year from the hill castle to a summer camp down on the lake shore among the oaks and beeches, near the reed bed where the swans have their nest, so that for the three hundred summers they may still partly live side by side with their loved ones until the day comes for their ways to part: his, back to the hill castle, where all the children’s belongings will stay just as they were left, he tells them, for when they revert to their true selves at the end of the spell, as if nothing has happened; and theirs, under an irresistible compulsion out of nowhere, to a waste of sea and solitude.

  To the lake into which their true selves were cast that fatal day they are bound by both hate and love. In summer their young friends join them on the shore there in their finery and swim or paddle out on the water in curraghs and keep them company. At first the songs they make are of day after day at home in the sun and rain and by the hearth fire in the long dark of winter, and of the young mother the twins have never known but the eldest two remember as forever loving and luminous, in looks so like the aunt who came to take her place, and in heart so unlike. Wary of strangers, they are never to be seen or heard unless by chance. Even so, the rum
our of them is all through the island, and the fear; so much so that the high king has decreed no swan be harmed by hunter or hound throughout the realm on pain of death, or taken into captivity. He comes to see them from time to time, when he may, sitting with them and their father for long hours in silence, stricken with self-blame and stroking their heads and long wings while they sing to him. As year after arduous year passes and children are born into the court and grow up never having known them in their true form, only as swans, the songs that they four sing are fewer, and dwell more and more on the life of lake and river, sun and moon, red dawn and twilight, love and longing, in tones so mournful that all who hear even a snatch of the music are struck to the heart with sorrow and wonderment. Over time, even the visits of the king their father to the lake fall off, though they are still greeted with the tears that the sight of them has always wrung from him, all his grief and remorse reviving at their great swoops and splashes of arrival, until their presence is almost harder to bear than their loss. They understand, and show themselves there less often, to spare him pain and to let time work its healing on him; and so it does, until the day comes when he can again see a swan alighting on the lake for another long winter with no leap of the heart, no pang of grief or fond hope. But time has no such power over them and their grief, and their fond hope. When will they be themselves again? They are exiles even from time.

  The love of this mirror of sky is so deep it holds us fast for life

  After three hundred years when their farewells are made and they set off, this time forever, they make their way high over the green hills and the black, and the domes and hewn stone lintels of the dead, and caves, and over the gnarled bare forests and trees and green forests, and red and gold, and bogs alight with cotton, and cliffs and rock stacks swarming with seabirds, and long pebbly strands strewn with sea wrack. They catch sight, here and there in a shine of river or lake, of themselves as tiny specks, gnats, flies, outstretched, all their white strength in their long arrowhead of thrust and soar, for as long as the spell binds them, every night an eternity. Now and then as they fly, and as they roost, as they must, they break into long slow intertwining skeins of melody, one voice and then another, and another and another, all repeating, all flowing together, madrigals of the upper air. They sleep close in all weathers. In the depths of the winter dark the eldest has always made a nest of herself for them all, a brother under each wing and one under her breast, her creamy neck flat to her back and her head asleep in plumage.