This Water

by Beverley Farmer

  He is alone. He is here in order to be marooned in silence.

  He too is stranded, walled up in a shell of stone, silence, solitude.

  His first sight of them close up is in the gold line of the sun across the water, coppery, monumental, masked with black and their plumage as if carved and inked in.

  He has taken to slipping through the undergrowth to whatever sedgy cove is nearest to where the sound is coming from, though for all his stealth his tread will crackle and crunch in the undergrowth, and how is he to tell, when so often the music comes from everywhere at once? There are always white dots far across the water, those few swans that have not left for the south, alone or in pairs or all together. Day by day the fall of the leaves opens the lake further to the cold light. Still, wherever his way opens on to the lake shore there is nothing to be seen but shadows, reflections, the occasional furrow. All the same, he being a patient man by nature and long training, at last there comes a day when he is creeping up, and there in a swirl just beyond the reeds are waves sipping, and a pale reflection breaking up, the hull of a skin boat, is it, drawing up at his feet?

  Swans, four of them. The dove descending. The tongues of fire.

  He is as still as a stone in his rapture. Even so they have taken fright and skidded off, ruffling, into a storm of water, leaving behind a thick wake. He has an impulse to call out to them not to be afraid, but they are far out of earshot. He utters a bark of laughter at the sorry spectacle of himself. Holy fool that you are, he tells himself, going mad all by yourself on your very own holy island. Your choir of angels is a flock of swans. But he hears them again, and glimpses them; and wherever the music is, so are they, until he can no longer doubt.

  This once they have come to him of their own accord. Will they come again? He can only wait, but out in the open now, where they can see him waiting. And come they do in the end, and take to keeping him company at a safe distance while they go about the business of swans and fishermen. Often he speaks at length or drones the one low wavering chant, not to them so much as to the very air itself. At first they can make nothing of it, but he is slowly spoken and slowly in turn their ears grow used to his rusty lilt and his gruffness. Much that he says is in their own language, changed, crude, in a different key, but they can follow. They themselves neither speak nor chant until one day the sister, taking the lead as always, and drifting within earshot, asks in his own form of the language how he can bear to be so alone.

  Me? he says. I am never alone.

  How so, says another of the swans.

  I have five companions, as you see, he says.

  Five? says the third swan.

  You four, along with my god who is ever at my side.

  The one you speak and sing to, says the fourth.

  They all speak in the same high hoot, hollow, with the hint of an echo.

  He nods.

  And who is that?

  My saviour. Yours too, if you will.

  We have never seen your god.

  Nor have I, the hermit says. He is a spirit, invisible.

  A spirit of the air?

  He senses a thrill of horror behind the masked faces. Four voices, out of the heart’s core.

  A good spirit, he says, the one who brought forth the universe and is goodness itself.

  How do you know?

  I feel it. I sense it everywhere. He is my rock.

  They float in silence, pondering this and eyeing the underwater.

  If I can swallow, he says, half to himself, the idea that I am having a conversation with four swans on the lake, what is so hard to swallow about my god?

  She is hovering, reflecting.

  We are here in the flesh.

  So you are. Swans are. But what are you, under the swanskin?

  Or you, or anyone, under the manskin?

  And again he sits thinking, and suddenly says, I sup with him when I pray.

  Here?

  Or anywhere. I bring my bread and wine, and he his own flesh and blood.

  I do not understand, she says.

  Nor I. I only eat and drink.

  And when you run out of wine?

  He laughs. Sharp eyes! We make do with water. Water or wine is all the same to him.

  He is unlike anyone they have ever known. He has a fringe of hair around a shiny bald head that he keeps under the cowl of his robe. He wraps up, he is a man who feels the cold and he makes sure his fire stays alight. He has a bracelet of wooden beads that he rubs. The beads are from trees in a garden high in a holy city in the holy land, he has told them, and came down to him from an old pilgrim now gone to his maker; as did the cross that dangles from it, made of the same darkly glowing metal as his bell and bearing the sun at its back. Where is that holy land, then, if not here? That land is far away, he says, at the foot of the sunrise. In a leather pouch tied to his belt is a little book he loves and calls his god’s very word. He sits for hours with his nose in it under the trees. The cover is burnished leather and the pages fine pale calfskin crowded with black lines of lacy printed shapes, and others that are blood red, they being the footprints, of insects or small birds, or the insects themselves, it seems, and some are grass seeds. Some of the letters in front have grown tall, or swollen up, imperiously, into coiled and knotted flamboyant monsters of gold enamel, blood red and deep sea blue. Scales of sun falling on them through the leaves set them on fire. Embroidered here and there on the pages are golden men and women, some with wings, and speckled scaly hot-eyed beasts. Clearly this is a man with one foot in another world, a man at home with magic, mystery, miracle.

  One day of her own accord the eldest pads into the upturned stone nest of the hermit and sits in silence cocking an eye at his nose deep in his book. In time the others follow, unafraid, reminded of the cave and the well in the ruins of their childhood, by the pool of light in the smoke hole here and the loud rushing of rain as often as not. Skins cover the floor, and skins and sacking hang on the wall, daubed on there with mud and clods of turf dried at his fire, so that the hut has a warm barn smell and they fit like swallows in a nest; only they never stay the night.

  From the air the green world of land and water spreads open under their wings like a leaf out of his book.

  Winter sets in and the longest nights. For one whole icy night they stand gravely watching the throbbing green swirls in the sky and him huddled outside in a mound of skins, face up and weeping, praying; and in the morning when they ask why, all he can say is that if this is a sign to him, to the world, this heavenly light, then it is beyond his power to read.

  It is only the winter lights, she says, and they mean no harm.

  Is that so? he says. Such winter lights are not to be seen where I come from, wise one.

  Well, in this land they are, she says, as common as rainbows.

  One day by the water she lets him into the secret of the bell, and how it was foretold long ago that this would be a sign that they were soon to be set free, and he is glad to hear it.

  Then it is as I have always thought, he says, and I am not here for no purpose.

  All the same we will stay on here, she says, if we may, when we change back. We have been bound too long ever to be fully free. We are bound to water by the spell and to this water, and to this land no less so, by a spell of another kind. You are our rock. Where would we go? We have seen our old home in ruins and the high king’s castle abolished, gone under the green hill. Our people are lost and so are we. We shall be strangers everywhere.

  Never strangers here, he says. Not while I live.

  I was ripe for marriage, was I not? she says into a long silence, bowed; it is her own reflection she is asking. Who will want to marry me?

  To their mind he is saviour enough on his own and as for the rest it must work itself out in its own time. As for him, he is a patient man, and a fisherman born. He would love to know how they came by the power of speech and song. And what does she mean, this new world, when the world is old and slow and rooted in vast ti
me? He asks to hear their story from beginning to end, and weeps to hear it. He tells his own story in return, easing his own heart by it and theirs as well. In no time he can tell them apart, though there is no need, when they are almost never apart. They nestle against him and let him stroke and fondle them. They are warm and solid and feathery, not to be mistaken for spirits. I have taken you under my wing, he tells them, smiling. It has come to seem to him as if they are five hermits on an island; and, to them, five swans.

  Come spring the cliff face is aswarm with birds on their nests. His head whirling, he climbs as high as he can into the screamings all around, the batterings in the wild air, until his bag is full of eggs. At home he breaks and eats them. All this his swans watch from above, unseen. He never looks up or down. One foothold, one handhold, up and down. They retreat and he misses them, surprised, until one day, clamped aching on bare rock, he hears them sorrowing overhead and his blood chills with understanding. From that day on he leaves the eggs alone.

  And they are back.

  My god has blessed me with your presence. He bows. Your company.

  We saw you stealing eggs. She stands tall. And breaking and eating them.

  I was. Until I stopped.

  Why so?

  We have no eggs of our own, says the middle brother.

  But I have my angels. Whom I would not offend for all the world.

  He watches marvelling as they soar up and flatten, dwindling away in the sky and back over the water to land. I would give my soul to fly like you once in my life! So he says, but he is quick to take it back. And washing off the mud of a day’s work one night at the spring he groans that he weighs on himself as if he were made of rock and if only he had the life and lightness of a swan. She answers that all they have is the lightness not the life. They are suspended between lives. He is sorry, he says, and he takes it back. It was only his aches and pains having their say, as flesh and blood will do.

  Flying into a dream, now white now dark now blood red, a high heartbeat.

  There is one stretch of water where the bank is thick with reeds and bulrushes where the swans often take shelter, near a fallen tree that arches over the green reflection of the hill and its own bare reflection. In some lights the unearthly green of this water reminds them of the green afterlife they are hoping against hope to enter one day hand in hand.

  He is fishing there in the popping water one twilight when they all four float up alongside him.

  What did you mean, she says, when you said your soul?

  My true self, my soul and inner being.

  And we who are swans? Where is our soul, our true self?

  I only know that all life has its soul.

  We are in a swan’s body without a swan’s soul, or self, or life or death.

  The others are out in wide circles, ring after ring, dipping their heads deep.

  What lives in no matter what body is the soul.

  So the dead have none?

  How can they?

  At that she lays her head down along her back as if asleep, her neck like a braid, her eyes hidden.

  I mean, he says after a long while, in case she is still listening, at death the soul leaves the body and lives on.

  She lifts her head. Where? And in what form?

  My dear, in the afterlife, I believe, in spirit form. In joy or agony.

  What is the bell for?

  A call to prayer, and to mark the hours –

  But you know the hours! It is you who make it call.

  Its voice, its ring, needs to fill the air. As you need your voices when you go aloft.

  It is one but we are four and we sing for each other.

  In fact, where I come from, he says, our stone tower had four bells and four bellringers ringing the changes.

  Changes? Four – ringing the changes!

  Now she knows it is only a matter of time.

  Tell me about the beasts of the book, she says one day, who are in robes of flame. We have never seen them before. Where are they from?

  He smiles.

  That I have no way of knowing. Not here below, as far as I can see.

  Nor in the sky above, she says, or we should have seen them by this time.

  True.

  They look to us as if they are made of fire, she says.

  There is such a being, or was, or so we are told, though not in this book. When it dies it is born again out of a golden egg, if I remember rightly, in a nest of fire.

  This is a bird?

  A firebird it was, everlasting.

  Born of the fire, she murmurs.

  Of the fire in the head of the maker, I fear. Or the fire in his wine.

  She gives him a look. Out of his egg of bone, do you mean? And he nods and laughs.

  Later, her enamelled eye fixed, she tells him about the fatal day and the blood red dress.

  That must have been a dress, he says, fit for a queen.

  It had no weight, only light. It was like the lake at sunset, clothed in a flame of fire. As soon as I put it on I knew I had come into my own.

  And what went wrong?

  She said we should go and thank my grandfather. On the way she stopped the chariot at the lake so we could swim. Then she raised a storm on the lake, the hag did, and sank us. It was as swans we came up for breath.

  And the dress?

  It fell into the abyss.

  And your stepmother?

  Changed into a spirit of air, fire, only everlasting. Blown away on the wind.

  I know of such beings. Some cruel, some kind.

  She is neither, she is nothing. She is helpless to do harm.

  What harm should I fear, who have my god by my side? You are the one I fear for.

  The one harm we all fear, she says, is separation.

  Another day he asks her out of the blue whether the dress was worth it and she tells him that they were not to know the cost, and it felt like a second skin. So light, she says, hardly more than a breath, a soft fire of a cloth. You should have seen it on.

  If I had an eye for such finery.

  The silk was gathered and woven in a far land beyond the sunrise –

  Out of the mouth of darkness –

  Into light! So it was. And they seamed and hemmed it in these islands here where our mother was born. And her sister.

  Maybe so. If it was the handiwork of the evil one –

  It was not, she said, misunderstanding. She could never have touched one thread of it. Only destroyed.

  It was not evil in itself, then?

  How could it be, when it was made with love to be given in love?

  What a song that would make, he says, not wanting to wrangle. The song of the blood red dress!

  I told you, it drowned, she snaps. What makes you think it is will rise up and sing you a song?

  But it has as good as done so and he smiles and holds his peace. In his mind’s eye is a flame of red, like one of the fabulous beasts, a winged one, resplendent in blood red, vermilion, lighting the way through his gospel book. In his hand is the rosary.

  In these islands, so she said. Is this after all her true motherland?

  You are not here for no reason, he says another day by the water.

  We know at whose bidding we are here.

  A higher will is at work in the world, he says, as it is in heaven.

  If so, why does it not show its hand?

  He closes his eyes to think. I believe it does. Over time it does. His handiwork is all around us and whatever is, is so only by his will. He rubs at his beads. The universe is his handiwork, his book of signs and meanings that we are too simple even to hope to read or understand. The book of life. Faltering, he looks up then, but she is nowhere to be seen. Ah, not so, she is high overhead, all four of them in a kite shape, gliding. Am I mad, he wonders, to be sitting here preaching my heart out to a pack of swans? It was if they had hatched one day, like moths out of the dark, from the very pages of his gospel book, the four apostles in glory, in animal
form, with wings, from the hands of what strange god? Maybe they are angels after all, he thinks, fallen unawares. Angels, or fallen angels. Should he be on his guard? But he dismisses the thought as craven. They mean no evil and do none. They are children, stranded here, and if fallen, only so, in that they have fallen into his hands. Is his duty not clear and his defence sure? Are his not the right hands? That is up to him.

  Once they are changed back, how strange will this world be then in their strange new eyes?

  One day as he is leafing through his book, and she looking over his shoulder, she cocks her head suddenly. In the top corner is a man sitting sideways and in his arms the white head of a bird whose dark-browed eye gazes out, as into a mirror.

  That one, what is he holding?

  He peers, it is hard to tell. Then he sees.

  A swan! he cries.

  How can it be? Is it a sign?

  Never in all these years has it caught his eye. Now he is transfixed. The whole book is a sign, is all he can say.

  Then it is!

  It is not that simple, he says, when it comes to reading a sign. There may be a riddle in it, a trick. A mystery.

  And that would make it not a sign?

  She is sure that it is. So is he. But of what he has no idea.

  At the end of any dry day now he is out in the sun reading his book aloud, and they gather around. When one day she asks why, he replies that this is his god’s word to the world.

  One word?

  Many words that make one.

  And it speaks itself out to you? says a brother.

  To me and all who can read the letters, he says. Or, if not, then the pictures.

  How?

  I was not born knowing, I had to be taught – so that is what it is for! he suddenly says.

  Could we be taught?

  If you wished. It would take time.

  As for that! she says.

  Indeed, he says, by his grace, that we do have.

  And so he believes, starting off with the pictures. There are two that the swans have looked at long and hard, and it comes as no surprise to him. One has the Mother giving the breast to the Child. The other has four winged figures emblazoned, one a man, the others glazy beasts reared up and glancing out sidelong. He turns to this one as two pairs of heads converge over his shoulders.