This Water

by Beverley Farmer

  Here we have four holy men, he says, enthroned in heaven.

  Their wings took them there, one brother says. Yet only one is a man.

  In the shape of a man, rather. They are none of them flesh and blood. The next is in the shape of a lion, the next, of an ox – the feet, see? – and the last, an eagle.

  An eagle! they cry in unison.

  And they wrote this book! he cries out in triumph.

  You knew them?

  It was an age of the world ago. They are souls in heaven. He looks up. And yet it came about after you were changed. This is a copy that my godbrothers made.

  What we read in this is a lost world to us, says the eldest brother.

  He nods. And to me also.

  At the end of one summer’s day, on the grey sand of the cove where they were first revealed to him he squats down with a sharp stone and draws her in outline as she floats, as it seems in the stillness, over the hot sky, leaving a wake – and he puts it in, with the ruffles gathered at her breast – and a reflection that he traces with a twig. She turns her head, and now he must wipe the sand and correct the angle of the bill and put in a long black-rimmed eye.

  She moves in closer.

  What are you doing?

  A picture of you, he says, on a page of sand. Tell me what you see in it.

  She waddles out dripping to peer down in the flat light of that hour.

  Lines, she says at last. Ripples.

  Ripples and outlines, he says, waiting to be filled in, but the light is going.

  Filled in?

  And given wings.

  Now she sees. A swan?

  While you were afloat out there on the red lake in the sky.

  But she is clawing and trampling it, she is taking to the water in a wild rush and off.

  Is that all? she cries out over her shoulder. Is that all you see?

  What he sees now is her with wings outspread and curling in at the ends, and the last light in them as if carved there, every ruffle and pinion, out of pure ice. O angel of heaven, he cries in his heart. He wipes the sand smooth, for very shame, not even understanding why.

  But by the next evening he is back at work with his sharp stone and twig, though the swans are nowhere to be seen. After a week of rain, however, when they go circling back overhead he is still there, still bent over the sand. But she alone lands at his side.

  Smiling, he looks up.

  What is this one then? she says, poised to lift off.

  Have a look.

  This one is a woman in a slender dress, with her long tresses and her sleeves flaring.

  Still to be filled in, he says. Given flesh.

  And eyes, she says.

  In answer he draws them in.

  O, she cries, if you could have seen!

  I think I may have done.

  Must we lose our wings? she is thinking, and how shall we bear it? And aloud, May it come true soon.

  Amen.

  A burning glass was I, the queen in me, yet flightless, her throne the sun.

  When do we come to the page of the Mother and Child? she asks, another misty twilight down at the shallows, and he says they will as soon as she likes and asks if she remembers her own mother.

  If I close my eyes I see her moving through a shaft of sun, alight as if from inside, half air, half flesh. Or I awake and find her stooping, a fall of hair full of lamplight. Shells of memory, broken shells. Pictures in a book. And you?

  I was a babe when marauders from the sea raided our village killing and burning, so I heard tell. The pillar of fire and smoke drew curraghs from afar once the ships were well away. These folk were burying the dead when there was I bawling, a babe in a charnel house, bloody but unharmed, the last one alive.

  They took you in?

  Another mouth to feed? They had little enough for themselves even before the raid. But they took me to a hermitage for the holy men to bring up. They were godfathers to me and godbrothers.

  She opens her wings and puts them around him, her silky cheek to the roughness of his, and neither of them can speak for a time.

  And so you were born again, she says.

  I wonder, he says one day when they are alone, if it might not have been down to the dress.

  What might not? She is in the shade, in the mirror of the shallows, agape.

  I mean, whatever made her strike like lightning, he says, out of a clear sky.

  She did that. But the spell never came to her like lightning! Our people at the lake told us no such spell was ever made but by long labouring in the dark. And was it for a dress she changed all four of us?

  How should I know?

  They told us after the change it was made for my mother.

  Now he is the one agape.

  The dress! she says. The dress.

  He has worn a path to the black stone, she sees, hovering before landing in a gust of wind.

  You gave me a fright, he says. Look. What do you see now?

  Yourself. A standing stone.

  He waits for her to see the lines, etched in deeper now by a slant of sun.

  A drawing? Open arms – wings? A swan? A man. Yourself, is it?

  A man it is. Not myself.

  I see. He has a beard. Who, then?

  He who is all the reason that I am here, the hermit says, leaving it at that and turning back to face the stone. But its stance is that of her stepmother raving and she will not leave it at that.

  Someone you know?

  He knows me is more the way of it.

  How can he?

  There are ways and ways of knowing.

  He has no eyes.

  They go in last, he says.

  I see. And then he will come to life?

  He is alive and not. He died long ago and he has life everlasting.

  She nods. In another world, then. Like the firebird.

  She understands. It is not even a question. Yet there he is at a loss, shaking his head at her, opening helpless hands.

  He is the king of glory, in whom I believe with all my soul, he adds at last under his breath, turning back, hammering.

  She is struck dumb. Life everlasting in this world, does he mean he believes? Then there is hope. Does he believe his stone is dead and yet alive? He is saying no more now, so much is clear, and she must wait and see. Will that spiderweb of shadow in the stone see, once it has eyes? As soon believe those holy beasts will rise up in flames out of the pages of his book! Unless someone is in the stone. Or unless the world has changed so much behind our backs, she thinks, that the day has come when the stones awake to walk the earth as men. She hopes the hermit knows what he is doing.

  And is this, then, the king who is to come, the northern king who is to set them free? How else, after all, is a king going to find himself here on this faraway shore?

  She flies back to warn the brothers. For all their trust in the hermit, they must beware of the stone that he is turning into a man reared up dark and grim over the sea. He is its maker and his fate is in his own hands. As for them, they must be on their guard.

  One night when the lake is loud and the hermit fast asleep in his stone hut, the embers stir and flare into a living fire that comes softly flowing and swaying over the floor to his bed, a living transparent shapeless flame, and his heart quickens. He throws off his heap of skins in his longing to draw it into his bed and have it lie with him naked body to body, soul to soul. In his sleep he knows that it loves him and is not to be feared, only loved. His mouth is open, but he can no more speak than if he were made of stone, nor can he move, only lie gazing and willing it to come and fold him in its batwings of fire and do to him what it will. Overflowing with hope as he is, he feels as if this has happened before, if only in dreams, this fusion of his body of flesh with the body of fire that is its life, in the mystery, the miracle of its making. What is incarnation if not a fall from grace into the flesh and blood where he nonetheless belongs, as a man of god and a man of clay planted in his own god’s world of mat
ter? He draws a harsh breath, and hears himself, sees the danger he is in, and the more unbearable danger of waking up too soon and being left behind, his vision failing him, falling away in shreds and flakes, for all that he is desperate to have it and to hold: until in its fierce grasp, at last, he is seized all over, rolling as if on a spit, scorching and sputtering in a whorl of oblivion. When his eyes open again, day is breaking and he is naked, alone and deeply at peace, having come to no harm in the hands of this devil, angel, god, he has given himself up to overnight, in helpless adoration. And will do again, no matter what, if only it will come.

  While they are on the page of the Mother and Child, gathered together to gaze in silence into this book that he holds half open, as if it were a door, for the first time in her life she catches sight of the dress in her mind’s eye, in the half dark of the bedchamber, quivering like a blown cobweb on the loom in her grandfather’s castle once, when she was little, unborn, the dress, before its making was even begun.

  The Mother, she says at last, and she can barely speak. The red dress.

  So she is painted in all our books, he says, in a dress of vermilion and a cloak of lapis lazuli, with a ring of gold around her head and the Child in her lap or at the breast.

  A silence.

  It is not as if our swanhood were a dress to be put on and taken off, she says then, to the hermit, to the brothers, to herself. We four are woven flesh and bone into our swanskins.

  No one has an answer to that either.

  Or so it has always seemed to us. But what do we know of spells? she says.

  But the hermit is down on his knees giving thanks for the grace, magnanimity, illumination.

  It is the golden time of the year again, when soft mist and rain sweep through, and they and the dew spangle the cobwebs and the fluffy seedheads. Again the waterlilies are opening and closing in a slow beat of wings, and the swans are beating their wings on and over the lake, fewer all the time, but as always some will overwinter. Again the trees are alight and she sees the slow fire that is each leaf, its skeleton as fine as the red spider who is busy rolling it up and mooring it with threads to a bare twig; the scabby skin of a great tree as old as she is, if not older, and at its foot little mushrooms, pushing up a white ruffle of a head on a neck, alike a cygnet, only to melt down in days into an inky sludge, and other glistening ones like drops of milk underfoot. This is an autumn of the old world, out of time out of mind and she is taking it all in as if for the first time. Or is it for the last? How are they to know when their time is up? Twice they have been overwhelmed by a sudden fierce urge to flee, once to the wild straits and once to these western isles. Has the last time of all come on them in the form of this lull, like the sea’s lapse between tides that the boatmen call slack water, dead water, now that the spell has worn thin?

  One of those twilights out on the painted water, as red gold as the sky and as still, they leave off foraging and float over to the spit of shingle where he has his fishing line stretched in; as if, he thinks, they have an announcement to make, something of magnitude. But when they open their bills it is to enter a song made of many interwoven songs, so that he can hear the words ringing out in the glassy silence of the evening sky and water, and yet not follow them through the entanglements of the music. Nothing has prepared him for this gift. Gazing, struck dumb with the honour of it, he strains to listen with everything he has, making out nine songs, now in the one voice, now in the other, now in unison, now all intermeshed; until he gives up his straining and is inside their lovesong and swansong, and all unknowing. Darkness has fallen by the time they slip away across the water, lost – for this one last time, if they only knew it – in their membrane of song, and he tracing four silver threads of wake drawing out ever longer on the silence of the night.

  All the trees are bare, spun in webs on the white sky and water, by the time there comes a flicker of red out of nowhere and suddenly boats are shaking the sea, a company of skin boats all carrying men, and the one in the lead flying a red flag streaked with shadow at the sight of which the eldest swan is a girl again for a moment, red in the water, with the madwoman towering over her and the air wild with shrieks. King, comes the cry over the water, ringing in her ears. (Free! Free!) Here comes the king, she tells the others, and now we shall be free.

  The brothers, thinking it is their father she means, are wild with joy, and no less cast down when all they see is wallowing boatloads of strangers at the landing. The brothers never heard their stepmother’s last ravings, except from their sister; and what a king and his men would be doing here makes no sense to them. Nor does it to the hermit on his way down to receive the visitors.

  But no king is among them that he can see, only a flag; and besides, all he has been told about is the bell and he knows nothing of any king from the north. He only sees a band of brawny marauders and he bawls them out, standing his ground onshore and telling them off for picking on a bare island and its holy man to ravage, and ordering them off too, and they exchanging grins all the while at the hairy fellow and his antics. None of the regular boatmen knows the secret of the swans, who are still out of sight as these boats bucket back to where they came from. But the swans have been on the watch and now they gather in the hut, and he finds out that a king and his bride will indeed have a part to play in the lifting of the spell and they have high hopes. And, as luck would have it, or fate, all four swans are in the hut at his mercy when some days later a whole fleet of boats lands at the shore noiselessly in the twilight, with a grander boat at their head, and a king on board.

  Some say at this point that when the king from the north has taken his bride from the south, she, having heard the stories, lets him know he need not think of bedding her until he has brought her, as a wedding gift, the four talking swans she has heard so much about, who sing aloud an otherworldly music that is a wonder to all; and they go on to say that, while all he has a mind to do is give her a good hiding and let her know who is master, there will be time enough for that, and meanwhile he has tracked them down by word of mouth to the stone beehive of an island hermit who has taken pity on them and given them shelter.

  So, taken by surprise, the hermit is roused that night by those same travellers looming in his doorway, booted and armed and thrusting lanterns in his face. Again fearlessly he stands his ground, stooped low, fists clamped on the sealskin doorflaps, but the king is among them and has already spotted their quarry. He tells the hermit to give up the swans and he will be safe; they have reared up behind him hissing in terror, so the story goes, their eyes ruby red in the firelight and their great wings flapping. The hermit too flings out his arms, but with a curse the king shoves him aside. Two of his henchmen lunge into the huddle of swans and like hounds hunting in unison they each grab one by a wingtip to bring it down. But at the first touch a faint quavering shriek arises as if from a long way off, and all four of the swanskins slough away, skin and plumage in one piece, to leave four flayed bags of bone standing, toothless jaws agape, for a split second before they buckle and fall.

  Aghast, the king rounds on the hermit and roars that he has laid a spell on the swans to thwart him and will pay dearly for this defiance.

  Had I had the power to cast such a spell, said the hermit, you would hardly be wise to go making threats. But this is not my doing – or yours, or so it would seem. They who were spellbound have by a miracle been set free. Not into this life or this world. His will be done.

  Free, are they? scoffed the king.

  Free at last. Not as they foresaw, alas. Not as they hoped. And not by any will of mine.

  It was by no will of mine that my bride sent me off on a fool’s errand, says the king. Singing swans of the otherworld! Did you ever hear the like? He waits but the hermit is on his knees lost in thought. And after all that, to end up with nothing to show for it but empty skins!

  What?

  The swanskins, man. By way of proof. I am not going home empty-handed having gone this far.

 
Too far, and the swans are gone, and any songs they might have sung, the hermit says, and he makes his cross, biting his lip. And what earthly good might four sorry shocks of feathers be to any woman, unless – heaven forbid – she be a witch? Skins that might be ripped off any old swans in the world! Might she not want to know if you take her for a fool?

  The king scowls. She very well might, as he knows. And as for commandeering the carcasses, he has a fair idea how that would go down.

  Come, now, says the hermit, a higher power is at work here, an unfathomable power neither of us should dare defy. It is all over. In no form will they ever come back to life. Stay the night and eat and rest, if you will, and let us keep the wake together, us two alone, mind, and you shall have all that is left of them now that is fit to change hands.

  The king’s men have soon unloaded their gear and set up camp, collected wood and lit fires. In no time they have venison spitted and roasting and are wolfing down bread and meat and tossing wineskins around, glad enough if they must be at the end of the world to be on land at least and free to sing and dance and snore the night away. Meanwhile the hermit, who has been bidden to join them and refused, in order to fast, can see to his dead in peace.

  Their eyes, as always, are like drops of water. The new faces they have are blank, no more than a gauzy shrivel over the bone, like silk after a wetting. How can this be? He passes a hand over their eyes to close them. Then he collects clayey mud in a bowl and plugs them where they would otherwise leak, scrubbing his hands and tossing the slops out through the doorflaps. For shame, he thinks. If they were not so frail, they ought to be washed and laid out, not left to go stiff all spraddled together, mother-naked, and not so much as a hair between the lot of them. But what can he do? Not for anything will he put them back in the swanskins of their long ordeal, and he has nothing that will do for a winding-sheet. His robe? The sail of his skin boat – his sail, his lifeline? Either would be madness. Nor will he ask the king for a cloth. Even given in utter penitence – and how might that be? – what a mockery, to be swaddled in the king’s cloth! After all, a higher will has decreed this, their ultimate incarnation. All he can do is leave them be. So much, he thinks, his gorge rising, for all that hope and patience, all that lost time! He strokes their newfound faces, the brittle claws of their hands and feet. He who could always tell them apart no longer can, but for the one, the hag, with her withered dugs and slit, her legbones and jaws hinged wide, the dreamer. O whiter than the swan, he groans, the pain of it catching him like a fist between the eye, so that he cracks and doubles up, rocking his head in his arms. O ripe for marriage! It takes a lull outside and the king’s voice bellowing orders to bring him to his senses. Hastily he wipes his eyes and crouches over ash and embers, blowing his fire back to life.