This Water

by Beverley Farmer

  And again the glow comes into his face. Severe he may be when she has failed to please him, but his beauty at such times is sure to transfix her. She is his for the taking and his artistry is proof against haste. He will draw the moment out as she stands gazing, helpless to move, all her skin alive to him. He will make no move himself, heavy in his stillness, until at last, almost as if she were asleep and yet awake in every nerve, she has reached out her hand and laid it on his thigh. Then he will relent and take her in his arms, and all will be well between them.

  In his absence she sometimes sees shadows crossing the snow and the beings who drop them there, their true selves, crossing the sky, so high, so soon out of sight. And once a curled white feather sways like a snowflake down past her at the windowpane to be lost in the expanse of snow. Lost to her eyes, but there, and she knows instantly that it is has fallen from a winged self flying between worlds. How she would love to take hold of it, to have it for her own! She longs for it, but knows better than to ask. She would rather have the feather than all the stones in the palace.

  Nevertheless in his absence – she has come to think of the dome as the very shape of his absence, enclosing her – with the golden ball to guide her she does the rounds of stones like spires, horns, cubes, glossy black grapes of clustered stone, stones smooth as water. Stars. Crystals of milky light, green stones like molten ice refrozen, blue in their depths, or green. Striped lozenges and red fans of stone. Lobes, feathers, blades, teeth, milky petals. Blue-black stones with a glitter of the night sky. Towers of stone, high brittle shafts, ramps and staircases. Beads and spines of bright red and white stone like frozen fur. Ringed eyes, and fingers. Speckles. Balls, smooth or faceted, and clear ovals full of cracks and bubbles and needles of air. Crystal forms enclosing their interpenetrating self-images. Just as they appear they imprint themselves, in a mind almost barren of comparisons; she can bring little to bear on what she sees in the stones. And yet, like the curtain of the bridebed, a membrane fraying at the edge of thought, pushing, almost, to be thought, shows up at times in her dreams, translucent, opening onto the beyond, only to melt away as her eyes open.

  He is back and now she is wary of him and he notices.

  This is new. You are always on the lookout.

  When you are away I look out for a sign.

  You never sleep?

  Except when I sleep and then I may see a sign of you. But there is always something new outside.

  Or so it may seem. He sighs. Even from afar.

  What do you mean?

  If anything lives out there it never sees whole the way we do in here.

  Does anything live out there? Then it must know better, she says.

  More.

  Know what?

  What it is like to be out there.

  Moment by moment. Facets of it.

  Now it is her turn to sigh.

  This side or that, he says.

  Which we could also know if we went out.

  In here we know all we need to know and that is the truth.

  I still do not see –

  Indeed, he says over his shoulder.

  I should just like to come to know ice and snow for themselves for once, as you do in the outside world, and not only in seeming!

  And you think you would like the truth of what you came to know?

  Like it or not. To have no walls in between.

  And then to come back in?

  Why not?

  Why not might be the first truth you would come to know. Beware of going too far.

  Between nowhere, she says to his back, and too far, how am I to know?

  Amber is more like light, she remarks one day in the jewel room, than crystal or other stones. It loves to be in the palm of the hand. Out of the ambit of the lantern she lifts a sphere of clear amber out of its pool of self-light and holds it up, only to find a clot at its heart: an extended webbing, a fur coat, a bead, like a long eye – no, two eyes, two black pits.

  There is something inside! she cries.

  He is behind her in an instant. So there is.

  What is it?

  A bee. A being.

  Flinching, she holds it to her eye. Like you and me?

  Yes, and as flawless. He turns it under the lantern. See how small and fine she is? Is she smaller than she looks, as if she were in water?

  That is a good question, he allows. A little smaller.

  And alone in there!

  Her companions went into the void an age of time ago in a lost world. Only she remains. She and the drop of amber in which she is held.

  The bride is transfixed.

  Intact, he says, in eternity.

  Does she know she is intact?

  A smile narrows his eyes. We know. Her beauty is intact forever, day and night, for us who have eyes to see.

  But for her? thinks the bride. Little one, you have eyes, she says into the amber drop, but do they see?

  His lip curls. How would we know how and what other eyes see?

  From what my own eyes have seen, day and night, she says, her voice high and quavering, I have come to see that beauty is a matter of the moment, caught in passing.

  Exactly.

  I mean, only in passing –

  What has come over you?

  – if at all!

  If at all? He stares. Speak for yourself, he says. What I catch I keep a hold of.

  And now he is gone again, abruptly, their flurry of confrontation left up in the air while she stood alone at a dark pane. He was caught unawares, as she so often was, but he never so until now. What came over him? Was it the sight of the bee? What did you ever catch, my love, she wonders fondly, except for stones? And herself, of course, in his game of the marry dance, but then she had caught him too, they had caught each other. She is alone and back to wandering the labyrinth at a loose end, still troubled, however, and struggling to make sense of the – what was it? – exchange. Stumble. She can recall it only up to the ring of her loud reply, and the way his face turned to stone as he swung on his heel. Had he taken the amber drop away? Though she goes back and back to the jewel room, it is only ever there in her sleep, alight in midair, out of reach. Somehow she has lost track. What is he doing with a thing like that? What has he done?

  There comes a time when, exploring, she trips on her golden thread and drops the precious ball, for the first time ever. It runs away and she chases it, stooping to get a hold of it, and finds herself at a half-open door where she has often walked before and there has never been one. Open, or closed? Neither. Both. Does this mean she is to go in? Is this a sign he has left for her? And while she hesitates on the threshold, before she knows it her eye has caught a glance in the gloom beyond, far from the lantern, an eye, two, a sudden glow, a pair of watching eyes. Or a trick of the light?

  She steps inside.

  At first the room has little to offer. Slabs of stone are stacked upright on the shelves around these walls, until a streak of window light etches, not only an eye, a whole shape she has not seen before, on a brown tablet by the doorway – a hoop, a needle arch of teeth agape, a cupped eye. She stops and traces the edges with a fingertip. No trick of the light this time, but a sunken, unmistakable face.

  Eagerly she turns the tablet over – blank – and moves on to the next one. There too lies a face, a body embedded, long-jointed, intricately etched; and so it is with all the slabs and thin tablets, a lacework of leaf, a shard of marble, a ribbed spine, a pale coil on coil, hollow inside – shapes one after another, that chime, impossibly, with images in her head. Dull thick plates of stone, and yet inhabited, more so than any of the gems and marbles and crystals with their star-fractures and showers of light – except for one. What they are like is the being in the amber drop. And if she – he called it she – is intact, so are these. And then she comes across the tablet of grey stone that he had shown her before, with the bird shape inside, and sees it with new wide eyes.

  This is not just a shape, this is a being, a self i
n the grip of stone, a horror to behold.

  Since he has shown me this, she thinks, tracing it with her finger, why not let me see them all? But did you really see, she asks herself, or did only your eyes see until now? Now it is almost as if they, the stone dwellers, have drawn her to them of their own accord. What do they want of her? All she wants is to be gone from here. And now – how to leave the door? Just as it was, it must be, half open. But how to be sure of finding it again? Did the golden ball bring her? Unawares, she has learnt mistrust. She pulls a fine thread from her hem and loops it around the stone nearest the door, leaving a white line on a white floor unravelling behind her alongside the golden one, until her shift is half eaten away and she is back on familiar ground.

  But the nameless images will not leave her alone. There is no resisting them, she is so drawn back. As soon as she wakes she must find her way along her golden thread, paying it out to the half-open room and its wonders. The further in she goes the more there is. She picks up each stone in turn, admiring every surface, finding blades and fretworks of some white stone, like marble, or ice, threaded through them, the shreds and knots and webs of shell, inlays of spine and scale all bound fast. She can connect nothing of this with anything she knows of and yet she feels she knows them. The stones have an open eye, or two together, or a hollow where an eye should be. They have teeth in bony mouths stretched wide in the act of being swallowed, multitudes of them, by these stones, she thinks with a shudder, and in that moment of revelation she shrinks from this room that has drawn her in. How can it be? Might she herself be swallowed – and he too, when he comes back – and bound sightless and helpless in stone like this?

  The room itself is as still as stone. And yet – unless it is the warping of the light of the dome – when she comes back, as she is compelled to, for all her fear, sometimes she finds one or other of the stone beings not quite as it was the last time, almost as if it has stirred, shifting and stretching or nestling in deeper into its slumber: as if they were loose in their own way, these presences or traces of presence in the stones, free and alive, in another order of being beyond her knowing.

  He has never brought her in here. He has left her to find it by herself. So she in turn will say nothing to him about it when he comes home, but wait for him to show his hand in his own good time. For all she knows this is a new step in the marry dance, a secret sign for her to follow. And he, once he knows that she has found the room – but will he, with no white or gold thread to follow, for she will have rolled it up as she went? – he will either speak of it, or not, and the game will go on from there and she will have to find her own way through.

  Or will he follow her in? She catches her breath. Is that what she wants? For once she is not sure. Might he even turn on her, as he had with the bee? She has been so much alone in communion with the stone beings mostly, and hardly at all with the gemstones. Might he have meant to keep her away from them, for her own sake? Has she made a mistake, a false step? What will he say if she has, what will he do? Close the door? Seal it up in the wall, invisible? Shut her out? Or in – shut her in! She shudders? Why would he? Was that the undercurrent of the marry dance?

  Although for now it is no more than a pang of misgiving at the back of her mind, an invisible wall seems to have arisen between them, a wall of more than crystal or even absence, a wall of secrecy. She has learnt suspicion and he knows she has. And hot on its heels, dread.

  Where has she seen such faces before, such gaping eyes and mouths as haunt her sleep, their fluency of movement so much the opposite of stone?

  It is in the bath, lying back with her eyes half closed, that the answer comes to mind. They were all in water, somewhere, once. Wherever it was, these were in a water that the stones must have drunk in, along with all that was in it. They are beings at home in water! Was the amber being one of them? But she could fly – unless these beings flew in water? There are ripples in so many of the stones that might have been water before the stone drank them in. And she has seen this water before, but where? – running water full of beings that live and fly, the darker for being submerged, the larger and more intense in colour and the deeper, the faster.

  That night as she goes in her sleep along a snowy ledge in another time, two selves converge and keep pace with her and with each other, in a shuffle of breath, of snow, of white feathers in white water. And she is shocked wide awake, too soon, and the vision dissolves, but she knows that she has already known them in some other world or time. She clings on, lying still, waiting for sleep to take her back. At her feet is a pathway of grey-green ice with puddles of water and a large pane under which water runs dark, with tawny fragments of what looks like fabric, ribbed, fluttering, leaves in it, leaves, she knows, and bodies with black pits for eyes, ringed in gold, passing through it as she gazes down, in a great mottle and speckle of skin of all colours, water selves, wide-mouthed, wide-eyed, watchful. A vision.

  It comes to mind that he never said that bees swam – flew – on wings, yet she had known. And she had never thought to ask why and where they flew, or what and where eternity was. Where did he go? Sometimes in her deepest trance of sleep he is back and silently takes her in his arms as she opens to him. But when, more and more seldom, she surfaces, she is always alone.

  When she next wakes she finds herself in a new world of bright light, overflowing with light, reflections and shadows, transformed. She who has spent so much time enthralled with the intricacies of shell and bone, of fractured crystal, by lantern light, finds herself and everything else bathed in pure light. For all their beauty, isolated in lantern light, those lost fragments of a lost world had only ever seemed to be transformed, a trick of the light on the mind. No true change had ever come about in them, for all her looking. But here and now it is the irradiated outside world she longs to see close up, the ice and fall of moonlight, and the snow all around and feel them too – and, if not, why not? With a sigh she goes back to window-gazing.

  What out there that takes your eye? it is as if she hears him say in passing. But he only seems to be here.

  Reflections. Shadows –

  No life in stones but life in shadows? he says. And she has no answer to that and makes none, her face deep in the light, a shadow.

  Shadows and reflections have a beauty of their own, the voice goes on. Have I ever denied it?

  After long silence, a concession.

  Or I, that there is life in stones? she replies.

  A misstep. His brow creases. He knows, she thinks.

  Shadows and reflections are not the truth of what we see. Not what it is. If anything they obscure it. That is all.

  You know what I see?

  You see what I see. Which is not the point, he sighs, however.

  But if we cannot trust our eyes –

  We can trust them to see, but only the surface, not the hidden depths. So beware. Speaking for myself, he adds, they are all that can be trusted.

  She is listening intently. But the voice falls silent.

  Now whenever she picks up a stone and turns it over and over, bringing up its particular self to quick life, she sees what made him want it. He does not mind its blankness. If her love for the stones is less than his, she must strive to love all of them for his sake. Is it because he found them himself, chose them one by one – how, where – that he loves them more? Did he love the ones in the dim room so much that he wanted to keep them to himself? She who loves him as much as he loves her, if not more, has always thought that his will was to have her love not him alone but all that he loved. If she does not, will he know and love her any the less for it? There is this absence he sees in her, of love for what he loves. Is it a flaw? At the thought she is cast down, as when a fog comes over the dome, only in her it is inside as well, she is all fog. To be loved is to be without flaw. And to lose love? She shudders. Can love be lost? What can be lost here, where nothing can get out? Only he can. But there is nothing here but him, nothing else that matters; and that is the troubl
e. All these stones could vanish, be lost, even the inhabited ones, and she would hardly mind at all, except that he would. She would mind for his sake. Is that enough for love not to be lost? So much she has no way of knowing! What does lose mean, and lost? He is here and he is gone, lost as she is lost when he goes away, like when they did the marry dance, and where are you, and here you are, back again! My love! Always! So after all nothing is lost? And the fog lifts and in no time she is fast asleep.

  Now snow whirls and flurries, now it floats so close to her face as she presses herself to the window panes that she sees every single flake whole, its six limbs outspread, falling. They are so loose, the snowflakes, shifting so softly that they send her back to sleep, like a charm. When she wakes no snow is falling and the world is clear, transformed into a golden hollowness, dazzling under a high white sky. How long has this been happening behind her back? She runs from window to window. On all sides the walls are sunk deeper in the snow, which is smoother than before, and touched as never before with gold, the faintest glimmer. Every shadow is the same blue as the shadows inside and all through the labyrinth. Moon shadows are black, never blue. A great golden ball has set alight the rim of every crest that the storm has whipped up, and riven – there are gashes in the snow, the ice, sapphire, and emerald, and a spray is coming off them, a breath, a wind. But surely he said the wind cannot be seen? True, because it is not the wind she sees but the moving lambent snowdrifts. Clouds rising that are like snow, snow lifting back to where it came from, leaving the sun dim, or mottled and veined, a ball of amber.

  Most amazing of all, in the light is a shape outside in the glitter of whiteness, a standing figure that at first she takes for her Lord. He is back and waiting for her to catch sight of him. But no, the figure is shorter, thicker. It is hard to tell, white on blazing white, but she fancies that this is a bride. By slitting her eyes, shading them, she can almost see that, like herself, and unlike him, it has two distinct mounds in front, under the tapering head, two full snowy breasts, much larger than hers.