Treasures of the Deep

by Andrew McGahan

  ‘They’ve turned to milk!’ cried another.

  ‘It’s the blindness fever!’

  ‘Flee! Flee if you value your sight!’

  Chaos descended upon the Hall, a storm of frightened screams and shouts as two hundred men and women stampeded for the doors.

  Susan’s terror was no less – the blindness fever, she too must flee! – but she couldn’t move. Her limbs were quite paralysed now and if not for the hands holding her up she would have slid from the chair. Who had stayed with her? Her father? Yes, she could hear his harsh cursing. And her mother too, who she could hear weeping now. But this was much too dangerous. If someone in the room had the dreaded blindness fever, then they must all get out …

  Someone …?

  It was only then that the awful realisation dawned. Panic gripped Susan, and she strove madly to open her eyes and to see, to look, to prove that it could not be her, not possibly her.

  But in fact her eyes were already wide open, and no matter how she strained to open them further, there was nothing to see, only a jumble of shadows. Except – was a third person with her now? Yes, she felt hands upon her face. For a last instant the threatening cloud of blackness withdrew to reveal a pair of eyes staring deep into her own; eyes that were dead and white and utterly unseeing.

  Toper Maggie.

  Then darkness fell – full, and forever.

  There was nothing to be done after that other then let the fever run its course, which took several days. For Susan, this was an unmeasured time of delirium, with little difference between waking and non-waking. All she knew for certain was that she was not at home in her own bed or her own room, but rather in a strange room and a strange bed – but where that was she could not guess, for she could not see it.

  She thought she could see it, at times. At times, she was sure she was wide awake and that the fever had only been a false alarm and that her eyes worked perfectly. She could see walls and windows and chairs with a crystal-sharp clarity. But then, just as she savoured the joy and the relief, the room would grow oddly tilted and flat, like a painted picture, before dissolving away into a swirl of colours, meaningless. And then she would open her eyes to terrifying blackness, and feel the sweaty sheets clinging to her, and the cold space around her, unrecognisable by any sound or smell or voice she knew.

  But there was someone with her throughout, someone who cooled her brow with a wet cloth and who muttered wordless comfort during the uncounted days and nights. Not her father certainly, and not her mother either, but a woman, to judge by the voice and the gentleness of the touch.

  And then finally it ended. Susan woke again to her normal mind, weary and dazed, and yet clear-headed once more. Fresh sheets, blessedly dry and soft, were being folded about her limbs.

  She opened her eyes and was blind.

  A hand pressed calmingly on her chest before the fear could make her rise. ‘Gently now, child,’ came the voice. ‘Lie still. The fever has broken at last, but you’re too weak yet to be up and about.’

  Susan knew the voice, even though she had never heard it speak so softly or closely.

  It was Toper Maggie.

  ‘And yes, child. You’re blind now, like me.’

  Oh no. Oh no.

  Tears pooled in Susan’s useless eyes. She went to dash them away, but found that her arms were loosely tied to the bed, so that she could not quite reach her face. Panic rose again as she fought with the bindings and the tears and the terror.

  The hand pressed upon her chest once more, gently, but too strongly for Susan – weak as she was – to resist. ‘You are safe,’ reassured Toper Maggie. ‘You will recover your strength in time, if not your vision, but now you must be calm. Your hands are bound only to prevent you from rubbing your eyes, for such is the natural desire in your condition. But rubbing them will not bring back your sight, you will only irritate the orbs and risk inflaming them, in which case they might need to be removed. So lie still!’

  Susan, with this new fear, lay still. ‘Where’s my mother?’ she whispered.

  ‘I’ll go and fetch your mother shortly; she can come to you now that the fever has broken, and the threat of infection passed. Mind you, I doubt there really was a threat – I doubt that victims of the fever are ever infectious to others – but as I’m already blind, that’s easy for me to say.’

  The woman must have been moving, because the tone of her voice rose and fell. Then she was back, and a cup of water, smelling delicious and cool, was held to Susan’s lips, and she drank, aware suddenly of how dry and sore was her throat.

  ‘Where am I?’ she asked.

  ‘You’re in my house. You were brought here after you collapsed at the inn; three – no four – nights ago it was. And here with Maggie is where you’ll always live now, and this will be your room, for that’s the way of things. But that doesn’t mean you can’t visit your folks whenever you want. And your friends too – at least, those who still want to see you. Some won’t, more’s the pity, for fear can make people cruel. But you’ll learn that yourself, soon enough.’

  She was in Toper Maggie’s house? But that was the Blind Women’s House, an ancient cottage on the outskirts of the village, draped in old ivy and shunned by children. The Blind Women’s House – Susan had used the name a thousand times over without really considering what it meant.

  A new terror filled her – was there no one with her then who could see? Was it only the two of them there, a blind woman and a blind girl? But any kind of monster could be creeping silently in the room, if neither had eyes to behold it …

  Maggie might have read her mind. ‘Don’t fret, lass, I’ve lived here forty years – twenty of them on my own. There’s not a mosquito or speck of dust moves around here that I don’t know about.’

  Strangely, Susan believed her, and the terror receded a little. Maybe it was just that Toper Maggie sounded so different from normal, so assured and sober. It was hard to picture her as she usually appeared at the inn – the childish face, the drunken laughter. Abruptly Susan wanted to see, to be sure it really was Maggie sitting there, she wanted to look – but that only led to more tears, and another futile struggle with the ties on her wrists.

  ‘You’ll get used to it, dear. You’ll learn to get by. I did – and you will too. We all have to, sooner or later, we who suffer the fever.’

  Susan stopped wrestling. Of course, yes, Toper Maggie had endured the blindness fever in her own turn. She would have answers. ‘How?’ Susan asked in hushed dismay. ‘How did I catch it?’ But what she meant was, why had she caught it? What had she done to deserve such a horrible affliction?

  ‘Ah now – how does anyone catch it?’ pondered Toper Maggie. ‘No one is sure. The fever strikes without warning or cause that has ever been detected, though it is known to be a disease solely of the lowland coasts. Maybe it comes from the sea air, or from the water, or maybe somewhere else entirely. All that can be said for certain is this – it strikes rarely; it strikes only young women; it always blinds them, and there is no cure. And though indeed only young women have ever fallen victim to it, that does not mean that old women, and men too, don’t fear it anyway – for sight is a sweet and cherished thing.’

  And here it seemed that Maggie lowered her face close to Susan’s. ‘But know this; it is not your fault. This is not something you brought on yourself for being bad or careless. This is not a punishment for some wickedness, be it of action or thought. This is bad luck, that’s all, no better or worse than that.’

  Susan cursed desolately inside the prison of her head. Bad luck? How could the woman use words so mild? This wasn’t merely bad luck; this was something abominable and unjust! She couldn’t be blind. She was young; she was only sixteen; she was supposed to be going to Stone Port! She couldn’t become like Toper Maggie, a strange and frightening figure behind a pair of those horrible, dead white eyes.

  That wasn’t fair …

  The blind woman let her weep for a time, then said, ‘It’s not such
a bad life, you know. It’s not as if the Stromner folk leave us to starve in the dunes. No, they give us all the food and drink we could want – and long ago this house was set aside specially for the likes of us. There’s plenty of room, so you’ll be welcome. I didn’t always rattle around here on my own, you know. When my eyes went – and I was only fourteen, younger even than you – there were three blind women living here. Very kind to me they were too, although they’re all long since dead. In fact, I was starting to wonder if I might be the last, if the fever had died out altogether. But now here you are, and I have someone to teach the way of things after all.’

  Susan’s tears were spent for a time. She sniffed wretchedly, only half sure of what she had heard. Teach the way of things? What did that mean? What was there to teach about being blind and useless and sitting drunk in the inn every day, living on the charity and scorn of others?

  And yet, this new Toper Maggie didn’t sound like a drunkard, or useless … she sounded quite the opposite. Capable and patient.

  ‘What things?’ Susan asked finally.

  The woman’s voice gave the impression she was smiling. ‘Do you think Stromner keeps us merely out of pity and fear? No, child – although no doubt pity and fear are part of it. Indeed, if you asked the Stromner folk – even your own parents – they might say that pity and fear is all of it. But whether they can admit it or not, whether they even know it or not, they keep us for a different reason. They need us.’

  Susan laughed with all the force of her bitterness and grief. ‘Need us? For what?’

  Toper Maggie was silent a moment, as if thinking how best to answer. ‘I’ve heard tales,’ she said finally, ‘from up in the highland valleys, in the snow and cold of the forests, where folk are rough and unlearned. Nowadays, of course, most all New Islanders are banned from reading and writing, but up in the highlands they never went much for reading and writing anyway. They’ve always got by without such things – and one way they do it is with men that they call Scribes. Do you know of them?’

  Susan shook her head.

  ‘Well, Scribes wander the high valleys, from village to village, and their sole purpose is to watch and listen. They sit in the Halls and Barrel Houses night by night, attending every council and judgement and ruling, every birth and death, observing everything that is said and done, and they remember it. That way, when someone needs to know some fact from the past, or some ancient law, or the ancestry of some child, they can consult the Scribes, and the Scribes will tell them, even though nothing is written down. They perform a vital service for the highland folk, and thus the highlanders feed and house them well in return. We, girl, are like those Scribes.’

  But Susan was shaking her head ever more violently – for the blindness had rushed up on her, a dreadful vertigo of darkness, and she had become convinced that she wasn’t blind at all, but that the mad old woman had wrapped bindings about her eyes, and if she could only shake them free, then this whole nightmare would be over …

  In response, Toper Maggie laid a cooling hand upon Susan’s face, so that Susan could feel the fingers upon the bare skin of her forehead and eyelids – and know that there was no blindfold.

  And then she wept again, hopeless.

  ‘We are like those Scribes,’ Maggie repeated at last. ‘We are, in our way, the memory of the village. More than ever, now that the Ship Kings have forbidden the keeping of written records. For we listen, we blind women. I, for instance, sit day after day in the Hold Hall, and hear every single word that anyone speaks, and I remember it.’

  ‘You remember?’ Susan spat in her despair. ‘But you’re always drunk.’

  Again, it sounded as if Toper Maggie was smiling. ‘Drunk you say? Well, so I used to be – once. When I was young, and bitter still at my affliction, and when the other blind women still lived and did the listening, leaving me with little to do – in those days, yes, I indulged in too much whisky, far too much, and so was given this shameful name I bear.

  ‘But I grew out of that long ago. Oh, I always have a glass by my side, it’s true, and because people see me in the inn all day, they assume I’ve drunk more than is good for me. Probably it’s only the innkeeper who knows that in fact I’ll take no more than four or five whiskies in a whole day and night, and that come closing time I’m as sober as he is, if not more so – for he takes a dram or two himself.’

  But Susan couldn’t believe that. Whatever she claimed, Toper Maggie always looked and sounded drunk. There were her strange smiles, her bizarre laughter, the nonsensical things she said …

  ‘People see what they expect to see, child. And when they don’t understand the things I do, then it’s easy for them to call it drunkenness. But either way, once I became the last of the blind women, I had more important affairs to tend to then drinking. It was my turn then to do the listening.’

  ‘The listening?’

  ‘Aye – we are listeners, we blind women. And we listen in a way that few others can, for no one talks to us. In that inn, I am no more than a piece of furniture. No one heeds me; no one addresses me. But that’s the power – for people talk as if I were not there at all, and so I hear their true thoughts. Being outside of every conversation, uninvolved in every argument, taking no side in any lovers’ quarrel, I can listen fairly and calmly, and remember what truly was said, rather than what those who are talking think was said, which is never the same thing.’

  Susan was struck by this. It sounded at first rather demeaning, like being treated as a child, for adults always spoke as if children weren’t there. But children were innocents, and rarely understood what they overheard anyway. A blind adult, however; that was a different matter …

  ‘We are a record,’ continued Toper Maggie, ‘for those that choose to consult us. An authority, even. Now to speak strictly, lawful authority in Stromner rests with the Elders of the Council. But those old men aren’t listeners, they’re talkers one and all. And you would be amazed how many folk – old men included – creep to my door of a night, or sidle up to me in the inn, to ask for the use of my memory, or for my judgement in some legal dispute or other.’

  It was true – Susan had whispered of such things even with her own friends. If a girl had problems, with her parents, perhaps, or with a boy, then rumour instructed that she was to knock in dead of night upon the door of the Blind Women’s House, and Toper Maggie would tell her what to do.

  But that wasn’t all. Those midnight visitors to Toper Maggie – so the stories went – often wanted more than advice, they wanted potions and spells, and sometimes to learn of the future.

  She blurted it out. ‘Are you a witch?’

  The blind woman laughed. ‘Of course not, child. There’s no such thing – at least, not if you mean magic potions and the like. Oh, I know a few treatments and infusions that can help folk with certain embarrassing troubles – but nothing more.’

  ‘But people say you know the future.’

  There was no laugh this time. ‘Ah now – to know the future.’ Toper Maggie mused a moment. ‘Nooo … I wouldn’t put it that way. No one can simply read the future like pages in a book. But I’ll say this: to listeners like us, the course of things to come can seem all too obvious sometimes, and thus to foolish folk who only ever talk – who are blinder than we are, in their way – the things we say sometimes sound much like prophecy, even if they aren’t.’

  ‘I don’t understand …’

  A sigh came. ‘It’s because we stand outside of life. I can sit in the inn and listen to the Council deciding upon some plan of action or other, and because I’m not part of the arguments, for or against, I can see better than they can if the course they choose is one destined for good or for ill. Sometimes it’s so patently for ill that I can only laugh – and then the old men get mad at me. But even though I do try and warn folk at times of the mistakes they’re making, I’m rarely heeded, because people can’t accept what I’m saying. They’re inside the world and I’m outside of it. It’s as if I’m s
peaking in a different language. There are no words. They simply think I’m mad. Or drunk.’

  Susan couldn’t have said why – for she didn’t believe in fortune-telling anyway – but she felt a strange disappointment. ‘There’s no more to it than that? You cannot really foretell?’

  ‘We, child, say we, for you are one of us now. But as for genuine foretelling – well, that’s a rarer thing. It certainly can’t be summoned at whim, in answer to this trivial question or that. But – as you’ll find for yourself, when you’ve lived blind for many years – there is a deeper insight that comes in time, more potent even than the art of listening. A true foresight, maybe. It’s not an exact knowledge of future events, but rather a feeling, a persuasion that things will follow a certain path, even though there may be no sign to support it. Some of us have it more than others, and it’s difficult to describe, but when the foresight is upon you – and there’s no mistaking it – then it’s well worth paying attention to, for it’s seldom wrong.’

  ‘You have this foresight?’

  ‘A little, a little. I have known, for instance – ever since the Great War ended – that life will now be calm and untroubled here in Stromner for many years ahead. Oh, the normal trials of existence will come and go, but there will be no great upheavals as long as I live. And I know I will live long.’

  ‘How can you know that?’

  ‘As I said, I can’t describe it. I only know it to be true. Oh, that doesn’t mean I’m beyond harm in the meantime. If I went now and threw myself from the cliffs of East Head down into the Rip, then I would die sure enough. Fate is not to be toyed with or tempted. But barring self-harm, I know I will survive into ripe old age, and see no hardships around me worse than those we know already. It’s another reason I laugh and smile in the inn. For life is good.’

  Susan said nothing, unconvinced. Was this all there was to foretelling? To say only that nothing bad was going to happen?

  Toper Maggie chuckled. ‘You think I merely delude myself with pleasant fancies – but you should be warned that my foresight has not always been so benign. When first I emerged from the blinding fever, forty years ago now, my first words to those tending me spoke of a terrible storm coming, of the end of the world as we knew it, and death to many. I spoke, I suppose, only out of my own pain and fear – but four years later the Great War broke out, and raged for twenty merciless years after.’