by Pauline Fisk
The two of them stood locked together. The dogs snapped their teeth, but the mountain man still held them back. Their coats bristled, the red spots on them standing out like wounds. Gwendolina sank back from them into the bog, the smile wiped off her face, never to return. She called for Gwyn, and he came rushing to her aid, fool that he was.
Immediately, he started sinking too. The mountain man watched without expression on his face, but Abren stared in horror as the bog rose around them. A thousand feelings clamoured, starting with revenge and finishing with simple human fellow feeling. She wanted them to sink, and yet she couldn’t just stand by. Wanted them to die, but knew she had to do something.
She struggled to her feet – but it was already too late. The false mother toppled forward on her face, followed by Gwyn. He tried to right himself, but only sank in deeper. Abren made to spring towards them, unable to contain herself any longer.
But the mountain man wouldn’t let her. He held her back.
‘There’s nothing we can do!’
At his words, Abren felt herself turn as cold as death. She couldn’t believe that the mountain man – who had rescued her – wouldn’t do the same for Gwyn and Gwendolina! She tried to tear herself away from him. To rescue them herself. But as if she didn’t want Abren’s help, Queen Gwendolina screamed at her:
‘May you never rest in peace! May you never love! May you never, ever find your true self!’
She screamed the words as if a curse. An age-old curse upon them all, and not just Abren. Upon the king, her husband, who’d betrayed her. Upon the elf-maid, Effrildis, who’d driven her out. Upon their child, Abren, who had stolen her child Gwyn’s place in their father’s life and in his heart. And upon the mountain man, too, who had turned on her in the moment of her triumph, and snatched it away.
Abren understood. She bowed her head. And the mountain man must have understood too, for suddenly his dogs tore from his side and before the false mother could call down yet more curses, they were upon her, yelping and howling, churning up the bog and calling down a nightmare upon her and her hapless son.
Abren screamed. She’d have hauled the dogs back if she could. But she didn’t have the power – and the mountain man wouldn’t let her, anyway. He held her tight in his arms. All she could do was watch as a swirling cloud of giant shapes, dark as night and speckled as if with blood, trampled the bog as if it held no fears for them, then rolled across the mountain, melting into the mist, baying as they disappeared.
When silence fell at last, the bog was flat. Nothing of Gwyn remained. Nothing of Gwendolina, except the little piece of string which she had taken off the corph candle. It lay among the reeds on the edge of the bog. The mountain man stooped and picked it up.
‘If you play with fire, then it will get you,’ he said. ‘If you light the corph candle, then the death by drowning you call down could be your own!’
He tucked the string into his pocket. There were no signs on the bog that there had ever been a struggle. Not a mark of pounding dogs.
‘What are those creatures?’ Abren said. Her voice was shaking.
The mountain man looked down at her.
‘Those were the Cŵn y Wbir.’
The source
Abren clung on to the mountain man. Whatever he had allowed to become of Gwyn and Gwendolina, he was still her rescuer. She was safe from the bog – and it was because of him.
‘They’ll never bother you again. Never touch you, little Abren,’ he said.
Crushed against his chest, Abren felt his heart flutter as he spoke. Who was he, she asked herself, who had snatched her from the pit of death, and now held her as if he’d never let go? Who was he, calling her ‘little Abren’, as if she meant something to him? Something special – precious, even.
Abren looked up at the mountain man. Surely she didn’t need to ask. She knew already. It was obvious. The man who held her in his arms was every inch a king! Every inch a figure out of legend, with clouds swirling around him and his black eyes just like hers!
‘You’re the king of Pengwern, aren’t you?’ Abren, scarcely dared to speak the words. ‘You’re my father!’
She looked up. Here was what she’d looked for all along – the heart of her story, at long last, and her own flesh and blood. She held her breath, waiting for acknowledgment to write itself upon the mountain man’s face.
But instead he threw back his head and laughed. And when Abren looked into his eyes, there wasn’t any humour in them. Wasn’t the ‘welcome home’ that she had hoped for, or a father’s recognition.
Abren knew that she’d made a terrible mistake. This man wasn’t her father, after all! His heart might beat like flesh and blood, fluttering at the mention of her name, and he might even look like her, with the same black eyes – but he was just a stranger. And not just any stranger, either! What had she been thinking of? This man was a murderer! She’d seen what he’d allowed to happen to Gwyn and Gwendolina. And now here he was, holding her in his arms as if she were his prisoner!
Abren tried to tear herself away, but the mountain man held on.
‘Not so fast, little Abren,’ he said in a cold, tight voice which Abren knew she’d never forget.
She struggled like a bird caught in a trap.
‘What are you doing? What’s the matter with you? Let me go!’
She kicked and fought, but it made no difference – the mountain man held her tighter than ever.
‘I want to show you something,’ he said. ‘Something that you’ve searched for and would give anything to see. And here it is, at long last. Call it a gift, if you like. A farewell gift from me. Look here, in my eyes …’
The last thing Abren wanted was to look again into the mountain man’s eyes. She tried to turn her face away, but it was impossible to avoid his gaze. It bore down into her and everything else seemed to fade. No longer were the eyes black, but silver like a mirror. And there was a world in that silver light, shining as if reflected. In it, crows wheeled through the sky. And trees swayed on a hill, with a river running round it. And a palace stood upon the hill. A pure white palace. Abren recognised its high white walls, built to keep out every danger. Recognised its gateways and its towers.
It was her home.
Abren cried out, staring into the mountain man’s eyes, and reaching for a world which wasn’t just reflected, but real. Real enough to touch and real enough to visit, passing smoking hearths with maids and soldiers clustered round them. Sweeping up staircases. Peering into room after room. Reaching one room in particular, and peeping like a little, playful child round the door. And there, at a window, a woman sat stitching, her needle catching the sun.
Abren saw it flashing – and remembered. She remembered the room, and she remembered the woman’s hair falling over her face, casting it in shadows. She didn’t need to see the face to know. This was her mother’s room! Her mother’s, and hers too! The one where she’d been born and had grown up as a child. The one where she’d lived happy days, and slept at night in a narrow bed. The one where she had sat at her mother’s feet, jumbling her skeins of thread, copying her fairy stitches, sharing the moment when she’d finished her embroidery and held it up, smiling and crying out, ‘There! At last! What do you think? It’s for you …’
And it was Abren’s little blanket! Her comfort blanket which her mother had given her, sliding it around Abren’s shoulders and knotting it under her chin. Abren remembered the moment as if it had only been yesterday. Remembered being a child in this room. Not a child in a homework poem, or the heroine in a legend which had grown around her life. But the real her. Abren. Here she was, at last. She could see herself.
And she could see her mother, too, looking down at her with the litttle blanket round her shoulder. And surely this was the moment which she had waited for ever since the night mists parted and she had floated through – a body on a river without a memory or name.
Abren raised her face to meet her mother’s gaze.
‘E
nough of that! The peep-show’s over!’
The mountain man blinked – and it was all gone. Abren came to herself upon a lonely mountain top. There was no palace made of white stone. No room with narrow bed and stone floor. No mother looking down at her, ready to receive her daughter’s gaze.
‘Please,’ Abren whispered. ‘Not yet, please! Bring her back!’
The mountain man looked away. He didn’t answer. Didn’t curse at her, like Gwendolina. Didn’t shout at her, nor waste his time on a final speech which explained who he was and why she deserved his hate. He just picked her up and marched out into the bog.
‘The river may have helped you once, long ago,’ he said. ‘It may have saved you from that poor fool Gwendolina! But it won’t help you this time! It won’t dare. If you want a thing done, you have to do it yourself! You’re not her kill this time – you’re mine!’
Peaty water splashed around them, but the mountain man strode through it as if the bog couldn’t touch him. Abren beat his chest, slapped his face and tugged his hair. But it was a pitiful little battle, lost before it ever started. The mountain man strode on until there was nothing but bog on every side of them – an unrelenting view, with not a tree or bush or rock in sight.
At last he stopped. Clouds swirled around them, and he looked down at Abren with a grudging hint of cold pity. Abren stopped hitting him, and clung on for dear life.
‘Please, oh, please, oh, please!’ she said.
It made no difference. There was no reasoning with the mountain man. He prised her helpless little body off him, and laid it down in the bog! Laid it like a baby being tucked up for the night – then turned away like a cruel father, leaving his child without a light, even though he knew she feared the dark. Then he walked away without looking back.
Abren watched him go. And when the bog rolled over her, she didn’t fight. What was the point? It wasn’t Gwendolina she was up against this time. It was this man who owned the mountain, with its storms and bogs and clouds, its forests and its streams. Who owned everything that moved upon Plynlimon.
And now he owned Abren too.
She closed her eyes. The bog slipped round her shoulders and under her chin, like a cold blanket of death. It oozed into her mouth, however tightly she tried to keep it shut, and filled her nose. It filled her ears and soaked through her skin, found her veins and infused them with black poison, clogged her arteries and flooded into her lungs.
So this was how her story ended, after all her struggles to make sense of things! Underneath the mountain in the dark; far from Pengwern and her friends; far from the river whose source she’d never found: far from that room where she had been a happy child, and far from her mother.
Abren sank down and down. A kaleidoscope of fleeting memories jumbled up together until only blackness remained. It filled her and she couldn’t feel, breathe, think, speak. Couldn’t find that will to live which had stopped her story ending on chapter one. Couldn’t cry out, as she had done then, for, ‘Just a chance – that’s all I ask.’
Now her chances were all spent. She free-fell through the darkness, wanting nothing but oblivion – short and sharp and let’s get on with it. But somewhere underneath her, Abren heard something. Heard it as she’d heard it before, under the railway bridge, and in Bentley’s living room at Christmas, and on the willow island only last night. And it wasn’t oblivion that waited for her, after all.
It was ‘her tune’!
It bubbled up, as sweet as candy and as fresh as air. The tune that said that she was just fine. That she was brave and strong and where she should be. That there was nothing to be frightened of. And Abren hadn’t lost the river, after all.
She had found its source!
She felt it underneath her, buried deep but rising all the time, bubbling up as fresh as air. And its tune grew as it rose. And the words it sang were, ‘TRUST ME’.
And Abren did! She let the river take her, as it had taken her once long before. The mountain man was wrong to say it wouldn’t dare. She felt the clear, fresh water of the Sabrina Fludde soaking through her pores, flushing through her lungs, chasing through her veins. Felt it racing through her heart and freeing it to beat again. She was alive. No black corph candle, summoned forth by Gwendolina, could stand in her way! No howling Cŵn y Wbir – and no mountain man!
Nothing could stand in Abren’s way! The river flowed into her and she flowed into it, merging together until no longer could she say ‘this is me’ or ‘this is it’. Her limbs turned into flowing water. Her child’s body turned into flowing water. Her face turned into flowing water – eyes, ears, mouth, nose, cheeks, chin and even her hair.
Suddenly she found herself moving and breathing with the river’s secret rhythms and its life. Flowing as it flowed, underneath the mountain where nobody could see. A river on a hidden journey underneath the bog – and Abren travelled with it and not even the mountain man could see.
She ran beneath the open grassland, ran beneath grazing sheep, ran deep down beneath banks of peat until the stream broke out into the light; until the mountain top was behind her, and the forest greeted her. Then she ran over its rocks and roots, through its pools and out again, down deep, fast gulleys to the waterfall above Blaen Hafren.
Here, water within water, she tumbled past the house and down the glen, flowing fast and never looking back. Past the quarry she flowed, and under the road. Back into the forest, and down through Old Hall. And once she would have changed lives with those schoolchildren, wending their way home at the end of the day. But now she wouldn’t be anyone but Abren, travelling with the stream, and giving it her name.
On she flowed, past St Curig’s House, where she looked for the Misses Ingram but couldn’t find them, out of Old Hall and down the valley. She flowed past the willow island where Gwyn had found her, and carried on until she couldn’t see the great bulk of Plynlimon any more. It lay lost amid its forests, swathed in clouds. Suddenly, Abren was free of it.
At last. She felt herself stop rushing in a panic, and began to flow more gently. With quiet dignity the stream carried her through the little town with the railway station and on into a wider world, where if anyone noticed anything, it wouldn’t be a body on the water. It would be a silver river threading home.
The moon was high, and the day was over, at long last. The stream flowed through the darkness, and Abren flowed with it, knowing that nothing could frighten her any more. She laughed as she flowed, and the stream laughed too, drawing new streams to itself and growing into a river big enough to shape a landscape. Hills here, valleys there, towns here, roads there. No one could fight a river which could shape a land like this! Not even the mountain man.
Abren laughed again, flowing on and on as if child and river, day and night, past and present, were one and the same thing. And all that lay behind her was forgotten, and all that lay ahead was – Pengwern.
Abren moved towards it like a conqueror returning home. She imagined its towers and spires waiting for her up ahead. Imagined Pen and Sir Henry, Phaze II and Bentley, Fee and Mena – her friends, all ready to forgive her for the things she hadn’t told them yet.
But soon she would! Oh, how she would! Abren laughed again, imagining the cosy fire in Bentley’s living room, and all of them gathered round while she told her story.
And suddenly someone laughed back.
The laugh was cold – and Abren froze. She knew who it was, of course. How could she not? She could almost see his eyes, tightening like lenses in his head. See him smiling because he’d found her. What a fool she’d been! She’d thought that she had won. But the battle wasn’t even half begun!
Abren took a last glance at the river, as she always wanted to remember it. Then the wind got up, and the moon disappeared. The stars went out, and the mountain man’s laughter ran down the water like an electric shock.
Abren felt it strike her, and cried in pain. She had felt his pity, cold and cruel. She had felt his hate.
And now she felt the m
ountain man’s power.
Part Six
River in Flood
Able-bodied men
Rain fell in sheets from a low-flying sky. It hailed down like bullets, riddling the roofs and spires of Pengwern and emptying the streets. It emptied the Quarry Park and left the town centre deserted. Saturday midday – the busiest time of the week – saw scarcely a shopper struggling up Pride Hill against the torrent pouring down from its drains and gulleys. Even the indoor shopping mall was nearly empty, and the market hall was no better, all its stalls set up but nobody in to buy anything.
It wasn’t just the storm. People were afraid of coming into town for fear of what the river might do. There had been floods before in Pengwern, but nobody had ever seen the river like this. They stayed indoors, grumbling about the weather report not warning them of trouble, the water authority not ‘doing anything’ about the water levels, and the town council not getting out the duckboards.
‘Just look at it!’ they grumbled to each other. ‘Look at all that water on the roads! And those cellars flooding! And those drains rising, all over town! This is meant to be the twenty-first century! What’s the modern world coming to? Why can’t somebody control a little river?’
It was a good question. One which even Bentley asked as he splashed through the rain, delivering a package to one of his mother’s customers. Beneath the high town walls, he could see the river swirling like a thick brown stew. Usually it flowed on its way, looking so tame, but now it flooded over pavements and crept up people’s gardens, heading for their front doors and sweeping away everything in its path.
There was nothing anyone could do. Bentley shivered with excitement. He reached the customer’s house and rang the bell. When there was no reply, he left the package round the back and hurried off to the town walls. Here a small crowd had gathered to take photographs, snapping away undeterred by the rain.
‘How could the river rise so fast in just a few hours?’ they wanted to know. ‘Where’s it come from?’ ‘What’s going on?’ ‘How high is it going to get?’
