The Well of the North Wind

by Steven, Kenneth;

  Colum got up and moved away, the bowl in his hands. He felt Ruach’s eyes watching him, even as he turned away. Finally he put down the bowl. ‘Fian?’ he said, his voice a question. ‘You are sure that it is Fian you have seen?’

  He came back at last, the cup full of more wine and water for Ruach.

  ‘Yes, it is. Over and over again. Yet it is only a part of what I am looking for. That I know too. Why is it that I should be anxious for him? When he is only working on the book!’

  ‘He is over on the little island for a time of quiet. Come now, Ruach, take some more wine and let your strength recover! How many days is it since you ate and drank as you should have done? Come, let me pour some!’

  But Ruach held his arm away. His eyes were thinking, slowly. ‘On the island? He has never been there before. Did Fian choose to go himself?’ There was surprise, puzzlement, in his voice.

  ‘He is there and he is safe!’ Colum said, and again he tried to hold the cup to Ruach’s lips. But Ruach was still thinking and wondering, still not able to understand. For every question there had to be another.

  ‘Has something happened to him?’ asked Ruach.

  *

  He thought of all he did not know about her. If they had come to the island from somewhere else. Where her mother especially had come from, and how she had learned to heal. Where her brother was now. How they had first known about flowers and which ones to pick. What they thought of Colum. What the others on the island thought. There was much more about her that he did not know than he knew. And yet what he did know was that he missed her, more than anyone before in his life. Perhaps it was as much for that very reason; he did not know her well enough and he yearned to know her better. It felt as though he had been imprisoned here against his will and that with every day that passed he missed her more and wanted to go back the more. And it multiplied in his head because there was no news. The water was silent and there was nothing, day after day.

  He thought he might have gone mad had he not had the chapel to visit. He wanted to pray there, but his prayers were ragged things that seemed to fall to nothing. The harder he tried, the more he felt the wretchedness of his inadequacy. He remembered that Neil had once clapped him on the shoulder and said that God accepted those who prayed with pen and ink. But he felt all the same that it was second best, and that they considered it so. He had gone on comforting himself with the thought that he did pray with pen and ink, but now that his hands were empty . . .

  His thoughts flickered. All at once he would see Mara in his mind’s eye out with her basket on the moorland. He would begin to imagine his conversation with her; a conversation they had never had. It was as though he woke up with guilt, knowing that his prayer had strayed. Yet did God require long and torn-out implorings? Did that make him listen more than to a moment’s prayer from the heart? Was it that we made God man by imagining our prayers must be like the hammerings on a locked door? Or was that simply the excuse we had created for ourselves?

  At least he felt secure in the chapel. He liked it best on days of storm, for he was sheltered and looked out from a window onto the world. He crouched dry and warm within; a lit candle fluttered on the shelf above him. He prayed in pieces. That was what he decided in the end. He prayed in pieces.

  *

  It was Mara’s mother who brought the light on the first day of the new year. Wind-still it was; nothing moved, perhaps in all the world. And the furthest hills cut out of sharpness, their sides that were pure with snow catching the sun’s fire. The sea like glass; one single mirror of white-blue in every direction one looked. And it was not cold; here in the shelter of the settlement it was not a winter’s day. When Larach went to pray in the hour before dawn he stood still a long time and listened to his own breathing and the tiny sounds of birds somewhere close by. He remembered the island in the north, and a morning it had been little different from this, and he thought of the three friends he had lost and he bowed his head. So in the hour that he prayed, the sun rose over the far island, and its path over the sea was unbroken.

  It was Mara’s mother who brought the light. She held it safe in a stone bowl, and her hands shielded the flame. They waited for her up at the settlement; the scribes and the sculptors, the musicians and the scholars – they stood together at the edge of the path that led to the chapels and they watched her walking. They were all silent; for once there was not so much as a word between them. They stood at a strange gateway and were content with silence, and through them – in a thousand different ways – poured the memories of the days of the year that had been.

  Even Ruach stood among them, stooped and older, yet a pale light back in his face and his eyes no longer bloodshot. They had given him something that made him sleep for two nights and two days, dreamless. The shadow had neither gone nor come closer; it waited and would not show its face, but Ruach had stayed with them all the same. He had found solace in the songs, especially late at night when he was most troubled. And they were good to him; they knew what he carried and they held little edges of the weight, to let his walk be lighter. He watched the light coming now, slow and steady, and it was beautiful. And at last Colum took the living light from her; an old light for a new year. And Colum prayed aloud, and it was so still he did not need to raise his voice and every one of them heard him well. And Ruach thought there was a skylark above his head as he prayed, twirling in the blue sky and singing. There was none, but there might have been.

  So Mara’s mother stood with them too and heard Colum’s prayer. But her daughter was not with her.

  *

  Fian wrote in the sand. He wrote strange things he had never imagined before and they came alive and turned in the air and roared at him as they flew away. He fell backwards into the sand and cried, but his cry was soundless, and then he saw his mother at the top of the steep slope. She was shouting at him but he could not hear her words. His brothers rushed down the slope towards him and swept him off his feet. He landed in the water on his back and the cold tore him. But it was not day now, it was night, and he saw the stars bright and crackling in the blue skies. He stretched his hand up from the water and could draw in the dark skies.

  It was like that Goloch found him in the cell. His forehead hot and wet with fever, locked in a strange tossing of nightmare. Goloch brought water from the well and made him drink; he brought him up from where he lay shivering on the stony ground and trickled crystal water into him. Some of it ran down the sides of Fian’s mouth, but it did not matter. A little was not lost. Goloch came with his own blankets and wrapped Fian’s quivering fever. A whole night he stayed with him, not sleeping, but watching and watching, listening to the breathing that raged and was not itself, leaving him only to get more water from the well.

  She wanted to take him somewhere and he said that he would go. He carried the basket because of her limp and she led him. He did not know where it was and the hill became steeper and steeper until it was a cliff edge. But she kept on calling him and telling him to follow because there would be flowers there. And he could see them. On the tiniest ledge of rock at the very top were the brightest and the best. And in his head he knew that this was martyrdom; that was the reason they were so good and beautiful. But he did not know if they were real or a metaphor, he only knew that he had to paint them. Yet how could he when there was nothing to paint with? And what mattered more than anything was that Mara did not fall. He had to stop her from falling; that he knew with all his heart and soul, and he held her as she struggled on the cliff edge. He held her firm and must not let her fall.

  *

  ‘Where is Fian, Mother?’

  ‘Sleep, child, you know that you must sleep! You woke because of the storm and now you must go back to sleep. Let me wrap you in the blanket, and let me put a couple of drops of the most healing flower on it. For you must get better; you must be well; you must worry for nothing!’

  And it was as though Mara was sinking through her bed into another place. She knew somewhe
re what it was that she wanted to ask her mother, but the words were like fragments of wood on a shore. They were brittle and they broke as she tried to hold them, and she could not put them back together. She saw Fian in front of her yet he had changed and she did not know how. It was him and yet not. She called out to him with all the strength that was in her but although he saw her he was far away. All that remained was his name; that was the only word that was intact and she kept it and repeated it over and over as she sank down into the darkness. It was no longer her bed, it was the moorland; it was the black turf of the moorland and she was as a flower pressed beneath its weight, deeper and deeper.

  *

  In the middle of the night Ruach broke into Colum’s cell; he did not even knock on the door but broke through it. Weakened though he was from his sleepless days of hunger at the south end, he possessed a strength that came from beyond him, for now he had seen. That night he had seen and known, and now there was not a moment to be lost.

  ‘Waken up, master! Waken up!’

  He rolled Colum in his bed as a small child might roll a younger sibling, foolishly and mercilessly, repeating the same words over and over again. Colum rose up in the bed and hauled Ruach away from him, not knowing who or what he was in the blackness. No one had roused him like that since the days of his childhood in Ireland, and they knew better than to drag him from sleep! Old as he was he was strong, and he knocked Ruach to the floor as if he had been little more than a doll. Then at last he had a candle lit and the two faces were yellow in its flutter. Both of them gasping for breath.

  ‘What is the meaning of this?’ Every one of Colum’s words was a rock and full of weight. Ruach crouched by the bed, trembling, but what he carried with him was bigger than his fear of Colum.

  ‘I have seen,’ he said. ‘I have seen that Fian is sick, sick unto death. The shadow has broken and I know. There is something more that I cannot find, but that much is certain. He must be brought back; he must be brought back in time, I beseech you!’

  And again like a child, like a child that must have its way at whatever cost, he hurled himself at Colum and began shaking him. Colum tossed him to the floor as a bear might brush aside a butterfly, but he would have no more of this. When Ruach picked himself up, more hurt inside than out, he could hear what his master’s eyes said. He needed no translation and Colum held him in his gaze until he was ready.

  ‘I have heard you, Ruach, and at first light I will start to find him. I can do nothing in the pitch dark. Let that be my word!’

  And Ruach went out unsteadily, like a drunk man, into the cloister. He crouched there a time, breathing, and he heard something, very far away. It was like wolves; the rising of the voices of wolves. He listened and did not know how long he crouched there. Still they rose and still he did not know what it was, almost like one of his dreams. And then all at once it broke through to him: it was the wind, the rising of the wind.

  *

  All of those days Fian did not dream. He wandered in half-awake nightmare, where Goloch’s face swam before his and the boy spoke to him, but he could not understand what he was saying. That was when the fever had come upon him, but before that he remembered nothing; he woke in the morning with not a flicker of a memory of a single dream. In those days before the fever that surprised him, he woke always puzzled that he remembered nothing, for it had been Goloch himself that warned him of them on the very first night.

  Now Goloch was afraid that he would die under the fever. He did not know what to do; he had to sit and watch over Fian as he gabbled and shouted in his wanderings – above all he had to make sure that he drank. But how could he leave him to go for help? There was no one else on the island and he had no way of summoning help without leaving. He had prayed the calm might last, that the day would come when Fian was well enough for him to leave so he might send for help. But the fever rose and fell; as soon as he hoped it was lessening a new night came and the raging was as bad as it had been. Then, when the weather had held and held, it suddenly broke. Like a wild horse that has escaped from the reins that have kept it, the wind rose and went mad. Goloch even feared one night that the beehive cell where he slept beside Fian might fall in with the strength of it. In his heart he knew it would not; the hands that built it knew their work. And not a single one of the stones so much as moved.

  But now he truly feared. Fian was as sick as ever, and there was little chance of the boatman Oran braving these seas now to take him back to the monastery. There was frail hope of Goloch getting word to Oran to begin with. The boy was brave, but there was one night he sat cross-legged in the beehive cell and wept, for he did not know what was left to do. And his own prayers were dry and useless.

  It was then that Ruach came to Fian in dream. There was no let-up in the savagery of the wind and waves, yet there was a time of calm in the fever. The incomprehensible babble of his delirium stilled and he slept. Goloch even had to hold the back of his hand before Fian’s nose and mouth to make certain he still breathed. But he did.

  Ruach came towards him in dream. Ruach, not anguished and distraught, but clear-eyed and well. He came as though stooping forwards to look at Fian, as though he knew his sickness and saw it. He was speaking, though Fian could not make out what he said, and the words were not addressed to him. Ruach came close and looked at him, searched his face so clearly that Fian could see the bloodshot eyes and how they moved as they searched him. How long it lasted he did not know; it was timeless, as all things are in the world of dreams. But it happened.

  *

  The bell tanged and tanged in the January sky, but its note was blown into nowhere. Somehow it was a living metaphor on this day. All of them gathered from the storm; it was more that they were blown together, for now they knew that it was winter. Now they were paying for the weeks of calm.

  And all talk and laughter was blown away too; it was as though nothing remained but knuckled hands and bewildered eyes. For this death they did not understand; this death they had not known would be.

  It was Colum that spoke. Two days before he would have been too weak, he could not have stood – but he was determined. It was like blowing the amber embers of a turf fire, hour after hour and refusing to give up hope, and the flame beginning again at last. But they did not all hear him; as the bell had been, so was his voice blown away by the wind and he did not have the strength to drown it out. Neil saw his face and the huge sadness that was in it; the blue eyes that spoke their sorrow.

  He stood and did not hide the stick he leaned on. He spoke and Neil wondered what else it was he heard in Colum’s voice, for there was of a certainty something he did not recognize and had not heard before. But he could not find what it was.

  And then, when Colum had finished at last, the whole island started out onto the moorland, for that was where the grave was to be. There had been no question about that. Some of the young boys, scholars and scribes, had hacked and chipped at the chosen place for the best part of the day. Soft the ground might be, but it was a knot-work of roots and cluttered with lumps of stone. The boys came back, all thought of talk knocked out of them, and slept as they had not done in years. But they had dug the grave nonetheless.

  And only when the body was lowered, gently and slowly, did the singing begin. Not one of the psalms that the monks had brought, but an old song, strange and eerie and sad so it broke the heart; a song that had been given from mother to daughter over and over again. It had its roots in a time when there was no time, when there were no books and nothing was written down, when songs and stories were only carried and treasured and remembered.

  It was the people of the island who sang it, not the monks. But Neil felt the power of it in the very marrow of his bone, and the song would not leave him all the rest of that day and into the night. As they turned away from the moor at last, the wind and the rain mocking them, he was sure he saw two ravens playing in the sky above until they were swallowed.

  But Colum had not come with them. No, he had gon
e back to his cell and closed the door and put aside his stick. He had gone down on his knees beside the bed and wept until his eyes were empty. And when his eyes were empty and he could cry no more, he asked for forgiveness for what he never should have done.

  *

  And it was Neil himself who brought Fian back in the end. Larach went with him, almost as much for company as anything else. He was stronger, but still a shadow of the man he had been, and above all else it was his courage that was weakened. In secret Colum muttered that was no bad thing: Larach might live a little longer.

  It was the first channel of water that was the worst. They were good navigators both, and Neil probably thought he could have steered between the islands with one hand behind his back, but the storm had driven itself mad and now the wind seemed to come from everywhere. It was all they could do to hear one another, and for a time it felt as if they would go nowhere at all but be driven about instead at the island’s edge, fighting simply to keep afloat.

  Then quite suddenly they broke free and the prow cut like a knife through the darkness of the waves. They shouted to each other and there was a moment’s grin on Neil’s face, but it came too soon. They seemed to fight the whole way south, and by the time they turned at last to navigate a whole broken cluster of islets and points of land, Larach was exhausted. It was no less than Neil had feared; he had not wanted him to come to begin with, afraid it would all be too much for him, that his confidence would be diminished the more. Larach crouched in the bottom of the boat, his face white and sore.

  ‘Rest all you need!’ Neil shouted as the wind eased. ‘This will be different!’

  And he was right. The great long south coast of the island beyond was sheltered. The full force of the storm was coming from the north and west, and now they had turned out of its anger. It was a sea in turmoil; the waves dipped and rose, and sometimes a grey cliff of rain drove against them. But still, it was nothing to what they had passed, and Larach himself saw that Neil had meant what he said. He did not sleep, but he crouched in the bottom of the boat a long time, until he felt strong enough to stand once more. Almost at the very moment he did, a watery, misted sunlight broke from the clouds and they looked at each other, smiled and laughed.