One day they had a race to the caves and back. My short legs couldn’t run fast enough to keep up. I stopped, choking back sobs, and flung myself down to beat my fists into the soft mulch. A shadow fell over me, and the oldest boy hauled me to my feet. He ran after the others carrying me on his back. I hid my face against his blonde hair when we reached them. The insults soon started – but they weren’t for me! My faithful steed grinned and jeered back at his friends until they laughed and started a new game.
“Thank you.” I whispered. He laughed again and put me down.
“You are an odd thing. I hardly felt you. My puppy weighs more than you do!”
“I did not mean thank you for carrying me.” I stumbled over the words, and then I blushed bright red. How ungrateful I sounded! I stopped, confused, and the boy slapped me hard on the back. It took me a second to realise that it was an affectionate gesture.
The boy’s name was Jonas. By listening in on Petra’s nightly gossip, I found out that he was the carpenter’s son. He was brash, and rude, and every week he seemed to find a new way to shock the entire village. He climbed up the sheer cliffs above the spring and threw bird eggs down into buckets and onto heads. He hated the crowded cabin his family shared, and slept out in the woods – which would have been fine, except that it meant he slept until noon and missed whole days of work. He goaded his tribe of boys into playing tricks on the younger children, and he catcalled the courting youths until they forgot about each other and greeted Jonas with their fists.
I thought he was utterly wonderful.
Nobody ever punished him. Jonas had no notion of a father. There was a distant older man who barely knew his name, and who was rarely sober enough to do more nurturing than a few lashes with his belt. Similarly, Jonas believed that a mother was someone who was slow and heavy, more bovine than human. The maternal creature always had an infant in or on her body, and had no time for any offspring who was old enough to walk out of the front door.
The sad thing was that this garrotted family was the same as many of the peasant families on the Mainland. The treacherous mountains wiped whole villages off the map, and several generations could be entirely forgotten with one unlucky landslide. Singen had stood for an impressive few generations in its sheltering gully, but the men upriver had diverted the torrent so carelessly that it had washed away half of the fields.
Jonas hated my wide-eyed adoration, but he never chased me off. I knew to scuttle away when he glared at me, but when we all walked home at sunset he let me slide my tiny hand into his, and he held it tight. If I grew tired he would lift me up without a word. I would lay my head against his shoulders and breathe in the smell of sawdust and leaf mould that clung to his hair. He would carry me into the village, to the sticky, muddy puddle outside of the inn. He nonchalantly dumped me down right into the middle of it before grinning and strutting away.
But enough about Jonas. I had fun with my friend, but I spent every other waking moment trying to make Petra care for me. She was the only mother I had, and she hated me.
Oh, I was not special. She hated everyone.
Mr. Heim was such a timid shadow that I thought of him as a stray dog which Petra grudgingly allowed inside her house. He had a high, balding hairline and very pale eyebrows, so he always looked anxious. Beside him, Petra was a tower of iron. She spoke to him as cruelly as she did to me, but the poor man did not even have the good fortune to sleep in a separate bed! While I covered my ears at night and dreamed of the river, he had to listen to every scrap of gossip she could spit out in her cat-yowl voice.
Years later, I saw a tree which had a long vine wrapped around its trunk. The vine had drunk so much of the oak’s sap that it was fat and bloated, while the poor tree was a withered husk. When I saw it I thought immediately of Petra’s husband. We slit the vine from roots to trunk. We picked out the seeds and hid them in our skirts. That night Dahra told me what the seeds were for, and I ran back into the woods to rip the vine out by the roots.
But that happened later, and I must not get distracted. If Petra had not been such a shrew I would never have met Dahra. I still wish I could go back to the village and throttle the old harridan for that twist of fate.
I don’t think the villagers knew what to do with me. Their fear had turned into suspicion. If they were cruel to me it was because I was eating food which could be in their own bellies. They almost forgot that I was the demon who was gleefully cursing their river. Still, there were a few rules which their stubborn minds had settled on: I was never allowed near the spring, and I was banished from the fields while the pails of water were being emptied. I could wash with a dampened cloth or nothing, and when it rained Petra kept me inside with the windows bolted shut.
Jonas told me that if I touched the water I would make it unclean. I thought of the dirt which stained into my hands, and agreed. I hadn’t been properly clean since I had been rescued. The boy scoffed at my shy nod and stabbed a finger towards the river. He spoke slowly, as if I were an idiot, and with the cruel bravado of an older brother.
“We’re not afraid of a little mud. You’re one of the floating dead. You’re as twisted and nasty as the corpses that get stuck in the rocks. If you touch the well our crops will rot. If the rainwater drips off your snotty nose into the soil then the fields will swarm with beetles and meat-flies. We’ve all seen the coffins, and we know they are full of bad water and diseased flesh. You’re no different than those dead people even if you do look like a little girl. That’s what they’re saying. That’s what your stupid head cannot understand. Got it?”
I chewed on my lip. I had heard most of the story before, but it hurt to hear it all in one go. I loved Jonas enough to trust him. I clung to his shirt and tried to hold him still – a challenge, since he was twice my height. He looked down at me and his face clouded with something painfully adult.
“You already knew, didn’t you?”
“Is it true?” I asked. He frowned, thinking it over.
“I don’t know if I believe it. No matter how many times I throw you in the mud, the weeds still grow.”
“I don’t care if you believe it.” – That was a lie, but I pressed him for more – “I want to know if it’s true.”
“How would I know if you don’t?” he sounded bemused, and then boyish humour crossed his pale face. “You should go swimming in Landen’s fishing hole. I’d like to see that toad sell his stinking fish after that!”
I thought he was joking, but the next afternoon Jonas picked me up and hauled me onto his back with a mischievous grin. He bullied his friends until they shouted and threw handfuls of pebbles at us, and then he stomped away from them and headed towards the cliff. Great mounds of rock rose around us like teeth as we moved closer, and I dug my fingers into the boy’s hair. I had never been this close to the cliff before. Its shadow felt waxen and clammy against my bare arms. Jonas shifted my weight and kept walking, silent for once, as the cliff face opened up and swallowed us whole.
I had never been inside a cave before. The twisting tunnels made my head spin. I squeezed my eyes shut and concentrated on the odd sound of Jonas breathing. His breath echoed in the narrow passageways, and his heartbeat thudded too fast. He was scared, too. His confident steps slowed down, and then he eased me down onto the slippery stone and held my hand tightly.
“Don’t be scared. It gets lighter up ahead.” he whispered, and the cave stole the words and hissed them back at us. His hand shivered in mine. “Keep your hand above your head, and duck when you feel stone or you’ll knock yourself out. Don’t let go of me.”
I nodded, and then realized he wouldn’t be able to see it. I couldn’t form words, but I squeezed his hand. The boy cleared his throat and then we crept onwards.
I thought that the tunnel was never going to end, and that the whole thing was one of Jonas’ jokes, when a shimmering blue light started glowing ahead of us. In five more steps I could see the boy’s crouching figure ahead of me, and then he straightened up an
d stepped aside. I followed him and felt my jaw drop to the floor.
The cavern wasn’t large, but it shone in such a strange way that I felt like I was inside a soap bubble. The walls were slick with water, which pooled in the middle of the cave. Far above it the rock ceiling gaped open and a great circle of sky looked down at us. Clouds were drifting above us, but they seemed much further away than they ever had before. Jonas let go of my hand and sauntered towards the pool, whistling. A dark figure looked up at him and laughed.
“I thought you’d given up pestering me, boy!”
Jonas grinned and shook his head. “Have you caught anything?”
The man pointed at a basket which the boy immediately dived towards. Scowling, he tripped Jonas mid-stride and sent him sprawling into the pond. My friend cursed loudly. I couldn’t help bursting into peals of laughter. Jonas scowled and dashed brilliantly cold droplets at me. The smile on the man’s face froze.
“That’s the girl from the river.”
I was about to play-act my ‘smile and be insulting’ greeting when I recognised the man. Now that he looked serious I was surprised that I hadn’t done so sooner. “You carried me!”
“For my sins.” Landen growled, and then threw himself back down onto the ground. “Well, now that you’ve both scared the fish, you might as well stay.”
“She can speak to the water, you know.” Jonas boasted as he tucked his legs under him. Landen raised an eyebrow.
“So can I!” he looked pointedly at the pond. “Hello, water!”
I blushed and looked at the ground, feeling cross even though I was used to being teased. My friend was quick to jump to my defence, although I knew that he was just using my story to play a game. “No, not like that! The river sent her back and it told her what it wanted.”
“What does it want, then?” The man humoured Jonas, but looked directly at me. I shrugged and fiddled with the baggy ends of my oversized sleeves. Landen looked triumphantly at Jonas, who groaned and cuffed my shoulder.
“Won’t you even pretend, Clay?”
“It’s stupid.” I muttered mulishly. To my surprise, Landen laughed and patted my shoulder.
“You can bother me as much as you like, little girl. You talk more sense than this idiot.” he gestured rudely at Jonas, who looked disdainful.
“If she really was a river demon then she’d lie about it. Everyone else says that she is. They don’t even let her wash her face. I wish they’d do that to me!”
“They’re superstitious fools.” Landen grunted. Seeing that neither of us understood the word, he pointed down the small brook which fed the pool. “The river was uprooted by city men. If they changed their minds they could send it right back on its course. It would take our neighbours two days to walk upstream and find the truth, but they’d rather make up stories. I’d bet a whole basket of fish that there’s another village somewhere burning incense to try to make their river come back.”
Neither of us could think of anything to say. Jonas unwound the twine on the top of the basket. “You don’t have any fish.”
“I don’t need any for that bet.” The man yawned and then ruffled the boy’s hair. “I do have some bread, though. Have you had lunch?”
The man should have known better than to feed strays! Jonas and I bothered the fisherman until he was sick of us. I never saw any fish in the icy pool, but Landen sat there at the end of every day with a crude fishing rod, shaping lures out of feathers and twine. Nobody disturbed him. I thought the other children must be too scared to walk through the choked cave tunnel, while Jonas accused them of being scared of the river.
Jonas told so many stories that my ears never stopped ringing. Outside the caves he was rude, and crass, and never said a word unless he knew it would annoy someone. When he was sat down, or had half a roll shoved into his grubby hand, the boy channelled all of his energy into making up fantastic lies. I listened with my mouth hanging open, trying to work out where the truth ended and the stories began.
Landen said he hated Jonas’s fantasies, but he never told the boy to hush. He showed me how to make fishing lures while Jonas prattled on beside us. There was a knack to crafting the intricate knots without breaking the quills. I was fascinated by the bright feathers and daydreamed about the exotic birds which must have sung in the woods all summer. When I made a lure I pretended that it was a bird, and that I was gently stroking its downy head. I was careful not to hurt a single tuft of feather, and held my breath when I was choosing them so that I couldn’t accidentally blow one away.
Jonas laughed when I asked what the birds were called. “Sparrows!” he picked up a bright blue plume and blew it at Landen. “He dyes the feathers in berry juice.”
My eyes filled with tears. It seems silly of me, now I look back, but at the time it felt like something wondrous had been stolen from me. Landen saw that I was upset and patted my knee.
“There are lots of beautiful birds in the world, little River.” he told me awkwardly, “They just don’t come here.”
“Nothing comes here.” I hiccoughed, “It’s dark and cold and hateful.”
Neither of them answered. After a while their silence became unbearable. I stumbled out of the cave and ran home. That night I sat by the tiny kitchen window and stared out into the darkness. The moon was out, but it wasn’t bright enough to form shadows. Everything looked flat and colourless. To my eyes it seemed as though the moon was sleeping and dreaming about a false village. When I pushed the window open my hand looked flat and grey. I pulled it back with a rush of fear. If I disappeared into the dreaming darkness then no-one would come looking for me.
I fell asleep with my head resting on the window sill. I dreamed that I was in the river, floating in the succulent green weeds and looking up at the surface swirling above me. The colours were astounding – as green as grass, and as yellow as the sun, and as blue as Landen’s sparrow feathers. The sparrows weren’t real, were they? I hated the filthy little liars. I gasped in breath after drowning breath as the water grew thick and putrid. My arms became leaden and numb. As I thrashed desperately against the riverbed the stones cut into my feet. When I looked down the silt swarmed with writhing human hands, with distended nails and vicious blades of bone stabbing out of their rotting skin.
I croaked out a strangled cry and woke up, dashing icy water from my hair as I threw myself backwards. When I dared to open my eyes I could see the open window in front of me, and the heavy raindrops which dripped onto the sill where I had been sleeping. Petra shoved herself through the door at my cry, and her eyes were hollow and accusing. She slammed the window shut and shook and slapped me until the raindrops were matched by my tears.
CHAPTER 3
By midday a great storm had broken over the village. As we ate lunch sewage water rose through the floorboards and pooled onto the floor. Petra made me dash pail after pail of water out into the garden. My hands blistered and bled, but the water only grew deeper. We heard men hollering against the wind for everyone to pack up their belongings and run.
The river had burst its banks. The torrent carved swathes of clay from the banks and forced them downstream. They crashed into the base of the mountain. Mud slicks, thick with sharp grit and shards of slate, were already bleeding from the cliff face onto the buildings below. As the flood grew worse the villagers realized that they had nowhere to run to. The rushing river was on one side, and the treacherous rocks were on the other. They could choose whether to drown or be dashed to pieces.
I cowered in the filth under the kitchen table, praying that the falling sky wouldn’t see me, while Petra frantically stuffed valuables into soggy baskets. She barely saw me in the chaos, but when her eyes finally fixed on me she froze. Her face fixed into an expression of perfect peace, as if she finally understood a riddle that had been vexing her for a lifetime.
“It’s her.” she told her husband, and raised her finger slowly towards me as if we were already drifting underwater. “The river wants her back.”
>
“Don’t spout nonsense.” The man snapped, his timidity eclipsed by fear. Petra spat at him, and then ran out into the storm. The door slammed shut again and again after she left, and when I was ordered to close it the wood was torn from my fingers. I shrieked and clutched at my hand, seeing the deep cuts where the splinters had sliced into my palm. I hadn’t stood in the rain for months. In my fright I thought I had been attacked by every droplet which fell.
When Petra returned I was huddled on my bed, watching the water splashing on the floor with pure horror. I didn’t have a chance to be afraid of the men and women who crashed through the door. Everything happened so quickly. Scores of rough hands seized me, and sank their nails into my skin when I tried to squirm free. They dragged me out into the rain. I squealed and twisted my body so violently that they nearly dropped me. I felt the cold water against my face and suddenly remembered the way the river had carried me ashore. I hadn’t felt soft, cool water since that day. I quietened, and the people holding me muttered to each other.
“The rain calms her.” one of them pinched my ear and shook me when I refused to cry. “See? None of the real children act like that.”
“Of course it calms the little bitch.” another growled, and rough hands started hauling me onwards. “Let’s get this over with.”
The river had swelled so much that silt was slapping into the fields. The villagers splashed through the stinking mud to an outcrop of stone which had formed an island in the torrent. It was barely large enough to hold a child. When they stood me on it the water tickled my toes. I clung to the slate pillar and watched in horror as they walked away. Their stocky legs were tripped and slowed by the water. My fever-starved body would have been swept away in an instant.
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