The River and the Book

by Alison Croggon

  I waited, hoping that Jane Watson would explain, as the phrase clearly meant something to her. It was impolite to ask directly. But she didn’t. Instead she reached out with the tip of her finger and gently stroked the page. I flinched and snatched it away: it was forbidden for anyone except the Keepers to touch the Book. A curious expression briefly crossed her face, a kind of lust mixed with frustration or anger, but it passed so swiftly I almost thought I had imagined it. Jane Watson apologized for her rudeness, and I dismissed her gesture as ignorant and clumsy rather than sinister, and forgot all about it.

  I remembered that expression after Jane Watson left, when I was tormenting myself with reproaches: I ought to have taken it as a warning, I ought to have been more wary. Back then, it was not my way to be suspicious. When Grandmother told me that Jane Watson had a cold soul and was not to be trusted, I defended her hotly. I said that Jane Watson could help us against the Tarns, and that we should not behave like foolish backward villagers, afraid of the new. I said things that make me blush now when I think of them.

  Grandmother shook her head and said nothing more. Later she told me that Jane Watson had enchanted me, and there was nothing more to say until the spell was broken. And when the spell did break, Grandmother did not once rebuke me, not by word nor by glance. That hurt almost more than anything else. I think it was Grandmother’s silence that made me decide to find Jane Watson myself, and to bring the Book back where it belonged.

  15

  When I think back, I can’t quite believe that I made the choice to leave my village so casually. I didn’t consult anyone, not even Grandmother. I just decided, and then I left. I suppose it was partly a question of pride: without the Book, I had no place in the village. I knew that my family didn’t need me: there were my brothers and sisters to care for my grandmother and father as they aged. I was a Keeper of the Book, and so had my place, an important place. When the Book was stolen, I had nothing. I couldn’t face my loss of status. Writing it down, I realize how vain my decision was. I suspect I didn’t speak to my grandmother about it because she would have pointed out my vanity, and underneath I was slightly ashamed of it – although I don’t know whether she would still have approved of my seeking the Book. But at the time I didn’t think about any of this. I just decided, and then I acted.

  I took the dinghy that had belonged to my mother and that had become mine when she died, and I packed it with supplies – flatbreads, smoked fish, dried fruits, a big bag of walnuts, drinking water. I filled a purse with my hoarded cache of coins, squirrelled away from my weaving, along with some small things that were precious to me – the gold earrings my grandmother had given me when I was presented at the temple, a bracelet of amber that had belonged to my mother – and tied it around my belly, where it would be safe and hidden. I had a little more money than usual, because Jane Watson’s arrival had meant that I hadn’t spent as much as I normally would at Mizan’s stall. I packed two blankets and some spare clothes and a small, very sharp clasp knife that I kept in a sheath on my belt.

  Then I wrote a note for my family, saying that I was going to find the Book, and would send word. I left one morning before first light, a week after Jane Watson. By now it was late summer, but there was as yet no sign of the chills of autumn. I unmoored the dinghy from the pier behind our house and rowed out to the centre of the River; then I shipped the oars and drifted downstream, watching the sun rise. It was a beautiful, clear summer dawn; the air brightened until it was like liquid light, and the River rippled molten gold. Somewhere very high overhead I could hear the lonely twittering of a lark, but that served only to deepen the silence that filled the world.

  I realized it was the first time I had been properly alone for many days. Then I thought, with a thrill of excitement that was not unmixed with fear, that I was more alone than I had ever been in my life. I lay back in the dinghy and stared up at the sky. Even though I had just made the most momentous decision of my life, I felt deeply peaceful. I had given my destiny to the River, and for that moment all the guilt and anger and sorrow that had filled me for days melted away.

  I had no clear idea what I would do. I thought I’d travel to Kilok and ask if anyone had seen Jane Watson. Yani and Sopli had come back because they couldn’t travel overland, but I thought that Jane Watson would have to come back to the River at some point, because it was still the major road in this part of the world. Beyond Kilok, I really hadn’t thought much. This was partly because Kilok was as far from home as I had ever been. I didn’t know what the world was like beyond it, and I didn’t have the Book to ask. I missed it most fiercely in those early days, when I so needed its advice.

  I made one sensible decision: to dress as a boy. Jane Watson had told me that it could be dangerous for women to travel alone. She kept a gun, which she wore on a shoulder holster hidden beneath her jacket when she was travelling. She showed it to me once: it was quite small, a revolver, which she said was standard issue for city traffic police, and which she had bought on the black market when she had arrived in our country. I weighed it in my hand briefly before giving it back to her with a shudder; it was surprisingly heavy and the metal felt cold and deadly. I had no idea how to fire a gun, and had never thought to learn. Now I wished I had taken the trouble. It wouldn’t have been so hard; Sopli had a gun and would have taught me, if I had asked him. But now it was too late, and all I had to protect me was my knife.

  On the other hand, it would take a sharp eye to pick me as a girl. As I floated downriver, I cut my braid off at the nape of my neck with my clasp knife. Although the blade was sharp, it took a while to saw through my thick hair, and when I had finished I held the severed plait in my hands for some time, breathing heavily, before I threw it in the water. The air felt cold on the back of my neck. The plaited hair twirled on the ripples for a while and then drifted off to the bank, where it snagged on some reeds. I watched its fate with a curious mixture of sadness and liberation. It was as if, with that gesture, I had thrown away my childhood.

  Now my hair was short, it would be easier to look after, and no one would think I was a girl. I have always been skinny, and my small breasts were easily hidden in a baggy shirt. With my worn sandals, shin-length trousers and sun-bleached shirt, I looked exactly like a water rat, one of the ragged orphan boys who hustle a living up and down the water, making deliveries, running errands, catching fish or freshwater crabs.

  I let the current take me for the rest of the day, only exerting myself to ensure that I didn’t ground on any shoals. I listened to the many voices of the River and watched the banks drift by, raising my hand occasionally when I passed farmers hoeing their fields or cleaning out the irrigation channels on the banks. I didn’t think about my family, who by now would have discovered my letter. I didn’t want to think about them, because it would hurt: they would be bewildered, grieving, worried; they might even be angry with me. I didn’t think about the Book, or where I was going. I just lay back in my boat and squinted up at the sky and let myself be empty. For the first time in my life, I was no one: I had left behind everything that I knew and everyone who knew me. I didn’t feel sad or lost or confused, or anything that I might have expected. I think what I felt more than anything else was relief.

  16

  When I read Mely the last chapter this morning, she stood up and stretched from her nose to the tip of her tail. Then she yawned delicately, showing every one of her white, sharp teeth. Finally, after all that pantomime, she deigned to tell me what she thought.

  “That,” Mely said, “is a pack of lies.”

  I should be used to Mely by now, but this offended me.

  “Lies?” I said. “I am trying to be as truthful as I possibly can. And how can you know, anyway? I haven’t met you yet. You weren’t even there.”

  “I met you very soon after that,” said Mely. “And you didn’t seem at all relieved to me. You were lost and confused and sad, all the things that you say you weren’t.”

  I sighed. “T
hat was afterwards,” I said. “I felt all those things afterwards. Not on the first day…”

  “That’s why I felt sorry for you,” said Mely. “Because you were so lost.”

  “You felt sorry for me? As I remember, it was me who took pity on you. You were the one without anywhere to live and with no food…”

  Mely scratched her ear, pretending that she hadn’t heard me. She doesn’t like to be reminded about that.

  “And,” I added, “I’m still the one who buys the fish heads. So it might be a good idea to be polite to me.”

  “You said you wanted me to be honest,” said Mely. “And look what happens when I tell you what I think! You threaten to starve me!”

  “You can be honest without being rude,” I said.

  “I told you a cat doesn’t know anything about storytelling. So why do you ask me? It’s your fault if you get offended.”

  “You like listening to Blind Harim as much as I do,” I said. “So you must know something about telling stories.”

  “Anyway, you might tell lies about me,” said Mely, who wasn’t listening. “I’m not a story, I’m your friend. What if you say things that aren’t true? Won’t you be changing how things are?”

  So now I understand that Mely is worried about this book, because she is part of the story. When I think about it, she’s right. Books do change things. My Book changed things all the time: people took its advice and lived better lives (or didn’t take its advice, and lived worse lives; but they knew what they should have done). It’s hard to see how this book I’m writing will change things, really; it’s a different sort of book, for a start. But I can see why Mely might not want to be a story cat in a story book.

  In the end, I promised to be as truthful as I possibly could, especially when I wrote about Mely, because being truthful would change things the least. Mely looked suspicious, but thought that would probably be all right. There are two problems with this: the first is that I suspect that being truthful changes things more than lying does. The Book was powerful, my grandmother told me, because it was always truthful; there might be another kind of power in distorting reality with words, but it will always prove weaker than truthfulness.

  On the other hand, Grandmother also said that truthfulness has many faces, and that some of those faces might look like lies. “You can never be quite certain,” she said. “And that is a good thing, because only a god can be certain about the truth, and even then only sometimes. It is much harder to be a human being than it is to be a god.”

  Aside from questions about the gods, the other problem is that I don’t think Mely will like it much if I do tell the truth, because it doesn’t always show her in a good light. Although she’d never admit it, I think that she wouldn’t mind if I wrote down a pack of lies about her, as long as they were flattering. Fond as I am of her (and I am very fond of Mely – that is the truth too), she is sometimes very annoying.

  As Mely said, we met in Kilok, two days after I left my village, and by then I no longer felt at all peaceful. I was lost and confused and sad.

  I know now that Kilok is a small town, but it is much bigger than my village, which is little more than a single road lined with houses and fields and orchards. I had been there many times with my father, who often brought cheese and fish to sell at the market, but never on my own. To me, Kilok seemed bewildering and enormous. I came ashore upstream, just where the houses began, and dragged my boat up onto the bank and covered it with brush to hide it from unfriendly eyes. Then I walked through the straggly outskirts into the market square, my shadow stretching long behind me in the rich light of evening.

  I had unthinkingly expected the market to be bustling, as it had been every time I had seen it, but of course by then everyone had finished their business for the day and gone home. A couple of stray dogs nosed about for scraps, and an old man squatted by the well clutching his walking stick and staring blindly into space, but otherwise it was deserted.

  The mood of peaceful certainty that had accompanied me down the River all day evaporated like spit on a hot griddle. It dawned on me for the first time that I had no idea what I was doing. What had I been thinking? What was I going to do now?

  I stood in the middle of the empty marketplace as the dusk deepened. A noisy bunch of starlings was squabbling in a locust tree and, further off, I could hear the faint shouts of children playing and the plaintive bleats of goats being brought in for the evening’s milking. A couple of people walked through the square and stared at me incuriously as they passed. I saw myself suddenly as others did: a scruffy, skinny lad. Even the dogs took absolutely no notice of me.

  I almost turned around and went home. It would be a couple of days’ hard row upriver, and inside I flinched at the thought. Then I remembered the shame in Yani and Sopli’s eyes when they had returned empty-handed from Kilok. I felt that shame already burning in my stomach, and I knew now it was shame at my own powerlessness. I couldn’t turn back yet. My pride wouldn’t let me.

  At the same time, I didn’t have the first clue what to do next. The thought of knocking on one of those doorways, of facing the sceptical eyes of a stranger, made my heart shrivel. As I stood there, caught between one action and another, the sun set and a fat orange moon rose, throwing strange shadows everywhere. In its unwavering light the houses looked sinister and dangerous, and I shivered as I made my way back to my boat. At first I missed it, I had hidden it too well, and for a few horrible moments I thought someone had stolen it. But then, with a rush of relief, I put my hands on its friendly wood, and I scrambled into its bows as if I were coming home. Which was true, really; that boat was now all I had of home.

  I pulled out my blankets and made myself a bed of springy branches nestled inside the sheltering hull of my boat. The night was mild and clear, and I lay on my back looking up with burning, sleepless eyes through the shrubby branches at the stars burning in the luminous dark blue sky. I had been sitting idly in the boat all day, so I wasn’t tired, and now my thoughts chased each other around and around in my head like a lot of stupid, frightened puppies.

  Mainly my thoughts were telling me I had just made the most foolish decision of my life.

  17

  I didn’t sleep at all that night. I lay back and watched the white ship of the moon on her long voyage above me. As the hours passed I felt my soul sinking, as if I were floating down through darkness, as if I were falling away from the moon and the world silvered by her light into an endless, black ocean. The waters beneath me were still and deep, and as each hour passed I sank more deeply into the darkness, further from the light, into a world that was ever more silent and more heavy.

  I think I hadn’t really believed until that night in Kilok that the Book was gone. I had somehow kept the knowledge from myself. Now I couldn’t escape it.

  There aren’t proper words for pain. When you hurt your body, or when you suffer toothache or a bad headache, the pain fills the whole world, and the only way to express it is to scream or groan; and then, when it’s over, you don’t remember it. The pain vanishes and your body forgets. I suppose it’s because if your body remembered what pain was like, it would be frightened all the time. It’s the same with grief or loneliness. Nobody can really know what pain is like for another person. Words can point towards the feeling, but they can’t describe it. You just have to hope that the person to whom you’re trying to describe the experience has felt similar pain themselves, because then they might nod and say, yes. Yes, it was like that.

  But even though I would like to be understood, I hope no one who reads these words has felt like I did that night in Kilok. I had felt rage and intolerable sorrow when my mother died, but at least I was in my home, with my people. In Kilok, nothing made sense any more. I had not only lost my home; I had lost its meaning. I had lost the rooftree that held my world together, the height and the depth of it, the hearth that warmed it. When I lost the Book, I lost my people and my place and the meaning of my name. I lost the picture that l
ived in its pages somewhere of my mother showing me its mysteries for the first time, and I lost the voice that led me through my doubts and fears and showed me the path forward. I lost my past and my future. I lost everything that told me who I was. And I lost my place in the village. If I was not the Keeper, then who was I?

  That night was the first time I tasted despair. But in the chill hours before dawn, I found that the ocean was not bottomless: there was a floor, a hard ground at last, where I stopped sinking. My soul looked around and found itself in a place of irredeemable bleakness: all was colourless, flat, devoid of hope. At that moment, I was sure that I would never again feel joy. At the same time, as I stared at that grey, shadowless world, I felt as if I were made of rock, as if nothing in me could be hurt again. A great stillness began to fill me. It wasn’t peacefulness exactly; it was simply that my soul had sunk as deep as it could go. The worst had happened, and I was still here. If I had not found that ground, I know I would have gone mad. Even in our village, I had seen people in great distress lose their minds. For some reason, I knew then that I would not go mad. I’m not sure what the difference is between those who collapse into madness and those who do not, and I don’t know whether it’s a curse or a blessing to remain sane. Perhaps there are darker miseries that would drive my soul through the stony ground it found that night. But I suspect that even if I stumbled into worse despairs, I would still be forced to suffer them in sanity.

  Gradually, as the first glimmerings of dawn began to lighten the world, I felt my body come back to life. I realized that I was cold to the marrow of my bones. I hunched the dew-damp blankets around my shoulders and shivered, waiting for the sun to rise. I felt utterly empty, as if everything that was me had been poured out and there was nothing left inside.

  I slapped my legs and arms, trying to get the blood moving in them, and then, realizing I was hungry, took some flatbread and bean paste out of my bag. I was nibbling my breakfast in the bows of the boat when I heard footsteps coming my way, walking carelessly so that twigs snapped loudly and leaves crunched. I didn’t feel frightened so much as shy, and I hid in the boat, hoping that whoever it was wouldn’t notice me in the brush; they had probably come down for their morning’s wash, and no doubt would welcome intrusion as little as I did. I peered through the branches and saw it was a stout boy about my age who, as I expected, was making his way to the edge of the river.