“Ough! Oughgurrouch!” went Jay’s voice.
“What do I do now?” I said to Tanamil in the whiteness.
“If you’re ready, you go further down,” Tanamil said. “You must make your way against the River’s current to its source.”
“Aren’t you coming?” I said.
Tanamil shook his head. He had that expression which was no expression. “I can’t come any deeper because of being bound,” he said. “Besides, I couldn’t help you when you come to the source. It has to be one of your father’s people who unbinds us. I must go and find Kankredin. Your mother was quite right.”
“Oh,” I said. I was very disappointed. I suspected he wanted to be with Robin again.
TANAMIL PLAYED HIS pipes again. It began as a shriek, but it passed to a hurrying, sobbing sound and died away. There was the streak of light and the sliding. This time I knew it: it was the same as when I had looked into the floods at night, not knowing the River was so high. It does not last long.
When I saw things as they really were, I was in the bed of the River, between high shadowing banks, among a flood of another sort. This was all people. People hurried past me in a shadowy crowd, more and more, coming always from the left and hurrying away to the right. My ears were assailed and irritated by the clatter of their feet. The clattering never stopped, yet it was oddly hard to hear. The people never stopped, and they were hard to see. Only when I looked at a person, and turned my head to keep my eyes on him or her as they hurried by, could I see them clearly. In this way I saw four men of our own people, a Heathen woman, two Heathen boys and a girl about Robin’s age who was neither Heathen nor of our people. All were strangers to me. And always they hurried by between the shadowing banks, on and on.
“Gull’s rushing people!” I heard myself saying. “These are the souls of dead people. Now I know. The River is everyone who dies.”
Speaking like that took too much of my attention. Next thing I knew, I was hurrying with the crowd, panting with haste, on and on. The only difference between me and the rest was that I was still clutching my rugcoat and feeling the One bumping heavily in my shirt.
Nothing seemed to stop me as I hurried. I did not think of stopping, until I saw light shadowy movements in the far distance. The hurrying of the people became broken and hesitant. There was an uneasiness, and we ran waveringly. Then I could see that people were turning about ahead, and some came past, going the other way. They were unwilling and kept trying to turn round. The clatter of our feet was in confusion.
Up till then I had run as one does in dreams, not asking why a thing happens. But now I stared ahead and tried to make out what the light shadows were. I saw huge glassy shapes striding towards me. They were transparent, but green and wavering, as if they were made of water. Though they were still far away, they were enormous and striding fast. I could not see what happened to the uneasy crowd as they met the glassy giants. But I had a sense of nothing beyond them, and I thought I heard among the faltering clatter of feet a voice crying out in despair. It sounded like my mother’s.
I was terrified. I tried to turn back and struggle away from the glassy beings. It was most difficult to do. The hurrying was still all the other way, and it swept me with it. I cried out for help.
Then somebody was calling me, above on the bank. “Tanaqui, Tanaqui! Where have you got to, Tanaqui?”
I looked up, expecting my father. I think that, all along, I had been expecting to see my father among the rushing souls. I saw, running along the bank and peering down at the crowd, a fair-haired young man in a faded red rugcoat. He was fiercer and sturdier than Tanamil, but he had a joyful look which was like Tanamil’s. I clung with an elbow to the rocky bank and gaped up at him.
“There you are at last!” he said to me. “Mother told me you’d be here. You mustn’t go that way. The mages are down there. Come up here on the bank.” He held his hand down to me.
“Gull!” I said.
“Who did you think I was?” he said, and pulled me up on the bank.
“But … you’re grown up,” I said. “Are people’s souls always grown up, then?”
He was annoyed. “I’m not my soul. I’m all of me. Come along. We’ve got quite a way to go.”
He hurried off along the high bank, the other way to the way the people ran, and I did my best to keep up with him. It was very stony and uneven, quite unlike the smooth trodden ground of the Riverbed. “Why are you grown up?” I panted as I stumbled after him.
“Because I was born five years before you were,” he said, striding along. By this time I was falling steadily behind. Gull realised and turned back. “Sorry,” he said. “You’re loaded to the thwarts, aren’t you? Whatever have you got?”
“My rugcoat,” I panted. “But it’s the One that’s really heavy. He went gold, you know.”
“I’ll carry the coat for you,” he said, and took it out of my arms, which was a great relief. “It’s a beauty,” he said when he had it. “It must be the best you ever did. What have you got it for?” Then he smiled at me. “I’m terribly glad to see you, Tanaqui.”
Gull only says things like that when he means them. I was truly pleased. I explained to him about the rugcoat as we walked up the bank above the hurrying multitude of souls, to the perpetual soft patter of their feet. Kankredin’s glassy mages were out of sight behind. Everything was shadowy. Gull was the only bright thing I could see. I suppose that should have told me he was not just a soul. But in spite of being with us all the time, Gull did not know anything of our adventures. He told me that he could barely remember the part where he was with us in his body. As I explained, I found it hard not to say, “But surely you remember Robin was ill!” and “You must know what our King is like!”
When I came to the end, I said, “Now what do you think I have to do to unbind the One?” and Gull did not know that either. “I hoped you’d know that,” he said. I was thoroughly dismayed.
“But you must know!” I wailed. “I can’t ask anyone else here, because it’s got to be one of our family that does it!”
“Yes, I know. We bound him; we unbind him,” Gull said. “Don’t get worked up. Let’s think.” It did me good to have someone calm like Gull. That is one of the things I have missed. “You’ve got the One,” he said, “and you’ve got the spellcoat that shows you finding out how Kankredin caught the One and then me. And Tanamil says it was lucky you didn’t see all Kankredin’s gown – That’s it, Tanaqui! The spell is broken in your rugcoat! You try putting the coat on the One in the presence of Oreth!”
In that place, when Gull spoke that name, its echoes rolled in the Riverbed. The hurrying people halted, and their white faces looked up.
“I’ll show you where his source is,” Gull said quietly. The echoes died, and the people hurried on.
“I can’t get used to the way things are the same and not the same,” I said. “The One is not the River. Is he this golden statue?”
“He was before the River, and he made it,” Gull said. He paced seriously and frowned as he tried to explain. Gull is not a thinker like Hern or Duck. “Making the River, he was bound as the One. He is the River, in a way, or its source at least.”
“But the River is people’s souls,” I said. “And it’s water too.”
“It’s all those things,” said Gull. “But … well, if anyone’s really the River, I think Mother is.”
“Mother!” I exclaimed.
“I can’t explain,” said Gull. “But I’ve talked to Mother a lot. I don’t think the One likes it, but he doesn’t stop me. Mother’s not bound, you know, but she’s in disgrace for marrying Father. She’s told me all sorts of things. You wouldn’t believe all the strange places and strange sorts of Undying there are in the land. When we’re unbound, I want to go and see some of them. That’s what I want to do. I shall have much more fun doing that than what Hern’s going to do, I can tell you!”
I remember looking down at the Riverbed while Gull said this. It was narrowe
r by then – a sort of rocky split – and there were far fewer people hurrying along it.
“What is Hern going to do?” I said.
Gull laughed. “I’m not telling. You won’t believe me.”
“Do you know what we’re all going to do?” I asked eagerly. “What about me?”
“That I can’t tell you,” said Gull. “It would be terrible bad luck on you. But our Mallard’s going to be a mighty mage – I’ll tell you that. We go down here. Take careful hold. The rocks are slippery.”
The sides of the split were wet. It was the first moisture I had seen in that place. I would have expected moss or mould or green things growing, but there was nothing but wetness. I went down, clenching my hands on rock and feeling my feet slide. Gull came after me more easily, but I saw he was taking care too.
When we were down, the rocks of the sides were high above our heads, and between them was dimness. Though the place was dark, there was a yellow-greenness everywhere, by which we could see. I looked back down the narrow channel. It was empty where we stood, but there were people behind us, two or three or more, always hurrying away from us. I never saw where they came from. In front of us were rock and an oddly shaped dark hole.
“We go in there,” said Gull.
He stooped and went into the hole. I edged in after him. How I felt is hard to explain. I was not frightened. I still went as you do in dreams. Yet there was a terror that was like part of the dream which, had I been really dreaming, would have woken me screaming. Gull moved to one side, and I followed him. It was soft and silent inside the hole. As soon as I moved from the entry, I could see. It was a cave, where the light fell greenish on the rocky back, and it fell in the shape of a figure with a bent head and a nose that was neither straight nor hooked, but both at once. I looked at the hole we had come in by. That was the same shape. Both were the shape of the shadow in my rugcoat. The cave was wet. Drops of moisture stood like dew underfoot and overhead, but the dew neither dripped nor trickled. It was a deep empty silence we stood in.
“Where – where is the One?” I whispered.
“Here,” Gull said. “Can’t you feel? This is all there ever is.”
It was perplexing. I could not put a coat on nothing. If I had been alone, I would have got as bad as Robin and started weeping and wringing my hands. But Gull was there, and he was not worried. In the end I took the golden image of the One out of my shirt. He was so small that it was ridiculous, but there seemed nothing else I could do. I placed him carefully on the dewy rock, so that he stood in the centre of the green man-shaped light. “Give me the rugcoat,” I said to Gull. Gull did so, and I placed the coat over the golden figure so that the head showed but the rest was heaped round with my weaving. I spread the cloth out and stood back to watch.
Nothing happened.
“We haven’t got it right!” I said. “What shall we do? We’ve got to do something before Kankredin gets here!”
“Wait,” said Gull. “Feel.”
There was warmth growing in the cave. Almost as Gull spoke, it grew from dead chill to the heat of a body. Gull and I both sweated, in big drops, as if we were part of the walls of the cave. Steam gathered about us.
But that was all. We stood and waited in the heat, but nothing else happened. The small golden figure still stood swamped by my rugcoat. The green-yellow light was unchanged, except by the haze of steam.
“What shall we do?” I said.
“You’ve done something,” Gull said thoughtfully. “It’s never been warm here before. But I don’t think that’s enough. There’s something else we have to do, I think – and I simply don’t know what.”
We stood again, and still there was nothing. At last, I could bear it no longer and cried out. “Grandfather!” I cried. “Grandfather, show me what to do!”
There was a green sliding in the cave. I could not see the rocks or the One in my rugcoat, but I could see Gull. He was bent and pallid and out of shape, like a person swimming underwater. Then I could not see him. I was in a still white place, with water roaring and rushing nearby. The sliding came again. This time a chilly wind came with it. I shivered, but I was glad of it after the heat of the cave. After that I was out on a cold hillside in the light of a golden evening. The first things I saw were heavy rain clouds, swimming away to the west in a green sky and limned with a dazzle of gold. Green turf sloped sharply from my feet. Somewhere to my right, water poured shouting downwards, tolling an echo like a bell. And beside me more water ran and spread on the turf from steep rocks behind, which were smoking like a fire.
I felt heavy tears dragging in my nose and eyes, but I stopped them. “My grandfather,” I said, “has turned me out. I call that ungrateful.” Then I looked at my hands, thinking I was carrying my rugcoat again. I was not. My hands were gripped on a bobbin wound with a dark yarn that glistered faintly. And I could feel that the heavy weight of the One was missing from my shirt.
I felt desolate. I knew how Robin felt that morning we woke and found Tanamil had left us. I knew how Hern has felt, knowing he had failed. But neither of them had just lost Gull for a second time. I walked with my strange bobbin across the soaked and steaming grass, not caring or noticing that my clothes were dry where they should have been wet, and barely grateful for the cold wind on my face. I told myself I was going to look down at the thundering water I could hear.
I believed I could throw myself down it, but I had to stop before I came to the brink of the turf. It was too high and too steep. The green country and the purple hills spread like the whole world below and seemed to wheel sickeningly. Almost at my feet was the beginning of our River. It poured in a white cataract from my turfy shelf to somewhere far, far below. It roared as it fell, and everything beneath it was lost in floating smokes and small drifting rainbows. Beyond, and away below, I thought I could see the lake where we had sheltered from the rain, as a bright lozenge laid in the wheeling steepness. I had to take my eyes away and fix them on my tall black shadow, lying nearby across the turf.
“What did I do wrong?” I said. I have been so proud and so sure of myself, ever since understanding came to me in the old mill, and now I saw I had prevented myself understanding truly by being so proud of my own cleverness. “But what about Kankredin?” I said. I tried to look out into the country below, to see if Kankredin was to be seen, but my eyes blurred. It was all green and blue and dizzying.
I looked at my shadow on the turf. There was another shadow stretched out beside mine, longer and large-nosed. I could not move.
“Grandfather?” I said.
His voice is like the sound behind the sound of the waterfall. “Thank you, Granddaughter,” he said. “You have been a great help to me. You took Kankredin’s hands from my throat.”
“Then what didn’t I do?” I said.
His answer came after a pause. He sounded sad. “Nobody asked you to do anything – beyond what your family has always done. And I was not very kind to your mother, after all.”
“I know,” I said. “But Closti – my father – wasn’t in the least like Cenblith, you know. You might have forgiven her.”
He paused again before answering sadly and hesitantly, “I am very devious, Granddaughter. You – you would not be here now if I had.”
It came to me that my grandfather was not only bound and sad, and weighted with shame and loneliness, but even uncertain how to talk to an ordinary person like me. I had not thought it was possible to love him until then. I wanted to turn round and look at him, but I did not dare. I looked at his shadow and said, “Grandfather, tell me what I have to do to unbind you. I want to. It’s got nothing to do with Kankredin or Mother or even Gull. It’s for you.”
Again the pause. “That makes me … grateful,” he said. “If you mean that, Tanaqui, perhaps you could think of the end of your first coat, where you speak of Kankredin. In what manner did you weave that?”
“In the expressive way Tanamil taught me,” I said.
“Then,” he said, �
�think on to the second coat now in your loom. You tell of meeting with your King and what he told you of me. Do you use the same weave there?”
“Yes,” I said. I had been in such awe of our King then. And I saw the coat clearly in my mind as I stood there, and my expressive weaving of the King going right across from selvage to selvage. “Of course!” I said. “You were bound twice! By Kankredin and by Cenblith.” Then I did nearly turn round to look at him, but again I did not dare.
“It was my own fault,” said my grandfather. He spoke musingly, as if he spoke to himself. This is how he must have spoken alone, for many centuries. “I can’t ask anyone to unbind us because it was my fault. The first time I was a fool. The second time I was a fool, thinking that I was about to be rid of the first bond in time to welcome my people back. I let Kankredin take me unawares. I knew Kankredin. He has inherited my gifts, but it was too late when I saw that he has put them to the worst possible use.”
“Kankredin? Is Kankredin of the Undying?” I said. I could not help interrupting.
“He descends from me,” said my grandfather. “All the people you call Heathen descend from me. They went from here, and now they have come back. Kankredin is like you – two lines meet in him – but he has misused his inheritance, and now he wants to take my place.”
“Can you stop him?” I said. By this time I was shaken with the urge to look round and see my grandfather, but I could not do it.
“I can stop him if I am unbound,” said my grandfather. “That I promise you.”
The Spellcoats (UK) Page 17