Solem

by Clive S. Johnson

  “Lesson?”

  He only glanced her way before telling her that some of the elders held to the belief that even the journey to the river went against prescribed tenets. “They argue it’s a waste of resources, that the benefit gained from eating the fish doesn’t repay the effort involved in getting them. And that’s not taking into account the risk involved,” and he eyed the dark depths of the forest.

  Janeen swallowed, the hairs at her neck rising at the thought. “Then why do it, Dad?”

  A short-lived grin touched his face and he slowed. “Because most of the elders, like everyone else, enjoy the taste too much, so it’s never become law.”

  He stopped and smiled, taking her gently by the arm. “It’s ever been thus, Janeen; a minor infringement. And anyway, people instinctively make up for it in other ways: for a few days choosing food that’s easier to produce, like mushrooms and paleberries, or whatever else is in season.”

  “So,” Janeen whispered, “everything’s kept in balance.”

  “Yes, daughter, the ledger made to tally, as we both know it must ever do.”

  The reassuring look on his face, to Janeen at least, appeared to belie a contradiction of some kind, a hint that this truism somehow no longer held true. Her father turned away, though, and strode on, waving for her to follow.

  Then it dawned on Janeen: enacting it into law would change their ancient order, even if only by a small amount—and change was, after all, a sacrilege.

  The ground beneath their feet presently became rockier, steeper, the air a little less close. Even the forest’s dense wall of brown and green about them had lightened, shafts of sunlight here and there striking down between the trees. The path slipped into a defile in an unusually moss-free wall of rock. Before long they each stood and stared out at a sight Janeen’s childhood memories could never have prepared her for. Immediately before them, a wide river slipped forcefully and majestically by.

  4 Of Bogymen and Demons

  The shock startled Janeen, but only until fear swiftly swept in to engulf her. The great wide river, and its unbelievable mass of fast moving water, rapidly paled against the vast expanse of sky also revealed.

  Janeen felt utterly naked.

  Shakily, she slunk back into the defile, clutching at the walls to stop herself from running away.

  Her father stared in at her, a strained smile on his lips but his eyes seemingly harried by doubt.

  “I could never get you past here as a child,” he told her, “however much I coaxed. You were so unsettled by it your mother refused to let you come after the third visit.” He tried to smile. “But, Janeen, you’re no longer a child. You’re fast becoming a grown woman. Time to master your fears. You see, there’s something I need to tell you, and I can’t do it here.”

  He held out his hand. “Come and sit with me, Janeen; come and sit on the riverbank; come and learn what only we adults are allowed to know.”

  Janeen clutched her jerkin close across her chest and edged a step or two nearer the end of the defile, but then froze. She stared into her father’s eyes, trying to ignore the unearthly absence of forest beyond them.

  “How… How’s it possible to breathe out there?” she whispered, as though saving her own breath.

  “Breathe?” and Bardwyn’s eyes crinkled at their corners.

  “Yes, breathe. What holds the air there? Stops it being blown away or swept along with the river?”

  He stretched his hand nearer her own. “Trust me, my daughter. See? I can breathe here, more easily in fact, and so can you.” His fingertips touched her hand. “Come and sit by the water’s edge, taste the air for yourself, eh?” and he slipped his fingers into her hand, lifting it, encouraging her out.

  Janeen felt so light she imagined she could be blown away herself, so easily freed of the forest’s protective embrace. Her feet seemed hardly to touch the stone steps that now carried them both the short way down onto the grassy riverbank, when she realised she hadn’t yet breathed.

  A sip of the air soon became a gulp, its sharp edge quenching a thirst she’d never suspected she had. Strength returned to her legs, although they were thankful she soon came to where her father clearly wished them both to sit.

  He carefully took the canvas roll from her shoulder, untied and unrolled it upon the soft grass, and sat, patting the space beside him. Janeen, however, as though in a dream, was too engrossed in trying to keep her gaze from the open sky above the rushing river. She sought out anything remotely familiar upon the bank.

  Just beyond where the canvas lay, a square of blackened stones formed a shallow hearth, within whose ashen earth no grass grew. Her father had placed his bag beside it, and now opened his hand towards the frame of fishing line still in her own. She handed it over, still in a daze, and sat down beside him.

  “Wasn’t I right, Janeen? Isn’t this air just so much fresher?”

  Slowly, she nodded, and with it let her gaze drift from his anxious face and out onto the river.

  She’d no way of judging its width; certainly it was much wider than the clearing beneath which lay their vegetable plots—much, much wider. But instead of solid, musky earth binding the vertiginous forest walls together, here nothing appeared rooted. Threads and cords and long plaits of brown and grey river swept dizzyingly past, snatching the eye from a distant wall of mossy green on the far side, carrying it towards a lazy curve around which the heaving river vanished downstream, towards the spring-set.

  And still Janeen dared not lift her eyes to the heavens—how could she?

  It was a while before Bardwyn said anything, by which time Janeen had begun to find her feet a little within this alien world, had quietened her heart and deepened her breathing. Now, though, the sky seemed yet more determined to tug at her awareness, beckoning at the edge of her vision.

  “You were born a child of our world, Janeen,” and her father’s words pushed aside the sky’s seduction. “But our ordered and inviolable world has always comprised more, a dangerous mite more.”

  “What do you—”

  “Please, my daughter, please hold your questions for later, hmm? What I have to impart is not easy to say,” and she nodded in answer.

  “You already know all the reasons why we strive so hard not to stray beyond what our world can afford us, why we keep so strictly within what the Sun daily delivers; after all, it’s what every child learns at its mother’s milk.”

  Again, Janeen nodded.

  “What we do not tell our children, though, is the true nature of the bogyman we scare them with. Only at the door of adulthood can this be made real, for the demon lives within us all.”

  “Within—”

  Bardwyn lifted his finger to his lips and stared out across the river. It drew Janeen’s gaze that way, and there she again lay her sight upon the hazy expanse of green that reared above the far riverbank.

  “Our fairy-tale bogyman is a real demon,” Bardwyn quietly said, “one that demands change for change’s sake, that sees good in novelty and evil in constancy.”

  Janeen felt him turn to her, but the far mossy slope held her gaze, drew it up to a line of partly smothered cliffs, then onto a steeper climb above that rose so high it once more risked her the sight of the sky.

  “Our world, Janeen, cannot afford the unusual,” and this finally drew her away from the sky’s temptation. She watched her father take a bright red, hand-sized block of some claylike material from his bag and place it on the stones of the hearth. He then withdrew a folded piece of cloth which he carefully laid in his lap, flicking his gaze at her when he realised she’d been closely following his every move.

  At first he appeared to drink her in, his hands absently toying with the edge of the cloth in his lap. Then his gaze ranged far into the distance, seeming to look through her.

  “Sometimes,” he said, but faltered in his gaze and his voice. “Sometimes,” he reaffirmed, “the demon breaks free of its prison without its guard knowing, walks at large to work its
devilry and returns too soon to be missed.”

  Janeen frowned but couldn’t draw her gaze from the cloth her father had begun to unfold.

  “Whether it be a strength of the demon or a weakness of his bonds, in the end it doesn’t matter. All we know is that the fault must be nipped in the bud.”

  He leant towards Janeen as he removed something from the now unfolded cloth, his voice cracking, clearly hard-won. “It doesn’t mean I haven’t loved you, nor that my love is in any way diminished, now you’ve reached the threshold of womanhood.”

  From his lap Bardwyn lifted and offered up an ornate necklace, a bright liquid-amethyst pendant at its centre, glinting as it hung between them. Without thinking, she leaned in to receive its embrace, the familiar heady scent of her father filling her nose as he fumbled with the clasp now at the nape of her neck.

  When he leant away, quietly saying, “Beauty well adorns beauty,” she straightened and dropped her gaze to the necklace.

  The pendant appeared to swish and sway and swirl, snakes of purple-toned hues writhing within, as though alive and alert. She reached up and covered it with her hand, feeling its warmth against her palm as her gaze returned to her father’s, and as his own hand rested firmly on top of hers at her chest.

  His eyes, so close to hers now, glistened wetly, welling at their corners as he placed his free hand in the small of her back, drawing her nearer.

  “Remember, Janeen, I always loved you, always will,” and he kissed her gently on the cheek as he quietly said, “I am so truly sorry,” and jammed her hand hard against the pendant.

  A sharp crack rang out and fire raged through her chest. It burned hot to her heart before a cold, numbing storm of ice blew in to freeze it solid. When her father’s tearful face slipped into enveloping blackness, it left only the roar of the river thundering through her mind. Even that soon fell silent, her last breath of surprise thinned to nothing more than an echo in the impenetrable darkness.

  5 Sharman Comes

  “Spring; it had to be Spring,” Sharman bemoaned to himself, “and an early one at that, and after such a cold Winter. Typical!” He pushed the boat away from the noon-high bank and leapt in, quickly taking up the oars and pulling with all his might, out from the dark shade of the trees into the fast flowing river.

  For the next fifteen minutes or so, other than the occasional glimpse over his downstream shoulder towards the spring-set, all he did was row relentlessly against the overpowering spate, at a slant towards the opposite bank.

  When the slick sliding bolsters of water finally stopped smashing against the hull, breaking over the rowlocks, drenching his smock and soaking through the seat of his pants to his drawers, Sharman eased off to appease his tired limbs. The slower flow—now within spitting distance of the night-hidden bank—at last gave him the opportunity to study more closely the rising plume of red smoke that still lay downstream—for which he silently gave thanks to Solem.

  “Definitely Harclifferd,” he said to himself, and let the now more sedate current draw the boat downstream, sculling an oar astern to keep it near the bank.

  Before long, the pebbles of Harclifferd’s narrow and steep shingle beach glinted in their rare favour of sunlight, the trees of the forest here held back by the cliff behind. The hearth still burned, still spewed out its clay-red smoke to stain the cliff above, to coil within the branches of the arboreal wall at its top.

  The shingle crunched as Sharman beached the boat, as he shipped its oars and quickly leapt out to draw the craft safely above the covetous river’s reach. For a moment he rested his hands upon its prow, but then turned once more to the hearth, now on a level with his gaze at the top of the beach. There lay the long roll of canvas, neatly before the hearth.

  “Sharman has come,” he solemnly announced, “to carry away your demon,” but then more softly, “Sharman has come, let none deny him be gone.”

  He cocked an ear, hearing only the river’s threatening laughter at his back, and bowed his head. Spitting into each hand, he rubbed them together as he crunched his way up the shingle.

  The fire crackled and sputtered, its smoke billowing out to singe his throat when he breathed it in as he knelt beside the roll. Sharman frowned at the length of it, his eyes narrowing as his gaze followed its laced up length to its broadest end. He coughed as he untied the bowknot there and parted the canvas, enough to force a sharp intake of breath and so yet more coughing.

  “By Solem; it’s not a child!” he eventually whispered before quickly wiping his eyes, drawing the canvas back together and retying the knot. When his gaze had run the length of the shingle and back along the clifftop, he again looked down, his brow deeply furrowed.

  “These old arms better be rested enough for your weight, my pretty one,” he mumbled at the roll before slipping an arm beneath each end. Groaning and staggering, he lifted and carried it down to the boat and there carefully bundled it in, jumping aboard to lay it out straight on the bilge board.

  He paused, staring out onto the river, then bit his lip as he patted the boat’s gunwale. “Best avoid taking you abreast of its flow, what with the extra weight, my old gal,” and he shook his head before jumping out and applying his shoulder to the prow. His feet scrabbled against the shingles until the boat finally slid back into the water and carried Sharman and the demon away.

  6 A Hot Soak Likely Postponed

  Fortunately, the widening river downstream levelled some of the river’s anger, but Sharman had still felt it prudent to keep the strong flow largely astern. Whilst still some way out into the river’s flow, it had swept him past his intended landing point, from where his carter leisurely waved before resignedly nodding in Sharman’s fast overtaking direction. Before long, both the carter and his cart fell from sight beyond the curve of the river upstream, towards the spring-rise.

  When sheer cliffs shepherded the water’s flow into slow drifting, oily blisters of deep water, Sharman again pulled hard at the oars, the slop of the fuller bilge now evident, away from the river’s roar. Each glance over his shoulder, though, steadily revealed more of the sheltered water of a lagoon ahead, into which Sharman presently rowed.

  Along its edges, the undergrowth beneath the trees gave occasional glimpses of straight and sheer rock banks, broken at intervals by dark gaps into forest enshrouded, weed infested and silted-up pools. Sharman leisurely rowed past them all and through a wide opening into yet another similar lagoon.

  At the far side, he ran the boat onto a stone ramp, cut into the bank, that rose shallowly from the water, the keel snugly coming to rest in a long-worn central groove. Reeling out a rope from the bow, he leapt out and climbed to a rusted iron loop set into the stone at the top where he secured the boat. A dark track ran into the forest beyond, into which Sharman now peered.

  “Come on; don’t take all day, Craith. I could do with a long, hot bath.”

  He took a packet from the pouch of his smock, unwrapped a dark gelatinous lump of compressed leaves and bit off a corner, absently chewing as he returned to the boat.

  “Well,” he said to the roll of canvas, speaking past a gobbet of saliva, “can’t do much more now than wait.” He turned back to face the track, perched his backside on the boat’s prow and folded his arms as he carried on chewing.

  The jarring nod of Sharman’s head brought him back awake, now convinced more than ever that he was getting too old for this game. His limbs ached from the rowing and he felt decidedly groggy from his nap.

  A wash of his face in the lagoon’s clear water revived his humour, and he’d just returned to the top of the ramp when he heard the creak of wooden wheels drifting out from the track’s dark entrance. A curse confirmed the imminent arrival of Craith, clearly with Duncan, his oldest donkey.

  “That’s no way to treat a beast of burden,” Sharman aimed at Craith as he came out into the light, leading the very beast by its bridle.

  “Eh?” the scruffy young lad called back.

  “He’s the one doing
all the work.”

  “Work?”

  “Never mind,” and Sharman drew in a breath as he shook his head.

  Duncan was brought to a relieved halt a few feet from Sharman, the donkey’s eyes hollow, its legs caked in mud and its head littered with flies. One ear drooped over an eye as it hung its head.

  “You come across a ploughed field or something?” Sharman asked, looking down at Craith’s own legs.

  “Lane’s under water back at Derry Dip, and it ain’t much better at Crook’s Fold. River’s high.”

  “I had noticed.”

  “Eh? Oh, aye, you will have.” Craith looked down at the boat, his brow furrowing for a moment before his eyes hinted at brightening. “Well, suppose I best get cart turned round.”

  “Suppose you better,” and Sharman rested back against the prow and prepared for yet more maddening amusement.

  Eventually—having unhitched Duncan, tied him to a bush, slung a feedbag over his head, and taken an age to manhandle the cart to an about turn—Sharman helped him wheel it backwards down the ramp. The tail edge of its bed thumped against the boat’s prow. They each then took hold of a shaft and hoisted it high, until the cart rolled back as its tail slid down the boat’s sloping prow, striking the ramp beneath its keel.

  When Sharman had scrambled up the cart’s now steep bed, the boat’s rope in hand, he let out an exasperated breath. “When was the last time you greased these blocks?”

  “Eh?”

  “These blocks? When did you… Oh, never mind. Look, get me some water to soak this rope will you?” and Craith shrugged before unhooking a bucket from beneath the cart and going down the ramp to fill it.

  Once soaked, secured to the cart and threaded through the blocks, they both heaved on the free end of the rope. The boat complained and refused to budge, not until Sharman had retrieved two wedges from it, wet them then hammered them both beneath each side of the keel. This time the boat only squeaked at it rode the wedges and slid onto the guide timbers set down the centre of the cart’s bed.