Solem

by Clive S. Johnson

  “Like he’d not slept well?”

  Janeen told Fulmer how her father had seemed nervous, but that she’d put it down to him wanting to tell her “grownup” things, like her friend Lyvinia had recently had from her mother. When Fulmer asked what had happened the day before, Janeen at first dismissed it as being no different from any other.

  “I…well, I spent it weeding our family’s plot, that’s all. Lyvinia was there doing the same on hers.”

  “What, vegetables?”

  “Yes.”

  “So it was in a clearing of some sort?”

  “Only a small one: enough for the fifteen families of Delph.”

  “And nothing…nothing untoward happened? All day?”

  For some reason the memory came back strongly to Janeen, the mundane but somehow satisfying hoeing, each steadily growing neat line of wilting weeds…but then, not their being gathered up into the wheelbarrow. Why was that?

  “Now, where’s my needle?” Fulmer asked himself, and an “Ow!” preceded “Ah, here we are; still in the bobbin”.

  After a while, he said, “Must have been pleasant weeding in the sunshine. It was certainly sunny here the day before yesterday, so I take it it was where you were.”

  “Eh? Oh, no, the clearing doesn’t get the sun, not ‘til late morning at this time of year. Just…just blue sky and…and the odd fluffy white cloud drifting…”

  A tear squeezed itself free and she fought hard to ignore it, tried instead to remember what had happened after she’d gazed up at the sky. Yet there was nothing at all, not until she remembered waking in the middle of the night, in bed. She again felt Fulmer’s stare, but somehow it seemed even more intense this time.

  “But,” he carefully said, “you were there all day, so…so you must have had the sun at some point.”

  “Yes…yes, I suppose I must.”

  “You suppose?”

  But Janeen hadn’t really heard, her deepening frown and descending tear hidden beneath the bucket.

  “You must be hungry by now, Janeen. Won’t be long before you should be able to eat properly—and painlessly. Not much more to do now,” but the hunger of her stomach had become a poor second to a new hunger of her mind, the hunger for a memory frustratingly obscured by the distraction of a breaking heart.

  After a while longer of quiet work, a chair or stool scraped back and Fulmer announced he’d finished. He drew beside her. “If you’ll take off the bucket, I’ll fit you with what I hope will prove to be a more convenient guard against your pain.”

  When she reticently slipped the bucket off, a pleasant smell came from Fulmer’s soft and padded workmanship as he quickly wrapped it around her head. Her new “pain-guard” left her ears free to be smitten by the open silence of the workshop. She reached a hand up and traced the guard’s extent, from above her forehead to the points of her cheeks, resting snugly on the bridge of her nose. As Fulmer gently jerked the part that ran above her ears, she felt the leather warming against the sides of her head.

  A last tug and a quick check with his own fingers around it edges, and he asked, “How does that feel?”

  Janeen’s hands now played more tentatively about her new adornment, patting at the soft leather encircling her crown. When her fingers found a knot at the back, Fulmer cautioned, “Watch you don’t undo it. I’ve tied the two thongs in a bow, so it’s easy to take off and put on. But now, more importantly, is there any pain?”

  She moved her head about, assuring herself it remained secure, and soon confirmed she felt none.

  “Good,” he said. “Then I’ll go make you some breakfast. Eggs all right?” and she cautiously nodded. “Once I’ve done that, I’ll leave you to eat in peace while I go feed the pigs. They’ll be wondering where I’ve got to.”

  She could hear him clearing up before he again drew near and took her arm. “If I may escort you through?” and she nodded a little more confidently this time.

  Once sitting at what felt like a large kitchen table, she relished being able to hear properly again, and not to breathe in Solem knew what had been in that bucket before. She hadn’t dared ask.

  When the sizzling of frying eggs baited her ears and their almost unbearably enticing smell filled her nose, in a quiet voice she said, “Thank you, Fulmer. Thank you for…for all your hard work making—”

  “Nay, Janeen, I’m only glad we’ve found a way to rid you of the pain at last. Maybe it will also give your eyes the rest they need to…well, to bring back your sight.”

  A burst of sizzling filled the air and the scrape of wood on metal. “We’ll have a look tonight and see if it’s helped, but only after sunset. Until then, I want you to rest and get your strength back. It’ll give me a bit of time to work out what your new history’s going to be, and it will set you up the better to learn it by heart.”

  Janeen felt the leather of the guard caress the furrows of her growing frown. “Why…why after sunset?”

  “Because, my dear Janeen, I suspect your suffering is the product of the thing whose absence curls the forests’ leaves tight shut at night, that closes the petals of the poppy’s flowers, that makes all these things, in the old way of saying it, diurnal.”

  “Diurnal?”

  “Yes. Only active during the day, during that time when Solem beams down her gracious smile upon this precious world of ours.” And with that, the sounds of eggs slipping onto a platter closed the matter, for the time being at least.

  Janeen’s appetite soon blossomed in the pain’s absence, and she hungrily mopped up everything put before her. Fulmer impressed upon her how she should rest during the day, maybe sleep a little if she could, and so build back her strength. He promised to pop in every so often to check on her, certainly to make her a midday meal and otherwise help her settle in as best she could.

  He, for his own part, spent most of the day outside, catching up on all his chores, much to the pigs’ eventual relief, she was later told.

  Fulmer had proved talkative each time he’d returned, seemingly long starved of company and so clearly delighted to tell her what he’d been up to. She suspected he did so more as a distraction, though, for he no doubt well enough imagined the fear in her blind and hidden eyes, a fear he must have heard in her voice.

  She couldn’t hide it, for it coloured her every thought, weakened her limbs at its prospect of being…of being…permanent. “What…what if I never see again?” she couldn’t hold back from saying at one point, at which Fulmer had placed an uncomfortable hand on her shoulder.

  “You’ll have to be strong, Janeen; have patience. We’ll see how your eyesight is before you go to bed tonight, when Solem’s at her most removed and you’re least likely to suffer her pain.” She felt the enthusiasm he then forced into his next words: “But before then, I’ll have to tell you all about your growing up in The Espousal of Gryff. I think I’ve got it all worked out now.”

  After eating that evening, feeling replete at last and with most of her other aches and pains now greatly diminished, Janeen eventually sat quietly in Fulmer’s company, the smell of a lamp telling her it had already gone dark. She tried hard to ignore her insistent worries about her sight. Instead, she thought back as she listened to the scratch of a pen nib in between Fulmer’s quiet sighs and tuts, only occasionally feeling she was being stared at.

  “You’ve not nodded off have you, Janeen?” Fulmer presently said, and she caught herself smiling for what must surely have been the first time since leaving Delph.

  “No, no I haven’t, Fulmer. I’ve actually been trying to remember that day I thought I’d spent weeding, but I can’t—”

  “We’ll come back to that another time, Janeen. It’s more important I get started on telling you about your new past.” He waited.

  “Yes, all right, I’m listening. I’ve normally an unusually good memory, which is why the other day’s bothering me so much.”

  “Well, for the time being, try only to remember what I’m about to tell you, hmm?” />
  The dwelgefa cleared his throat.

  “You, Janeen, were born to parents of the same name as your true ones—best to keep the lies to a minimum—in a place called Fonschore. It’s bigger than Delph, some twenty five to thirty families, and sits on the spring-rise shore of Fonder Lake, which is to the winter-set of us here in Halden Weald.”

  “Fonschore on Fonder Lake, winter-set of us, and we’re in Halden Weald,” she committed to memory.

  “I’ve chosen there because of its remoteness and the reserve of its people, and to be honest, their disdain for most others in The Espousal. You’re a little lighter skinned than they are, but I don’t suppose anyone will notice—few up here ever get to see them.”

  “But then…how is it I’m here?”

  “Ah, the clever bit, if I do say so myself: when you started to notice your eyesight was failing—oh, some nine months ago, let’s say—you determined, against your parent’s wishes, to search out the nearest dwelgefa—me. It’s commonly held that we know how to cure all manner of ailments.”

  “And do you?”

  “No, Janeen, I’m afraid not. It’s a universal need people have, to believe there’s someone somewhere who has all the answers, but there never is. Anyway, with the last of your failing sight, you finally made your way to me at the end of last Autumn—”

  “The Autumn? Why then?”

  “That’s just after I had my last visitor—my half-yearly beer delivery—until Sharman turned up with you. It also puts it well before this week’s missing demon at Harclifferd. There’ll be no end of talk about that for some time.”

  “What’s Fonschore like?”

  “I don’t know, but I can’t imagine it’s any different to anywhere else, excepting Gryff of course. As almost everywhere in The Espousal is forested, as in The Green, I reckon it’s safe to say it’s just like Delph.”

  “If you say so, but…but you also said it’s on a lake; I’ve never seen a lake before.”

  “You’ve seen a river, haven’t you?” and she nodded. “Well, imagine the water’s not moving and it’s a lot wider, and that’s pretty much a lake. Anyway, no one else will have seen it, not this far to the night-hidden.”

  “You said ‘excepting Gryff’. So, what’s different about there?” but the room fell silent for a while until he again cleared his throat.

  “Some beer, Janeen?”

  “Beer? Oh, er, a little, please. I quite liked it before.”

  “Watered down, mind,” and she heard him clattering around before its pungent smell tempted her nose.

  A beaker was placed in her hands, but before she drank, she again asked, “What is Gryff, Fulmer?”

  His chair creaked and what she took to be his own beaker clumped down on the table. She again got that feeling of being stared at.

  “Gryff is a place unto itself, Janeen,” and he drank some of his beer. “Its name is extremely ancient and means…‘a sanctuary’.”

  “Oh, a place where ‘demons can be kept removed from the world at large’? Is that it, Fulmer?”

  He laughed. “You do indeed have a fine memory. Yes, my young one, in a manner of speaking. It’s a clearing in the high forest, some three hours noon-high of here, like Delph’s own clearing but…well, much larger—about a quarter hour’s walk across.”

  Janeen blew out a long breath. “I bet you can see a lot of sky from there,” and her hidden eyes followed where her memory’s gaze now climbed.

  “Yes,” Fulmer said, but slowly, “yes, you can—an awful lot.”

  “Like Harclifferd?”

  “Oh, an awful lot more than that, and with a more open view,” but his words didn’t seem to have the man himself within them anymore, as though his thoughts were most definitely elsewhere.

  “I’m…I’m not sure I would have liked to have found myself there, Fulmer; I had enough trouble coping with the open sky above the river at Harclifferd.”

  “Yes,” he absently said, “I’m beginning to see how that would be the case.”

  “Fulmer?”

  “Hmm? Yes, Janeen?” and his voice seemed to hold more of him now.

  “Tell me what’s in Gryff’s clearing; please,” but silence came between them until she heard him rise from his chair.

  “Oh dear, but I’m afraid we can’t waste the lamp’s oil; it’s too hard to come by. So, time for sleep I reckon. I’ve made you up a bed of sorts, just across the passage. Nothing fancy, but it should do the job.”

  “Please, Fulmer, don’t treat me like a child. What’s in Gryff’s clearing?”

  He quietly breathed out then snatched a breath. “A building, Janeen, the sort you’ll never have seen before: a big one made of stone, big enough for the needs of hundreds.”

  “Hundreds!”

  “Maybe…well, maybe nigh on a thousand or more.”

  Janeen had difficulties imagining that many people, quickly concluding she couldn’t, not really.

  “That’s why there’s The Espousal, Janeen; not the meaning you might be familiar with but a much more ancient one. It means ‘to take on a cause’, and in our case that cause is Gryff itself, to ensure its perpetuity.”

  It was proving too much for Janeen to digest, not in such short order. Her silence soon prompted Fulmer.

  “Anyway, I think it’s now late enough to see how your eyesight’s doing, before I have to snuff out this lamp. I’m sure you’ll be keen to know yourself; I certainly am.”

  “Oh…er, yes, yes I am—desperately,” and she gulped as she felt Fulmer’s fingers untie the pain-guard’s knot, the leather softly sucking at her skin as it slowly came loose.

  “Ready,” he said, and she quietly told him she was before holding her breath as she felt the guard slip away from her face.

  16 Grosswilleal and Beyond

  The ancient broken paving of the long Dagning Way had carried Sharman, Craith, Duncan, and the cart all the way from their dawn start in Halden Weald to their midday approach to Athergap. The sun had warmed as it had risen ahead of them, up from the forest’s dense canopy and over the steep rise they occasionally glimpsed through the trees to their right. It now slanted down into the wide gap the road cleaved through the deep forest and slanted through the cloud of steam rising from Duncan’s labours. Not far ahead, their way cut cleanly through Athergap’s tree-shrouded ridge.

  “Right,” Sharman said, breaking their long silence. “See that large finger of rock?” and he pointed ahead, to one side of the road. “We’ll have a brief stop there. I’ve something I need to do.”

  At the rock, Craith duly brought the cart to a halt. Sharman climbed up into his boat and threw Janeen’s canvas sheet onto the ground beside, clambering back down himself.

  “What you doing wi’ that?” Craith said.

  Sharman gathered it up. “If I brought no demon over here yesterday, then there wouldn’t be its sheet here now, would there?”

  “Ah. Suppose not.”

  “There’s a deep hole round the back of this rock. Once in there, it’ll be lost forever.”

  Craith again thought of Janeen whilst Sharman pushed his way through the undergrowth and out of sight behind the rock pillar. He saw her long black hair, its shimmer of slate-blue, the contrast it made against her pale skin, unblemished but for the muck and grime of her journey. He recalled its tender swell as it tantalisingly slid within the low neckline of her thin and dishevelled—

  “Craith?” Sharman stood before him, frowning. “You all right? You look as though you’re—”

  “Safely hidden is it?”

  Sharman narrowed his eyes. “As though it had never been.”

  Craith nodded. “Good,” he said and then led the donkey on, the cart again creaking and rumbling over the cracked and broken flags and on into Athergap’s deep cut.

  On the handful of times he’d been this way, Craith had always welcomed its almost sheer rock faces as the gateway to his own familiar world. Having lived his life on the riverbank, with its open expanse of wat
er to one side and frequent breaks in tree cover afforded by the steep ridge on the other, he’d always found the depth of the forest’s dense spread disconcerting.

  His spirits rose the more as they soon came out and gazed upon the river’s mighty push away from the sun’s high glare. It swept Craith’s own gaze along the not too distant riverbank, the view more open here through the thinner growth of trees on the rocky ground. The water was certainly high, tree trunks and foliage-bedecked branches tumbling by like drowning men.

  It brought Craith to shiver at the memory of Fleabag Fulmer’s dusted-off rule.

  “Even higher than yesterday,” Sharman quietly said. “I’d certainly not answer a call to cross over today.” Craith remembered the ferryman slipping swiftly past their intended landing point beyond Derry Dip the previous day, the mad dash Craith had then made to join him at the Lagoons.

  Not much further beyond Athergap, Dagning Way would give out abruptly to the river’s course, as though its meander had once curved its banks much further away, towards the spring-rise. They avoided its dead-end by putting the sun behind them and turning off onto a rough and potholed track. It too meandered, but along the base of the ridge through which they’d just passed, aiming them at a shallow angle to meet the river some hour’s journey downstream. There, the sides of the ridge would fast become high cliffs that dominated the riverside village of Grosswilleal, where Sharman lived and kept his boat, the highest point on the river’s navigable stretch.

  As the cliffs did indeed eventually rear high above them, and as they dropped down the last short dip in the track towards Grosswilleal, the creak and clatter of the cart clearly signalled their arrival. From one of the few half-timbered buildings set tight against the cliff, Sharman’s wife ran out towards them. Her greying brown hair streamed out behind her, laying clear her wide and glinting eyes.

  Before they’d even reached the bottom of the slope Agness was already throwing her arms around Sharman’s neck, gripping him tightly. Sharman himself looked uncomfortable, even more so when Agness pushed herself away and slapped him across his chest.