Secrets of Carrick: Merrow

by Ananda Braxton-Smith

  In spite of her haggishness, and the manner in which she daily left me wrung-out with her small-mindedness, it was strange at home without my aunt. I needed to go somewhere else for the day; somewhere cool, plainly, and somewhere I might find food for our stores. We’d eaten most of the smoked fish and only had a little pig-meat left. Ushag had mentioned going eel-bagging up the gorge together soon, so I thought I’d do that. It was cooler up there and later I could grab a bag of twilight eels and avoid her accusations of being a slugabout, while still spending the day in and around the river. My story would have to wait.

  I grabbed the lumpen barley-meal from the pot. It had set and was easy to eat while walking. I was just out of the yard when Bo skipped up beside me. She didn’t understand when I pointed at the byre and told her to go back, so I had to lead her myself and shut the door on her. She watched with wet brown eyes as I walked away, to the end of the path, and without a sound. We had always gone about together since she was only a few weeks old. Sometimes it was just to sit on the cliff-edge and watch the sea, and sometimes to Market-Shipton where she spent her time robbing apples or charging at the cattle-sellers if they came too close. She was sweet and funny and everything — but doting on a cow suddenly seemed childish.

  ‘Don’t look at me like that!’ I shouted at her, and I thought what is the matter with everybody? ‘You’re a cow!’

  It was comforting to reach the shore, to hear the waves and feel the slippery sand and smooth pebbles under my feet. I did think for a moment that I should just go sit on the seabed where it’s always cool and peaceful, but I didn’t want to be disturbed by all that coming up for air. I wished, as I often did, that I could breathe under water. The sand gave way to pebbles under my feet. I stopped for a moment to shuffle about in their coolness.

  I once saw some feet on folk in Shipton and almost brought up my meal at the sight. These folk commonly wore shoes but had taken them off to walk on the sand. It was like watching slugs, and made me look at my own quite differently. I like my feet. They’re wide and brown and strong-looking.

  Ushag had once made us shoes but neither of us had been able to walk in them, so now they held sweet peas by the threshold in spring. We’d never laughed so much as watching each other try to walk in those shoes. Auntie Ushag couldn’t bring herself to lift her feet at all. I lifted my whole leg, slow and careful-like, while gripping the shoe with my toes but it still flew off. My aunt had laughed until she cried.

  That had been a few years ago but I still smiled to remember it. I thought it was comical too, but not so as you’d need to cry.

  I scrambled up the stony riverbed where it snaked between the rock-walls rising on each side of me. Wind is broken up and scattered by these walls so it’s always still up the gorge. Trees grow straight out from the cliff and then turn and stretch for the light, growing thin and long that way. Vines hang from the trees and tiny green things grow where the river meets the stone. They look like mats of clover and even have flowers. Inside the flowers live little bright green ants.

  As I climbed, the walls closed in. The rock holds the heat near the gorge entrance, but further up the sun cannot reach into the abyss and I began to feel the warmth drain away. In the shadow of the cliff I grew cool. I liked the feeling of my legs walking hard, my feet in the river and my breath drawing in, cool, then flowing out, warm. My heart was pounding but my mind silent. In this manner I kept clambering upward.

  At about noon I was higher than I had ever been and it was all new country to me. The cliff-walls were only four or five paces apart now and the wide, slow river was a deeper stream splashing itself against boulders and flowing under ledges, down into the earth. Holes and gaps opened in the rock and there were caves all around me.

  The caves were marked by deep carvings all around their openings. I’d seen smooth hand-sized stones carved with just the same circles and spirals and shapes all over the headland. They just lie around and turn up wherever you dig, but I’d never seen the marks so deep and clear.

  Some people say the smaller stones are the relics of the Old days, when the rock and cliffs were the business and property of those who lived inside the earth. Nobody knows who those folk were but they are supposed to have liked digging, smithing and carving. On the other hand, the Little Brothers say their god put the carvings in the rock at the very beginning of time for his own good reasons, and it’s not for us to ask questions about his world but only to be grateful. Ushag says they’re for the healing of women’s problems, and dizziness.

  But these rocks were boulders. They couldn’t be carried as pocket-tokens, or crushed to a powder and drunk. They were too big. One of the caves had a long tunnel as its opening and was marked by one deep-cut spiral.

  Stooping to see but blinded by the sunlight, I doubled over to shuffle through the tunnel. As I did so I left the light, and what I realised now had been warmth, behind me. It was cold like early winter inside the mountain. A strong smell of minerals, iron and salt made me wrinkle my nose. When I stood up I was in a small cave; dark but not pitch-black, and almost twice my height to its roof. I waited for the darkness to settle and then felt my way in. It wasn’t far to the back wall, only a few steps with my arms stretched in front of me. I sat down with my back to the rock and my eyes to the tunnel entrance from where a little light pierced and spread.

  Damp stained the rock-walls. My shoulders were already clammy. I could hear the river running underground, somewhere close but hidden. All was dark and dripping. Then something long and feathery crawled across my foot.

  When I’m scared I can’t move. Other people jump or run and that is the sensible way; I know it but I can’t do it. When I’m scared I freeze. I hold my breath. I turn to stone. Anything could carry me off, or even kill me, while I stand there with mind and heart rushing but a body petrified.

  So I froze. Only my eyes shifted. I’m ashamed but it took all my courage just to look down at the long thing crawling across my feet.

  It was only some long white worm with countless legs. Not deadly. I breathed again and as I watched, it flattened itself and slid away into a crack in the cave wall. Lifting my eyes I realised then, not just the white worm but the whole wall was moving. This cave was anything but empty. I half-fell, half-scrambled away from the living wall.

  There were white spiders with legs ten times the length of their bodies, tiny pale hoppers with feelers as long as a hand, and there were all the slender, perfect toadstools. A frog whose eyes were as black and bulging as its body was wasted and sallow, gulped at the clouds of grain-sized midges I’d disturbed and which now clouded my head and shoulders. There were water nymphs without wings. I waved and slapped at the biting midges but they only rose in greater numbers. I sat still and they settled again on thick slime-weed growing where damp wall met slippery floor.

  Those white spiders hung from the wall on their impossible legs and blew about in any slight breath of moving air. I saw that the frogs were all blind, in spite of their bulging eyes, and so were the hoppers. It seemed a type of miracle that they should be all living there together inside the earth, and I sat and watched them a long time.

  Slowly I got used to them, slowly I brought myself to look away. After awhile I heard something bubbling in the far corner of the cave. I crawled over to it, feeling my way across the rough floor. I pulled myself up and over a rock rim and peered into a pool of black water. A face with searching black eyes peered up at me. I froze.

  A savage face rose above a bony neck and shoulders and the lot was tangled all about with a lot of dark hair. It stared at me. I stared at it. Neither of us shifted even a jot. Something slithered pale in the bottom of the black water and I pulled back slightly. So did the face in the pool. I craned forward again. So did the face.

  It was me.

  I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen myself, but I hadn’t looked like this. There was a stranger in my face; a look in the corner of my eye I didn’t know. It was a hard face with tight lips. I kne
w it from somewhere. Ushag’s face, I thought and sat back with my hand in the icy water and a few tears hot on my cheeks. The wind had picked up and tiny gusts rolled about the cave, sending the spiders flying on their threads and the disturbing the midges.

  Then I heard them singing.

  Just like Scully said, it wasn’t a beautiful sound. It wasn’t really what you’d call musical. It came from faraway, and sounded like all the wild things at once: foxes, eagles, wasps, dolphins, barnacle-geese, crickets. It also sounded like all the creatures caught and shut up in sheds and byres and fields and cages everywhere: lowing cattle, braying donkeys, howling dogs and yowling cats. There was a chuckle of morning birds and the wailing of gulls in it too. It made me want to stand in the cave and make the same sound, to sing that song that was so free. It made me want to run. It made me want to fly from the cliff and land in the throat of the unseen singer.

  It made me want my mother.

  How can you want something you don’t know? I thought, but the doubt didn’t change the feeling. I still wanted her. I wondered, did she look like Ushag too? Why had Ushag whispered and shaken her head when she said I was like my mother? How was I like her? Why was that a bad thing?

  The singing stopped. Bubbles rose to the surface of the pool, and popped. I’m not sure what I was expecting but my heart wanted another face to be in there, a face like mine but older, a face with long dangling earlobes and greenish skin. Instead, I just saw an eel. Not just any eel, either, but a huge, fat one that’d take plenty of smoking and plenty of eating. At once, my belly took charge of my heart and I threw myself at it. It was a giant. I shouted as I fought to hold the coiling tail and the water thrashed and foamed. It was such a battle as could shake the earth. I fell and the eel slipped out of my hand.

  The earth was shaking.

  All the rubble and steeps were rocking. The earthshakes were growing stronger as the summer passed. All the creatures of the rock-walls had slipped away into the gaps and cracks, leaving only me and the eel. There was a grumbling deep within the earth and all the hair on my arms stood up and the back of my neck prickled. The eel dived down into the pool and was gone. If I didn’t get out I would be buried alive and I began to run, but the stone floor shifted and I fell. I reached out to catch myself and as I did so, all was still and quiet again. I just lay there, eyes closed, with my hand flat against the wall.

  When I opened my eyes I saw some kind of chalky picture under my hand. In fact, all around the bottom of the cave wall, and around the pool itself, there were these pictures. At first I thought they were a kind of sea lily or anemone, but they weren’t. They were outlines of hands. There seemed to be hundreds of them. The hand I’d reached out to when I was falling was smaller than the others. At first I thought it might be a child’s hand. But when I looked closer at the fingers I saw I was wrong. Those fingers changed everything.

  Because they were webbed.

  Chapter Six

  Kraken

  I’D FOUND PROOF. My aunt would have to believe me and then, in turn, she’d have to tell me what she was hiding from me and then I would know it all. The true history of my mother was close, I could feel it. I ran home in twilight, forgetting the eel-bag and slicing my feet open on old barnacles and broken shell all the way down the gorge. The blood trailed behind me across the sand but I was numb to everything but this: I couldn’t wait to tell it all right to her face! My scales. Merrow-song. Webbed hands. She’d have to own I was right.

  But Ushag didn’t come home that night. I milked Breck and turned the cheese-wheels, and ate my cold supper alone. Wherever she’d gone my aunt had taken the last of the rushes so I slept outside in the moonlight along with the night-birds. I lay awake a long time, until the midnight wind-rise, and then slept only to dream over and over of white webbed hands rising from a black pool. Ushag came home at daybreak.

  Not seeing that I lay against the house rolled in a rug, she clattered into the yard hung about with what looked like all our nets and snares and dropped them in the dust by the well before taking a long draught from the bucket. She had more rabbit and fowl hanging about her middle than a deserted grain-store. Their blood dripped and dribbled down her, front and back. She turned her face to the near-full moon and I could see she’d been tying one on.

  Every now and then she does that. She sits by the fireplace, or goes alone to the grove of bees, and she drinks too much. Sometimes she drinks so much she falls over and sleeps right where she is without moving a limb all night, and wakes up with her face marked with the pattern of the ground. Sometimes she sings a little. I could see this night had been one of those nights.

  She drank deeply from the well bucket and finally tipped the whole thing over her head. Then she hung the game in the lean-to and went to bed and I went back to my webbed dreaming. I wanted her sober and well-rested to hear my proof, and to eat her humble pie.

  But I slept until the sun was high, almost to noon, and when I woke my aunt had gone again. She’d left me a bucket of wrens to pluck, having skinned and gutted the rabbits herself before she left. I did so and then saw to Breck and Bo, turned the cheese-wheels, and put the meal in to soak. I swept the floor of the house, and watered the lean-to of its blood and feathers. When Ushag came home she would have nothing to roll her eyes over, nothing to moan about at all, and then I would tell her.

  By then it was mid-afternoon. I hoed the rows, spread the nets for the moon-catch out in the sun, made a small-birds pie — and I was done-in. I went to the rocks to sit and watch.

  From these rocks overlooking the cove-beach, with the gorge and the little inlet to my right, and the red cliffs away to my left, I could see my whole world. I used to go there to look and be peaceful but lately I went to wonder if there was ever to be any place for me other than this cove, its gorge and the inlet. With no notion of where or what those other places might be, there was still something about this wide view of everything I knew, that made me want more than I could see.

  On cloudy days the cliff stopped at the waterline. There was always something smashing or splintering against its base among the foam. Today there was some weird water moving along the cliff-base. It seemed to be a river running its own private course within the sea itself. This sea-borne river was made of ruffled and bothered waters, and it passed under where I stood, rushing past me, the gorge, the little inlet and out to sea. It coursed out beyond Carrick’s waters dragging foam, driftwood and all kinds of wreckage. Faraway, the undertow ended in a spiral of muck on the surface of the sea.

  This tow was sucking everything into it. Near the inlet the waters collected themselves somewhat, only to build and bubble there awhile and then burst out even stronger on the other side. There, in that protected beach, part of the rock-wall had given way and over the rubble I could see entirely into the cliff. Yesterday’s earthshake had brought some of it down, and now there was a new sea-cave. From where I stood it looked to be deep.

  I coveted that inlet and its new sea-cave. It called me.

  Down below me the lone seal and her pup played in and out of the undertow. The mother was wise and swam across the tow, enjoying being swept away for a time and then collecting herself further along. The pup followed her, as thoughtless as any land puppy and in danger of smashing his head any number of times, except that the mother wouldn’t allow it. She nudged at him, steered him with her body, and when necessary she rose right under him and carried him on her back into safe waters.

  They barked and spat just like land-dogs in a swift stream. I wanted to live in the salty water just like them, and to twist and roll through the waves like they did. I wanted to rise and fly, spitting at the sun. I wanted to be part of the wild play; but I was too scared of being carried away into the sea in a sort of Progress, along with the rest of the tow’s wreckage.

  Then I saw Ushag. She was standing in the twilight sea, fully dressed and unmoving. She was waist-deep right in my spot, right where I go to sit. She’s never where you want her to be, I thou
ght, and always where you don’t. Typical! I could see even from the cliff that she was in one of her cold, dry humours.

  So, I couldn’t go to tend my anemone gardens if I wanted, or to watch the herds of urchins graze in the sea-meadows. I would have to pass my aunt and I could see from her face, it wouldn’t do. I didn’t want to speak to her until she had the ears to hear me. I didn’t want to see her until she stopped rolling her eyes. Suddenly I didn’t care whether she came home that night or not. I set out for the Slevins.

  I didn’t arrive until well after dark, and there was a bit of a fuss from Ma who insisted on putting the pot back on the fire and sending Scully to relieve ‘poor Ushag’s’ worry. I assured them that my aunt was a cold fish who thought of nothing but work and they didn’t need to waste one thought for her, but Ma crossed herself and fussed about her altar, and was generally so hurt that I said sorry and hugged her before there were tears.

  ‘Your aunt has good reason for how she is,’ she sighed and passed me the broth and gobbets. I tasted it and straightway knew how hungry I was.

  ‘Well, I wish she’d tell me,’ I drawled through my full mouth, dripping broth and cabbage and fish. ‘She’s so tight-lipped. I can’t find out anything!’ On the last word I spat up a lump of fish and bone, sending Ma reeling back.

  ‘Heishan!’ Ma dabbed at her face and mine. ‘She’ll tell you in her own good time. She’s the fully grown woman in your house.’

  In an instant, I was at once flayed-red and white-hot. ‘Well, what am I, then?’ Tears burst from the corners of my eyes. The fire hissed as some fell in the flames. ‘What am I, eh? I’m no child any longer and nobody can say I’m not. I’m almost thirteen years old and I do everything she does. And I do it by myself these days.’ Ma watched my face as I spoke. ‘I mean, she plainly knows I can do it all without her. What else is there to being grown?’