Secrets of Carrick: Merrow

by Ananda Braxton-Smith

  ‘There was nothing on the earth to remind the woman, my friend, where or what her memories might be.

  ‘So finally they came to journey inside the earth where they were witness to many other wonders, among them a dark palace full of invisible beings who could shrink themselves into holes and take Other forms. These Invisibles had once lived in the Bright Halls but had been exiled, and sentenced to fade. Now all that remained of their brightness were the silver hand-marks on the dark walls, left from trying to feel their way. The woman and the girl met with dangers there and Other troubles. For instance, they were once tricked by a salamander.’

  ‘I told you so,’ said Ma, sucking the last of the hare off its bones and relighting her pipe. ‘I’m not gloating, mind you,’ she added, gloatingly. ‘Never, never, trust a salamander.’ She rocked a little and muttered under her breath.

  ‘May I finish?’ Ushag butted in. Ma stopped muttering and nodded. ‘There’s only a little more. It’s a small story as yet, but it’ll grow as it goes.’

  ‘Among other things, the woman and the girl were tricked by this salamander,’ Auntie Ushag repeated, ‘and they had to strike a bargain with a water-horse, but those are other stories from other times.

  ‘Inside the earth-palace was a pond. It had been chanted into being by the Invisibles who dwelt there, and its water sang eternally to them in the voices of sea-birds and bubbles. The girl, with her big-heartedness and true gaze, plainly heard the song telling them to trust the pond and they would be rewarded with a treasure more than gold, more than a strong body, more even than land. This woman, my friend, didn’t hear any words. She only heard bubbling. Having misplaced the memories of her childhood, she now knew no treasures beyond those of grown people — gold, health and land. She was suspicious of the calling water. The girl was not to be put off, though, and refused to go without her kinswoman who then knew she must go whether she wanted to or not.

  ‘After journeying through a tunnel of ice — where, by the way, the Invisibles tried to hold and drown them for the simple pleasure of new company — they rose into an upside-down room of that earth-palace.

  ‘All the lost memories come here to this topsy-turvy chamber where they are put into pits and wait there for their owners to come and claim them. Not many come, so the pits are full to bursting. One of the pits holds lost memories of old journeys, in the shape of shoes. Another holds those of forgotten bothers in the form of flies; still another holds memories of mothers and sisters. The floors are salty from centuries of weeping, tears of both sorrow and pleasure.

  ‘However, the biggest treasure of that journey-hoard, for the woman of this story, was not to be a found memory but a new one. In that chamber of the earth-palace tending to the memory-pits lived an old merrow-man, who seemed made up of only bones and coiling tail and dry cough. Once-silver, now-grey scales left a trail from pit to pit as he dragged his tail around the chamber. It knotted itself as he turned and turned from pit to pit, and he tripped over it many times a moment. The old male seemed to be shrinking, like one day he would shed his last scale and there he’d be; gone. His bed was already just a heap of his own scales.

  ‘He found many of my friend’s memories that afternoon; childhood games and infant heartaches, great meals and foul meals, early songs and shell bangles, good friends made and lost, spats and enemies long-forgotten: but the old merrow-man will never knew that he himself was the woman’s greatest find. That’s one memory will never end up in the pits.

  ‘When life is hard, she just remembers the merrow-man and his long, knotted tail to have all her happiness returned to her.

  ‘That’s the end.’ Ushag stopped and took up the jug and poured for us all. ‘What do you think?’ There was nothing I could say, so I didn’t. The glow of the bonfire was in me, and thunder rolled in from the cove. The starry night was losing its rule as storm-clouds sailed in.

  ‘I think it’ll brush up nicely,’ said Ma. She toasted my aunt. ‘Especially with Scully to add the finer points. Like where that salamander comes in.’ She smiled in a meady haze, then her lip curled and her foot twitched like she was already kicking the evil thing in her mind’s eye.

  ‘Not salamanders again.’ Scully plucked at his fiddle-strings and as he did one of its pegs dropped out. He started feeling for it in the grass around where he sat. ‘Maybe something more about the song of the pool, though…’ His spider-fingers crept into the grass between us. Dreamy from the jug and the story, I didn’t notice him pick something up from beside me and fit it to his fiddle.

  When he started the tune, though, straightways I noticed and everybody else too. The voice of his fiddle was changed. Its high notes had always rather scratched and pulled at the ears though nobody minded, as Scully always managed to use the scratch to reach further into a body’s heart. Everybody knows that fiddles have different voices, like people, but when he played that night it was as if Ma had suddenly stood up and talked with the Prior’s voice, or Bo had barked. Even Scully stopped for a moment before going on, his brow creased and his eyes blinking over and over.

  The rest of us listened with shock turning to delight. This new voice was shy, but pure and glad. It filled the grove with all the good sounds such as people laughing, night birds singing or teeming rain outside when you’re tucked up by the hearth in a rabbit-and-hare rug and nothing to do but stay there until it’s over. As we listened, each one lifted his or her eyes to the sky and smiled. Scully played the short sweet tune all through, and stopped.

  ‘Well, bugger me,’ he said, running his hands over the instrument, and then I saw. His old wooden peg was lying where it had fallen; he had fitted the fiddle with Mam’s finger-bone. Nobody had noticed so I flicked the old peg into the dark beyond the firelight. A new life in Scully’s fiddle seemed to me a good swap for that cold, stone shelf in the sea-cave.

  Ulf rose and patted Scully’s shoulder. ‘Fagr Söngr,’ he smiled, before doing a little jig and winding through the grove toward the house, humming and muttering as he went. Ushag followed him.

  ‘Pudding,’ she shouted over her shoulder at us. The rest of us sawed off the last bits of hare. Ma lifted part of hers to the fire before popping it into her mouth and sighing.

  ‘This night is almost done for us,’ she said, pulling her shawl close and watching the sky. There was only a small dome of stars left in the middle of swarming cloud. ‘We don’t have much time and I have something to tell you young ones myself. I met another sort of hare today. Charmed it was, from the Other Place.’

  ‘Now, Mary…’ started the Prior but Ma cut him off.

  ‘Don’t now Mary me, Father; I don’t have time to fuss with you about such things. This hare, she had a message for me. According to her I’m for passing over and soon too. I’ve just got time to see my boy settled in the holding with his friends about him and sort out my dead dress and then I’m for the west.’

  ‘Hares do not prophesy people’s dying,’ stated the Prior, as simply as if he was only saying that one thing and another thing make two things. ‘And if they do, then it’s not a hare. It’s the Old Enemy come to lure simple, uneducated minds to corruption.’ He took the remains of the sea-broth, piled roasted roots into it and tucked in once more. You’d have thought they never fed him down at the Abbey.

  ‘Well, that’s all you know and I’m sorry for it but the charmed ones don’t know they can’t. They just do and that’s all. It’s all up for me. And to tell the truth, I’m ready to rest in the memory of others…whether you want it to be so or not,’ Ma told him straight. ‘And who are you calling simple? My name’s Mureal.’ The Prior seemed to lose his appetite and put his trencher to one side. He took Ma’s hand and entwined all his fingers with hers. There’s nobody, mortal or Otherwise, who doesn’t understand this kind of talk; the kind uttered by the body when words aren’t working. The face on him was gloomy, and Ma wouldn’t have it.

  ‘When I die,’ she told him, leaving her hand in his, ‘there will be a great turn-out and
a knees-up. Scully will play his jigs. No sad tunes, my lad, all right?’

  Scully nodded, calm and unchanged by Ma’s news, at home as he was with all things Otherwise. It as though she’d said she was going to Merton and would see him later. ‘After that, I will sail the western seas to the island where the souls of my other children wait for me. Some parts of them may be forever with Themselves in the Other Place but their mother will find the more important parts of them, and draw them in around her. I will wear my dead dress, with a rinse of lemons to brighten them and of rosemary to take away the smell of wormwood. I’ll do that tomorrow.

  ‘My boy and my girl will meet me on their shore and I will embrace each one. Their faces will be as autumn apples to me, their gaze will fall like spring sunshine, and I will drink the nectar of their voices. Their breath will breathe upon the seared places of my heart and I will be whole once more. The years will pass away and I will stand in peace with the gods again. I will curse them no more. The lovely boy, Jesus, will be there and he will feast with us.’

  ‘Now, really, don’t be so foolish,’ said the Prior churlishly taking his hand back, but Ma turned on him so quick and fixed him with such an eye that we all held our breath. He stopped talking straightways.

  Ma went on in her regular voice, kindly and old. ‘He has told me so and who am I to not believe what He tells me.’

  ‘Look here, I’m sorry but the Lord Jesus Christ does not go around telling pagans he’ll meet them in the western islands,’ insisted the Prior, though to me he seemed sorry for it. ‘The days of miracles, and of Him walking and talking with His own are over. Why would He talk to you if He doesn’t talk to His very own?’

  ‘Well how do you know what He does and doesn’t do if He doesn’t talk to you?’ I asked.

  ‘I read my Bible, and I pray,’ he told me.

  ‘What if you can’t read?’ This was Scully, his voice quiet and calm among the trees.

  ‘Well, then…’ said the Prior. ‘Then you must listen to those who can.’

  ‘To you, in fact,’ Scully suggested in a seemingly friendly manner.

  We all looked at the Prior closely, like he was a book we could read.

  ‘To me…’ he trailed off. We looked at him even closer. He gave us a shaky smile.

  ‘Why would I listen to somebody who doesn’t even talk with Jesus?’ said Ma, and that was that. The Prior gave up on us.

  ‘Once I’ve got my sons and daughters all together again,’ went on Ma, ‘Jesus will take us up in his silvered driftnets, through the cloudy realm and to his own Great Hall. There I will live with my children altogether in a good, strong roundhouse, and we will till the paradise-fields until they yield to us wild strawberries and sweet wine. And Scully will have somewhere to come when it’s his time, he won’t have to return to the Halls of the Others. Jesus’ Father will keep us safe from Themselves, and old Breeshey will come to talk and story with us. All the gods will be pleased with me again and I’ll be able to rest.’

  I put my arms around her and touched my hot cheek to her cool one, as dry and veined as a leaf. ‘What god could be angry with you?’ I said.

  Ma sighed. ‘Take your pick,’ she answered me. ‘I was beside myself with the lot of them for years. I called them names such as no decent person should even overhear for fear of soul-rot on the back of it. I crossed the bones at them, and cursed them daily. My praying was often only so much name-calling and moans. My best prayer was only a prayer to be able to pray again.’ She thumped at her chest and sat up. ‘But they still put the heart in me to go on. No limping, fair-weather gods in Carrick, only those who talk to a body in their own way and help her to live and find life good after all.’

  Truly, that old woman was a marvel and I wouldn’t be surprised if when I pass I find all is exactly as she said.

  Scully picked up his fiddle and my mother’s voice filled the hazel grove, singing at our fireside as was only right. I went into the dark to piss and as I did so I saw Ulf and Ushag coming back with the pudding. Suddenly I was hungry for sweetness, for all the honey, figs, mint or whatever was in that dish they carried between them. Leaping up, I ran toward them in the dark. That pudding looked heavy, it looked sizeable and I couldn’t wait.

  Then they stopped, and for some reason so did I. Their faces under the swift clouds were like twin moons. Ulf stooped to her and their brows touched over the pudding. Ulf was whispering to my aunt in his own talk, and she was watching his mouth with a face on her I’d never seen. The face was so Otherwise I even looked away once but, as I think I’ve said before, I learn too much by eavesdropping and I wasn’t about to stop now. I opened them again.

  She had closed her eyes and was shaking her head. He kept on whispering, in fact he started hissing but she folded her arms and looked at him so straight he stopped straightways. They stood for a moment with the early raindrops spitting and steaming about them, then he stopped and stuck his hand into the pudding. When he pulled it out he was holding a pearl, as big as a wild plum and glowing like the moon in his hand. Ushag looked at it like she’d never seen one before. I could hear Ulf, the wind and the night, all hold their breath. Then she looked up and the light of the pearl was in her eyes.

  Ulf laughed then. Picking her up by the waist with one arm, and with the pudding in his other hand, he stumbled toward the hazels with Ushag seeming tinier than I’d ever seen her, and kicking fit to bust. Her kicking wasn’t real, though, it was some type of play and I felt strange about seeing it, so I turned away. Whatever it was, the thing between Ulf and Auntie Ushag was bound to change everything.

  Back at the fire everybody cheered the arrival of the pudding. It turned out to be somewhat of a tower of wine-soaked figs, almonds and spiced-cakes, spotted over with mint, fennel seed and violets. The top battlement of the tower was formed of stuffed apples, and the whole dripped in butter and honey. It was a little hollowed out after Ulf’s hand had been stuck into it, but to me it was still like a dream of food, as Ushag was like a dream of my aunt.

  Before finding the merrow-bones my aunt would never have thought of hosting a feast, and wouldn’t have fed the Prior if he’d turned up starving. She’d have been after him with the broom at first sight of him in the cove. She would have enjoyed it and so would I. Before the proving of the merrows, she would never have let the blue man stay in Marrey cove, never mind opening the wreck-trunk for him. Once he was able to walk, he’d have been sent off to live or die among the southerners — in towns now busy ridding themselves of outsiders and monsters to be ready for their end-of-the-world.

  Now, freed from her story, she could take her enemy’s hand. Freed from her own story she could be kind to strangers.

  ‘I tell you what, Father,’ she said now, putting her hand on his shoulder. He flinched like he’d expected her to slap him. ‘When that Christian sky of yours falls, we’ll all just go catch larks,’ and she held out to him, shining with butter and honey, the first of the stuffed apples from the top of the tower of pudding.

  I knew then. I would never tell her.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Go Tell it to the Bees

  I HAD TO TELL SOMEBODY.

  Three days after the feast my new knowledge was harrowing my mind and burning on my tongue. I could have told Scully but he was to be my first and best ally in the saving of Ushag from herself. In him the story of the merrows of Marrey Cove rose smooth and honey-tongued, and given the chance he could persuade the pearl from the shell. I needed him to keep faith. I couldn’t tell Ma, she had enough to be going on with, what with the prophecy of her own death and all. Her dead-dress lay airing over the berry-canes by their threshold, like a pile of glossy ravens with their black feathers stirring stiffly in a breeze. The Prior was impossible and Ulf wouldn’t understand — or perhaps he’d understand the story, but not the secret. Some people think that facts are the only truth. He might think it dishonourable or something, and think it only right to tell my aunt about her own sister’s bones. But if he w
as to keep his new friend, Ushag needed to keep the merrows and that was that. Some stories are truer than facts.

  I had to tell somebody but it must be somebody who wouldn’t, or couldn’t, tell Ushag. I settled on the bees. Scully had said they were Marrey bees so in a way they were family.

  Bo and I set ourselves for the hawthorn grove. It had rained for two days after our feast-night and the earth was soft and brown again. The heat had broken during Ushag’s feast-night and our holiday scattered by storms. As the first fat singular drops had fallen we’d let them hit us full in the face. They’d hissed and steamed as they hit the feverish ground. All the barrels filled in a half-hour, and the water was still running away in trickles, streams and torrents down to the sea. Since then we’d had two days of sheet-rain, and though for now the black skytowers in the cove were holding off we could smell that it wouldn’t be for long. All the smells that had lain locked in the dust all summer were now at their liberty in the cooling air. My breath prickled with sharp goodness.

  As we left the yard, Bo trotted right beside me in a lather of mud and gladness, leaning against me like a hound and with such weight I was nearly knocked off my feet. I rested my hand on her neck as we went and breathed in the byre; the fresh dung, the straw and her own warm hide. I was eased to have her with me, even if she was just a cow.

  Up in the grove the bees were all a-buzz. They too could smell the rains returning. Their king had put them all to their tasks before it broke, as Ushag and Ulf were even now readying our place for flooding and drenching. I had left them hurriedly packing the walls with straw, and fortifying the roof, as I sloshed up toward the hazels and the grove of bees. The embroidered curtains from the wreck-trunk flapped wetly as I passed between them, and the tapestries seemed already just part of the soil.