Now, I didn’t know how to go about actually telling the bees. Auntie Ushag and I didn’t do that sort of thing. Ma was the only person I knew who talked to creatures like they were folk, and often to folk like they were creatures, but somehow I didn’t want to ask. You can’t ask your family to talk to the bees for you. It’s something a person has to manage for themselves. I sat by the hives and listened to that busy world for some time.
At last I lay my gift of a leftover currant-stuffed apple by the biggest hive in the grove and greeted what I hoped was the bee-king.
‘Blessings on you, little minister of sweetness,’ I started, and was pleased with the tone I struck, which managed to sound both respectful and friendly, and the bees themselves hummed louder so I was encouraged. ‘I come to bring thankfulness for your labour all these years of the cove, and to tell you of a passing,’ I said. A cold gust blew through the grove, and there was silence. I leant forward and lay my head against the trunk by the hive. Now I was unsure how to say what I had to say.
‘Your mistress has turned up dead,’ I whispered. Some of the bees had found the gift and were dancing in the wet grass. Others followed to see what the fuss was about. The buzz grew until the whole grove hummed and sang, and it seemed like the whole hive-town crowded into that sweet, stuffed apple. They had accepted the gift. They would not be leaving the cove yet. ‘She lies drowned on a shelf in the cliff,’ I told them.
My words weren’t enough. A person’s life should add up to more words than nine. All those words I’d been told about Mam over the years — all wrong, or only partly right, or just plain nasty. All those stories that weren’t hers anymore, or mine. Even the merrow-story had passed from me, and now lived in Ushag. She needed it more than I did. Meanwhile I felt like a fish out of water without it. I felt unclothed, cold and alone, without a story for Mam and me.
If I didn’t make my own story there were plenty to do it for me. Some would do it kindly, others any way they could, but I knew now I wouldn’t like it. What I needed was a new story, the right story to say what I knew about Mam; I needed a story in which both lies and facts could turn to truth in my throat.
The events of that over-hot summer were leeching from my memory. That day in the grove between the rains, I could hardly remember the start of our skyclad season: something about heat, something about seals and scales, and something about the truth, is all I recalled. What I needed was my own, my very own story. One that would lie like a reptile on the hot rock of my heart and tell others to go away.
‘My mother was a little wild like all of us who live in lonely places,’ I started, and my voice was like a mild wind, quiet but everywhere in the grove at once. Like the honey-tongued Slevins when they told the Other stories, or like the Prior when he talked about the end of the world, the story told itself. ‘She sang of salt and rock and water, and she was brave and true. She wed for love, not dirt or work, and her husband was young and strong before being taken in honour to serve the kraken in his Court. My mother conceived me in hope and cheerfulness and we had three years together before…’
Before what? I thought. This story-making was a slippery thing. I needed something that was true about her, or it wouldn’t work. Everything turns into a story the moment it’s done. The facts of things do not store well. They rot and fall apart. But the stories we tell last and even grow. What was to be the truth of her death?
She could have drowned herself, as Ushag said.
She could have been dragged off course, as I was, and then drowned by the changeable tides and tows of the cove.
She could have retreated into the caves and died there from the ice-and-salt elements.
She could even have been murdered, as some say down south. I didn’t think so, though. I just knew, like Ma. I started up again.
‘A daughter knows her own mam,’ I told the bees. ‘The scaly skin covers us both and her face lives in my face. Her blood runs through me. Her bones live only in my memory.’
That was good. It sounded right and true. Ma had said that’s where bones lie. I carried on.
‘A northerner knows their own cove. My mother still lives in the sand where she played as a child and with her child, and up the cliff-path where she walked. The byre holds the buckets she filled and mended, and the orchard brims with her sweetness. We still eat from her work and bless her sweat. We tell her stories to each other, and we even fight over her.
‘She is still with us, in spite of those who tried to steal her. They tried to steal her with enchanted words tucked in stories. The hid her in Mirror-tales, which only reflect the longings and dooms of the listeners. They made her invisible in Vanishing-tales, and pocked her all over with evil in Splatter-tales. They thought to hide her in one of those stories from the long-dark of midwinter, spiked with murder and the Old Enemy.
‘There are always folk in need of other folk to flesh out their own stories. They need others to join in before they can believe in anything at all. They commonly get about in crowds, and tend to ganging up. During her troubles, under siege and unprotected, they robbed Ven from us and to trap her alive in a bad story. In spite of it all I always knew her. I saw her through those lies.
‘A daughter knows.
‘My mother was as full of stories as a spring pilchard is of eggs. After the death of Colm Breda, though, she lost herself in that one story; the story of Lost Love. She was a shelled crab after that, soft and easy to the teeth. For a year and a day she walked Carrick among its everyday cruelty. A year and a day she ripped her tunic and covered her breast in ashes; a year and a day she wept, salting her meal with tears. Then one morning, a morning that dawned like the first morning of the world, she tired of that story and stopped weeping. She felt herself changed. Somewhere deep in the veins and caverns of her body, a new thing was growing and thriving.
‘Longing for the scour of the salt and the shock of water she took me and went to the shore. She waded into the quicksilver sea. Brimful with the new thing she turned, lightclad, to smile at me. Her body grew as the High Lake on a bright spring day. It ruffled. Then she turned to face the horizon.
‘Her mortal body became a ribbon of sparks that moved over the water; at first holding its form, then loosening and flying apart like a pack of swallows startled in a field. At the last she dropped in atoms and specks, fathoms deep into the kelp forest where she has become the new thing she felt inside her body.
‘Her waving hair is plaited through the wrack, her many eyes flash about the seabed, her fingers idle among the anemone gardens, and her lips talk with clams as they were never able to talk with folk. Her voice is in the wind, her ears in the sea-caves and her heart beats in my stone-sack. Instead of carrying the stories, the stories now carry her. She is a wake.
‘The fact is that on that day in the cove, my mother turned to stories. People can do that. What is anybody in the end but the story of themselves?
‘She lives in Scully’s fiddle and the new tune he made on the feast-night. She lives in the secret silver hoops on a hidden rock-shelf. She lives by Ma’s hearth where she sat the Slevins through their troubles. Like it or not, she still lives in Market-Shipton where they never before saw her kind and are still trying to tell the story of it over their grog and envy.
‘And she lives in Auntie Ushag, the only aunt left in Marrey cove, the aunt who stayed.’
Now that is a true story. I’m sticking to it. Honour Bright.
Glossary
bodge — [n] old timber; [adj] bodgey
cronk [Manx] — a hill
earwig — eavesdropping person
grog-blossom [Manx] — [n] a red nose from constant drunkenness
hedge-pig [n] — a hedgehog
heishan [Manx] — [n] half-grown girl, hoyden
kraken — [n] a sea-monster, something like a huge octopus
longtail [Manx] — a rat
merrow — a mermaid
moaney [Manx] — peatland, bog
wiggynagh [Manx] — raider
or viking
A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR
Some of the words in this book are Manx, the talk of the people of Isle of Man in the Irish Sea. This language nearly died out, but is now reviving. There are still only two thousand speakers of it in the world.
The language of the Vikings is called Old Norse. The author would like to thank Ruarigh Dale of the Centre for the Study of the Viking Age at the University of Nottingham (UK) for giving Ulf words.
First published in 2010
by
an imprint of Walker Books Australia Pty Ltd
Locked Bag 22, Newtown
NSW 2042 Australia
www.walkerbooks.com.au
This ebook edition published in 2013
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
Text © 2010 Ananda Braxton-Smith
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means – electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise – without the prior written permission of the publisher.
National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:
Braxton-Smith, Ananda, author.
Merrow [electronic resource] / Ananda Braxton-Smith.
Series: Braxton-Smith, Ananda. Secrets of Carrick; 1.
For young adults.
A823.4
ISBN: 978-1-742590-38-7 (ePub)
ISBN: 978-1-922179-81-4 (e-PDF)
ISBN: 978-1-742590-36-3 (.PRC)
Cover illustration © 2013 Emma Leonard
For Nigel,
my own true Northman.
Secrets of Carrick: Merrow Page 16