The Wish Kin

by Joss Hedley

  But here, now they are here. Colm and Lydia and the first few of them struggle to the ledge, look down into the filling space. It is unrecognisable. The machinery is drowning in the rising water. The surface is thick with debris. The great generator and some of the workings are still in motion, but others have ground to a halt, waterlogged, suspended. The electric tubes overhead glow whitely onto the grey surface of water.

  Colm turns away from the sight, looks back at the people as they gather on the ledge.

  ‘We are close now,’ he says. ‘It is not much further. Please, keep together.’

  His eyes meet his sister’s. Gander, Lyd? he asks.

  She smiles at him. Her face is weary, drawn, but there is a light beneath her skin, and that flame in her eyes. Her step does not slacken as she sets out before him onto the path. Gander, she says in return, and strides through the tunnel.

  Suddenly, there is a crashing ahead, a downfall of rocks onto pathway.

  ‘Lydia!’ Colm shouts, terrified. He cannot bear that he might lose his sister too.

  There is an instant of uncertainty as the dust from the fall fills and settles. ‘I’m gander, Colm!’ he hears after a moment. ‘We’re all gander.’

  But the ceiling of the tunnel they are in is piled as an impassable barrier of rubble on the ground.

  Lydia hurries back to Colm’s side. ‘We’ll have to take the podium exit,’ she says. ‘That’s what the man in black boots said to the keeper, do you remember?’

  Colm looks at the rising water below. ‘It will mean going down into that!’ he says.

  ‘Do we have a choice?’

  Colm! Lydia! they hear. It is Moss from far away.

  What is it?

  Have you got them out yet? Colm, I need your help to release the other prisoners! Can you come back?

  Colm stands still and silent, thinking what to do.

  ‘Go, Colm,’ says Lydia. ‘Find the podium exit. I’ll stay here with the people until you give us a signal. Then you can go to Moss.’ So saying, she helps the child from his shoulders, takes the hand of the elderly woman in her own. ‘Be careful,’ she says at the last.

  Colm turns, examines the ledge for a way down. Not far to the left is a stairway cut into the rock. He descends this and crosses the flooded floor of the cavern. The water surges around his legs. He is shocked by the strength of it.

  The podium rises high and imposing out of the water. Another stairway takes him to its summit and he crosses at once to the rear of it. Directly behind the chairs of the Mater and the Pater are sleek panels, and behind these is the dark cut of an opening, wide enough for several people at once. But it is difficult to determine the level of safety within; even from here Colm can see that the floor is awash with running water.

  A shout and he sees several of the people from the ledge wading across the flooded cavern floor towards the podium. Lydia is behind them, calling for them to return.

  ‘We cannot wait,’ says one of the men as he climbs onto the podium. ‘Better chance this than be drowned back there.’

  ‘But this may be no better!’ Colm replies.

  The man, though, does not listen to him but steps through the opening and disappears. Several others follow after him. Colm is uncertain, distressed.

  Remember who you are, and he too steps through the opening, tracks the course of the tunnel. It is flooded, yes, but the water here is shallower than lower down in the caves, the tunnel seems shortly to reach upwards, and the air within it to be fresh.

  All right, Lyd, he calls. Bring them across.

  Colm returns to the mouth of the opening in time to help Lydia and the elderly woman. They pass through and upwards, out of sight. One by one Colm hands the folk into the tunnel, watches them ascend, turns back to help another. When the last of the group are inside, he descends the podium and crosses back towards the staircase. The water is now thigh-high.

  Where are you, Moss? he asks when he reaches the ledge.

  I’m on the third level, he hears his friend say. Can you find your way?

  I think so.

  Colm hastens down the flooding tunnel to his right. Here and there piles of rubble emerge from the stream like little rocky islands. In the distance he hears the crashing of stone into water. Small showers of sand trickle from the ceiling above him.

  Moss’s voice urges him on. Hurry, hurry! Do not stop. Do not look back. Colm keeps his head down, concentrates on the length of his stride, the sure placement of his feet.

  As he travels along the tunnel, Moss’s voice of urgency is joined by threads of another. At first, he assumes that this is Lydia’s, but listens more closely and realises it is not. Hurry, the voice says. It is scratchy, barely audible, but the deeper Colm goes into the earth, the more the voice speaks and the stronger it gets.

  We are here, waiting. Hurry! We need you, he hears.

  Colm runs and runs, through the rising water, over the slippery, difficult path. After a few minutes he hears a shout, sees movement ahead. It is Moss with a band of weary prisoners trudging up the path.

  ‘Moss!’ he calls, and surges through the water to meet his friend.

  Moss’s eyes are aflame. ‘Take these people to safety,’ he says. ‘Then come back down. There are still many more to release.’

  Colm nods, strengthened by his friend’s seriousness, his intent. He turns and begins again the climb to the engine room, his arms once more supporting the exhaustion of others. He speaks to Lydia as he climbs, prepares her to receive these weary folk.

  And the new voice does not stop but grows stronger, and urges, encourages, advises when he is uncertain. Hurry, hurry, it says. The owner of the voice seems to know well the lie of the land. The left fork, the further stair, the right tunnel. Colm follows the directions, tentatively at first, but then with more and more confidence. He leads the group through the streaming, crumbling corridors to the vastness of the engine room.

  Lydia is waiting for them at the mouth of the podium exit.

  Gander? she asks.

  Gander, he replies. He passes the prisoners into her care, turns, and heads back to find Moss.

  As he ploughs again through the tunnel, taking the left fork here, the right there, the voice grows stronger, is joined by another voice, and another. Hurry, they say. Hurry, hurry.

  Who are you? he asks as he runs.

  The Kin, they say. We are the Kin.

  How do you know the way?

  The Clan have had us here for a long time. We know the tunnels well. But hurry, now. There is much to be done.

  So he hurries, alert for instructions, for the next sign of Moss and the prisoners. Back through the water to the podium exit and Lydia, then into the tunnels once more.

  Now as he runs there is a loud boom, and the tubes of light in the ceilings go out. The tunnel is in darkness, and Colm can see nothing. He finds the wall with his hands, follows the roughness of it slowly. But the water is up to his waist now, and he is unsure how long he can do this.

  Moss! he calls. Moss, are you far?

  I don’t know, Moss replies. I’m not sure where I am.

  Colm can hear Moss breathing, wonders if it is in the Inner Speech that he hears this, or if his friend is really that close. He hears then a whisper, one of the voices, Remember who you are, in the darkness. There is silence, a strangled commotion, then Moss’s voice booms into the tunnel: ‘I am the Fire Keeper!’ and the place is ablaze with light.

  ‘Moss!’ cries Colm. His friend is all fire, his eyes, his mien, the flaming torch in his hand. Moss roars again, ‘Fire Keeper!’ then reaches in to a crevice where the wall has given way to the water. From within he tears two wooden struts, wraps cloth from his back around them, touches them to the torch in his hand. They flare up, burning, bright. ‘Here,’ he says, and passes them to Colm. ‘Take these and the people and hurry back,’ he says. ‘I will be on the highest level.’

  Again to the podium, to Lydia ecstatic with the news. ‘Fire Keeper!’ she says over
and over. ‘Of course!’

  ‘We’re nearly there, Lyd,’ Colm says. He gives her one of the torches, then charges back through the water. Stone from the ceiling crashes downwards.

  Come, hurry, come, the voices call. There are more of them now, he thinks. More of them, and they are louder too. Almost there, almost done, hurry, hurry!

  Colm takes the left tunnel, travels along with Moss’s torch making plain the way. The tunnel makes a sharp ascent and as he reaches the crest he can see light ahead of him. He joins Moss as his friend struggles with the key in the lock of a cell door, struggles while the water level mounts, while the ceiling falls in sheets about them.

  Hurry, hurry! the voices say, and the key engages, the lock releases, and the door bursts open with a great force from the inside.

  ‘Storm Holder!’ they hear, and they are met with the sight of the man previously seen only from above, he who had sat so still and quietly, eyes closed, mouth moving, hands gently in his lap. Now he stands, eyes aflame, chest expanded with the enormity of knowing, and a voice like the roar of a storm.

  The three of them, then, break open the remaining cells, release, among others, the twins, their faces burning with growing understanding, and the weeping woman, weeping no longer but feverish to get to the sea. ‘Sea Singer,’ Colm thinks he hears her say. When her voice joins with those of the others, when together they coax Colm and Moss and urge them, ‘Hurry, hurry,’ he knows that these are the voices he heard as he travelled back and forth along the tunnels. And as they head at last to the engine room, these few need little prompting, know well the way to go. Tired though they all are, as Colm and Moss and Lydia waiting for them now at the mouth of the exit and all of them are, there is a brilliance to them, a burning fire, that lights their minds and their hearts and their faces as they step through the opening, as they make their way together to the top of the tunnel. It is the fire of knowledge and of place, and it burns in the soul of each of them as they emerge to the softness of sand, to the vast stretch of sea, to the quieting mist, to the rain.

  CHAPTER

  18

  The grass is moist and cool beneath his feet, the sky still grey from night. Colm crosses the yard and takes the short cut between the houses to the beach. Derry trots alongside him, bounds forward when they reach the stretch of sand. His barks are high and sharp, joyous in the Inner Speech.

  Boy and dog run in pelting wonder to the sea. They swim side by side, paddle towards the blood of light on the horizon. A scrabble of rocks, a jagged island, and they haul themselves out, sit together looking east, Colm with his knees up under his chin, Derry with his paw resting on the boy’s foot.

  The sky lightens, the air grows warmer. The sea presses as a shimmering silvery skin about them; but they are safe, sure on their scratch of rock, their island.

  Father was unlike any man you have ever known, says Colm, and the dog looks at him, licks his brown salty shin. He was clever, so clever. And wise with it. He could see what would happen, trained us to bear it, to survive. It is because of him that I live today.

  A gull circles above them, lands on a rock near their feet. Colm reaches into the pocket of his shorts, tosses a soggy rip of bread into the air. The bird lifts briefly upwards, its neck craned, arched, and catches the bread smartly in its red beak. Several more gulls appear in the sky, screech and call over the sound of the sea. Colm pulls more bread from his shorts, throws it all high.

  The two swim back and take the beach northward. Derry runs ahead, then back, runs in circles around his boy then off again. Colm drifts slowly through the path of sea on sand towards the ruins that are the airport.

  It is almost a year since Colm and Lydia led the prisoners through the torrent to the safety of the raining world above, almost a year since Moss ran through the tunnels unlocking the cells to release those incarcerated within. It is almost a year since Colm saw his father frail and weak on the floor of the flooded cell, since he saw him there with his hollow eyes, his sunken cheeks, his stretched and worried skin. And so, too, it is almost a year since Colm drew the great cloud, since the torrent of water that fell from its belly rushed into the cell and pulled his father under. It is almost a year since his father died.

  Colm stops at the cyclone-wire fence that stretches from the waterline up into the sand dunes. This is as far as he can go; to go any further is unsafe. He heads away from the beach and into the dunes, climbs to the top so that he can see further north, can see that sunken, ruined ground where once the airport lay.

  It is a strange sight, desolate, yet in possession of a ghostly presence that hints at earlier times of activity. The airport buildings have gone, swallowed up into the thirsty earth, so thirsty that even when its channels and tunnels were running with water it was still not enough, it still had to collapse into itself so that great chasms were made in the roof top, so that more of the new-falling rain could tumble in without hindrance. It was the rushing, the running of the water through the tunnels that wore the patience of the walls, that irritated them so that they broke, crumbled, their great stony segments carried off in the torrents, carried off so that more was troubled, so that more walls were irritated, worn down, so that even the great walls supporting the roof of the cavern could hold out no longer and instead had to give, to break in, to relinquish, so that in turn the marvellous arch that was the ceiling of this astonishing place also gave way, buckled, and collapsed, crushing the machinery below, swallowing the buildings above.

  Now only the occasional block stands on the very edge of what had been the tarmac, as a scrap of memory of what the place was like not so very long ago. Everything else is broken, in pieces, and Colm looks at it, feels a thousand emotions in his chest.

  The Clan is crushed, its plans thwarted by the deluge of water that fell upon the earth a year ago, the rain that was called by Lydia from clouds drawn by Colm. At the same time, the raging underground fire that started in Wonding so very long ago was doused, quenched thoroughly both here and across the country.

  This is good, thinks Colm. But how can he think of that mighty deluge, now made famous in story and song, without thinking of his father? For it was this same deluge, gathered of the same rain, drawn of the same cloud, into which Rafe Bell was finally pulled.

  Colm is sick at the thought, nauseated. The bile rises in his throat and his tongue goes cold. Even after a year the grief seems scarcely lessened.

  He swallows, whistles to Derry, and walks away from the sea. On the other side of the dunes a cluster of Handy Homes sits on their rubber wheels. Several of them have baskets of flowers hanging from their windows. Colourful fly strips lift and flap in doorways. A cat sits, fat and contented, on a pink plastic chair. Colm skirts the little community, pushes into the stretch of scrub that separates the Handy Homes from the town, and winds his way along a sandy path.

  A year ago, Colm thinks. A year ago and none of this was here. Just the dunes, the sand. Now the place is bright with summer grasses, and flowers of all colours.

  The sun is up now, the earth slowly warming. Colm passes through stands of fluffy pampas grass; the last of the dewdrops fall from the gentle blades as he brushes by. The path inclines briefly, and then he is at the town.

  A year ago. He remembers the ruin, the desolation, and can hardly believe that the bright little centre he sees before him with its clean neat buildings and smooth wide roads is the same place that a year ago was empty, ghostlike, its paths and pavements cracked and burning, its nature strips torn open as scalding gates to a fiery underworld. He walks quietly down one of the smaller streets on the outskirts of town, Derry at his side, and is, as ever, amazed.

  For here abounds yet further evidence of the Rekindling, here abounds yet further proof of the Wish Kin, and of their steady work for the gracing of the earth. Trees line the street, their branches leafy and green and heavy with summer fruits; garden beds are filled with pinks and purples and mauves; lawns run thick from the footpath to brightly painted doors. Colm walks sl
owly through colours, through sweet fragrances, across soft grasses, and again cannot believe that things are as they are: that there is ripe fruit hanging from trees for him to pluck, to consume; that there are taps all along the street that he might turn on and drink; that there is shade and shelter and rest and an ever-emerging abundance. And this is only here, in the town. The reports from further afield, from the south, from the west, and even from the north, are the same: that slowly, surely, the earth is being graced.

  Boy and dog wander along the waking streets then cut through to the beach once again. The sea now is filmed with gold, and Colm can see the swell picking up, can see that it will be a good day for waves. And it is here, as they walk this last stretch of sand before home, that Colm’s thoughts turn towards Jeune, that he begins again as he does every day to try to speak to her.

  Jeune, he says. Jeune, it is Colm. He walks slowly, dulls the sound of the waves, of the gulls, listens carefully, closely, for something else. Jeune, he says again. Can you yet hear me? The waves crash on the beach, the gulls swoop and call, and Colm tries harder to push them from him, tries harder to find clarity. Jeune! Jeune! But nothing, not yet anyway. And so he does as he does every morning, he speaks on as though she has heard, as though she is standing by his side, as though they are walking together, just as they did back in Burren. There was a brief rain this morning, he says. Early, when it was still dark. I did not have to Draw, nor Lydia to Make. The weather, it seems, is beginning to form into patterns, beginning to find its own way without us. I am glad of this, very glad. It is the way it should be.

  He stops and looks up at the sky, brilliant in its clearness. On the horizon he sees a push of cloud, acknowledges it, watches it move closer in response. He drops his eyes to the ocean and continues. That free fire outside of Wonding I told you of last week was Kept yesterday by Moss. Never was a better Fire Keeper, of that I am sure! He may be heading north shortly to deal with a small outbreak; Lydia and I will join him if he needs rain.