Who am I, coming back into being here in this tight skin each morning? At the time of waking, anyone, no one. Where am I, she thinks, until it dawns. And how old? All the ages she has ever been. Summer and winter, the sun rises and up she comes in the same gauzy slick and glow of living light of yet another day by the sea, of lifting her head like a seal in a shawl of shed water; of porridge cooked her mother’s way, under her mother’s roof, with milk and a coil of honey, just right; of sitting up straight at the bench like a good girl, eating it all up. Sometimes her mother boiled her an egg with a pencilled face that cracked when she banged down the spoon. When the egg was all gone she put it back in the eggcup upside down. Hurry up and eat it, you’ll be late for school, her mother scolded, only to find an empty shell. That was the game.
Still she goes in swimming, evades the hanging jellyfish, snatches at a passing shoal of little skeleton fish that, ogling, deflecting as one, evade her, and comes up against strung seaweed and waves and once, vast, a black undulation, looming overhead, pitched to come thundering down, that she takes for a stingray and dives away from, gasping, struggling to the shore. Flat there, the sea, lap-lapping at her toes. Was it just bull kelp? No way of knowing. Playing safe. She never swims in the dark, even in her dreams, only in the light.
The schools are back and still the weather is holding and the house, like the sea, has its tides of heat and cold that lag behind night and day. At sundown crickets jitter out of the dry land and a rim of dust, or haze, fumes, ash, keeps the sunsets alight in ribs of flame, of apocalyptic fire, like years ago when a volcano far to the north, in Asia, poured out blood and fire in a mirage over these shores, aflame, week after week, as if beamed up from the roof of the world. What next, the apparition of bushfires in the sky, faint flames, smoke, ash in the throat and lungs, a long haze on a gilded sea – what omens, what black ships looming, what icebergs? The sun burns and the moon waxes and wanes, and all this she is aware of, attentive to the rhythms without knowing she is, having no need to look at a clock any more, or a moon chart or tide table, knowing anyway, more than she has ever known unless in her earliest childhood: so much so that she drifts into waking, eating and sleeping a little later each day, left to herself as she is in a slowly unspooling tidal life, the immortal first summer of memory and dream, the essence of summer.
Well into April the spell of heat endures, barely broken by the one wild week of cold tempestuous winds and high tides swamping the beaches. White water smashes into the dunes and the standing rocks and swills up over the flat rock under the lighthouse, the one like a head in profile, an old man’s sleeping head pillowed on sand, and washes away the bottom steps of the staircase. Even the planks of the pier are spurting, awash. When the sky clears and the sun comes out again, all the old warmth is there still, but unmistakably now, for the first time in the year, it’s the hazy, salty inner warmth of autumn.
All along the front beach the mounds of seaweed lie stewing, hopping with sandfleas. More weed is swilling in the shallows. Niches in the rock face have a floor of sand with globules of the red wax of the New Year candles still poking up, like sucked lollies spat out, raspberry jujubes. At the headland a salty sweetness hovers thick as honey. The cliff face harbours gnats, at rest invisible in the pitted limestone among the shadows and cracks and mussel spat, until triggered off in black outbursts that patter and sting, crowding into eyelids, nostrils, earholes, wings of black gauze in a blind whirr. Even if you keep well clear, skirting the pools out to seaward, something in the cliff is aware and shifts, a rousing and swelling up as of the great stone honeycomb itself, tawny and black-tipped.
For once she has it all to herself, as she wavers, faint, rickety, at the thick edge of the water. Warm as it is, and not so long after midday, the sun is low and the shadow long, the sand already more than half in the shade of the cliffs. The forecast is rain and a strong wind warning and she knows this is the last hot spell, if she wants one last swim, at the tail end of the summer, on the hinge of the year. But not here in this swampy backwater by the seawall. She has her bathers on underneath. Just this once, for the sake of its vast bare wash of sky and sand, she will go on under the lighthouse in the distilled heat of the day and swim at the surf beach.
Here too, wherever you look – her feet go so slow in the soft sand, so astray, sinking and rising – are the traces of the battering of the past week; loops and shreds and grass skirts of bladderwrack strung up drying at the high tide line and on the torn wire fence along the dune, bleaching beads and amber hanks and tentacles; and dog turds and driftwood and shells all through the marram grass, where the sea has carved out channels and new high gashes. But it faces southwest and is still flooded in sunlight, the broad beach a clean sheet, the sand and sea one white glaze and not a soul in the surf for once, no encampment of surfers and dogs. And this too she has all to herself.
As usual she strips to her bathers, drops her towel at the waterline – red towel, red bathers, a lifetime – and walks straight in, by instinct finding a channel of sand in the maze of the rock shelf at the same spot, she thinks, as the cold clamps her legs, where a seal bolted one day and fled out to sea. High water then, but low water now, water enlaced in stone, stone in water, and harder to tell water from shadow or shadow from substance. She perches shivering on the bare rock at the base, leaning back against the jagged ridge of crests, her Mountains of the Moon, as of old, the promised land. Green, gold and bronze, the rich weedbeds of the pools are all around, long pulsing hairy arms in a sway, ripples in yellow webs pulling in tighter as they are disturbed and laying open all their weave again into a stillness. This is the place of the apparition like thunder of the seal, where he reared up taller than anyone and gaped and fled convulsing in all his length, the seal, sprawling his tumultuous way over the rocks out to sea. How those eyes burned bronze-black, and those long-boned hands – the rocks all around her bristling and glinting with strings of drops and bubbles – and that furry head split into a wound, a husk, a pod that burst into a flower of blood, hot with breath, silenced, a raw mouth. And the lightning disparition of a seal.
Out to sea, a long way past the lip of the farthest rock pool, smooth water has begun flooding into the network of channels, a webbing of white light dissolving and reappearing with each new wave, rolling in midair, waves such as she has never seen. Is the tide on the turn, so soon? She squints into the distance, spellbound and yes, she is not mistaken, there it is again, a glassy flow and then on its way is one long wave of winnowing incandescence.
The sheer mass of it takes her by surprise, the vast heave of itself sheer over the edge of the rock shelf, engulfing pool after pool. She tries to stand and is hurled hard against rock, a jagged overhang, and her shoulder stings, and her nose, her scalp, a sharp bang and gash, searing, as the wave sweeps her back through and over a channel and she’s out, over the last edge into the open water choking on mouthfuls, the snorkel swinging as she is filled down to her depths with icy water. The mask is on crooked and her frantic fingers jab her in the eye just as she is slammed into the rock wall again in the crash of a new wave. Her other hand is jammed hard, and she wrenches, groping for a foothold in a clamp of rock, and grabs at the mask, its pane cracked from side to side, a blade of light, but it yanks off, tossing, hurtling itself and the snorkel free, and now she is wedged hard in the rock, blindfolded, caught in a web of torn hair and seaweed and in her throat a curdle of blood, a scream of water.
This Water
I once had a true love I let slip through my fingers. He paid with his life for my love. As do I myself in my own way still, loving freedom as I do and yet living on as I do, as hostage to the peace, not to say linchpin, and keystone. As far as a woman can, I make sure I keep my hands on the reins of power. I play my part to the hilt.
In the long free days of my girlhood I went dressed in silk all the colours of flame, and as light as flame; over the dress, like a shadow, I wore a long-sleeved black cape so thin that the white of my arms and the blo
od of my silk shone through. So swathed in scarlet, in wedding finery, under a shroud of black, I hid myself in a hooded cloak of black wool embroidered in all the colours of the trees, in which I passed unseen on silent feet over land and water.
If I were to plead my cause, I who have never minded what anyone thought of me, what might I say? How was I to know what love was, until I had it before my eyes? How was I to know its nature? As with milk, salt, honey, water, we only know what something is like once we touch it, or smell or taste or swallow it, or are swallowed by it. Only when it was too late could I know that it was too late. As is always the way, I laid eyes on him, and hands and will, before I so much as knew it, and was bound to him and he to me for life. Nor could I have let go had I ever wished to. Not that I ever did.
What could I, having spent all my girlhood among women, have known of warrior bands and their oaths and feuds? I was the high king’s golden daughter, my beauty made much of, but I cared little for that. Headstrong I always was, from babyhood, and wilful. I wanted my own way and I had a sharp tongue if crossed. I took nothing lightly. All my life I had been at pains to learn the duties and rituals of my rank by heart, and all that I could master of music and magic and secret lore. I was used to knowing that whatever had caught my eye was mine for the taking. But the one man I wanted on sight as I had never wanted in my life before, when I gave myself to him, he turned me down, if only in order to keep faith with his kinsman and leader, the old man I was expected to marry. The way I wanted my next breath was how I wanted this other one once he had caught my eye, dark and beautiful in the fullness of his youth, and on impulse I bound him then and there with a binding of words, not to be broken for as long as we both lived, to be the breath of my body to me, as I to him; and to escape, though his leader held the keys that night, and meet me outside the walls and steal away while the castle slept.
Before I came of age, when I was hardly more than a child – before I had even begun to bleed as women do – I had a strange foreshadowing, whether from a dream or from the other world I was not able to tell. I found myself in the singing air down at the lake, alone, looking for waterlilies on one of those hot still summer days when every tree and reed and stalk of sedge and swan and lily pad stands out, doubled, imprinted as if on silver in a mirror of light. The lily pads were close inshore behind the jetty. I clambered through the brambles and ferns, took off my shoes and hoisting up my skirts went wading out, parting the water all around, with my tread lifting a mist of fine mud, out towards the finest patch of lilies, flaring white, each with a little sun inside. But midway I trod on some soft thing that squirmed, and, peering down, I saw at my feet a shape of flesh, body parts, loosening, heaving, in splashes of black, white, red, under the ripples that I had lapped myself in. All the lake stood still but for the swirl of waves that flounced around me in a mirror image that was not mine, but some raw white sunken thing bathed in blood and shadow. A death’s head on a bare spine lay rolling up its inky eyes at me. I could not move or cry out, I was caught fast in the mud. Floundering, I lost my footing and slid under, and yet I had no feeling of the water any more, its liquid solidity, its cold. I was all eyes, gazing up through a glassy skin of mirror at a cracked sun. A stab of terror woke me and I fell back, and I rose up out of there and backed away facing into the light, never looking down until my heel grazed the shingle. Then I turned and ran. I never set foot there again. Nor did I ever speak of what had happened to me down at the lake. Indeed, what had? Had I been dreaming, or had the lake? No way of knowing.
When a parade of suitors came to the castle asking for my hand my father decreed it wise that I, being as headstrong as a filly, was to be given my head and marry to please myself. I turned them all down without a second thought or look. Not one of them made the least impression. In the women’s quarters we laughed and mocked them, taking roles, rehearsing their lovesick declarations and proposals. None of us had heard of any warrior, often at loggerheads with my father, sometimes at outright war, only not so at that time, whose followers might put the idea of me into his head; or not until, bridling for fear of a rebuff, no doubt, he sent two of them on ahead of his march to know my father’s mind. And when my father in turn asked me, I said, Why not, if he prove worthy?
In no time there he was at the gates, this man I had, as my father saw it, more or less taken on trust, on a whim, tired as I must be of the whole sorry process, and unworldly, though ripe and ready for marriage. But I had meant it as an open question: let us see if he is worthy. As for him, it was not me as such that he was after at all, just a wife, he being newly widowed and a poor sleeper without a wife warming the bed. And so his followers had put up my name as if they knew of no other unwedded bedwarmer. If nothing else, there was the alliance such a union would forge at long last with the high king. And there was my beauty, besides, unsurpassed, so they reminded him, in all the land. So he too said, Why not?, and came wooing at the head of the pack.
From the battlements I looked out and saw my error. He was the oldest of them by far, an old grey wolf, battle-scarred, sly and dour. He was older than my father. No one had thought to tell me so. Not only that, but when we were introduced while the feast was being prepared in the great hall and left together to make what we might of each other, he was stern and gruff, aloof, his talk, such as it was, barbed, his bearing stiff to the point of rigidity, as befitted his great age, if not rank. The question of marriage did not come up. Incredulous, insulted – I was a child – and utterly relieved, we took our leave of each other. Had he changed his mind, and would he now go on to brazen out his stay with us regardless? No matter what was in his mind, however, mine was made up. I had known at first sight he was not the man for me.
Received as a guest with all due ceremony, notwithstanding, and handed the castle keys for the night, as the custom was, he soon let it be seen that he had not changed his mind, he had simply taken my consent for granted. I was his for the asking – no, the taking, so it would seem. Was there no need even to ask? He thought me as good as his already in all but name. So, as we women soon saw – as the night wore on and the feasting, the singing, the carving and devouring of the roasted meats, and the drinking took a bawdy turn up and down the long tables – so did his men, and ours, all think, full as they were of mead and ale; for the talk was all of our impending wedding and bedding, and the water was closing over my head, and my time running out.
I sent my attendants to fetch the ceremonial golden goblet from my quarters, and a sleeping draught, and I mixed my mead unobserved and took it around the company, but first of all to the guest of honour, the warrior, the bridegroom; then to all the rest in turn, I pouring a measure, they downing it as a toast to the bride and bridegroom; only not to his young kinsman who had caught my eye, nor his two close comrades before whom, when the hall lay fast asleep, I was to chant the words to bind him. They got plain mead from my goblet.
Without a backward glance I left the castle where my windows were lanterns by day with the sun in them and pools of amber in the long firelight and I went out forever into the dark of the night under the stars, and he was there before me. Invisible in my black cloak and hood, but still in my finery underneath, burning, like a shadow I stepped forward, and saw him start, and put my arms around him. He said his comrades had agreed that, being bound, he had no choice but to obey; and they being the old man’s own son and grandson, they would testify that he was bound against his will and forced to break faith. But you must go back, he said, while there is still time, or I fear there will be war over this and bloodshed. As for that, I said, I shall die rather than go back. Then so be it, he said.
I took him down to the water meadow by the lake where we kept the horses, to catch two and harness them to a chariot before the castle woke and found us gone. And so he did, and we fled all night in the chariot as far as the river. He told me the old man, once he came to, would be hot on our heels in no time with his men and hounds, and our wheel ruts were plain to see. We must go on foot
from here, he said, and it will be hard going for you sooner or later in the dark of the forest. So we left the chariot and a horse there on the bank, and took the other over the ford and left it on that side to confuse the pursuers and give us time, and we ran. It was hard going on the muddy forest floor in the dark, all brambles, pits, rocks, mud and tree roots, and I was tired sooner rather than later and out of breath. He said, I have never carried a woman in my life nor shall I. I need no carrying, I said, only rest and sleep. So we stopped there and by the light of the moon he built us a shelter of branches.
The scrape of something heavy woke us, a vast form in a shroud of mist, and I was so weary I lay frozen as it snuffled its way in under our roof of branches, a great bloodhound, that nuzzled softly at my man’s neck where he lay, and licked him, whining; and he knew it well and fumbled its ears and whispered his thanks and sent it padding away. Its master is close by, he said, and it came to warn me. Soon there sounded a shout far away in the mist, and another, and that too was a warning from two among the warriors who had gone apart from the rest. But I could not go on and they could hardly fail to find our hide of branches and surround us.
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