So they found us in the mist and with great shouts and jeers and challenges to come out and fight. He said he would only fight the old man, and then only if he must, to save himself, but he wished no one any harm. At the last moment there appeared a stranger on the wind, and it was my love’s foster father, the high king himself who had raised him as a son and divined his danger. But my love would not fail to face his pursuers, and only asked that I be taken away to safety, and he would join us if he lasted out the night. And so I was gathered up in his foster father’s cloak of wind and set down in a hut. There he kindled a fire and roasted meat on a spit in the hearth, against the coming of him we so loved; who escaped, and came.
He was the finest of them all and mine to have and to hold, though he had loved many before me. No one could leap so high, so far, so light as he, so his comrades told me; I should have seen him leap; and so he escaped over and over, saving his life and the lives of many who otherwise would have died in battle against him. At my bidding that fatal night he had leapt the castle wall, a great bastion of roughhewn stones piled high in a time beyond time, impregnable. Later, besieged, he would leap off a high bough of a rowan tree to safety, as fleet as a bird, with an army at his heels. The most beautiful man was mine to sing to sleep and sing back awake before the day’s dawning, and at first it was enough to have him asleep at my side night after night and wake up in his arms.
But my pleasure wore thin. My pride nursed its wound. We were together and yet he slept at my back with his arms around me, or with his back to me and my arms around him, and he would not turn over however much I tossed and turned and clung burning to him down the whole length of his body. Though never leaving my side, he had not broken his oath and taken me to him. We never spoke of this refusal, this mute denial, this naked sword that hung on a thread between us. No bond I knew could resolve it by force; nor could my pride have borne it; the thought stung me crimson all over. He must take me of his own free will or not at all. Never more than one night in any bed in the wild; and on many a bed that we rose from at dawn, if we had bread, he would leave behind unbroken bread as a message to the pursuer, by way of appeasement: untouched, intact. For all I know, it may have felt more like a taunt to the old man, a further provocation, and only inflamed his rage; but I held my tongue, for once, I of the sharp tongue, the hurt went so deep. A taunt was how I saw it myself night after night, and a provocation as I lay in silence at the sleeping side of my chosen one who chose night after night not to be mine. I will be your bread yet, I vowed in my heart, and your meat and mead and your water.
Once he argued that it was not himself that I loved at all but a charm some other woman had put on him, unasked, on parting, having once loved him, a charm that no woman who saw him ever afterwards could withstand. Be that as it may, I laughed. Then he asked me for both our sakes to let him go. He cried out in pain that my love had set him against his band of brothers and stripped him of all that he had won for himself in his life, honour not least.
Love is like water, a trickle enough to drown in, and a lake not enough to quench the thirst of it. Like love, water is always underlying its invisible self, folding and rising and falling. Its skin is a mirror or a crusty turbulence. It alone knows what lies under it and at what depth. And do we ever know the depth and flow of our own love, let alone the love of another, even, especially, the one we love? Rising water cannot be kept out and, sinking, cannot be kept in, but will flood and seep away, always changing and the same. Water will have its own way. And ours is a land quick with water, on the surface and underfoot and hung in the air, and all of life is bound to it.
We lived on fish and small animals that he caught or trapped or snared, and in season the fruits of the wild. We had constantly to crisscross rivers and streams to cover our tracks. One day I was halfway across a shallow bend in a river of stony pools dripping with branches overhead, and I with my skirts held high, when I missed my footing on a mossy stepping stone and slipped and sent an icy splash surging up over my thighs and deep inside between them. I gave a small shriek I could not hold back. Hush! What is it? he said, and floundered to my side, feeling for his knife. Nothing! I turned and said, and plunged on. We must make no sound, he hissed behind me, with them always at our heels. It was the sudden shock of the water, I said, and how deep it went in.
I stumbled through the sedge onto the bank, dragging my red skirt and my black one, both heavily soaked. As I held them up in a patch of sun and stooped to wring them out, my hood fell back so that my hair came loose and tumbled over my eyes, the water drops glittering in my red gold fell of hair. I groped for the bare wet hairy part where the water had gone in, and cupped it as like the snout of a nuzzling hound. The marvel of this water! said I. I can hardly get over it. How came it to be bolder and go further than the bravest of men has dared to go?
I had spoken my complaint, my taunt, out loud, in an undertone, musingly, but he heard, as he was meant to do. He took sudden hold of me by the waist from behind, bent forward as I was and still holding up my skirts, and pushed me facedown in the wet grass and went in after the water into the place where it had gone. And so he had his way with me, as with others before me, and I my way with him who was the first.
I crept out in the blue dawn to the stream to wash away the blood he had drawn from me. I bent over and was mirrored. Was this what I had divined in my dream between the swans and the waterlilies, no dissolution, only the loss of maidenhood, be it in joy or sorrow? But this water, having entered and swallowed my blood, gave me no answer in return.
He once said that he had heard I was a woman who never put a foot right or spoke a right word. Yet when we fled the next day he left broken bread behind us, and from that day on no more bread.
To love is to lose, and I had that if little else about love to learn by the end. We were runaways, hunted down in the wild, he to die at the hands of the man I had flouted and I to live on under duress, yet of my free will, into old age with that same man. While my love lived I was his sun and the light of his moon, and I bore him four sons and a daughter; and I was unknowingly the death of him, while having no hand in it.
It was not love that the old man wanted; as if it ever had been. He wanted blood. Nothing would stop him gorging on the blood of vengeance. My skin was safe. I was the prize cow, promised to him, only to be stolen from under his nose, and by one of his own. I should not be slaughtered. I, like it or not, was his. Let him only catch the thief! The cow he would drag back through the mud and dung to the byre. But time and time again, though we came within a hair’s breadth of being caught, so close that we could count his footfalls and every gasp for breath, like water we always slipped through his fingers.
Love is life, and terrible as long as you have hold of it, or it of you, and not for anything do you let go.
Sometimes when I close my eyes two cupped hands appear before me and water springs up in them and they are holding out this water, barely holding it, so that it runs through the fingers, a fountain, a spring I once saw in my young days or some hidden well. But when I bow my head to dip my mouth in the hands and drink, they vanish, gone at the touch of my lips. The water of life, gone. If I could only recall where, if time would only take me back, I should take this water in my mouth and find my love and give him in one last long kiss what was begrudged him, who would not have begrudged a wolf if it were thirsty at death’s door.
Never two nights in the one place, never a daybreak that did not find us on the run. Wrapped in skins and furs we lay down to sleep in caves and brambles and lashed high in the crown of one or another grand old green tree of shadows. And one of these was a tree of life indeed, a rowan sprung from a seed out of the otherworld, whose berries were honey sweet and gave health and long life, but that a giant on behalf of the otherworld stood guard over it and tore to pieces any who dared go near. But this giant had given my love leave to hunt in his woods, as long as he swore to leave the rowan tree alone.
One day, however, two strange
rs ran us down. They were brothers, they said, in the power of the old man, who had demanded that they honour a blood debt he claimed they owed him, by bringing him either my love’s head or a handful of the life-giving rowan berries. Then two against one they took on my love, as the easier task, and he effortlessly overcame them and made them captive. But the moment I had heard of the berries, and I holding a life tight in my belly by that time, a craving had blazed up in me for a sight of this rowan tree all aflame out of the otherworld and a taste of the berries. Unless I get some, I said, I must die of the lack. So with his captives my love went and asked the giant for some for me and was rebuffed. So he was driven to challenge the giant for the berries, breaking his word; and we two came near to dying for it, for by the time he had fought and killed the giant, and set the brothers to bury him and then fetch me, and meanwhile picked them enough berries for themselves and to take to the old man, and we two had climbed into the branches to have our fill of berries and fallen asleep, the old man had got wind of it and tracked us down with an army.
I was only saved when again his foster father divined our danger and came as before, veiled in invisibility, and bore me and the child in me away through the air, to his valley stronghold this time, far in the east, while my love fought his way out over ring on ring of corpses. He had said that if he died I was to be handed back to my father. And still the old man swore vengeance, until in disgust his own grandson broke ranks, swearing to shield my man against this madness, he being one of the comrades who were at the castle on the night we fled. And together they made their way to his foster father’s stronghold.
Always on the run in those days, my womb long since bled dry, I was nonetheless so well, I was very well, incandescent in my wellness, burgeoning. Was it a barrenness I had in my womb, I wondered, or a child not yet awake? – only I could never tell, not until those cold sweet rowan berries burst in my mouth and I knew in a flash how it stood with me beyond any doubt, as I had hoped; a stirring, a flutter as of eyelids in the very depths of me, a quickening.
In the forest we slept and in the heather inside stone circles that stood guard and in the mossy shelter of one great sunken capstone after another, splashed with lichen, doorways to nowhere, slouched under a hill or out in an open, monumental, among the sheep and cows. In the rain we lay down cloaked and veiled, and in the mist, and in the darkness of bear caves. And on white summer nights we lay out in the open as if hanging from the full moon on a thread, spiderlike. And so it was for us, our pursuers never far behind, day and night, and hounds on our tracks; but the strongest and wisest hound was the one who had loved my love of old and come in secret to warn him, and would never let them get too close. And to this the old man turned a blind eye, though the hound had betrayed his trust and gone against him time after time; even he had the grace to overlook a divided loyalty in a beloved hound. Not so a man, and he only forsworn because being bound he could not help himself. So we lived never knowing if we would live to break bread another day, sleeping late and light always to be out at birdcall. That high moment of rapture, when the year was burning on a low wick, and we like children clambered up and raided the rowan tree in our lust, is with me to this day, the shock of the blood red berries is in my mouth, sweeter than honey, and the kiss after kiss we gave, laughing, our lips and tongues blood red. I was never to give him a last kiss, and that was through no fault of mine. But by then we had gone beyond far all bonds and toils of fault and blame, he and I.
We were still safe in his foster father’s castle when, at his wits’ end, the old man took ship east across the stormy strait, in search of an ally in his unending war against us; and he sailed back defiant with a borrowed army braying a new challenge. Then came battle and a welter of blood such that not one of those men from over the sea took ship again to his homeland; but my man was unscathed, as was his comrade, still with us and fighting on our side against his own grandfather and all his hundreds of warriors.
Next in desperation the old man sailed back over the sea, only this time for his old wetnurse, to fetch her out of her refuge in the otherworld, she being worth an army; she had a power of veiling herself and a whole army in invisibility and of killing by magic. Once they landed, she, out of love for her nursling, flew straight to where my man was hunting alone by the water and launched herself off a lily pad to strike at him out of the clear midair. But he, at bay, divined in a flash where the darts came from, and hurled his spear into the void, piercing her, so that she took on her hag shape again and tumbled to earth with a shriek. He hacked her head off and took it as a trophy to his foster father, who showed it in turn to the old man, asking if it were not high time he made peace.
He had had enough and gave in. He and my love met to swear a truce before the high king my father, who had brokered it, and he then and there handed over my dowry in land and gold. Our comrade rejoined his grandfather and we two went west and made for ourselves a hill fort where we had long wandered in the wild. If those years were our springtime, there we came into our summer at last and our harvest time.
This whole green land is steeped and sodden, waterlogged, and my man died for want of a sip of water out of the hands of his bitter enemy. But it was that man who plotted this death, with his ruse of a boar hunt, though this time he was the one forsworn, they two having long been at peace.
An unforeseen death, it was nonetheless long foretold, if not to him. He did not know that when he was a boy in his foster father’s care, living with his mother and a little half-brother, his blood father came and killed that half-brother out of spite, and was found out; and that the dead boy was brought back to life by his own blood father as a boar, spectral, monstrous, and bound to avenge his own death one day, not on his killer but on the son. This the old warrior knew. He was in the crowd that day and saw and heard what happened. My love grew up to be that warrior’s follower and then, on my account, his enemy. By what long paths of chance, for good and ill, had he to come to that fight to the death! Was all his life fated in babyhood beyond all knowledge or will? In that case, so was our meeting and all that followed. Or would he always have come by some path or other to confront that boar, to his downfall, had we never met, had I married in misery or never been born? If what happens is fate overmastering us, not even the old man was to blame for what he did in cold blood, any more than we were – than I was, in my ignorance, in good faith, ablaze in hot love.
Be that as it may, he was at the bottom of it, the old man. Some even say he took the shape of the boar to lie in wait. My love, who only knew he was under a bond never to eat boar, if not why, saw no harm in a hound’s belling in the still of the night. So forlorn was that sound, so desolate, that my skin crawled and I pleaded with him not to go. But he was bound, he said, to follow any hunting horn he heard; and the old man knew that too. At daybreak my man went off, alone but for his hound, to join the hunters, not even knowing who they were or what the quarry, let alone that he was the quarry. But if our life is indeed foreordained, and our death, so is our nature, and his was to meet death face to face.
High on the mountainside he ran the boar to ground, tackled and felled it and gave it a mortal wound, and was not gored, or so I was told; but a bristle of the boar stung him with deadly venom, and this too was foretold, that they two sons of the one mother would die the one death. His hound that had fled the boar slunk back to howl over its master. Soon the old man, that lurker in the dark, came along with his own great hound to crow over him where he lay fallen, and to wonder out loud if any woman who had ever loved him could bear the sight of him now. He, writhing, asked for water. The comrades came gathering around, one at his head, another undoing his clothes, another tending the wound, in vain. They all knew that the old man, and he alone, had the power to save the life of anyone he gave water to drink out of his own hands. They called on him but he baulked. At that his son and grandson flared up in fury, until, daunted, the old man dragged his feet down to the well in the hollow, scooped up water and brought it
back, only to let it run through his fingers. Again they raged and again he trudged off to the well, and spilt the water, and, under threat of death, again, and by the third time it was too late. A great howl of grief went up, from both hounds and men. His comrades came and told me how the old man had got by foul means what he had always wanted and could never get in a fair fight – his betrayer dead at his feet. They warned me, they being his close kin, that now his will would be set on the wife he had always wanted. Tearless, with my man’s hound writhing on its belly at my side in anguish, I told them I would not have him, I would die by my own hand rather than that, I would throw myself in the deepest water.
On us winter had fallen, unending winter. In my grief I held off in our hill fort and lay low and saw no one. No attack came and no siege; I remained after all the high king’s daughter. Meanwhile I sent my four young sons over the sea, first for their own safety, and then to be trained in warfare and come back as grown men and avenge their father. When after long years they came home – and how his father’s blood shone out of them, his beauty and valour! – the old man got wind of it and made good his silent threat of years by massing the warriors at our walls. As he might have known, he had left it too late. My four sons battled the cohort of one hundred men that he sent out. They piled up the corpses at his feet. He thought better of it then and pulled back.
If we wondered what and when his next move might be, we were not kept waiting long. He sent messengers first, as he had to my father long ago, with marriage in mind. Then, as now, for better or worse I was on my own. He came to parley, as I had demanded, under my safe conduct, alone but for two kinsmen. Ravaged and grim he looked as they came up the gates, he who had led my sons’ father to his death in cold blood and stood gloating, arms folded. He was only here under duress, with his men in uproar and close to revolt; and he had a hide to save and a mind to healing our feud if a way could be found.
This Water Page 7