This Water

by Beverley Farmer

as I am

  deathless

  never fear I

  nor dare

  I will hound you

  down

  so let this cave be

  lifeblood

  for a little while

  messenger

  crawl

  thread of gold

  there seek her out

  bring her to light

  her or her fate

  you shall live

  when you shall be

  lifeless

  one more shade

  will know you

  try to outfox me

  O holy mother O forlorn! first bearer of the firebrands and heart of fire O lead me to where

  I

  O

  The Ice Bride

  His remote snowball of a world is a solitude as far as the edge of the dark, and the core of his realm is a palace whose crystal dome stares up like a blind eye into the universe.

  Hived in the dome is a labyrinth of rooms, floor on floor, which is the crown of his world, as she herself, as he so often tells her, is its jewel. Inside the icy walls are rooms within rooms, ramifications of empty rooms whose walls hold up translucent rows of shelves to perpetual lantern light. The walls along the winding passageways shimmer as palely as the ice world beyond. Behind them are other rooms, some with an open doorway, some with a door open inwards, some with a blank wall through which only a blur can be seen. Above and below each room, more rooms recede, smaller and smaller. Through the dome is the whole glittering encircling dark of the universe. No night falls here or day breaks; only webs of snow or fog from time to time drape it in reflections of its own faint light.

  He first came into being for her when he appeared and took her in his arms. She spoke her first ever words: What are you?

  He kissed her. I am the Master of Snow and Ice, he said, and you are my bride, my masterpiece, a paragon of bridehood in the making. I have much to reveal to you now that we are married. The vows, the rules I have bound you with, our mutual duties, are those of fidelity, patience, honesty, devotion, trust. In the fullness of time you will also know by heart the bonds of silence, absence and solitude.

  I see, she said, and he smiled, knowing better, and kissed her again. Have no fear. It will come more easily as you are perfected.

  White from head to foot, in clear weather the dome, hiving the moonlight and the starlight, glows from afar, if there were any eyes to see in the wastes of snow and ice. In what passes for high summer in this slow world – although she is yet to see a glimmer of sun, let alone a summer – its crystal catches the sun and daylight is all. Then too no night falls, it has nowhere to fall; just as the sun never falls, but hangs low and rises again, and a moon leaves a faint white shadow from time to time. Then there is only a dimming of the glare or the brilliance of the sun as it dips and soars from horizon to horizon, changing from red gold to gold to white and back again. As for the depths of winter, then the sun never rises. She is a winter bride and her winter is one black night. If the sky is clear, the stars throb overhead and one moon or another sails shrinking and swelling, now here, now there, penetrating, now through this surface of the dome and now that, faintly, or piercingly. Sometimes sheets of light move loosely overhead, emerald green and golden, unfurling and furling lanterns that make the skin of this whole ice world luminous. Rarest of all is a blue sky. In between high summer and deep winter there is only a diffuse whiteness of day. By nature this sky is white, grey, black, lost in fog or overcast in cloud, and the new snow blows in, whirling storms of snow, or falls hard and piles high up the walls, blinding them, or freezing, or the dome is sunk in a suspension of fog in the glow of its lanterns. Time barely moves here.

  Whatever is inside the dome and outside always has been and always will be, as will the Lord of it, and of her. The dome is where they belong. He says so when he comes to her out of nowhere, an apparition. There is no other he or she and no other where than here in the vastness of the land and spotted sky with its moons that come and go. So he has told her over and over since he came and she knows it by heart. By herself she knows nothing, and how this can be she has no idea, when he knows everything, and she is willing to learn. He pleases her. All she desires is to please him in whatever way he desires.

  How can it be that he came and she was here, when he was here first? He has been here before, so he has said, and been away, in his constant coming and going. Constant, he says again, looking into her eyes, and she knows she loves him, if not what before is, or away, or why constant. Is she not constant? Is she not constancy’s very self? Has she too been here before, come and gone? Why must she stay behind?

  Why go? Must you?

  Not for pleasure, my love. I take my pleasure here.

  Where do you go? she says into the soft angle of his neck. Take me with you.

  You belong here.

  So do you.

  But all his answer is a hand under her chin to lift her face for a kiss.

  This is how it begins, with an amazement that arises whenever she sees in her mind’s eye how, as she is standing by the outer wall looking into the world, there comes a speck of glow that moves in, growing, and stops, and moves back into the dark and suddenly, behind her, with a rustling, an apparition of light looms up. Whirling, she sees another just like the reflection, and like her own self, clothed in folds of white, only not as much like her as her reflection is; although in another way even more like, being solid, whereas the reflection is faint, diaphanous, misty, coming ever closer, taller and taller, lifting her veil, folding its silken arms around her and pressing a soft mouth to hers.

  Her heart beating like footfalls, in a spin of confusion she pulls away to stare back into the dark. But the glow has gone out like a falling star and she turns her back to the window, and faces him.

  Nothing else is here, he says. We are alone, you and I .

  We are alone, you and I.

  I love you and you love me.

  I love you and you love me.

  Always, my Lady Bride, the apparition says then. And my Love.

  Again she catches the rhythm and repeats it after him, gazing into his face, enraptured, and he smiles.

  My Lord is what you are to call me.

  My Lord, she will always remember to call him, and my Love, and turns back to the window, to where they stand once more so entwined and embodied, facing two luminous selves. My Lady Bride. My Lord. My Love. Always. Alone, you and I.

  He takes her hand and leads her up the spiral stair into the dome to the bridebed. It is clothed in white fur and spun silk and has a canopy and side curtains of the same cloth. They alone and their bed have clothes. They take theirs off to slip into the bedclothes and stroke each other’s smoothness. Sometimes he takes her clothes off and then it is her turn, turn and turn about. From the first she has liked to have the curtains open day and night so as to see out into the sky. He from the first has always closed them over before lying down, and left them closed on leaving, however long he stays. She can never tell how long. When she awakes she rouses herself to pull the curtains apart on to a changing sky, or a fall of snow, a starwheel turning, a transfiguring moon. Where does the light come from, she asks when he opens his eyes. He answers with a kiss on each eyelid that sends her back to sleep. When she next opens her eyes he is gone.

  The dome crowns a fathomless array of passages and crystalline rooms, their walls clear or translucent white, as are the floors and high ceilings. Shadows are where that light is, whether light held inside or trickling down through the dome and the windows in the round of the outside wall, high narrow windows, little more than the width of one who might stand there looking out. She wonders how the inside would look from the outside, with its inner vanes of wall revolving as the onlooker walked, and the one figure that is herself, inside, oblivious, also tracing its winding path, and stopping, perhaps, having sensed some other presence, and going up to the nearest window, taller and taller, confronting her counterpart.

 
; But there is no way in or out as far as she knows, and no one else to see in. How he comes and goes is his secret.

  On the inside there is a world of things, room after room of the treasures he has gathered on his travels and is showing her step by step, room by room. He has a way of opening a door in a blind wall where no door is, a pass of his hand – she always cries out in surprise and he smiles. She watches closely, in vain, to see how it is done. But once he has led her in and shown her the room himself, this door too will stay open and, as long as she can find it again, she has the freedom of this room. From far down the passage she can tell by the slant of the light each door casts, being transparent, which ones are open. In mist and fog there may not be enough light and then she will lose her way in the fold on fold of passages, looking for the outer passage, but there is nothing to go by, with the light outside no brighter than inside, and all the lanterns reflecting in multiples. Then she knows she is lost and trembles in fear. Why, when she is only making her own way through, lost in contemplation only, not truly lost, it is not as if she were going anywhere? How can she go astray if all she has to do is draw the thread of herself through until he comes to take her hand and lead her into some luminous new room of treasures by way of a hidden door? And yet, the tremor. What if he is away? He smiles and says she has nothing to fear. She is the most luminous of all, he says, his one true bride forever without flaw and the crown jewel of his domain.

  So it will always begin, with his apparition at her back in the pane again, and a speck of glow dwindling away in the dark outside, but sometimes not, depending which window she is standing by; and sometimes he comes in moonlight, announced in a speck of darkness growing larger on the snow; and sometimes after a snowstorm the fresh snow has added an outer frame like a eyelid, and its white is all that can be seen, until he appears at her back and takes her in his arms. She will always be awake and at a window when he comes, having had a sense of him, of longing for him, of having been drawn here on watch for him. They two will stand doubly reflected, over and over, each pair different because at a different angle, looking on, sunk in wall after wall.

  Sometimes he has a treasure to give her who has everything. The first is a ring of gold he slips on her finger when she is not looking, and nor is he, but kissing.

  She breaks away and stares down, fluttering her hand.

  My Lady, he says. My Bride –

  Its light is like the moon, and yet not –

  They break off, having spoken together.

  To have and to hold – what do you say?

  Thank you – my Lord.

  – And to wear as the sign of your bridehood forever.

  I will, she says. To have and to hold?

  As is your right and duty, he says, my Bride.

  So she will, although she is not sure if she or the ring is to have and to hold.

  He has never spoken like this before. Nor does she see why she needs a sign, she who is bridehood’s very self, when his presence, his apparition, his own very self, is all the sign he has. The ring holds her in its grip, glinting and catching her eye. But none of this can be said aloud, as she is coming to know without knowing how she knows. She is bound by invisible rules of time, silence, love and more, whose names she has forgotten, clamped on her with this ring.

  In pride of place in the dome is another bright treasure he presents to her, a moving mechanism encased in its own room a long way down from the dome and yet full of light, full to bursting. At times the long light of the moon reaches down into its body to join the lantern light, and at times so does a bright star. The movements of the mechanism are internal, held tightly inside itself. It revolves its fretted parts in silence, dancing with itself and all the while shedding a glitter of gold.

  The first time that he led her by the hand along all four sides his face was flickering in all the gold and hers, behind him, in the crystal.

  This is a clock, a timepiece, he said, by way of explanation, breaking the silence. It tells the time. And when she frowned, still not understanding, a little answering frown appeared on his face.

  It keeps track, he went on, of the time. She nodded and his brow cleared. What does it tell him, even so, she wonders whenever they stand here together in contemplation of its behaviour. Of what does it keep track? Where is the track it keeps? The intricate machinery has nothing to tell her, it only waves its wheels and jointed arms on and on in orbits and multiples of intricate rhythm, a writhing lattice of small consequences, naked and magisterial in its self-containment. What need of this, to tell what the moon and the stars already tell? It is constant in all weathers, yes, although the sky passes at the same steady pace regardless, just as the mechanism does, and will go on the same way if it stops. Not that it ever will, he assures her of that, and why would she want it to, if he wants it to go on? But it keeps time a secret it never tells. It is the golden silence at the heart of the dome and beautiful in itself, as it moves and its facets shower the light in a glaze of gold. She sees herself in it, and him when he is here, large and close in the crystal, and small and intermittent in this or that other of its gliding parts, moving as the parts move. It takes her faint shadow too, and his, and moves them over the walls. It has its own shadows, soundlessly gliding – and yet, when she presses herself to the crystal there is a faint throbbing, a ripple under the skin, as there is in herself, and in him – or is that her, their, own throbbing, reflected back out? Sometimes when she comes away a smudge is left keeping track of where she has been, a breath of presence, quick to clear. No such sign ever forms on the inside of the crystal.

  How does it tell him the time? It is like the ring, his ring, or hers, but only at the back of her mind, out of reach. They are two of a kind, the clock and the ring, one substance and one shape. But whereas the clock, once she goes out, is gone time after time from her mind, the ring never goes. And whereas the ring is simplicity itself, she can never hold clear in her mind, as he does, the shapes and patterns and slippery convolutions of the clock. Every time she comes back into its room there is a shock of surprise before she knows it again, insofar as she does know it. If to him its meaning is as clear as crystal, to her it is always as formless as the lights and shadows and reflections it throws off in passing. Try as she might, all that she ever retains of its presence is a slow coil of entangled light flowing like water or wine.

  These are the substances she knows best, for they are what sustains him and her: this water so pure that it is invisible unless it is shaken and then a faint crinkled silvery edge appears; and this wine almost so, but for a stain of gold. As in love and fear she takes in the water, each time, and the wine, they are already gone from her mind as soon as the goblet is empty. She is as if reborn on the threshold of the room where they take their meal, a new being, a bride – and whose doing is that if not the water’s and the wine’s? What else is there? Nothing is lacking. Whether or not unseen hands provide for their every need, only he knows. He says she is as pure as the water he pours from the jugs into the goblets they drink from, though this water is not so much gold as silver, as a rule, depending on the light, whether of the lanterns or the moon, the water that is life to them. It is no less beautiful to see when set in motion, and in its simplicity no less intricate, than the timepiece. And while the water moves itself in its habitual pattern, the pattern is always looser, as if water were heavier and more free. She holds the goblet sideways and the water slides forward, keeping itself flat. If she shakes the goblet the water wavers up the walls and slowly comes to rest. She loves it for its behaviour and for being as glossy and transparent as the goblet, so that whatever is behind or underneath shows through; and for the way it takes the shape of the goblet, endlessly pliant, as free and supple in shape, it seems to her, as the silvery pliant beings they themselves are, he and she.

  Everything else is hard, frozen solid, unchanging, but for the flow of spun cloth, water and wine.

  I see what water is like! she says one day, and he looks up, attentive
. The winding stair to the dome, the crystal of the stair!

  So it is, he says, and smiles.

  And it is like…there are other things it is like…

  I know, he says, and lays her down in his arms, stopping her mouth with a kiss.

  It seems to her that she too is transparent, in a way, to him if not to herself; as much so as the water is, or wine. While she never sees past his surface, he sees her through and through. How is it that she alone is blank and unknowing, when otherwise they two are so alike that they are almost reflections of each other? Never mind, he says, and so she will not mind. She will learn, she is always learning. She understands all that he says, if not always his meaning, and that will come in time. Meanwhile if her own self is a blank to her, he sees and knows her, and that will have to do, that she is his to see and read, as easily as he reads the way from room to room and the winding and unwinding dance of the timepiece. He for his part never minds her not seeing as well as he does, and needing to be told again what she should know by now. Time will tell, he tells her. She can take her time. All the time in the world.

  She is learning to play a game. She sees him coming from some far part of the great labyrinth, through sheet on sheet of light, and she has to catch him and he to evade her for as long as he can, or the other way round, or they may change halfway, until in no time she is giddy. Their shapes warp in the layers of crystal that divide them. Neither must hurry, but keep to a walking pace, nor call out, in the game of silence he calls a ‘merry’ dance – and she the ‘marry’ dance, in her innocence – he is leading her on. It ends with him winning, and her found, the loser and the one lost. She is the one who falls in a heap, in helpless surrender, and then he will be at her side straight away, smiling and catching her up, as if he has been there within reach all the time.

  Were you lost? he says. Then you are found. And when she wins, once in a while he lets her win, and she says that he was the lost one, and he agrees. So I was, he says, and now I am found.