Skin

by Ilka Tampke

  I nodded, urging him to continue.

  ‘My bones and skin were all turned to fish,’ he said. ‘There was pain in the transition.’

  ‘You are the fish…’ I murmured, my mind twisting in the figuring of it.

  ‘When I finally found the light of the surface, I was in a different place. The hardworld. You were there and I was man again.’

  ‘That was the first time? When I found you with the hook?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I stared, incredulous, into his dark eyes. He took fish form, unaided, without intent. He was the most gifted of journeymen. ‘Am I the first you have known then, other than these women with whom you live?’

  ‘Not the first. There have been other visitors here, other journeywomen. But none as strong as you. You are the first who has lured me out of this place. If only for a short while.’

  I leaned forward and pressed my lips against the ridge of his cheek, flooded with tenderness toward him. He was at once so needing of care, yet so firmly held within his own skin, as if my love would roll off him like water.

  The wind squalled outside the hut and I heard distant shouts from the Mothers as they secured their doors.

  There was little light beneath the doorskins now. I burned to be gone, but I could not leave now, not without hearing the whole of it. ‘Why did you not tell me this as we met?’

  ‘Because I did not understand. I no longer knew myself.’ He glanced at me. ‘All I knew was that I was under some kind of spell and I could not venture more than a few paces beyond the edges of water before I was bound by the way of the fish.’

  I nodded, speechless at the workings of the realms.

  ‘With every passage, I saw more clearly what had happened. But my love for you had grown also. I thought you would not wish to meet me if you knew the truth.’

  I squeezed his knuckles, still held in mine.

  ‘How could I tell you that I had only a few hours or less to walk on your country before I would feel the ache of the fish in my flesh? And that I must enter the water or I would change right there on the ground and die with your disgust as my last memory?’

  ‘Disgust? It could never be.’ I stared at his profile, choking with love. There was such intimacy in this truth, and yet the facts of it brought us no closer. ‘But how did you know when to come?’

  ‘I could feel through the water when you were near. At first I could reach you outside the forest. But then I could no longer take form as man unless I was within the forest’s bounds.’

  ‘If only I had known this—’

  ‘I sang you my song! You did not return it. There was no purpose in telling you. But when you showed me the sword—’ His face buckled then hardened. ‘I don’t belong here, Ailia, I belong in the place where my mother was from, where you are from—’

  I stared at him. I had no words, no answers. All I could offer were my arms, my mouth. And these he accepted. He swung around to face me, loosening my robe with one hand while the other pulled me close.

  ‘I have to leave,’ I whispered.

  His lips brushed my bare shoulder.

  Our fingers trailed, trembling, over each other’s arms and necks, then beneath our robes, the secret places that made us both shiver and gasp, before we shed our clothes and fell naked on the furs that lined the floor.

  Now he did not pull away. Now he was here, above me, around me, grasping me to him as though life itself depended on our union.

  We rocked together as one: of bone, skin and muscle, faces buried in each other’s shoulders. Yet still we were not fully joined. Would he betray the force between us again? ‘Now,’ I whispered.

  He raised himself above me and, with eyes locked to mine, entered my flesh and, with it, my spirit. Our movement hastened, our bellies slipped with sweat until we were clinging to each other as our world broke open.

  We lay speechless, keeling.

  His seed coursed within me. My flesh hummed as though made of light.

  As the world re-formed, it was something other.

  When my breath was quiet I sat up. ‘I have stayed too long, my love.’ I said, reaching for my dress.

  He rolled over and did not respond.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked, leaning on his shoulder.

  ‘I have given you all and now you will leave—’

  ‘It is not my will to leave,’ I said, anguished that he would think it so. ‘Were it not for my Cookmother…I will return as soon as I can.’

  ‘And I must wait.’

  ‘Can you come with me?’ I asked.

  ‘How?’ he said, as he turned back to me. ‘I will die beyond the waters of the forest. Have you not heard me? It is only as fish that I breach the veil between the realms. I cannot come through as man.’

  As I listened, a truth began to form in my thoughts. ‘Taliesin, if you were made kin to the hardworld—by marriage—could you come through as you are?’

  He gave a despondent laugh. ‘I should not be surprised that you have reckoned it. This is as the Mothers have always told me. They will release me by my marriage, but that it must be true kinship, a marriage of souls. That means only you, and you do not have skin. You cannot marry.’

  ‘Yet the Mothers do not call for skin!’ I said.

  ‘They do not,’ he said. ‘But I belong to where it is hard. I belong to where skin is needed.’

  Again, there was no time now to unravel what he might tell me of the Mothers’ freedom from skin. There was only time to forge our future. I paused before I spoke it. ‘I do have skin. I have met one who knows it.’

  Something shifted with the utterance.

  ‘Has this person told it to you?’ he breathed.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘But she will.’

  I reached for the soft, dirty fabric of my under-robe and tore a long strip away from the hem. ‘We cannot marry yet…’ I pulled him to standing. ‘But this I promise you: I will learn of my skin and I will return for you.’ Hurriedly I laid my left arm over his and bound the strip tightly around both our wrists as a handfasting, a rough betrothal. ‘Taliesin of the Salmon, do you bind yourself to me?’

  ‘Yes,’ he nodded, laughing.

  ‘Now you…’ I urged, when he did nothing more than grin.

  ‘Oh.’ He took a deep breath and lifted his chest. ‘Ailia of skin unknown, but who hails from Caer Cad, do you bind yourself to me?’

  For an instant, I saw far into the depths of him, and stood, teetering, at this precipice. ‘For all time.’

  His kiss earthed me.

  ‘But now I must go. It is already dark and I must travel by torchlight.’ I unwound the rag from our wrists.

  ‘Ailia—’ He frowned as he caught my spinning hand. ‘Stay this night.’

  I shook my head. ‘My suckling mother ails—’

  ‘Give me this night and go back at dawn tomorrow to tend her. You do not know when you will return to me. Give me a night to hold as a talisman.’

  I hung poised, trapped by his gaze. He loomed before me,
his eyes pleading and yet challenging.

  My breath caught with a sudden sense of danger but I clung to him, as if he were all that was safe. I pressed my cheek to his bare chest, inhaling his soursweet skin.

  ‘Why have they kept you?’ I murmured. But even as I uttered it, I knew the answer.

  They wanted him because his bruised light knew all the world’s shadows, because anyone who encountered him would want to be close, as I did, to the tattered wholeness of the universe that turned within him.

  I stared at him, so grateful, so disbelieving that he was mine. If I had nothing else, this was enough. ‘One night,’ I said.

  After a burial, the closest kinswoman must pass the first night in the bed of the dead.

  This will prevent the spirit stealing back from the Otherworld.

  I SLIPPED INTO Steise’s doorway just before dawn, poorly slept, churning with worry for Cookmother. I washed and dressed, then Steise walked with me to the edge of the hutgroup.

  ‘You have done well,’ she said. ‘You can hold strong change.’

  I nodded miserably. I had not done well. I had delayed my return to the one who had given me all. ‘How shall I get back?’

  ‘This way.’ She pointed toward the western horizon. The hills and valley were bleak in the struggling light. ‘There is a track.’

  ‘But that is the opposite direction from which I came,’ I said. ‘I must return to the temple and travel by boat…’

  ‘Go.’ She waved me on.

  I strode down the hillside and followed the track into forest, staying faithful to Steise’s direction, though this was no Isle country that I recognised and I drew no closer to the temple. As I neared the forest edge, I sensed the same thickening of the air that I had met in the gully. I laboured to gain enough breath, but, despite the discomfort, I did not need my sword to cut my passage. The realms were aligned and I could move through.

  The trees receded and I was in open grassland. It took a few deep gulps of this new air before I realised I was staring at the fields of Summer. The Mothers had sent me directly home. I wanted to weep with gratitude, but I began to run. As each foot hit the ground, I prayed. Let it not be too late. Frost crunched on the mud as I ran up the entranceway of Caer Cad. It was deep winter, as it was with the Mothers. I could be thankful, at least, that the seasons had not been turned by my journey.

  The cold had driven people indoors and the streets of Cad were empty. I knew I should go directly to the Great House to announce my return but I stopped, breathless, at the kitchen door. The willow wreath had not been placed. She lived. I rang the bell then pushed straight through.

  The kitchen was greatly altered. I scarcely recognised it. The clutter of cook tools and piles of baskets were neatened. Heka and Cah sat at the fire.

  ‘Where is she?’ I cried. ‘Where are her things?’ Then I saw Cookmother lying in darkness, Ianna crouched beside her.

  ‘Ailia!’ Ianna looked up, her face wretched.

  ‘Are you returned from the Isle already?’ asked Cah without greeting.

  ‘Not yet.’ I tugged off my cloak. ‘I’ve come to tend Cookmother.’

  ‘You are too late,’ said Heka. ‘She died not yet an hour ago. We have not even placed the willow.’

  An hour! I ran toward her. Perhaps she had fallen into a half-death. Perhaps her spirit was still within reach.

  I knelt down beside her, stroking strands of hair away from her forehead. The folds of her skin fell smooth as she lay and her face looked as gentle as a babe’s. I put my arms around her. She was nothing but bones. Her bedsores leaked a wicked smell and I winced as I held her. She had been poorly tended.

  The girls murmured behind me.

  ‘Go away!’ I shouted. ‘Let me be alone with her.’

  As they shuffled outside, I turned back to my suckling mother. ‘Tidings, Cookmother,’ I whispered. I watched her closed eyes, her chest, for a shadow of movement. ‘I am here.’

  Did her cold fingers clutch back as I squeezed them? Quickly, I built a drying fire with spruce and birch brush, washed and dressed her sores in flax, and laid her on fresh straw. I warmed stones in the fire and placed them on her chest to draw out the wetness, then I boiled ivy and coltsfoot and dribbled drops down her throat from a bronze pipette. This I did for many hours, while Ianna, Heka and Cah kept their distance. Finally I sat still beside her.

  A rough tongue greeted my hands as I rested them in my lap.

  ‘Neha.’ I rubbed her thick winter coat and kissed her head.

  I waited a long time for Cookmother to awaken. But when Neha barked at the silence, I knew she had seen what I could not: the spirit’s flight.

  I walked out into the cold night and looked up at the clouds that emptied the sky of stars. A horn call sounded from the shrine. It was midwinter. The very night that she had found me.

  How could I not have come?

  Ianna emerged behind me. ‘Ailia,’ she said. ‘Oh, Ailia.’ She leaned against me and I held her, dry-eyed, while she wept.

  I deserved no comfort.

  We took elder tea by the fire before hanging the willow to announce the death. There would be little sleep that night.

  ‘How soon did she worsen after I left?’ I asked, cradling my tea.

  ‘She grew well after you left,’ said Ianna. ‘It was not until the following summer that she caught damp sickness again. Then it worsened with the cold.’

  I stared at her. ‘But I left only last autumn—how long, by your reckoning, have I been gone?’

  ‘I thought you had the knowledge gifts,’ scoffed Heka.

  ‘You left the autumn before last,’ said Ianna. ‘Grief has confused you.’

  I nodded and sipped my tea. I was wrong. There had been a distortion. But this time, seasons had been lost, not gained. A second solstice horn call tore my thoughts from the figuring of it. By turns of the hardworld I was sixteen summers.

  ‘Are there not solstice fires this night?’ I asked.

  ‘The legion is too close now,’ said Cah. ‘Since last Beltane, Fraid has ceased the fires.’

  Ianna helped me weave the wreath while Heka and Cah took the news to the Tribequeen.

  ‘Did she know much pain?’ I asked. ‘Who made her medicines?’

  ‘I did,’ said Ianna. ‘Mostly hogroot and verbane.’

  I withheld a frown. These were poor treatments for fever.

  ‘She was maddened with heat by the end,’ Ianna continued. ‘But there was one thing she said, over and over, when death was close.’

  I looked up. ‘What was it?’

  Ianna faltered, suddenly hesitant.

  ‘Tell me,’ I urged.

  ‘My boy,’ she answered. ‘Over and over. My boy.’

  All through the night, tribespeople came and went, offering their blessings to Cookmother on her journey to Caer Sidi.

  Fraid arrived first with Llwyd by her side. Bebin was called from her marriage house, swollen with child. Too stricken to speak much beyond greetings, I embraced them all and told them only brief news of my time on the Isle.


  Heka and Cah served thick stew and warm honey beer. Amid the crying and keening for Cookmother’s death in this world was laughter and celebration for her birth in another. All who came left a small trinket—a silver statue, a carving or a small bone comb—for her to take to Caer Sidi. By the end of the night there was a pile of gifts two hands high beside her.

  When the visitors were gone and the girls had fallen to sleep, Fraid and Llwyd sat with me, taking a last drink. At Fraid’s temples were thin streaks of silver that were not there when I left Cad. ‘Who will wake her?’ she asked.

  ‘I will,’ I said. ‘I will wake her for seven days.’

  ‘A long wake,’ said Fraid. Seven days was the wake of a high warrior or a low king, not of a cookwoman.

  ‘She is deserving of it.’ I had not been here to prolong her life. I was determined to care for her in death.

  Fraid looked to Llwyd, who nodded his head. ‘Seven days,’ she said.

  Draining their cups, they rose to leave.

  ‘Journeyman—’ I touched his cloak. ‘Can you stay?’

  Fraid departed and he sat back beside me. He waited, but I could not find my words.

  ‘She was well loved,’ he said at last. ‘But by none more than you.’

  ‘And yet I did not come.’

  ‘You were her greatest comfort,’ said Llwyd. ‘You were her renewal.’

  I shook my head then looked to him. ‘Ianna said she spoke of something as she died.’ I paused. ‘She asked of “her boy”.’

  Llwyd flinched.

  ‘Was it just the fever?’ I whispered. ‘Do you know of what she spoke?’

  He ladled some more warm ale into our cups. ‘She has told you, I expect, that once she was a journeywoman? That she walked with the Mothers?’

  ‘Yes,’ I nodded. ‘And that they kept something she treasured. She said nothing more.’