The Mythic Dream

by Dominik Parisien

  “Well, maybe someone wrote an ending because the story isn’t yet over, and there’s little comfort in unfinished things.”

  He had always seemed impossibly old to her, as adults do to children, but in these last visits, she could see the patterns of age on his face and in his step.

  “I’ve no right to ask this,” he’d said, “but I hope that you’ll come back. Come home. At the end. When my story finishes.”

  Niamh had squeezed his hand, and promised that she would.

  * * *

  I wonder sometimes how things would have ended, had not Aífraic transformed himself from fisherman to guardian of stories. Ireland changed and changed and changed again in the years after I spoke my curse. The old gods faded from memory, and their stories faded with them. Even my name—Aoife, Eva, Eve—is now better known in another woman’s story.

  But the swans and their story had Aífraic. He listened and he recorded and he made of himself a witness. He wove his thread into their tapestry, and kept it there through will. He lived hundreds of years past his span because of this, outliving even Aodh and Conn, both shot from the sky in the years that Ireland tore itself apart.

  Through it all, through war and time, and even until the end, until the cancer that burned through his blood extinguished his life, Aífraic listened. And he wrote. And he remembered.

  * * *

  The cry of seabirds woke Niamh with the dawn, the sun striping gold across the waves. She pulled on a jacket, boots, and stepped out into the crisp morning air.

  There, out on the rock of Carricknarone, was a swan. Elegant and lovely, and utterly alone.

  Niamh closed her eyes at the pinch of her heart, at the full-bodied wish that her great-uncle could have been with her there, to see this.

  When she opened them again, the swan had left the island, and was swimming, very near to shore. She opened her beak and spoke in poetry: Imagine a story as something that remains.

  Then the swan stepped between the tide and the sand. As she did, her bones shifted, her feathers fell away, revealing a human woman. “Thank you for being here, Niamh. Aífraic told me so many stories of you.”

  Niamh realized then that Aífraic had seen this before, had heard the poetry spoken by this very swan. That he had told her a true story, one that only now was ending.

  “I think,” Niamh said, her voice windblown and rough, “that he told me your story, too.”

  “It has been long in the telling,” the woman—Fionnghuala—said. “I am glad you are here, to see me through its end.”

  “He meant, I think, to be here, too.” Crying now, the tears mixing with the salt spray on her skin.

  “If you will remember me, remember this, it is more than enough that you are.”

  The woman fell quiet. Niamh took her hand, held it as the woman dissolved into sand and water, and one white feather, floating on the tide. Then she went back inside, to that final part-written notebook, and she wrote of the death of a swan.

  * * *

  And so the curse I cast was no more. All four of those children who were never mine—Aodh and Fionnghuala, Fiachra and Conn—gone to dust and feather and story.

  I am still here, still raven-winged, and I do not hear the steps of Death behind me. Perhaps that is a curse. Perhaps it is a story, unended.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  * * *

  Sometimes when I write, I give pieces of my own life to my characters. Like Niamh, I love the story of the Children of Lir. And also like Niamh, I feel that the most common ending of the story—a convenient priest, the baptism of the four former swans—is wrong. And by wrong, I mean in the sense of not matching up with anything in the previous part of the story. It feels tacked on, as if a different person wrote the ending to a story someone else started. And so when given the chance to retell the Children of Lir, I wanted to write about that odd-seeming ending, and about the way stories get told, about what gets passed on. My version of this story is dedicated to the memory of my grandmother.

  * * *

  KAT HOWARD

  ACROSS THE RIVER

  BY

  * * *

  LEAH CYPESS

  When the sorcerer walked through the town gates, I was standing with my friends Reuven and Yitzchak in the square, which was not where we were supposed to be. Reuven should have been in the study hall, where his wife had directed him to go. Yitzchak should have been at the market, helping his father. And I should have been resting my voice, since that evening, for the first time, I was going to be allowed to lead the prayers in synagogue—an honor I had been hoping for and practicing for, but that I now, somewhat nervously, wished was not coming so soon.

  We were all, mind you, on our way to where we were supposed to be. We were obedient young men, with no inner drive for trouble. Reuven loved his studies, and I loved the taste of prayers in my mouth, the feeling that came when I hit the right accents with the right emotions. Yitzchak, while he did not exactly love trade, certainly appreciated the money he would take home. But we were all still young, and it was a warm lush day with the first hint of summer twining through the breeze. It had been a long time since the three of us had sat together under a teacher’s stern eye, and though we saw each other in passing almost every day, we always had something to catch each other up on.

  “My wife,” Reuven said—he was newly married, and always blushed slightly when he said my wife—“tells me her sister is ready for marriage, and her parents are talking to the marriage broker. What do you say, Yitzchak? You won’t find a better family.”

  “Eh,” Yitzchak said, lifting a shoulder. “I admire her parents well enough, but I’m not sure I like who my brother-in-law would be.”

  Reuven made a show of punching him, and I gave them both a sharp look. Not too sharp—I didn’t want to appear insulted that I, apparently, was not a good marriage prospect for Reuven’s wife’s sister—but really, we were no longer children. If the rabbi’s wife was at market, and saw me behaving like a wild animal, she might mention it to the rabbi, and he might decide I wasn’t ready to lead prayers after all.

  “I have to go,” I said. “I need to practice for tonight.”

  Yitzchak lifted the corner of his mouth—once he was in a jocular mood, it was hard to get him out of it—but Reuven nodded. “Of course. Are you going to sing one of your own poems?”

  “No!” I hadn’t even considered it. No one but the two of them and my father had heard my compositions. And though they all assured me my prayer-poems were wonderful, I knew they were just shells of what they could have been. They needed an infusion of words and songs I couldn’t yet give them. And though I knew where I could go to find that music, I wasn’t ready.

  I could not possibly explain. So I said, “It’s only my first—”

  Then a hush fell over the square, and we turned just in time to see the sorcerer walk through the gate.

  He was dressed like a monk, but his cassock cast a shadow darker than itself, so we all knew immediately what he was. He walked past the beggars at the well, past the women herding mules along the street, past the children playing near the walls, straight toward us. The only three Jews in the square.

  We should have run. We would have, if he hadn’t come so fast. Next thing we knew, he was beside us. His sleeve fell back to reveal a gnarled hand with too-long fingers, and with the knuckles of that hand, he brushed Reuven’s cheek.

  Reuven let out a small, strangled sound. Yitzchak and I stepped back.

  The sorcerer smiled at us, then turned and kept walking, farther into the town.

  * * *

  News of the sorcerer had been passed along by traders and travelers from the other towns along the Rhine. He was from the east, they said, from the land of the Byzantines, and he was headed back there to help the Byzantine emperor fight the Moors. On his way, he was killing as many Jews—only Jews—as he could.

  This was no real surprise to us Jews, though it was quite a relief to our Christian neighbors.
<
br />   He had already killed many of us. He touched people, and they went home, and then they weakened and died. The travelers were unclear on how long it took.

  But they were clear that he never stopped with only one. After Reuven died, there would be dozens more . . . maybe hundreds. First here in Worms, and then in another town, and another. There was nothing we could do to stop it.

  I helped Yitzchak walk Reuven home to his wife and waited with them until the sun dipped low. And then I went to the river.

  * * *

  Years later, when I was much older and living in another land, I discovered that scholars had been searching for centuries for the Sambatyon River. It puzzled me at first, because of course I had always known where it was. It was right behind my house.

  It took me longer than it should have to realize that I was the only one who had ever seen it. Not merely in my hometown—that, I had always known—but in the entire world. That was why others searched for it in distant deserts and faraway jungles. They did not know that the Sambatyon came to those it chose.

  By then, I was ashamed to tell them it had chosen me.

  The river behind my house wasn’t usually the Sambatyon. Normally it was the Rhine, flat and gray, with ripples that were slow and languid, as if they didn’t quite have the desire to make it all the way to the sea. As if, like the rest of us, they had nowhere to be but here.

  It was only when I was alone, but not always when I was alone, that I felt the change: a restless surge within me, as if my mind was a maelstrom, full of thoughts and words and images desperate to get out. As if the prayers I practiced so diligently—prayers that I loved, that I longed to share with my community and devote my life to perfecting—were too rehearsed, too calm. Missing something I could not find in my synagogue or my town.

  Then I would go to the river and find it wild and turbulent, waves rearing high above my head and crashing down in a fury of white froth. Rocks the size of a man’s fist were tossed among the waves like goose feathers at a slaughter, clashing against each other and smashing the waves into glittering bits of spray.

  The violent waters were always blue, a brighter, more crystalline blue than the sky above Worms ever was. And on the other side—which I could glimpse in bits and pieces, scattered and distorted through boulders and froth—I saw no houses and gardens, no chickens or pigs. I saw tents, and long leonine creatures that looked like neither dogs nor cats, and dark-skinned figures in strange white clothes moving among them.

  I wanted to see more, but not nearly as much as I wanted to hear their songs—prayers that must be so like, and so unlike, our own. I knew their music would fill the gaps in my own hymns, that if I infused my compositions with their prayers, it would make us whole. Bring us closer to God and to what we should have been. But the river, with its frantic rocks and roars of spray, was unceasingly loud, drowning out any sounds from the other side.

  By then, of course, I knew what the river was, though I still didn’t know why it was what it was. I had learned our history: how a thousand years ago, ten of Israel’s twelve tribes were exiled before the rest of us. How they passed through Assyria and found a place, safe and secure, beyond the Sambatyon River: a river that ran wild six days a week, but became calm and smooth between sundown on Friday and nightfall on Saturday.

  Living in isolation, the Ten Tribes could atone for the sins that had caused their exile and could prepare for their eventual return. They had their own kingdom, their own customs, unchanged over the hundreds of years during which we, descendants of the other two tribes, had mingled with our neighbors and been downtrodden by them. The Ten Tribes had kept their original customs, their unique ways, their native skills.

  Which would, I hoped as I watched the waves shoot billows of white spray into the air, include sorcery.

  Two boulders crashed against each other, sending shards of wet rock flying. I flinched away, but felt a sharp pain right under my eye. When I touched it, my finger came away with a smudge of blood.

  It was the first time anything from the river had touched me. As if it could see the rowboat I had dragged over—borrowed from a sympathetic Christian neighbor—and knew what it meant.

  As if the river was warning me.

  I did not step back. I was afraid that if I did, the rocks would disappear, and I would be facing only the Rhine: flat and wide and still, with nothing on the opposite bank that couldn’t already be found on this side.

  The sun touched the horizon, a blaze of orange drawing a host of blue and pink after it.

  The rocks fell into the water, a sudden avalanche of deadly splashes. The froth settled into a swirl of bubbles, the ripples going as still as fractured ice.

  It was the Sabbath, and on the Sabbath, the Sambatyon River ran smooth and tranquil.

  I had thought that in its stillness, it would look ordinary, like any other river. But its sudden serenity looked more unnatural than its usual chaos.

  And now, at last, I could hear voices from the other side.

  I had dreamed of this moment for so long: my chance to take the music that drifted across the water and weave it into my own prayers. To reunite the Tribes of Israel, in song if not in reality.

  Until tonight, I had spent my Friday evenings at synagogue with my father. I went with him even when he said I was too young, in order to pay close attention to the cantor. I had to know the prayers from our side of the river, to know them in my bones, before I could mix them with those from the other side.

  They were singing in words I recognized as Hebrew, but so strangely accented that I couldn’t make out their meaning. Not that I needed to: I knew what the songs were about. They were singing on their side, as we were on our side—as I should have been, at synagogue—to welcome the Sabbath.

  I could have stopped and listened. Could have held those prayers in my mind, to bring back and mingle with my own compositions. Even at that moment, with the palpable terror that was strumming through every Jew in Worms filling my body, I considered it. Just for a few moments. It was what I had been born to do, and surely it wouldn’t make a difference. . . .

  I thought of Reuven’s wan, hopeless face. My shoulder muscles knotted. I drew in a deep breath, closed my eyes, and pushed the boat into the river.

  * * *

  During the week, it was the rapids and the rocks that kept the Sambatyon impassable. Any attempt to row across it, or even to step into it, would have torn a man’s body apart.

  On the Sabbath, it was something else that made the river into a barrier: God’s law. For a thousand years, no single person from the Ten Tribes had taken advantage of the river’s calm. A boat ride, a transgression of the Sabbath, would tear a Jew’s soul apart. To them, and to us, it was just as real a blockade as the deadly waves.

  Something inside me shrank as I picked up the oars. And yet it was such a simple thing. The river didn’t fight me; it was glassy and smooth, stained pink by the sunset. My body didn’t fight me; my hands were sweaty but firm around the oars, my arms pulling rhythmically. I thought of all the Jews in my town, of my father’s white-streaked beard and my mother’s tired smile, of my little sister who climbed trees like she was half-squirrel. She was small and fast and lithe, and had not yet learned to be afraid.

  She would learn it today.

  In other towns, the sorcerer had killed children as well as adults. Entire families had vanished. In some cases, he had killed all but one, leaving a lone soul to bear all that grief.

  The oars dipped in and out of the water, forming ripples that looked like quenched fire. If my soul fought me, I didn’t hear it.

  Souls can be very quiet, sometimes. That’s why we need to raise our voices in prayer.

  * * *

  A man was waiting for me on the other side of the river. He stood with his arms crossed over his chest, his face set in a forbidding scowl.

  I decided not to get out of my boat just yet.

  I dug one oar into the bottom of the river and heard a snap—the ground
was covered with rocks, not dirt, so there was nothing to dig the oar into. I should have realized.

  Since the oar was already broken, I kept pushing until the boat was high enough on the bank that I was pretty sure I wouldn’t drift away. Then I pulled the oar—or half of it—into the boat, and laid it carefully next to the few items I had flung in at the last minute: a glass jar, a sack, a woven basket. I was surprised but pleased that my hand did not shake through any of this.

  Then I turned to face the man.

  He stepped closer, with a little lurch. “You should not be here. You are in violation of the Sabbath.”

  He spoke in Hebrew. Though his accent was strange, I was able to understand him. His voice was clear and slow and faintly melodic.

  My own Hebrew was creaky and limited, used only for prayer and study. But for this, a matter of law, it was not hard to find the words I needed. “It is permitted to violate the Sabbath to save a life.”

  “Whose life are you saving?”

  These words were harder to find. But I managed, in embarrassing fits and starts, to explain. The man listened without changing expression until I reached my point: “We do not know magic anymore, and we do not use weapons. We cannot kill him on our own. We need help. We need someone to cross the river and challenge him.”

  The man sighed, and I heard his answer in his sigh. “We cannot cross the river.”

  “To save a life, it is permitted—”

  “It’s not that. This river is not meant to be crossed.” He stepped back, away from the water. Away from me. “Not yet.”

  I had been thinking this through all day. There were so many arguments, subtle and persuasive, that I could have made. But my limited words would have come out in a tangle, and all I could manage was, “We need you.”

  I put all my despair, all our helplessness, into those three words. The man bowed his head, and I had a moment of hope.