“Please.” Lara spoke directly to Silas. “She didn’t want any of this, any more than we did. And you know if you are being honest, that it will help Raul to know she has come back. Otherwise it was all for nothing, in his mind.”
“Best that she had never come back, and just let him get over this, over her…” Silas muttered, almost to himself, but his hulking frame started to move to the side. Before he moved fully though, he shot his arm hand out and gripped my upper arm – painfully hard.
“You ever betray him again, no fucking world will be safe enough for you to run from me.”
He meant it. His eyes burned down into mine, and his words were branded on to me. Then, just as abruptly, he released my arm and stepped off to the side, causing me to stumble forward and clutch at the tent.
I walked in slowly, dreading what I was about to see, needing to see it. Raul lay on a bed in the middle of the dimly lit room, piled with furs and quilts from his chest down. His eyes were closed, and his lashes rested on hollowed cheeks, that looked as if they had had their life sucked out of them. He was so pale, his skin, usually so coloured from his outdoor life, was almost translucent. He looked waxy and unreal. I stepped closer, reaching out my hand to his face, as if to convince myself.
He looked like a ghost of the man he’d been. I had a sudden shocking image of myself as I had appeared arriving in England all those years ago – a little ghost. Was that what had happened to me when I had finally crawled out of my brother’s arms? Had I been using every ounce of strength I had to keep him rooted into my reality, with me? I know we had been linked in such a primitive way, beyond choice, beyond understanding – and the need to keep that link had been agonising. Once I had realised that he was gone, that he no longer walked the same world as I did, I had admitted defeat, my strength gone, and I had climbed out of his embrace. He wasn’t there any more. He had left his beautiful face, his gentle hands. His body was just a shell.
Had I been like this ever since that day? Utterly spent, on the brink of life? Is this what I would have looked like to anyone who had really seen me? My eyes closed, my lashes fanned out on my pale cheeks, my body barely breathing? A 20-year coma?
Lara went around to the other side of the bed. She busied herself by laying out all the plants we had gathered on her table at the back of the tent, working quickly to chop, knead and crush the ingredients. The tent was suffused with fragrance, so thick you could almost see it hanging there in the beams of dusty light from the dim lamps.
As she worked I simply stood there by his bed, my fingers gently touching his shoulder. It felt so wrong, wrong in every way. Even the power dynamic of me standing over him like this felt wrong – reinforcing my betrayal. So I knelt by the bed, relieved to find some small way to retreat from the imbalance between us. His current fragility was palpable. It was there in the weakness of his breath, the effort needed for the rise and fall of his chest as he slept, and it broke my heart. I had done this.
A whole host of emotions crowded in on me, and the air turned sticky. I had been trying to do what Raul had kept encouraging me to do – choose for myself, understand what was going on inside me, act on it more – but somehow I had got it all horribly wrong. I wanted to shrink back into doing what was expected, what was safe, what always worked.
Lara then moved quietly to the other side of Raul’s bed. She held a carved-out wooden drinking bowl, cupped in her hand. With her medicine ready, she started gently trying to rouse Raul from his sleep. His head turned reluctantly towards the gentle pressure she was exerting on his other shoulder, and his eyes flickered open, away from me. Lara smiled down at him.
“You’ve got a visitor,” she said.
He looked confused for a second, and then slowly turned his head back in my direction. He blinked a couple of times, and then a slow smile spread on his face. His lips looked cracked and dry, but he moistened them before he tried to speak.
“You are OK! And you are here. You came back!” His voice was barely more than an exhalation, but it was beautiful to hear. I could only nod dumbly, over and over.
“Did you get to London? Is that where you went?” he whispered huskily.
I nodded again, and was rewarded with a smile.
“Thank goodness,” he said, as he closed his eyes and settled his head straight on the pillow.
I touched his shoulder again so lightly, needing the contact. “Thank you,” I said. “I’m so sorry, but thank you.”
He opened his eyes again and smiled at me. “I can’t say it was a pleasure. But I would do it again. It’s OK, Eve.”
I tried to smile back, but it felt very skewed and I couldn’t control it properly.
“You don’t know how good it is to see you. That you came back. So good. Worth it.” He winced as he bit the words out, and Lara moved back in to end the conversation, and get the medicine into him. As I watched her cradle his head to help him sit more upright to drink, I suddenly felt as if I was intruding, so I slipped away.
He made steady progress from then on, gaining strength every day, looked after unstintingly by Lara and his friends. They truly were his family, I thought, as I watched them tend to him. I went in to see him on a few occasions, and he always seemed pleased to see me, though I had the uneasy sense that I was infringing on some family intimacy. Yet, he did nothing to lend any weight to that feeling, always asking me to sit with him and talk for a while. He seemed lighter in spirit as the days went past – almost strangely so – and I noticed that he smiled and laughed often, with his eyes as well.
Lara caught me looking at him as he chatted casually to his friends, who had crowded into the too-small tent to see him en masse, as they tended to do in the evenings. She came up just behind me, and whispered in my ear: “I told you that it would do him good to see you...” and I felt a little nudge from her elbow as she smiled behind me.
I didn’t know what to make of it, but I delighted in his recovery. I had started to realise just what a friend I had in him. I was humbled by what he had done for me, still eaten up with remorse at what I had done to him, but the wonder of the care he had shown to me was the main feeling to which I kept returning. Only Marni, I knew, and perhaps Lara, now, would have done something of that magnitude for me. All my frames of reference were having to be reassessed and drawn up anew.
Enanti: the present
Finding a place
For 20 years I had known the shape of the socket I should fit into. I just couldn’t get myself into the correct shape. I could shave off bits here and there – enough to allow me to slip in – but it was never a good fit, and staying there was grinding work. The grating feel of bone scraping on bone.
Here, I had a place. A place that I moved in perfectly. I hadn’t felt it to start with, but now, slipping in without pain or effort, it felt amazing. A bit like how I would imagine being at home. I had no idea what this place was, or where it would take me, but a place is a place. I’d take that for now.
It was weeks later that Raul was well enough to be out of bed, walking carefully around the camp, trying to get back into the rhythm of normal life. It felt like a gift to have him back around the campfire in the evenings, watching him smile at the stories told, and laugh at the jokes made. He had a stillness about him that I had missed so much. Although his whole body quivered with life again, and I had seen how decisive and physical he could be when out hunting, this was the core of the man – this immensely powerful stillness. He always watched, assessed and then acted. He never rushed in.
I could almost see him tasting the air, listening to his gut, cocking his head to hear.
One evening, I found myself sitting next to him around the fire. It was one of the first times we had had to speak in relative privacy. I needed to thank him; I wanted him to see how much it had all meant to me. I wanted to give him something of mine.
“I wanted to tell you that I’ve decided to s
tay,” I said to him quietly. “I don’t know if your faith in me is wildly misplaced, but I am willing to stay and see. I’m sorry if it is; sorry if I let you down.”
“Are you sure?” Raul asked.
“Yes,” I said, directly into his eyes. The flames crackled and popped a small distance from us, throwing up golden flecks in his eyes as he looked at me.
“You need to stop worrying about letting me down. It can’t be about that.”
“I know. I want to stay for my own reasons, and there are many, but that is part of it, I suppose.”
Raul nodded slowly, seeming happy with my answer. It was honest at least. Then he turned and caught me in his gaze again.
“Why did you pull away from me in the Shifting Pool?” he asked quietly.
I sucked in my breath. I wasn’t ready for this conversation. Back in London, I had prepared a few stock answers that I could throw him off with, but with what had happened since my return, all of them seemed too trite, too dishonest. Yet I couldn’t tell him the truth, either. I wasn’t ready for that sort of exchange. I never would be. I pulled my eyes away from his, and stared at the ground, feeling his assessing gaze on me the whole time. I had no idea what he had seen, no idea whether what I had seen came from me or…or both of us? I was utterly wrong-footed.
“I…I just didn’t want to feel controlled by you. I wanted to choose to be here on my own terms; that’s all – just like you’d told me,” I managed to get out. “I didn’t understand why you were holding onto me. I thought it was just so I wouldn’t be able to get away. I knew that you badly wanted me to stay here to help you, and I thought that was why you did it. It was just a childish reaction to being told what to do. I’m sorry.”
Raul kept looking at me. I could feel his eyes resting on my profile, but I couldn’t look up and meet them.
After what seemed like minutes, he just said, “OK.”
I couldn’t tell whether he believed me, or whether he was simply aware that I couldn’t say any more on the subject – that I wanted to run from it and never have it mentioned again. I was good at that. It actually worked. If you tried hard enough to bury something, the rubble only slipped every so often. Most of the time, you could even be surprised to find it there.
The next few weeks were a happy time. I had chosen to be here, and that in itself made everything feel different: more poignant, more personal. I started to feel more useful around the camp, even welcomed on some short trips out into the forest to collect necessities. My conversations with Raul were factual, friendly, but had a certain distance to them that I found helpful, familiar. I wondered whether he was doing it deliberately – not pushing me further than I could go at any given time. I asked him more about what it was he believed I could do. It seemed to revolve around some belief in my senses, which apparently had the potential to be more acute than anyone’s in the camp. It was this more than anything that made me think that someone had made a big mistake, and I worried about it. I had deliberately blunted my senses over many years. There was a thick layer of glass between me and the rest of the world.
He also thought that my potential for flight, sensory input and swimming outstripped anyone in the camp. But beyond all that, he believed, without any clear guidance or evidence, that somehow I was pivotal to saving Alette – that I had some particular ability to save her, although he didn’t understand that himself.
My wings were large now, which I found exhilarating. I hadn’t attempted to fly since my failed flight up on the cliffs with Raul, but I somehow knew that things would be different next time. I needed to try. If I was resolved to be here, to see this through, I needed to see what I could do. I needed to try to reach some of these potentials. I started to think I could.
The colours of people’s wings seemed to be based around family lines. Raul’s were the colours of a hawk – hues of ochres, sepias and burnt umbers – all mottled through. Those of his close band were similar, ranging in their depth of colour, but sharing the same palette. I didn’t actually often get the chance to see them, as they rarely showed their wings, rarely took flight at all.
It was easier with Lara and some of the other villagers in the camp. Her wings were very pale – almost white – a trait she had shared with her family. Most of the other people had wings in hues of grey and silver, again, all differing slightly between the individuals of various nuclear families. One family, however, had purple feathers mixed in through the grey – their wings were magnificent. Children differed slightly from their parents, showing a mix between the prominent colours of both sides, but ending up with a pattern and hue entirely their own. As individual as fingerprints.
My own burgeoning wings fascinated me. Their colours were like nothing I had seen here. They were dark, glossy. It was only when the sunlight caught them, that their true nature was revealed. They shone with iridescent indigo, teal, turquoise and cobalt. A couple of times it had seemed as if some violet hues were also in there, as when the light hits a drop of petrol in a puddle, or the hidden majesty of a starling’s feathers is exposed by the sun.
I loved them, loved the impending sense of freedom they gave me, loved the act of growing them. And I loved their rich colour, although it also made me acutely aware of my lack of any family. They functioned as a very obvious signal to all who saw me that I had no family here.
“Can you change the colour of your wings?” I wondered aloud. “Does the colour signify anything? Do they change as you change?”
“No,” Raul replied. “The colour is yours forever. It makes no distinction between good and evil, right and wrong, light or shade. It is the colour you were born with, it doesn’t make you who you are. It simply signals where you came from. The rest is up to you.”
That answer satisfied me. I’d been struggling with the idea of destiny – everything being pre-ordained. I had worried that the colour of your wings, in some strange way, controlled your path in life, highlighting your inner self, your deepest intentions. But it was simply a way to show kinship – nothing more important than sharing your mother’s hair colour; nothing less important than bringing something of the past into the future.
“But what about the Craven? You’ve mentioned that they all have red wings. Why? I don’t get that. Surely, if they are the lost, as you say they are, they would all have different colours, have come from different places.”
“That is true,” Raul said. “They did all come from different places, for different reasons. They are the lost souls, those who have donned the mask permanently, and fight for the Shadow Beast. He is their master now; they have no will of their own. When they give themselves over to him, they have already lost their wings. The sadness is that there will be a million different stories about how that came to be – each one intimate and personal to that one. But once they have reached this stage, Eve, they have chosen a different path. Their wings are gone, and they chose to find wings again under the Shadow Beast.”
“What do you mean? They all get the chance to regrow them again, as I’ve done? That’s a good thing, surely?”
“No, their wings are not real; they haven’t regrown. The Shadow Beast takes them and he grafts these wings on to their backs. They are made from the blood of others who have lost their wings. They shine bright with that blood. And they are grafted onto these soldiers; theirs but not theirs. They can fly, but it is very mechanical, awkward, unnatural. They only ever fly as a last resort. And they all know that these wings are not their own; they belong to the Shadow Beast, and he can take them back at any time, offer them to another who pleases him more. He hacks them off, and they are once again wingless, flightless.
“Most Craven are not people any more, Eve. They are the parts of people that remain after all is lost. The shadows that remain when a person has not only given up trying to save him or herself, but has now died. The darkness created by such things coalesce into these shapes, forever trying to find their
way back, searching for some form of peace. If they were still people, they could still be saved, they could still find a way. There is always a way back, however far down the road you have gone. But these are the shades of people; the ghosts that remain. Yet they retain a power in their darkness, in the pathos you will feel. Unmasking them allows the truth of them to be seen, and there is a peace in that for them. They cease to be. They are discontent, yearning, loss and void. When that is exposed, they find their rest.
“Just occasionally, you will see one of them wearing his or her own wings still. They are those who have come to the Shadow Beast for a multitude of reasons, and have offered themselves to him, with their own wings. They usually have damaged flight – their wings are dying. Some don’t lose the ability to fly abruptly, they go into a long decline. And some people then choose to follow the Shadow Beast – to gift him what remains of their flight in return for his power, his ability to lend some strength to their wings once more. But they are also the most complex. Rather than being ghosts, they still have the person within them – they can still choose another way. They are a hope, even though they feel hopeless. Once unmasked, they can go either way. Be wary of them, but be compassionate, too. That’s all they know now. But they weren’t always that way. Life has brought them to such a pass. Any one of us could be in their position. Don’t make the mistake of thinking you are above it. None of us is.”
* * *
A few nights after this exchange, Raul found me standing alone beneath the trees, staring out into the dark of the forest.
“What is it?” he asked.
“I don’t know, really. Just a strange feeling of being hemmed in. I love to retreat to the safety of these woods; it feels as if they hold me. But I am feeling restless, like I need to be in a wide open space.”
The Shifting Pools Page 15