The broken pieces of those walls now eddied in front of me, bumping into my legs as the flood sucked them back out. The scratches on my legs cut deep, and it stung. But the water also soothed as it receded.
I faced a new world, the same as it had ever been, but entirely different to me. Life surged through me. I could see with a million eyes, feel with a thousand fingers.
Enanti: the present
The Craven
It was the hour of long shadows. The time when each entity on the earth was stretched out and extended to its fullest – dwarfed by its own shadow. The trees on the bluff were half in the light and half in darkness, and the darkness would only grow. Night reclaims the land unapologetically – just as the tide comes in to claim the beach. It doesn’t steal in; it marches unrelentingly forward. It is not the rumoured thief in the night; it rides in as a dark lord, sweeping all before it. And there is a part of you that belongs to this night, that thrills as he rides in. If you face him without fear, you are gathered up by his dark clouds, and embraced by the night. You enter a new world, a world that you have always been a part of, but had forgotten.
The deep red of their cloaks and their wings alerted me at once. I didn’t even need the wave of intense dread that was transmitted to me on high frequency. I was glad of the wind today: Raul needed me up here in the sky, and I knew I still couldn’t get airborne without that initial lift. From up where I was flying, I could see for miles, and home in on their movement. I could also feel the change in the patterns of air around me, the scent on the wind. Some were already beating their wings slowly, working the muscles, preparing for battle. The natural majesty of their wings contrasted sharply with the hideous masks they wore on their faces, alien and anonymous. It was as I scanned them more throughly that I spotted evidence of what Raul and I had spoken of. In among the sea of deep red wings, were the occasional set of white, brown, even purple. An army of lost souls.
I had a sudden flash in my head, a vision: one of the riders rode with dark, glossy wings, flashing with deep blues and turquoise. And then I was suddenly no longer the observer; I became the rider. The mask sat heavy on my face, dark, sweaty, suffocating. Through my eye holes I could see the legions of other riders I rode with, uniform, disciplined, red capes flying out behind them, masks obscuring every face.
“No!” I screamed. “No! I am not that!” My hands pulled at my face to dislodge the mask, but my fingers clawed onto skin alone, scratching rough furrows into my cheeks. The vision was just as abruptly over; there was no mask, nothing to pull from my head. I slowly brought my hands down from my face, shivering in the chill of new awareness.
“The Craven!” I shouted down to Raul and the others. “Large numbers, riding in formation.”
Raul immediately circled on his horse, whirling around to face his band. He spoke to them in quiet, direct terms, as was his way. The attention they paid to each word he said had been evident for the whole time I had known him. Today was no different.
* * *
“Go for their masks! The masks, Eve!” Raul shouted up at me, surging forward into the throng. I saw them thrusting at him with their broadswords, slashing and hacking. He parried with his own, pushing hard against them, waiting for chances to unhorse them and rip off the masks. Frozen, I simply stared down at the scene below me, feeling as if I was back in one of my dreams, just floating above the horror. A helpless onlooker, I could only observe the death of my friends, impotent up here. No! I wanted to be present here, part of it. I needed that. I rushed back into myself, slamming into my own rib-cage with such force that I shook. I opened my receivers to full volume, and I let the sensations flood in. I was back, I was here, I was now. Noise was everywhere; screaming, grunting, the manual effort of a fight for life. As I saw the Craven unmasked, I saw a flash of their faces before a puff of dark smoke obscured them, and their cloaks sagged empty on the ground. They vanished, turned to ash, blew away on the wind. The sensory input was excruciating, but I took it all in hungrily, gritting my teeth through the disorientation. I fought to focus my mind, to use the information coming in. After an agonising few minutes, a sort of calm came over me. The input was still there, but I was able to regulate the pain a little, think above it, feel it thrumming underneath, bubbling with life. The masks, I remembered. I have to go for the masks. My wings, powerful now, beat the air, caught the gusting wind, and I angled them to allow me to swoop down at speed.
Power surged through me as I rushed through the air, feeling my old friend stroking past my cheek, filling my wings. I could sense which riders were less sure. I could feel out their weaknesses, smell their lack of composure. Their masks could hide a lot, but not that – not now I was plugged into the mains of the sensory world. I slammed on the brakes at the last possible moment, coming at speed between two riders who couldn’t track me well enough, constrained by their blinkered masks. As I shot through between them, each of my hands pulled at their masks, willing them to come away. They did, and the two figures slumped into oblivion.
I did this over and over, diving down into the field, pulling off the masks. Occasionally, one wouldn’t come away – was too tightly held on to – and I soared upwards again, having failed. Once or twice I experienced the shock of unmasking one who was still human. Rather than the smoke, the ash and the slumping of the cloak on the grass, a person fell from the horse, hitting the ground hard. They looked lost, exposed and terrified. They remained on the ground, looking around, breathing hard and curling up into foetal shapes. They reminded me of hunted animals. Their wings of various colours, dishevelled and weak, hung limply over the ground.
It didn’t take very long. Their flight was so poor, hardly any of the Craven left their horses to meet us in the sky. Red cloaks were strewn on the ground, the wind tugging at them as they sagged and flapped. The pitiful sight moved me. Those who had survived were given food and water, and horses were there to take them back to our camp. I wondered what the future held for them, what they would choose next.
My body ached with effort, but my mind bore the brunt of the pain. Raul found me, sat amid the detritus of our battle, my shoulders slumped, my wings tucked in.
“Talk to me,” he said softly. He sat down next to me, and waited.
The words wouldn’t come immediately, and when they did they were halting.
“I feel the pain of this place, these Craven. I can almost taste it. I never wanted to be near a war again. I might not be attacking them with a sword, but I am killing them nonetheless. I’m not a killer; I can’t do this.”
“No, you’re not a killer; I know. But you are a survivor, and you are fighting a war – whether you wish to or not. You’ve been fighting a war ever since you lost your family – you never left it. Trying to kill bits of yourself, trying to find ways to struggle through every day. You wake up to a battle each morning. That was your reality. And that was a battle you could never win: trench warfare – designed to last forever. But there is a different way to fight, Eve. A way that can break through for you – can give you back parts of yourself, that can lead you out of war. To peace. To home.”
“I don’t understand, Raul. Killing is killing. And I can’t do it.”
“Death is a part of life for all of us. What you were doing out there today was banishing parts of life that sought solely destruction. What we faced today were one group of the Fears – soulless, faceless creatures that can suck you down into oblivion, keep you alive but only in the most limited sense of the word, swelling their own ranks by stealing your mind, stealing what makes you you. And these Craven are the easy ones – the ones that you can simply unmask are the easy ones. You will meet others that are so much more sophisticated, that can steal you by temptation, by false promises, by betrayal. Those are the Riven. They can assume many forms, and you should never underestimate them. Their masks can be so seamless that you are unaware of them: they are the most dangerous.
�
�But you are also right, Eve, you are not a killer. There is a world of difference between a killer and a fighter. And you are a fighter. Yet you must be prepared to fight for what you seek. And you know about fighting. I’m not talking about what happened to your family – I’m talking about what you’ve done every day since. Just in a way that damaged you. There are different ways to fight, ways that do not involve these crude weapons,” – he glanced down at his sword – “these are not it. The weapons you need are within you already, waiting to be found and used. And the strengths you have within you can cause unspeakable damage, or unimaginable wonder. And you get to choose.”
“What do you mean?”
“You have something inside you that can help you. Everyone has it to some degree, but yours is vast Eve; I’ve felt it.”
“What do you mean?”
“You have a well inside you – a vast body of water, just moving there, holding. I’ve mentioned it before.”
“Holding what?”
“Everything that you have lived through, seen, sensed, thought and felt. It has absorbed all the reactions of those around you, drunk it all in. And now it holds it all there inside you.”
“What’s it there for?”
“It’s there for you. For you to draw on when you need it. An unseen strength – a calm place to which you can retreat and examine all you have. Somewhere to look to for answers for anything that life can throw up. It is all in there. It is you. It is the source of all your power.”
“I don’t really understand.”
“It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t make it less real. Just remember that when you really need it – when you need to hide away, to regroup, or look for new strength – you can look there. It will make sense to you then. It is a wonderful thing.”
* * *
I didn’t take my earlier vision to Raul. I didn’t need him to tell me again that my destiny was in my own hands. The vision had been profoundly unsettling, but I had an innate understanding that it was simply a metaphor, not just of my possible future, but also of my actual past: how I had already chosen to be living. I had flirted with joining those legions, coming closer than I had known. Rejection of that now shuddered through me. I no longer wanted to feel anonymous, confined behind a mask, suffocated by my own camouflage. Perhaps if I had continued in that way, I would have become fully Craven: that rider cloaked in red.
It was what I had always been afraid of – that by stepping out from behind my protective glass wall, I was not only opening myself up to the wonder of life, I was also in the firing line again for all the pain that came with that.
I dreamt such confusing dreams in those nights. Some had me sitting up screaming, seeing blood and destruction all around me; others had me waking in tears of longing, desperate to get back to sleep again, to get back to the dream where I saw them all: my family, playing in our garden at home. Sitting out under the jacaranda trees as we tried to spot the first stars of the night. Licking clean the wooden spoon with my little sister after baking, giggling as she smeared the chocolate all over her rounded face.
I felt desolate on waking. Like those first days of grief – a few seconds of confusion, wondering what this heaviness pushing into me was, and then everything came smashing back into clarity. Pinned to the bed, breathless, wanting to escape back into my dreams. I didn’t like this reality – I wanted another one. I wanted to go and find them in my sleep.
That was it, I thought as I lay there. It is what we do. When one reality is too much for us to cope with, we create another, we live partially elsewhere so that we can function and survive. We shield ourselves with other worlds. And yet now I found myself in another world entirely – another reality – and it was forcing me to feel. How many realities were there? Do we create them all? Are they all just fabrications, dreamscapes?
And even as my strength grew in this place, my senses opened, and my wings took flight, I wondered. What was it all for? They all spoke about the great gift it was to live fully realised, but no one had told me just how painful it would be, too.
There was a price to pay in feeling again. Feeling anything meant feeling everything, and some days that was too much. Pain really is the cost of love. The crowning and the crucifixion. The thaw is always yearned for, but it isn’t pretty. Like the melting nose of a glacier, out would come a mass of debris that had been locked away, a random army of moraine strewn across the valley-floor.
The next few days were full of agony and doubt. I felt that I had lost my way, and I was frightened. My mood didn’t seem a surprise to my friends, and they let me be. In some tiny way, I found some solace in that, as if this was ‘normal.’ I hadn’t felt normal for a very long time. It was a start.
“There’ll be many days like this,” Raul said, one evening. I hadn’t seen him much for the previous few days; he had been busy with scouting out the surrounding land, keeping the camp supplied with fresh food, and finding reliable water sources. And, well, I had been avoiding as many people as I could.
“I like things to make sense. I know where I am, then. I find this a lot harder. I have so many questions – and no one to whom I can address them. No, I don’t mean there is no one around who I could talk to; it’s just that I know they are questions I am asking myself. I want to answer them. I don’t think anyone else could.
“But I miss them, Raul, my family. I miss them so much at the moment, it’s like a raw wound. And I feel so angry. I feel this anger in me that I had forgotten was there.”
“I know.” Raul put his hand over mine, and I was reminded of Marni making the same gesture so recently. Now, as then, I didn’t flinch at all.
“It’s OK to feel angry. And it is better to know that it is there.”
“But what do I do with it?” I asked.
“What if you don’t have to do anything with it? Maybe you do, maybe you don’t – but you’ll know. Maybe it is enough to feel it, and know it is there. It doesn’t change who you are. You were already that person – you were already angry. You are just more aware of yourself now. Don’t let it throw you into doubt.”
“I’m trying.”
“I know.”
“And what am I doing with Sula! I mean, I can’t help her, and she looks up to me. But I’m a mess myself – and I know I am just going to let her down.”
“So who should help her then? Someone who doesn’t understand where she’s come from? Someone who hasn’t seen what she’s seen? You don’t need to have all the answers, Eve – for you or for Sula. But the fact you are still here, still trying, means something to her. It makes her think that maybe she has a future too. That in itself is a great gift. You shouldn’t be doing that for her, anyway – just for yourself. You don’t have to do anything beyond that, or feel any pressure. Stop thinking you are going to let people down.”
“I know, I know! We’ve been here before. I’m just struggling right now.”
“I know. And sometimes things can become clearer only after a struggle. And I’m always here – if that helps at all.”
I smiled my thanks up at him, and, sensing I wanted to be on my own, he stood up and left me to it.
That afternoon, with the shadows lengthening, I slipped away into the woods. As I stepped out into a clearing, I caught my breath.
With the sunshine pouring through the trees, Raul sat astride his horse in the clearing. As the light caught him, his features were cast in gold. The hairs of his furs glimmered and his open wings were gilded. The shadows of the trees, the darks of the woods - all served to provide the relief for this glittering spectacle. I stood transfixed. I had never fully understood before that the lights shone brighter when the darks were there: just what magic could be created when they worked in harmony. Like a Caravaggio painting, the scene was infused with life. I had seen all these things before; I just hadn’t properly felt them.
I understood a little more now about
what Claire had been telling me, what Raul had been nudging me towards all along, what my father had taught me so long ago about the stars needing the dark night to showcase them. Something I had somehow always known inside but shied away from. Light with no shade was a blinding life, parched and sterile.
Dream
Hunted
As the creatures swarmed up the hill, any chance of escape was rapidly disappearing. I grabbed my son, shoving a few things that he would need into the little school rucksack on his back. We had all agreed to defend this last central room of the compound until death, but I couldn’t keep that promise. Not with my little boy to protect. We had barricaded the front door, but now the creatures were climbing up the steep hill at the back, too. We would be cut off in minutes. No one would listen to me.
We crept out of the back door. I could hear the crack of foliage, and the heavy grunts of the creatures. They were close. Every few seconds, I caught sight of their vile faces as they lurched up the hill. Their faces. They chilled me. Contorted and misshapen; their eyes their master weapon. One beam from those eyes meant incineration.
I looked down the valley as the hill fell away to my left, the creatures coming up on the right. I clutched my little boy, and begged him to hold on tight. I leapt from the ground, to fly out down the valley. As soon as I was in the air, one of the largest creatures locked on to me with his eyes. Then came the shock wave. Intense pain spiked through me. I’d failed.
As I opened my eyes I was back in the central room, panic filling it, and the smell of fear permeating everything. Someone knocked into me as he ran to help barricade the front door. I struggled to understand for a few moments. I was back at the start – a second chance. This time I had two sons, and I had to save them. I filled their rucksacks, and we crept out of the back door.
“Fly, Mummy, fly!” one of my littles ones cried. But I saw the enormous creature coming up the hill. In another few seconds he would be looking directly at us, and would have a clear line of fire. Flying wouldn’t work; I needed to hide. If we couldn’t be seen, we couldn’t be killed. I turned left and ducked into the long grass. The thickness of the cover swallowed us up, protected us. I ran, hunched over, both boys clinging to me. We ran and ran, stumbling through the undergrowth.
The Shifting Pools Page 17