The Well of the North Wind

by Steven, Kenneth;

  Fian let Ruach lead the way. Ruach did not know where to go, but he staggered north, hugging the coast. It was tiring beyond words; they hardly went any distance before a new wall of rocks loomed ahead, slippery and brittle. Ruach fell again and again; it was now light enough for Fian to see the bright blood on his hands. But always he picked himself up once more and went on, the sunken eyes searching and searching for what something deep inside had seen.

  Then, just when they had all but reached the north end of the island and were about to step down onto a long curve of white sand, Ruach pointed. He let out a half-cry and staggered down over the boulders and down. Fian followed. He saw something ahead but had no idea what it might be. He caught up with Ruach and they ran the last of the way together, where the tide was coming shining over the beach.

  A boat: the broken remains of a boat. And a man: the broken remains of a man. And Fian recognized him as Ruach was down on his knees already bringing him out. It was Larach, and this was Ruach’s fallen star at last.

  *

  They were fragments. No, they were the broken pieces of things that once had been fragments. Larach came and went; like a man deep underwater he came up sometimes, for a moment, to the surface, and his eyes opened. A word, a few words, and then he was gone once more, back into the soundlessness of the deep, from which no one could reach him.

  They watched him night and day in shifts. Even Colum, for Colum loved him like a son: there was a bond between them no one could have explained, least of all they themselves, that was real enough for that.

  Sometimes he fretted in his sleep; as though wrestling sea creatures, his hands fought. And he struggled where he lay; glistened with beads of hot sweat, and they held him until he calmed and cooled, until he fell under the surface once more and was gone. When he slept then it might have been that he was dead; his breathing thin, almost invisible, and his eyes still. Day after day after day.

  And after however many of those days she came, with her daughter. They had not even told her of Larach, had not sent for her – yet all at once in the evening she was there. Had someone told her of the finding of the ruins of the boat, or had some deeper voice told her of his need? Fian was there when they darkened the door. He felt a shyness through him he had forgotten he possessed; she had not come to find him, and she did not even glance at him, and yet he followed her every look and move, felt his own face and hands strange and awkward.

  ‘There is nothing I can do for this man,’ the woman said after she had knelt by him a long time. ‘I cannot bring him back from the place where is gone; he alone must choose. He has many dark dreams; he has seen things he yearns to forget.’

  And all she did was to drop sweet oil on his face and forehead, for his skin had been dried crisp by the sea. She smoothed it into his skin and hands, tender and slow, and the scent of the oil filled the chamber like an enchantment. Then she and the girl were gone, as suddenly as they had come. And Fian looked at the girl as she left; he had not meant to, he never intended to, but he could not stop himself. Yet she did not look at him as she vanished.

  The only one who slept and slept, deep and untroubled, through those days was Ruach. Even his face had changed; the mask of fear and torment Fian had seen that night, the night they found the boat and Larach – it was as though it had never been. Blessed in calm it was; his hands nestled by his side, and the curl of a smile on his lips.

  Poor Ruach, Fian thought tenderly as he passed him – at peace until the next dream comes to haunt him. And just what did God mean with that?

  *

  It was calm after those terrible days of storm. A flickering of snow on the highest hills of the closest islands, and the skies clear and still. The geese came in their arrowheads, and Fian closed his eyes to hear their voices. They brought the winter but he loved them just the same.

  Suddenly there had been many things in his hands, after the night that Colum washed their feet and after the finding of Larach. It was like drawing down a bucket into an old well, one that long had been dry, and finding to one’s utter surprise there was water in plenty. Yet he knew now that he believed things came from his hands. He could not explain it, and perhaps it was good he could not, yet he knew it was true all the same. And the God that Colum had spoken of – the God of the bright moments – that God he could believe in and love.

  ‘The sun did not go below the horizon at midnight, and the land was still awake – the birds called and there was life, life in all its fullness.’

  He ate bread; he ate bread and drank milk. Quite suddenly he had come back, as though indeed he had decided the turning in the road he must take. Thin as though the sea had washed him away, had worn him to no more than sticks that might break in the slightest wind, and yet he was there. Larach, the only one of the four who had returned.

  And Colum crouched closest to him now and listened and watched and nodded. And Larach smiled and said he did not want them to sit there and see him, but they sat there just the same. He was their brother and they had prayed and he had come back.

  ‘What happened?’ Colum asked, his voice low so it was almost a whisper, and he was the only one who would have dared to ask.

  Larach sighed and his hands held each other on the bed, and Fian saw for a moment a greyness that crossed his face, a flickering of fear, that he thought must have been the remembering of terrible things. Larach swallowed and swallowed.

  ‘We went north and there was nothing the first days. It was good and we landed in a place of trees, made a fire, drank water.’

  It was those words that stopped him, that broke him. Drank water.

  Grief swelled in his eyes and the tears coursed his cheeks; the thin frame of him shook and he brought his hands over his face, ashamed they should see. They spoke to him, rocked him, hushed him like a child.

  ‘Later there was no water,’ he whispered. ‘There was thirst and no land for days, and I thought things that make me ashamed.’

  They let him sleep then and it was as though for a time he fell back into that deep place of water. It was a dark pool, and though it was on the edge of death it was not death itself and it was beautifully tempting. There was no fear there, there was nothing but nothing. And all that long night he slept.

  Around him they worked for the winter. They built walls against the winter. A boat came from Ireland, with news and fresh meat. Fian thought then of how far he had come since he first left. He could never have gone back now and he would not have wanted to.

  And he did not miss them. That truth stabbed him sharp and clear. He did not miss them. He thought how his mother would misunderstand this world and want to be gone. He would show her the book and she would stare at him and it and have nothing to say. How did a book help with the washing of children or the making of food?

  ‘Aran died. He drank seawater because he could endure the thirst no more, and his lips and eyes turned black, and in the morning he was dead. I would not have known his face again and now I cannot forget how he looked in the end. May God grant that one day I can forget.’

  And a murmur passed round them as they huddled that night to hear Larach’s story. He had walked for the first time that day, in the sudden frost of the morning with the skies blue-white and the hills sharp with their edges of sunlight. Two of them had helped him walk, as though he was an old and feeble man, not the strong navigator he once had been.

  ‘We came to an island ten days later. Sharp and high it rose out of the sea, like a creature that had frozen to stone. Barren it looked; a place of blackness and emptiness, yet we dragged the boat ashore with what little strength remained, and then the miracle . . .’

  Even now, Larach’s eyes glistened and he turned away a moment and Colum leaned to reach his hand, to murmur words of strength. But he found his courage again, turned back and now his voice held.

  ‘The sweetest water I have tasted in all my days,’ he said, ‘from a pool like a font in the rocks. As though it had been prepared for us, made ready a long
time before. We drank and we drank; we covered our heads and faces with water, we laughed and we rejoiced.’

  His face changed and the eyes darkened. ‘And we thought of Aran, how he should have lived that little longer and been among us.’

  He waited, and his eyes glittered over them, and not an eye or hand moved. ‘We stayed there two days and two nights, and then we started north once more.’

  They saw it, the painting of the voyage he had made for them. There in the winter darkness of their world they were back with him. They did not want to sleep until they had heard the story to the end.

  ‘We came to a great island, were washed ashore onto a black beach. All the stones and even the sand – black. I think we slept where we lay. It was not cold but we woke again in the rain, and then we found a cave – deep and warm and sheltered. The first thing that Rua did was to paint a cross on the stone wall – and to carve the cross that he himself first made here on the island! We stayed there a long time, for we were weak and perhaps afraid.’

  The wind came now and pulled at this place of sanctuary, and Larach fell silent. His head fell and all of them sat crouched, listening, and were there in their minds in that island cave – waiting and wondering. And in that moment of silence, that very moment, the cat called Pangur came miaowing in to their midst. And they burst out laughing – all except Larach perhaps – and the laughter rose until Pangur herself had fled back out. Even then in the end Larach laughed, there where he sat, and Colum beside him. The cat had broken the spell.

  ‘Enough for tonight,’ Colum told them, ‘and tomorrow there will be more!’

  And they went out into the bright blue beauty of the night, the skies blown by a huge wind, and a few stars not sharp but like grains of salt. And there was something of Fian that almost wished he had gone, that thought he should have had the courage. And then he remembered what an old man had said in the place where he had grown up, that it was all very well to say you were steady in a storm when you were sitting at home in the rain.

  *

  Colum was ageing. Fian thought of it that night; how he did not hear so well, and grew cross at things he could not mend. The man he had been lay inside, and often – especially when they gathered to sing – was no different. He was the Colum who had landed here to change the world. He was as strong as on that morning they had dragged the boat ashore and a new life had begun. But sometimes, just sometimes, Fian caught glimpses of an old man. A man that was tired, who had carried too much for too long. But he would say nothing. He would have no help, no pity. It was a brave man that asked, and an even braver one who asked a second time. He spent time alone and came back strange and distant, as though he had sought to find himself and been on a long journey. Fian thought he would have liked to take that great hand a moment and hold it tight, as though to say many things that could not be uttered with words. But it was not for him to do; it must be one of the others. Yet he wished it might have been him all the same.

  *

  He woke during the night and was quite awake at once, knew that he had slept enough. There was something in his hands, almost a tingling; something was buried there that had to be found. He got up in the dark stillness and crept outside. The night was blue and his breath smoked away into nothing as he stood there yet. There was a pattering of snowflakes on the wind; they came, thin and drifting, and melted wherever they landed. All around him the others slept, and that was good. He had always liked to be the only one awake and he never quite knew why. As though now he stood on the edge of some great find, that he alone was awake for a reason. He made not a sound as he moved through the settlement and went into the tower. He remembered the first day.

  Yet perhaps he had been wrong. He sat a long time in the darkness and the silence, and what was buried in his hands remained hidden. All he knew was cold; the wind came in ghosts and was gone, but he shivered in the end and huddled in to himself over the page, and thought bitterly that it would have been as well to go on sleeping.

  Until dawn. Until the sky above the far island became like the belly of a fish, flecked with strange fires and patterns. He stood and watched for a time, until he understood. It was that moment of light he wanted and had to find. He went back and began, and then, as always, time ceased to mean any more. He might have been there an hour or a half-day, and all the cold and hunger and doubt was gone from him as though it had never been. There might have been voices around him too; Neil or Cuan or one of the others. He would not have heard them. All he searched for was the finding of the light.

  When he was done he drifted into a half-sleep but once again he would have had no earthly idea how long it lasted. All he knew was that in a dream he saw Mara before him, coming closer in the shadows and speaking his name. She spoke it again and looked at him, but her voice might have been underwater and he could not answer.

  ‘Fian!’

  He sat up and he realized that it was no dream at all, that Mara herself stood in front of him. And he did not feel strange, as on the night when Cuillin had been healed. There was no time for that now.

  ‘I brought you something,’ she said, and held up a tiny vial. ‘It is a colour, a colour I do not think you know and that has no name. But it is made from flowers on the island. I hope that you can use it.’

  She turned to go.

  ‘Please, Mara – wait!’ he implored her, and she turned back to him. He remembered the last time he had seen her, at the Well of the North Wind. He was afraid he might say the wrong thing again now, but he had to speak. Her face was gentler; it was not torn and anguished as it had been that day.

  ‘I am better,’ she said, as though he had asked her, ‘but the winter is long and hard to me. There are no flowers and I miss them.’

  She smiled and he nodded, understanding. He had never thought of such a thing and yet it must be so. The same eyes see different things, he realized, and that was somehow strange and even wonderful.

  ‘Thank you for this,’ he said, and he went to the light of the window and held the vial there so he could see the colour. How many thousand flowers had been melted into those few precious drops? She went over to the book to look at his page; he heard the uneven steps as she limped over the stone. He was pleased that she looked; he wanted her to.

  ‘It is beautiful,’ she murmured, and that gave him courage. ‘Will you come and visit us?’ she asked, as he turned from the window. ‘My mother would like to meet you.’

  *

  It was dark and low and he felt shy. He felt still in a dream that Mara had come to find him and bring him a gift, and her mother did not smile but looked at him a long time and then took his hands. She took both of his hands and turned them upwards and studied them. Then Mara brought candles and he scented things he had never known before, and she offered him something to eat.

  ‘You are a good man,’ her mother said to him, dropping his hands at last. ‘But there are things in your hands that are dark.’

  Then she was gone, away into the shadows, and Mara leaned close. ‘She means no harm. She wants very much to see the book!’

  ‘Then she must come and see it!’ Fian exclaimed.

  A man loomed out of the dark and took Fian’s hand and all but crushed the bones. He carried a net with him, said nothing, and was gone.

  ‘My father,’ said Mara, her voice quieter. ‘He is getting ready to leave for the fishing. But he does not understand the language you speak.’

  ‘Then how did you first learn?’ Fian asked. ‘If it was so strange to you?’

  ‘My mother learned from the monks when they first came here. She wanted to learn what it was they brought; she was curious. And then when I was growing one of the monks came to teach my brother and me. My father did not want me to learn at all, but my mother made sure that I did. Sometimes she helped me. When we were walking for hours to find flowers she taught me words. I still have much to learn.’

  ‘You speak well,’ said Fian, but he uttered the words softly, for he thought she might
not want her father to hear them. The fire was stirred and his eyes smarted with turf smoke and he thought of home. He remembered how he had learned to write against his mother’s will, and he found himself telling Mara, and about how he had been brought here.

  ‘You know that your book will have to be hidden,’ she said, and he thought it strange, as though she had heard nothing of what he had just told her. He neither nodded nor shook his head, but looked at her waiting for her to say more.

  ‘My mother has seen it,’ she said at last. ‘She has seen men from the north who would steal it. One day it will have to be hidden.’

  And he in turn did not know what to say to that. But he knew Ruach and he knew the power of his dreams. And he thought of Larach.

  ‘Then the book must be kept safe,’ he agreed. ‘It is precious, more precious in a way than gold or silver. It is a thing without price.’

  All at once she leaned towards him and spoke soft and swift. ‘You must go now. My father is getting ready to leave and I know he will want me to help him. Come back and find me – at midnight.’

  He found himself outside and his head felt such a tumbling of words and strangeness. But that he had seen Mara again at all; that she had come to find him. He saw a boat nodding on the water; heard the voices of men on the shore. They looked round at him and he felt shy; they did not greet him. He was from his world; they from theirs. And he thought how it must have been when Colum first came here with his stories of a man who had died and returned from the kingdom of death. What did they think of Colum, these fishermen who had been born here and who would die here? What did they think of his chapels and his crosses, of all those who had come here in his wake?