He could not work the rest of that day. He was restless and his hands would not be still. He talked with Neil and found himself irritable and short-tempered. He complained about wood and light, and afterwards as he stormed away towards his own shelter he wondered where his frustration came from. Was he just tired? Was it as little a thing as that? He almost hoped it was not, that there could be more reason for his mood. But if there was, he had no idea what it might be. He thought that Ruach looked anxious, and worried that a new dream lay like a shadow over his heart. But if it did, he was not the one to solve the riddle.
He did not know what to do with himself. Had he tried to sleep he would have thrashed the hours away, searching for the best place to lie. He found little Cuillin, working away at the ground despite the frost, and saw the child-like joy of his smile. He had almost nothing, yet what he did have he loved with all his heart. Fian felt ashamed of himself for his bad temper, and knew that he should go back and find Neil and tell him so. Not that Neil would bear any grudge; Fian’s grumbling would be like feathers in the wind to the good-hearted Neil, who found laughter everywhere he looked.
No, he did not go back to find Neil as perhaps he should have done. He went to find Ruach, and he knew where he would find him.
How silent it was, the island – like a creature that had crept underground to sleep the winter. There had been frost the night before, and pieces of ice lay white across the moorland. No more than fragile flakes, so that when you held them they were gone in a moment, turned to a trickle of water.
Fian looked out at the broken pieces of island that lay all around them, as he had often done before, and asked himself if anyone lived there. He knew of some monks who had gone to set up a chapel and a settlement on the nearest island, for that was what Colum wanted. He had never intended they should remain with him, copying manuscripts and arguing over angels – he had wanted them to leave, to set off on new journeys, carrying with them the story he had brought from Ireland to share like bread. In the beginning it had been like that: plenty of them had been set on fire by his passion, had all but thrown themselves into boats to do his bidding. But that was a long time ago, years before Fian had known him. Now he was gentler; the fire in him had not died, it had become a glowing heart. Now he did not want those around him to be gone; he wanted them to stay.
Fian saw a seal head dark in the waters of the west side. He could not resist going closer, as he had never been able to resist since childhood. The seal swirled about the shallow water, vanished sometimes until Fian was sure he must be gone, and then magically reappeared somewhere else entirely. Fian went out to the edge of the rocks and waited, feeling twelve years old again. Neil, Colum, Cuillin, even Mara – all of them were for a moment forgotten.
The head appeared in the water and the eyes studied Fian for a moment. He crouched in the rocks and sang, his voice strong and steady, for he had heard stories of seals coming close to hear the singing of humans – there were even songs written to bring them close, though he had never heard them, far less learned them. His mother had had no time for such things.
He thought now that he had sung rather well, and he looked to see where the seal was. After a moment he could not help but smile to himself, for the seal had disappeared. It was a sore lesson to learn that day.
He set out across the last hill and came down to the green dell, the place where the light had shone that day of greyness. And now there was nothing; it was empty and silent and no more than a place held in the hands of the hills. Yet that in a sense only confirmed what he had felt before rather than anything else. It made it easier to believe, not harder.
‘You did not just come down to find me, you came to find yourself!’ said Ruach, and there was almost a smile as he spoke the words.
‘I came to find many things,’ Fian agreed, and he started sifting in the piles of shingle about his feet, in the hope of a bright flash of green.
‘What is it you have seen, Ruach? Do you know yet?’ He would not have asked had he felt that the man was too deep in his inner turmoil. Perhaps now he felt he knew Ruach better than any of them, liked him even more too. He wrestled with light and dark, and was not afraid to show it. No, that was not true – there was little he could have done about showing it – there was no choice. But Fian had seen too much show, even among the monks, and nothing had made him doubt more than that. Ruach struggled, yet he did not let go. Year after long year.
‘There was no dream,’ said Ruach, and he looked out south as he spoke. ‘Sometimes it is like that. It is as though I am given a rock while I sleep. I can feel its shape and size – I can see it. But I have to translate it. It has come in another language and the languages are never the same twice.’
‘I think I told you that sometimes I waken with things in my hands,’ said Fian. ‘Drawings. And I don’t know what they are until I go back to the book, until I lose myself in the work. I have to lose myself first.’
‘Perhaps we can exchange dreams,’ said Ruach, and again a shy smile curled his lips. ‘I would not fear yours quite as I dread my own!’
‘So how do you find it in the end?’ Fian asked.
‘For every one there is a different answer. There is no learning how it will be next time. Always I pray, Fian – I pray that I may know quickly and be spared the torment of the searching. And I never am.’
‘Why do you think that is?’
‘It’s what I’ve been given to carry.’
No voice of martyrdom. The words just as they were, neither heavier nor lighter than that. And Fian nodded and could say nothing more, and the two of them crouched there for all the world like two boys, sifting the stones for green treasure.
‘Once I asked that it might be taken away,’ Ruach said in the end. ‘I thought I could never go through it again. Perhaps it is like going to sea, knowing always you will be desperately sick. You know it is ahead of you and so you dread everything. You dread the next time. And then I dreamed that I had been given a new boat. Not only that, but I was a child again. I was not this failing man I saw in my reflection; my skin was new and shone. I knew that the boat was a gift, and I ran to it with a whole heart. And ever since then, it has been different.’
They did not come back together, for Ruach was not ready. Fian came alone, slowly, and he thought of the dream the whole way over the island.
*
It was a struggle to wait up until midnight, and a struggle also to escape from people. This little island could be a babble of tongues! That was what Colum had once shouted in fury when he could find no peace to think, and there were plenty of days it was true still. Often enough it was exciting talk; two young men wrestling with ideas through the night and not sleeping until the dawn had crept in over the sea; others carving songs, carving stone, carving wood – and talking as they did, searching their way forwards.
He wanted to slip away like a shadow long before midnight, and of course they did not want to let him go. The place was busy and excited and he loved it; just that that night of all nights he wanted to be away.
‘Stay with us, Fian, and tell us what you think! You spend too much time on your own, hidden away in that tower! There are times you need talk, too, and you need us! Stay with us and tell us what you think!’
He promised it would be tomorrow, and they shook their heads and smiled.
‘That story has been taken out of the drawer once too often,’ said Neil, though they knew they were beaten. ‘We’re just not good enough, that’s what it is.’
‘I shall swim round the island twice over in penance if I don’t keep my word,’ said Fian, and that was enough to have them raise their eyebrows. He heard their good laughter as he went out into the darkness.
A full moon that night and a silver light poured over land and sea. Not the tiniest breath of wind and the sea silk. He was not cold, though he thought that by morning there would be a glitter of ice on the stones.
It was a miracle to have escaped, he thought. Harder to expla
in his wanderings tomorrow if they went to find him in the tower that night and found neither his candle nor his bent head. But tomorrow would have to take care of itself. He left the settlement and found his path, was thankful for the moonlight. He could move swiftly enough and not risk a twisted ankle; every step was clear. He got there and Mara was waiting outside; she put a finger to her lips and drew him away from the doorway, whispered to his hunched shadow.
‘My mother is sleeping! As long as she doesn’t hear us now . . .’
She took his hand and led him, down and down to the shore. He had thought of it before and he thought of it now, how humans could be so quiet when they pleased. They could make as little sound as deer.
He was shy that she took his hand and yet he liked it. When they reached a path through the heather she let it drop again and he was sorry, but he would never have had the courage to reach for hers again. The moon might have been leading them, and making a path across the sea that was almost unbroken. And he wondered where she was taking him, and at midnight, and she walked quickly despite her limp – up now over a headland and a long plateau of grass. Still she did not walk beside him but ahead, and the tiredness he had felt earlier was gone. There was a gladness in him, a glow, and now they were going down onto a curve of beach, but walking on to its end and up – to a steep slope of rock and ivy and a single wind-bent tree. Up at last to the shallow arch of a cave.
He sat beside her and understood nothing, but he did not want to ask.
‘Look,’ she said, and he stopped looking at her but at what lay in front of them. The curve of beach stroked by the sea down below them; the far island and its headlands, its great hills – all lit by the ball of the full moon that lay right ahead of them. Never had he seen its grazings and its silver pools so magnificent, and their faces were bright with its shining.
‘I knew it would be like this tonight and I wanted you to see it,’ she said.
‘I’m glad I was able to escape,’ he told her. ‘They were all excited and wanted me to stay, wanted me to talk. I thought they might not let me go!’
‘Excited?’ she repeated and smiled. ‘Then it’s because of that.’ She nodded up at the full moon and he frowned at her, not understanding. ‘The full moon does that,’ she told him. ‘It makes men excited and angry and sleepless. It always has done and it always will.’
He thought about what she said unhappily. ‘Is that not part of the old religion?’
She laughed, and it was like the merry laugh a child gives when she cartwheels through spring flowers. And in the end he had to smile himself, sheepishly.
‘No, it is not,’ she said, and sat so she could see him in the entrance to the cave. ‘It is just one of the many strange things about the world. That is all. Not everything needs to be explained and understood. That is what your monks want. They want to answer every question until there’s nothing left.’
He thought about that and said nothing. He thought of the great debates he had left behind and he saw that in a way she was right. In a way.
‘I don’t think we want answers to everything,’ and even as he spoke the words he noticed that he counted himself one of them. ‘I think there is plenty we will never know and do not even try to explain.’ Was that what he thought and what they also would have believed? He was not certain.
Her face smiled again as she looked at him. ‘Everything you cannot explain you just call God!’ she said. ‘That is your easy way out!’
Now he wanted to creep back to his tower and his book and his inks, and say that all this talk had to do with the scholars. He was not one of them; he would copy their words but not join their arguments. He liked to be on the edge of the talk, to listen to two of them building and building their debate. It was like a game of invisible chess. But he had neither a head nor a heart for it himself, though he liked well enough to listen at the side in the shadows. And he admired them; perhaps he knew that now as he had not before. He had counted himself one of them.
‘Do not look so anxious!’ she said to him, and he turned back to her and smiled again. She made him think and that was good. She and her mother were outside their little world of the settlement and the chapels. Their world was not the only one and it was good for them to remember that.
‘I brought you a gift,’ she said gently. ‘I thought of the work that you do and I wanted to make you something.’ Now she looked away, shy, towards the silver-plated hills of the far island. Not a thing moved in the night; there was not the slightest noise. ‘After the day I took you to the Well of the North Wind, my favourite place on the island, I did not know what to do. I know that I am ill and that I will die, but I do not know when. It is something I can do nothing about. And sometimes I am frightened and want to hide away, and sometimes I want only to live and laugh. That day I was afraid.’
Her eyes held him and he listened and tried to understand. ‘Perhaps I will be like that again one day,’ she said, ‘but then perhaps you will remember. You will know it is the fear inside me.’
‘I missed you when I did not see you,’ he said. ‘I wanted to come and find you but I did not have the courage. I thought you . . . I thought that I had said something that angered you. But you were often in my mind.’
He had never spoken such words before. He had never thought he would speak to her again. It was true that he had missed her, but he had also dared not think of her because he believed it was useless and impossible.
‘So after that day,’ she said, and now he saw the tiny vial in her hands, ‘I went back on my own to the well, and I found special flowers. I made something for your hands and for the work they have to do.’
He looked at her, stunned. That she would do such a thing for him. Her eyes smiled. ‘Give me your hands.’
He held them out, still speechless, and she let a few drops fall on his palms. Softly she smoothed them into his skin, and he caught the fragrance of it then, and it was so strong it all but left him dizzy. It was like the very scent of summer; it was as though she had found the summer and distilled it down to this. For him. She poured new drops now onto the tops of his hands and smoothed each finger in turn, and all at once he thought of that first day when he had met Colum, fearful and gauche and bewildered, and he had been told that his were the fourth pair of hands to work with the book. And he remembered too how they had taken him up into the tower and told him the sacred nature of his work, how he must always be careful with his hands.
‘Will you draw something for me?’ she asked suddenly, looking up.
‘Now?’ he said, surprised and foolish.
‘No,’ she said shyly, and looked back at his hands as still she worked with them. ‘One day. One day, if it is possible.’
‘Of course I will, Mara,’ he said, and he wanted to kiss the top of her head as she bent over his hands but he did not. He turned his head slightly and put his left cheek there instead and closed his eyes. And she did not move.
*
Just days and days of stillness. The snow down on the islands; here and there almost to the very edge of the sea. Days of gathering driftwood and breaking the ice at the well for water. A cold that hurt like a wound in feet and hands. The waking in the middle of the night to hear the low voice of the wind, passing like a ghost from nowhere into nowhere. Days of hunger when there was all but nothing to eat, when even walking felt a penance and everywhere too far away. At midday the only sound ravens tumbling and talking their dark dialect in the white-blue silence of the sky. And yearning for the fire; hands yearning to be over the turf fire.
One day Larach came to find them. He was better, though his face was still hollow and the eyes staring from their caves. But he had learned to laugh again, even though the deaths he had left behind still haunted him.
He came to find them and they were silent as they waited, watching. Mostly they looked up as he came close, though one stared into the fire. He stood there and his shadow blocked the snowball sun from the open doorway. They looked, knowing he would
speak, and waiting.
‘Colum was weeping,’ he said, his voice sore. ‘He was only weeping.’
*
Had her oil made a difference in his hands or was it something else? He just knew he was on fire with pictures, and that he was drawing well. Somewhere very deep inside he was sure of it, though he would have said the words to no one in a thousand years. Yet he knew all the same; he was sure. That in itself brought him back to draw the more. It was like stoking a fire; once the first flames came you knew how to bring them on and wanted more. There were times he did not even want to sleep because he knew what lay in wait on the page; he could see it there, not yet drawn but sleeping. And though he dragged himself away, reluctant to sleep, he knew it was good to rest too. He came back restored, eye and hand steady. He knew the danger in going on just a little too long.
There was one morning he was down at the shore, by the little beach where he had shown the children his drawing. He was like a child himself; sure he was on his own and squatting there at the very edge of the tide, watching the ripples of clear water break over the sand. He was far away in himself.
‘What is it that you want with my daughter?’
He gasped, all but toppled forwards in shock, and her hands reached out to steady his shoulders. But when she brought him back, she did not let him go. And her mouth again, rasping at his left ear: ‘What is it that you want with my daughter?’
He knew who she was; there could be no doubt about that. It was her strength he remembered more than anything; a kind of strength he had scarcely known before. Not a mere physical might that gave a man the power to lift great rocks; it was more than that. A strength that went through her whole self; strength in her seeing, in her talking, in the way that she held things.
‘I want to be her friend,’ he found himself saying, and he had not spoken any words before that morning, so the shape of them felt strange in his mouth. ‘I want to be good and kind. I mean no harm!’
Perhaps she relaxed her hold on him a fraction, but her voice was no less strong. ‘You must know a little of what Mara has suffered, Fian. She has seen the face of death many times and come back. You must be careful with her. She is made of brittle things. And you could break her if you are not careful.’
The Well of the North Wind Page 7