There he goes! Back to his book, boys, and he even hangs his head in shame! He heard Neil’s voice, joyous and full of good-heartedness, and he made himself listen to Goloch and his stories. It was all he could do.
In the end he could listen no more, and he thanked Goloch for looking after him well. He made to leave for the well and a last drink of water.
‘Pay heed to your dreams!’ the boy called after him. ‘Everyone who comes here dreams!’
*
It was the very dead of night and all the settlement slept. The last argument had been left in laughter and half-hugged shoulders. No lights shone. About midnight there was a crystalling of snow and then nothing, not so much as a breath of wind. The only sound came from Colum’s chamber, much later, and by then he was ragged and the bear in him close to breaking loose.
‘I have done what you bid me and I can do no more, so let that be an end of it! No, I will not talk about it, nor will I do so tomorrow! I am troubled by what I have done and would that I were not. He is gone and that is what you wanted.’
Still the other voice spoke in the shadows and would not be done. He breathed and kept the bear on its chain; his voice was small but dangerous.
‘It is the middle of the night and I am an old man. I should not be here and would that I were not. There are times I grow tired of what I carry and this is one of those times. So leave me and let us pray that what we have done – yes, what I have done and what you have done – may be for the best. I bid you goodnight and I ask that you leave me in peace.’
The shadow went; hurried out into the hugeness of the night. And Colum closed his eyes at last, though his heart did not rest. Sometimes he yearned for an earthly master to give him counsel. The world came to him and wanted answers; to whom was he to turn? There were times when God was silent. Perhaps now, after all these years, even more silent. He did not know if he believed all the words he had spoken to Fian, and that troubled him. He wanted to believe them and yet he was not certain. For whom had he spoken them? For Fian, for himself, or for his visitor?
At the south end of the island Ruach kept his vigil. He had vowed he would sleep when the last piece of wood was burned, but he kept going to find more. He was too frightened of what he might find in his dreams. Still nothing was clear; only a shadow moved on the edge of his consciousness and troubled him. He worried for Fian and did not know why. An otter came out of the shadows and melted into the water without a thought. If only he might possess such courage; to enter the darkness with the whole of his heart.
*
It is strange how we are not missed. All of us want to be, especially when we are dead and have departed for good, yet then we cannot know how we have been missed. But we want to return and know that somehow our not being in the familiar place made a difference. That the days were different for those we left behind.
Perhaps it was as much because Fian was so often up in the tower that his absence was barely noted that first day. There was bread to be made. A group had stayed up late the night before talking to Larach; he had assumed something of the mantle of the hero since he recovered. A number of the young men had grown fascinated by the dream of desert places, and he had found one and endured there and returned. Perhaps his gaunt face and hollow cheeks made his status all the more heroic. Perhaps he limped on that left leg just a little more when he knew they were watching. So Fian’s empty bed was hardly noticed until the next evening. Even then, though it was talked about, there was little concern. He might be working on a new page – and they knew that of late there had been plenty. Or he might have gone to find Ruach. They knew well enough that the settlement could be too much for Fian too; the endless babble of the scribes and their thirst for answers. He was one of them and yet he was not. They accepted him and did not need to understand him.
It was only on the following day that they first began to puzzle over his absence. Neil went up to the tower, taking the steps two at a time and humming something that he himself had composed only a few days before. He stopped abruptly, seeing at once the place was empty. He had been all but certain he would find the artist here, his head bent over the page. And he had not been here for long enough. Neil stood there a second, waiting and thinking. Then where could he be?
In the end it was Colum himself who told them, and though they were a moment surprised, they quickly forgot to be. And the place where Fian always was simply filled. He was not missed. Cuan and Neil spoke of him once or twice in the first days, but not thereafter.
Only Ruach remembered him, where he kept his silent vigil down at the south end of the island. Sometimes he did no more than sit at the mouth of the overhang where he sheltered, huddled in to himself and looking out always onto the sea. He did not even have the desire to search for stones.
And the girl remembered him. She knew that he had gone and she felt his absence somewhere deep inside. She went across the moors to the Well of the North Wind, slow and limping, wishing he was with her, and wishing it was not winter and that there might be flowers to gather, for that would have been a comfort. But she did not know why it was that he had gone.
*
Strange that the last thing of which Goloch had spoken was dreams, for Fian had no sense of dreaming that first night. He had no sense of sleeping deeply, for he lay on almost pure rock, and he turned and turned again. But it was as though he flowed always through strange water, until at last he lay a long time and knew that it was morning.
He knew where he was as soon as he opened his eyes. The light came from a hundred places in the stone beehive in which he lay. There was no sound – of water, of wind, of anything. It was seldom he woke to silence. No matter the earliness of the hour there would be talking close by; some huddle of scholars who had slept a couple of hours and had returned now to the tussles of the night before. Or talk about the bringing in of a boat or the mending of a wall, at the same time as a debate over some phrase of music. Talk was part of the fabric of their garments.
And so the absence of it was strange. He felt lonely for the first time since childhood, since his mother chased him out and he went down to draw in the sand. That was why he had begun to draw. Yet he could not even do that here, he thought, as he went out at last into the cold grey wretchedness of the morning. Every beach was made of stone. It was as though this place had been chosen for him as somewhere he could not hide. There was nowhere to escape from himself.
He drank a long time. He crouched by the well and looked all around. The evening before there had been shimmerings of islands to the south; now the mist had swallowed them. He could not even see the place where water met sky; they were as one. Even the sea did not move but came and lipped the island shore without a sound.
He walked the circumference of the island and was almost glad of the noise his feet made on the stones. All he found on the far side was a gully that went straight down from the top of the island to the shore. It was as though lightning had once struck it and burned a mark there for ever. But there was nothing to find except a rubble of broken stones.
He went back to his cell because there seemed nowhere else to go. Inside was a new stack of pieces of oatcake. It was apparent that Goloch knew his task well: to be invisible but to watch those who came here without fail.
It suddenly struck him that this was a place Mara would not like either, for there were no flowers. The thought of her was like a shock of light. And yet it came to him at that moment, too, that he barely knew her. There was far more that he did not know than he knew. There had been too little time; nothing like enough!
And when he thought of Mara he remembered her mother also, and the morning she had found him at the tide’s edge and held him. It was as though she had put a knife to his throat. She had wanted no talk of her daughter’s healing and yet why should there not be? Why could the God they believed in not take away her sickness?
He looked up at the pieces of light that showed between the stones. He did not know what to pray for himself and Col
um had wanted him to come to pray. So if he could not pray for himself, he would pray for Mara.
*
Ruach saw a storm coming, but he did not know if it was a real storm or one of anger and strife. He fretted because the shadow would not come closer; he felt it on the edge of everything. He could not walk over the beach without seeing it there ahead of him, and at night he was afraid of closing his eyes. For all that, he would rather be where he was. He could not have borne the talk and argument and laughter of the settlement; he could not have answered questions about the setting of fires or the fetching of water. He knew that he was only a stone’s throw from escaping into his own death. His existence was bearable because shadows came, most often in dreams, and a few days later they manifested themselves, he understood them, and the storm broke. The day that followed a storm was nothing less than blessed release. He felt whole and unafraid; he could laugh and hear song, talk and forget himself. He could love and feel loved.
But never had a storm lasted so long. Never had a shadow lingered at the edge of his consciousness like this without coming alive. All he knew, or thought he knew, was that it had something to do with Fian. But there was little help in that. It was insufficient; a fragment of possibility with which he could do nothing. And so he gathered wood and fed a fire; he wandered over the green glens at the island’s south end finding the leaves of a sour herb he could eat, and drinking water from a loud stream that snaked from the high ground.
Nothing. Just the sea’s breathing; its suck and fall, suck and fall. There were mornings when he felt stronger, after he had slept a few hours of the darkness away. Then he clattered down over the rocks to the tide’s edge and was a child again, crouching in search of fragments of translucent green stone. He searched for a perfect one; an oval stone the size perhaps of his thumbnail. When it rolled in his palm it would be dark, almost black, but when held against the light it would turn lemon yellow, a little world of caverns and ledges. He would play his game with the sea; hunching as close to the waves as he dared, before skipping back as the next wall of thunder rolled in. But more often as the morning progressed he sat somewhere higher up, close to the overhang where he had his fire and curled to sleep, to sit and sift. Perhaps it was the sheer rhythm of his hands that comforted; the sifting and sifting of little hills of shingle. It was like the rhythm of the sea, the in-breath and the out-breath. But by the afternoon he could do nothing. Often he could not walk as far as the tide’s edge. The fear had descended and he almost saw the shadow there on the horizon, on the edge of the outer world and of the inner one also. He tried to pray and most often his prayers were like flimsy things of grass that blew away on the wind. He just crouched and rocked, backwards and forwards, and sometimes he cried. There were flickerings of home and growing up; he remembered a wide, green place and the soft voice of his mother. She rocked him and sang a song that was to send him to sleep, but he fought against sleeping because he liked the song too much.
It was when the dark began to descend that he felt most afraid. Now it was almost midwinter and the shortest days of the year. Sometimes he managed to struggle up to the summit of one of the little hills to watch the sun’s fall. He kept the light to the last, then crept back down through the shadows that were growing already to hide in his cave. His fire was tiny and he fed it fragments; it was there he kept watch as the sea boomed around him invisible in the darkness. He could not pray but he sang; that is, he sang inside. He heard slow and beautiful psalms sung in his head; he heard them sometimes over and over again, and they kept the shadow from falling across him completely.
But often the night was all but over by the time he slept. It would have been so easy to get up and wade into the sea. All of this would be over; there would be no more waiting. No more nights like this. Sometimes, just sometimes, sleep came over him as he lay huddled there under the rocks. He woke in the light of a new day, rejoicing that he had slept at all.
The night after Fian left he did not sleep. The dawn came, grey and cold, like a wolf. The shadow had not left him; all night it had been there, closer yet still invisible. His hands and feet hurt so much he cried. He knew that he had to move. He knew, too, that he could not do this much longer. And then the words came to him: he must go to speak with Colum. He let them echo in his head before he truly understood them. Yes, it was all that he had left. Even then, he got up and dragged himself over the top of the shore. The world was wrapped in wool. He started walking.
*
Goloch crouched in the doorway. The silhouette of him, the wild curls trailing over his neck and shoulders. He did not come in to the cell. ‘I forgot to take you to the chapel,’ he said. ‘You were sick when you arrived, and then you had to have food, and when I showed you everywhere else I didn’t take you there. I’m sorry to have broken your silence.’
Fian was not in the least sorry, but he was amused that Goloch had to break it with quite so many words. It was obvious he was waiting. ‘Well, will you take me there?’ Fian asked.
They walked out past the well and down to the end of the island. Fian had a sense of it now; it was a long, thin tapering shape – pointed at both ends and with one single ridge of hill along its middle. The gully ran down from hill to sea on one side.
When they reached the end of the island (what somehow Fian felt must be the south), Goloch began clambering up towards the top. There was rubble everywhere; piles and piles of the strange grey shards. Sometimes he went on all fours because of the slithering piles of them and the steepness of the slope. But he was younger and fitter than Fian who came tottering behind him, clutching strands of grass whenever he found them. He had spent too long in the tower with his book.
Close to the top Goloch turned to watch how he was getting on and to wait for him. And as he straightened up Fian saw there was something he had not noticed before; a hole that looked as though it had been carved out of the very hillside. Goloch waited until Fian had caught up with him and recovered his breath. Then he disappeared into darkness.
The chamber was about six or ten feet deep. It took a moment for Fian to see anything at all, but vague shapes began to grow out of the gloom. Something that might have been a font; ledges in the walls for candles; smooth surfaces for seats.
‘No one knows if it was carved like this or if it’s an accident of creation,’ said Goloch. He shrugged his shoulders and smiled, looked about him at the ceiling and the walls. ‘And what does it matter! But the legend is that it was a hiding place, that it was made by God for someone in great need. That is why the island was seen as holy in the beginning. There are many years of prayer in this place.’
Fian nodded. Above all, it was an escape from the greyness, a greyness he thought might have driven him mad in the end. He thanked Goloch as the rock chapel came alive moment by moment. The boy went in the end, though it was clear he had no wish to go. And Fian wished that he could have brought Mara here. He remembered the cave where they had crouched in the moonlight and where she had taken and anointed his hands with the oil she had made for them. And he prayed for her and prayed for her; just the same words over and over in his head. He prayed that she might be kept safe and well.
*
Colum gave Ruach wine (watered down, for he saw how weak he was, and how his hands shook). He put some knots of bog oak on the fire and he brought Ruach close in to the flames and wrapped a blanket around the remains of his shoulders. In all the years he had not seen him like this.
‘Have you eaten, Ruach? You cannot live down there on nothing! You must come back and let us care for you for a time! There will be space in the infirmary and you can sleep. Your eyes tell me you have not slept for days!’
‘I am haunted by a shadow.’ The voice little more than a whisper, and Colum took his hands and chafed them, for they were like stone with cold. Ruach stared into the flames and his eyes glistened with light. ‘That is why I came back,’ he went on, and each word was like a painful step. ‘I long for release and there is none. The shadow
is out there and will not come close. I cannot sleep for fear of it.’
‘Then I will pray with you and we will ask that you are able to see and that this can be at an end!’ said Colum, and he held an open hand under Ruach’s chin and tilted the cup to his lips. As he did so he saw the blood around Ruach’s pupils and how his eyes wandered. Like a man who has fled a war, he realized. This must not go on.
He was about to ask more and thought better of it. Ruach was half mad with hunger and thirst and exhaustion; he stood on the cliff edge of delirium. He must be brought back first; that was the only hope.
Three times others knocked on the door asking to see Colum, and three times he sent them scuttling. He had neglected Ruach and he knew it. This man who had been troubled all his days by ghosts and dreams, yet who never faltered in his trust. In the days of Rome they could have set him against lions and gladiators; Ruach would have gone out ready, his life held in his open hands. There were younger, stronger voices here now; perhaps they were heard too often and the Ruachs were left in the shadows. Yet it did not help that more of his days were spent hidden in a cave than here in the settlement; there was little Colum could do for him there. Maybe now was the time to bring him back among them . . .
He made up a little gruel in a bowl and fed it to him. Already Ruach was stronger; his hands had steadied and there was colour in his face. Still he stared into the fire, but there was less madness in those eyes. As Colum fed him he prayed in the silence of his heart, over and over again.
‘Do you have any clue?’ he asked softly. ‘Have you any thought of what the darkness might be, Ruach? Tell me if you have had so much as a glimpse.’
And Ruach turned. There was a crumb of gruel on his upper lip as he lifted his face and Colum drew back, the empty bowl held in his hands. ‘Fian,’ he said, without a moment’s hesitation, and it was as though he breathed his name rather than spoke it. ‘I am anxious for Fian, that is all I know. There is more, and that I cannot find, but I am anxious for Fian!’
The Well of the North Wind Page 9