The Well of the North Wind

by Steven, Kenneth;

  Sometimes Baan came and crouched close to him (though not within his reach) and asked for his forgiveness. He looked at her with black, hollow eyes and did not blink, until in the end she went away. He heard her crying sometimes, through the night, and he felt nothing; he stared into the darkness and was empty. There came a time when she did not try to talk to him any more, and he rejoiced that she had given up.

  One late afternoon he knew he was ready and he got to his feet. The world went dizzy about him but he waited until it passed and then took a step. She was there at once, begging him and trying to block his way, saying things on top of each other until he lunged at her and she shrieked. He went out into the light and the brightness hurt his eyes; water poured down his cheeks and he could barely see at all. He knew that she was behind him in the doorway and he heard her crying, but there was no way on earth he would look back. She must have stood there in the entrance to the dwelling as he staggered away. His heart hammered with the exertion and he felt sick, but he fought his way on. Her voice began to diminish and he knew that she couldn’t be following him and he was glad. He stopped when he could go no further and sank to the ground. He felt so sick but he knew he had to keep moving.

  He would not even let his eye fall on the settlement or the tower. He walked onto the moors and staggered about there, often walking in half-circles. He stopped many times to rest on stones; he went slowly, trying to find his way dry-shod across the boggy ground. The spring had come even though he barely noticed it. Little fragments of birds fluttered from tussock to tussock and sent out strings of sound. He heard them but he was determined only to get across and to find his way. He thought once that he heard his name called, a long way off, but he did not turn round and never knew if the voice was real or imagined. Night was falling when finally he got there and all but collapsed on the soaking ground. He had promised himself he would drink, from the Well of the North Wind.

  *

  If he had thought that Mara would come to him, that somehow her spirit might linger in that place she had loved so much, he was wrong. What he felt was hunger and cold. There was no light here on this side of the island; no light on any of the islands to the west. It was cold when the wind came and he kept crouching further and further in to himself, like an animal preparing to hide the winter away. But he would die here; they would find him like this. He imagined that finding and it was the only thing that gave him pleasure.

  But he did not sleep. There were times he imagined things, yet he did not believe they were really dreams. He met Colum on the stairs that led up to the book, and Colum could not look at him. He crumpled on the stairs and his staff fell, and Fian simply stood there and the silence was huge between them. Then, about first light, he heard crying somewhere close and he thought then that it was Mara and his heart leapt. He looked all about him and was wide awake, but then he heard the crying again and knew it as the unearthly voices of seals down on the rocks of the west. Their crying was like human crying and he realized it was not night any more; the skies were low and grey. For a moment he felt a fool: he had come here without blankets and without fire, had no refuge of any kind. Before the morning had risen red and gold he had made something for himself; the shelter a beast might have had.

  He imagined Baan running to the settlement and to Colum, telling him the news and begging him to do something. She wept and would not be consoled. He would die here and they would find him.

  ‘I have brought you two things,’ said a voice behind him, and he spun round in absolute terror, so far away was he in the world of his thoughts. ‘Fire and food, and I will share them with you!’

  ‘Ruach!’ he cried, and he forgot everything to get up and lay his cheek against the side of the other man’s face. He felt the tears sharp in his eyes. Ruach was glad and mischievous; boyish and delighted. There was no shadow in him; no dreams that darkened his day. He brought out the best green stone he had found; long as his hand it was and almost oval, of the deepest jade green. He had polished it until it shone; his pride and his joy.

  ‘I found it one morning at the lowest of tides. There was a beach that normally is not there, at the very corner of the south-east. There was no sea and not a breath of wind, and I saw it from a long way away, prayed that I would reach it before a wave came in. And I did; I found it in time!’

  He had brought fire and wood. Yes, everyone knew where Fian was; Baan had come to tell them he had gone and that he would most likely be here. This had been Mara’s favourite place.

  ‘What did they say?’ asked Fian, when he had refused to have any oatcake.

  Ruach looked at him with big blue eyes, as the flames took and grew. ‘Colum said: He is drinking a cup of poison in the hope that someone else will die.’

  A breath of wind came, and still the blue eyes looked at Fian, and then he looked away at last into the fire. The words echoed and echoed in Fian’s head.

  ‘She will not come back to you,’ Ruach said, and he reached out and held his hand. Still Fian looked into the fire where he crouched, but he could not push Ruach’s hand away. He would not look at him, but he could not push him away.

  *

  It was that day Larach returned from Ireland. He was himself again, the face strong and full, his great hands alive once more. He had been at the monastery of Clonmacnoise and it had been so mild and warm that spring already he had swum in the great curving river that lay below the chapels. It had been a good winter; perhaps in the end the grief had left him and he was forgetting. Colum welcomed him as he might his own son; Larach could see the love in his eyes and it almost made him shy. But he was heart-glad to see Colum just the same; he had feared it might have been his last winter.

  ‘There is one thing I want you to do for me,’ said Colum, and he drew him to one side and whispered to him in the shadows.

  It had been a fine spring day. The first larks sang in a still sky, and the light was clear over the water. Neil said to the scribes that they were free to go as long as they went swimming. They raced down to the beach where Fian and Mara had sat that last time, and they played and laughed naked in the sea until they could bear the cold no longer. It was as though they were washing away a long winter, Cuan thought. It was not easy to bear the days when there was all but no light and the wind howled relentlessly.

  Fian went down from the well to the rough shores on the island’s north-west coast. He still carried the last words that Ruach had spoken. He missed Mara, yet did he keep her alive in his mind because he had loved her so much or because he was bitter they had taken her away from him? He felt as strange and lost as ever before in his life; he did not know where to go or what to do. He gathered fragments of wood on the shore for the remains of the fire he had left behind. What would he have done if she had lived, if he had come back and she had recovered? What then? Would it have been possible, or was all that little more than a dream? He knew nothing, or almost. He did know that he had loved her and that he missed her now, that he grieved for her loss and because he had not been allowed to say goodbye.

  But his death would not bring her back. All he could hope for was that he might be with her again in the kingdom. And if he was still full of anger for those who had betrayed him, what of his anger for God? Why had he taken Mara away as he did? Was he a jester who played with all the creatures he created?

  *

  Fian had not eaten for days and he felt strangely good. He drank and drank; the dark cool of the well water reached the very depths of his being. It was as though his senses were somehow heightened, or perhaps it was that he had grown used to silence. He heard the cuff of the wind when it came and passed over the emptiness of the heather and stone; he heard the ravens’ squabble as they flew over each other in the blue sky, and he even heard the black rustling of their wings. He was glad that he was where he was and not in the clamour of the settlement. Even in their worship there was so much noise; he had come to the edge of himself and he was clear and ready.

  He thought of Mar
a and went over every word they had spoken together; he dug into the ground that had been theirs and held everything again. He wished that they had had more time. He had come with hatred for Colum and for Baan but he had gone beyond hatred. He did not want to think of them but his dreams were not places where he found his revenge. His head felt empty; he walked and stopped to watch a butterfly in the grasses. He crouched beside a single flower and studied the fur of a bee that hummed against it.

  He did not know what remained. That was the question he asked himself; what remained of all he had carried and been through? He knew that he could not have written or painted; he felt that there was nothing left in his hands. He did not even mourn that loss; it was as though the man who had gone up to the tower to his inks had been another.

  He was far past hunger and yet there was nothing of him but a thin rack of bones. He went down to the sea one morning and stood there naked, his ankles in the shallows, and he saw his rippled reflection. He somehow had not imagined this was what he had become, and he stared at himself as at a stranger. He stayed awake through most of that night and he felt neither tiredness nor fear. He thought of Ruach, and it flashed through him that he was growing like him. And that pleased him; he was only glad.

  *

  Did he imagine the secret beach that Larach took him to? Was it part of the delirious wanderings of his mind or did it happen? Was it the following day or the same one? Somehow only parts of that time remained, the way it can be in a dream. He was walking behind Larach and they were going down and down somewhere steep; he was afraid of falling because of the great boulders around them and the deep chasms that lay between. Yet he walked without falling all the same, Larach a few feet ahead of him. They came down to somewhere he had not known before; there was a great dark promontory to his left and a beach of boulders where now they stood. Larach turned and motioned to him, and the sun was in Larach’s face; Fian remembered thinking that he looked younger and full of light.

  They went to the promontory and Fian saw a kind of jagged gap at the bottom, a low cave that disappeared into the rock. Larach vanished into it and all Fian could do was follow. It was soft under his knees, soft and wet – and he realized that it was sand. He did not like the tunnel; he wanted to be out of it but he could only go on and he fought forward through the dark and suddenly broke out in sunlight. The brightness was fierce in his eyes and he was on a beach, a beach made of sheer white sand. It was shielded on all sides by arms of rock like the one he had passed through; as he looked round, still on his knees, he realized he had come in the only way there was. And he thought to himself that it was a kind of door. But Larach was taking off his clothes to swim; he was saying something to Fian he could not properly hear, but he got up and began doing the same. It seemed all he could do. He followed Larach into the water and it hurt more than anything he had ever known; it was so cold it made him dizzy and the world seemed to tremble. He gasped and was under and he swam, in the blue-green shallows of that secret place. And even then, in whatever state he was, he wished that he and Mara had found this, might have known it together.

  And he felt that something washed away. Like an old skin, a whole layer of himself. He thought of the beach where he had started, and the letters and the drawings in the sand. He went under and came up gasping sky, great lungfuls of blue sky. And Larach was laughing, not laughing at him but with him, and he found he was laughing too. He could not remember when he had last laughed and it was good; he did not want to stop.

  Then they were not in the water at all but up on the little beach among the rocks. There was a fire made of heather roots that spat and thumped as the flames devoured them, and Larach was turning little fish in the smoke, for Fian caught the scent of them and it was as good as anything he had known in all his life. For a time they ate, hungrily, and there was no need to say a word.

  And then it did not seem day at all but evening or the beginning of night, and he was cold and Larach put something around his shoulders. They crept close to the fire and it was red, and he stretched his hands over the heat. And it was as though at last he heard Larach clearly, as though before he had been far off and everything was muffled. Now he heard every word clear and whole.

  ‘I wanted to tell you the end of my story, of my journey back from the north. Because you were not there to hear it; I don’t know where you were.’

  And Fian remembered; for a second his head dizzied as he remembered that night when he had slipped away. The last time he had seen Mara; the night she anointed his hands.

  ‘I had been with Cormac on a tiny rock of an island: it was he and I who were left. There was nothing, nothing but dark rocks. I remember thinking of the temptation in the wilderness, of turning stones into bread. Cormac went searching for anything; he was beside himself with hunger. He started climbing a rockface because he believed there might be something to find above us. He was mad with hunger. I watched him from below and kept calling for him to come back. He had all but reached the top where there was an overhang of rock. He clawed his way out to the end of it, and then he lost his grip and fell backwards so that his head broke on the rocks. I ran to him and I saw the moment that his eyes emptied and his life flowed away.

  ‘All I could do was to push out the boat and get in myself, weak as I was. I thought of those others who say they are going wherever God would. They have given up their own strength because they have nothing left, and they are carried at the mercy of the waves. That was all I could do.

  ‘I had neither food nor water in the boat and I had given myself to God; I knew that I would die there. I felt no strength left; I had gone beyond myself. And then, Fian, I knew that someone else was with me in the boat. I was in the stern, unable even to rise, and I could see him in the prow, working with things and busy. The sun was almost above me, so looking ahead, all I could see was a shadow. And I knew that we were moving south; I felt the wind at my back, rushing, and I thought of the word south, and it seemed the most beautiful word in all the world. I wanted to say thank you, and I could not so much as move my broken lips to do so. I could only mouth the words. And then he was beside me and he gave me a skin of water. I put it to my lips and drank. Never have I tasted water so sweet and pure and good. I closed my eyes until it was done and when I put the skin down he was gone.

  ‘And ahead of me, Fian – a long, long way off – I saw the island, this island, our island. I knew that I had made it, that I was almost home.’

  *

  When he awoke, he did not know if he had slept for an hour or a day. He lay curled in close to the well, and the wind played about him in the grass as though it spoke to him. It said that winter was over and spring had begun. He got up and all that had taken place with Larach came back to him, and already it was like a dream. If it had happened, how had he got back to his shelter in the rocks? He had no recollection of returning. He only knew that he felt more himself than ever before. It was as though he had carried heavy rocks when he came here, and now he had put them down. He felt new as the island felt new, and he knelt down a long time to drink from the well.

  It was when he stood up once more and moved up onto higher ground above his shelter that he heard the tang of the bell. The first time it was so faint he was not sure if he had imagined it. The wind came again, a soft paw of it, and he heard nothing for a moment. He held his breath and his eyes circled. Then again – the slow tang, tang, that he knew so well. It was still early in the morning and he listened again, as though somehow the sound would tell him more.

  So he found himself walking back, not hurrying, over a moorland that was coming alive. The white heads of the cotton grass; the little heads of flowers the name of which he did not know. Mara should be here, he thought – but when the words came to him they did so with happiness and he saw her there bending to search for things and telling him the names he did not know. He smiled and she was gone. Now he had walked high enough to be able to look down on the east side of the island and the settlement. He saw figur
es everywhere and heard the bell’s clear call. It lay below the surface of his understanding and yet somehow he felt he knew. Perhaps it was a little like Ruach seeing things without knowing their names. And the sunlight came, full and gold, and spilled over all the ground below like a blessing.

  He came down at last among them and they were carrying brooches and carved wood, gifts most precious. He walked among them but they did not notice him; they had come here for someone else. His name whispered a thousand times, with love and reverence and kindness: Colum. And so in a single flowing they gathered in the chapel and beyond it, to remember him and the fragments of his memory that were theirs and no one else’s.

  And Fian saw that none of them was crying. They sang and their eyes were full of light and love, but they did not cry. They came to thank but not to weep. And all at once Fian remembered the day he first arrived, when he had gone timorous to meet this master, not knowing what to expect, and Colum had taken his hands in his to look at them. His would be the fourth pair to work on the book. He smiled now at the thought of it, and at the long journey of the years, and suddenly he felt a fussing with his own right hand. He turned and it was Ruach, putting his own small, girl-like hand in his. And their eyes met a moment. How would Ruach be now, without the earthly father who had been his world? Yet he sang too, broken and hopeless as he was, yet stronger in the strangest way than any of them. Perhaps it was as Colum himself said, that it was broken vessels that let in the best light.

  And Fian remembered the anger that had been in his own heart; he remembered it because it was nothing but a memory. It was like an island of darkness one passes on the sea and leaves behind. It had gone. He had come back in time to say farewell; he had not come too late.