Which was true. Until he was there, too.
She tilted her face and took in his dark, weed-strewn hair; she knew what he was from the beginning. Stared into his strange blue-green eyes, gently touched the oddly downy skin which stretched across his thoroughbred bones. He didn’t stay long that time; he didn’t say a word to her. Afterwards, she marvelled to herself that she had not felt even the faintest flickering of fear.
The second time he came, he lowered himself down beside her where she sat, and laid his handsome head in her lap. She could have done it then, in exactly the way that all the old stories say. She could have left – escaped him. Everyone knew how it was to be done. Could have untied the long strings of her apron, and slid a flat stone under it in the place where her thighs had been; could have left him sound asleep there, and run.
That was not the day she ran.
Instead, she sat with him there while he slept, fingers combing his weed-tangled hair, hands stroking his silky, dark, pointed ears.
The third time he came, he laid his head on her breast, and she did not push him away. A skein of wild greylags called out to her from the sky; a silvery brown trout jumped for joy out of the dark heart of the loch. He lifted his hands to the ribbon that bound up her hair; undone, she closed her eyes, and let it all fall.
There’s a story about the birth of this island, do you know it? Well then, here is another for your collection. It happens also, you see, to be the story of a each-uisge. There were no Western Isles in those days; there was only Stack Rock in the outer seas, and that with a fine castle upon it. That castle, it is told, was once the home of a fearful giant. Oh, a right monster he was: half man and half serpent, and the proud possessor of nine fierce heads. His favourite food was young girls. He would raid the inner isles to satisfy his appetite, carrying off nine maidens at a time – one for each of his cavernous mouths. One day, a young man who was betrothed to one of the captured maidens decided that this did not sit well with him at all. So he took himself off to a certain mountain loch in which lived a each-uisge. The young man knew the horse well; it seemed they were both keen on fishing. And the boy had warned the water-horse once, when the men of the village had set off with the intention of capturing him – for he was a fine strong horse, and would work for them well in the fields. It was known in those days that you could capture the eachuisge if only you could get a bridle on him; he would not be able, then, to take on human form. So anyway: the each-uisge owed this young man a favour. Well, he told the horse of his loss, and asked would he carry him across to the outer seas in search of the evil giant. The each-uisge agreed. So they set off together, and the horse swam around with the young man on his back until finally they found the giant. The horse assumed his fine human form, and together they managed to slay the monster and free the nine maids.
But that left them with a wee bit of a problem. How to bury so gigantic a creature, even though they’d reduced him in size by cutting off eight of his nine heads? Well, he was too big to sink, so in the end they left him floating there in the outer sea, and the young man and his betrothed swam back to Skye on the each-uisge’s back. As time passed, the sea claimed the monster for its own. Seabirds flew in and pecked at him; fishes swam in and nibbled at him. Strong winds and waves crashed at him, scrubbing and rubbing till all that remained were the bare bones, and these turned eventually to rocks and hills and cliffs. The Butt of Lewis was born from his one remaining head, and the soles of his feet are now the cliffs of South Bernera. The eight disassembled heads became the outer islands. And that, so they say, is how the Western Isles came to be.
But my point is this: it was a each-uisge who helped to save the day; a each-uisge who helped give birth to these islands. It stood in stark contrast to the other tales – the ones which say that they’re liars, and always evil. That girl knew the story, of course. And in it she found the local hero she had been looking for all her life.
On the day she ran, he had asked her to marry him. To come with him, down through the deep dark waters of the loch; down through the deep, dark waters of the world. To come with him to another world. He could change her, he said; he could transform her into a creature just like him. She would live with him forever in the land beneath the waters – but sometimes, if she chose, she could walk these hills again as a beautiful young woman. Just as he did now, as a handsome young man.
It was the choice of her life, and the only real choice she would ever have. That girl knew it, for sure. Can’t you see that now, young man? But faced with a choice she had never really expected, that girl simply did not know what to do. Who knows how it is, the land beneath the waters? Who knows what it is, to live the life of a each-uisge? Would she remember who she once had been, or would it all fade away when she changed? How could she choose a thing when she did not really know what it was that she was choosing? Yes, she had wanted something more – she had prayed for something more. But now it came to making a real choice, she was afraid.
So she ran from him. She left him there by the lochside, his wild eyes flashing and his fine-boned arms outstretched to her, and she ran back home to the village.
In one version of this story, that girl stays home and stays safe. Marries a local lad and lives happily ever after – or so the people of this township would like to think. In a second version of this story, that girl stays home and stays safe – then dies of a broken heart. But this – this is a third version of the story. This is another story again.
What should she have done, then, that girl? Gone back to her stifling, small life? Gone back to her small life, as I did? Yes, me. I understand that girl, you see, because I was just like her. Because the same thing happened to me.
No, it was not the each-uisge; it was a selkie that did for me. Out of the moonlit sea he came, strong and sleek; fronds of sea fern dripping from his body onto the singing sands. Yes, when I was a young girl, something happened to me down by the sea. This sea at the edge of the world, this sea at the end of all things. This sea where the road runs out, where the heart gives out, where the spirit’s lifeblood leaches out – if you let it. I haunted this shoreline as a girl. I would stand right there on those sea-battered rocks, searching for the Blessed Isles out west. When I was a child, I thought St Kilda was Hy Brasil. You know how it is – how it comes and goes, even on the clearest of days. One minute it is there, then you blink and it has vanished again. I would stand on those rocks in the face of prevailing gales and wish for magic with all my heart. Someday, I’d dream, a boat would come and carry me away. The boat, of course, would be steered by a handsome prince, and he’d whisk me off to his magical island in the west.
Instead, it was a seal-man who carried me away. He surfaced slowly from the flood tide; washed up on Mealista beach. Becalmed, bewitched, I scrambled down to him; I watched with fascination as his sealskin slipped away. I stared into his wild, animal face; saw seahorse and starfish flash in his dark, round eyes. He took hold of my hand, and we swam together under a suddenness of September stars. Yes, the first stars I had seen for four long months, glistening and glittering even through the bright white fullness of the moon. He made love to me in the shallows at ebb tide; he left me when the sea deserted the land. When the tide turned tail and ran for its life, a third of the way to Mealista Island, and more.
I knew all the stories about selkies, of course; I knew that those seals could take their human form just once a month. One night each month, when the moon was bright and full. So when that full moon next shone down on the fine, white sands of Mealista, I was there waiting for him. In flood tide and ebb, and all the tides between – he came and he went through all these long, hard years. Why do you think I have stayed here, young man? A handsome woman, unmarried, alone? I have stayed in these bleakly beautiful, godforsaken edgelands for him.
If he could have made me like him, I would have taken to the sea in a flash. I would have become seal for him; I would have become selkie for him. I’d have braved the Blue Men of the Minch with
him, I’d have stolen the pearls of mermaids for him. But that gift is not in a selkie’s power. That is the gift of the each-uisge. The each-uisge, you see, holds the power of transformation. Not just for himself, but for others.
He was a strange creature, my selkie. When he was on land he longed for the sea; when he was in the sea he longed for the land. And is that not given to us all, to long for what we never can fully hold? Sometimes, love is like that. Sometimes, love can only exist while balancing, like angels, on the head of a silver pin.
So I fell into such a love: I fell into the arms of the sea. I fell into the sea. Do you know the old story from Harris about the fish that fell into the sea? A Tarbert fisherman caught a particularly fine herring. So fine and beautiful was the herring, and so fond did the fisherman find himself of it, that he stuck it in the breast pocket of his jacket to keep it safe and warm. It was not the cleverest idea in the world, and, well, that herring struggled. Of course it did; it was a fish out of water. It couldn’t breathe. But like any animal, it wanted to survive. So it gaped and it gasped, and finally it found a way to take its oxygen from air. To bypass its gills, to open its little round mouth, and let the air find its passage through.
The herring was happy enough in its way, they say. The man loved it, and fed it; the man sang old fishing shanties to it, to lull it to sleep at bedtime. Then, one night, the man went to the pub as sometimes he did on a Saturday. But this particular Saturday happened to be his friend’s birthday, and the man had a little too much to drink. Staggering home along Pier Road, he decided to go and relieve himself into the water. But just as he was unzipping his trousers, he caught his foot on a misplaced stone, and pitched himself to the ground. The herring tumbled out of his breast pocket, fell into the sea – and drowned.
So there she sat, that girl; there she sat, in the chair where you are sitting now. Word-wounded, world-wounded. ‘The thing to do,’ I said to her, ‘is to take your life in your own hands.’ This island will chew you up, if you let it. This island, and the stories they tell about how it is supposed to be. ‘Make your own story,’ I said to that girl. ‘Make your own ending. Whatever story you choose, make it your choice – not theirs.’
They never found her body; the each-uisge, they say, took her after all. Drowned her or ate her, who can know? And after a fashion, they’re right. He took her. But what they never could grasp then, and what they will not understand now – when finally you write that girl’s story down for all to see – is that she went back to him of her own accord. She went willingly into those deep, dark waters – and she went as a each-uisge.
What’s that, young man? There’s a knocking on the door, you say? That will be him, then; I thought he might come today. The moon is full, and this winter afternoon is quickly fading to nightfall. Go on then: it’s time for you to be away. I’ve spoken enough stories into your shiny little machine for one day. You can let him in on your way out. He will hang his sealskin on the hook behind the door, just as he always does. It is worn now, with dark and faded patches, with scars around the neck from battles he has lost and won. He will sit there in your chair, dripping and steaming in front of my bright-flamed fire, and we’ll look into each other’s eyes awhile, and smile.
One final thing before you go. If you want to be certain of what happened to that girl, go up to the shielings at dusk or dawn, and find your way through the quaking bog to the rocky shore of Loch an Eich-Uisge. If you are lucky and if you’re quiet, you will see them there, grazing in the bright green pastures by Allt na Cailliche. You can see them there still, they say; you can see them to this very day. A great, sleek-limbed black horse, his long mane a-tangle with pond-weed and sphagnum, with flashing white teeth and his tail held high. And beside him there, his faithful mate: a prancing young mare with a coat the colour of cowberries, her shining eyes as blue as the sky on a crisp, clear winter’s day.
SNOW QUEEN
THIS LAND; THIS island of white and snow. Can you follow the sparkling motes of freezing mist through Arctic air; do you see the aurora’s brushstrokes on the pure, translucent canvas of our icebound cliffs? This beauty so pellucid, so serene, that your heart would shatter if you thought it might pass forever from this world. This beauty. No wonder you come seeking it. This last bastion of ice; the still point of a burning world. I have seen the icebergs weep; I have seen the dissolution of great glaciers. Snow Queen has raised them from the dead.
Snow Queen. I imagine you’ve heard of her. I imagine you think you know her. A bad sort, evil through and through. I thought it too. Believed the men who wrote down our stories, for didn’t they always know best? Didn’t they always know true? The men knew – or so they said. The men had always plenty of things to say.
Snow Queen doesn’t say. Snow Queen loves silence. Loves the silence of ice, and snow.
It is Snow Queen now who knows best; it is Snow Queen who alone has held true.
Snow Queen will make an iceberg of your heart.
*
There is no path through this snow but the path we make. In this whitening-out wonderland, the path we make closes quickly behind us and is forever gone. Listen, and I’ll tell you a story as we walk. Once upon a time there was a little boy and a little girl.
I came to Snow Queen’s country when I was still that girl. I followed the boy here; I thought I would save him. I thought I would save him from her. I listened to sunshine, I listened to swallows. I learned little from the surly river; too much from the self-centred stories of garden flowers. I followed the loquacious crow, and slept in the bed of the feisty little robber-maiden. I took the advice of a wood-pigeon; I rode on the back of an affable reindeer. I ate the fish of a Lapp woman, and harkened to the wisdom of the northernmost Finn.
I came at last to Snow Queen’s blue-lit palace. To its dazzling white walls of driven snow; to its doors and windows of cold and cutting winds. I found him there, willingly beguiled. Brooding over her frozen lake of puzzle-pieces; the icy fragments of her fractured Mirror of Reason. Reason now all broken in the world, and she alone capable of piecing it back together. I came to him while she was gone, for away she had gone as always she must, to grant to the wintering world her gift of necessary frost. To restrain the rank fecundity of festering lemon groves; to temper the scorching vineyards in the south. I melted the lucent ice in him with hot and muddy tears; I kissed the chaos back into clear-sighted eyes.
I thought I was saving him. How little I knew.
*
Have you ever seen a polar bear die from heatstroke? Snow Queen has. Seen ice fields soften to swampy lakes; seen ice-falls plunge to a fractured, screaming demise. She has torn the rays of moonlight from her hair; she has poured her diamond tears in smoking seas.
There are no more polar bears, now; the last one died of hyperthermia. Eyes fried like breakfast eggs; blood a-boil under burning skies.
Snow Queen will make glaciers of your arteries; she will thicken the blood in your veins to ice.
We stole away her secret, you see: the mystical words that formed for us in the silvered slithers of her glassy lake. We stole away her mysteries – the ones that would, if he solved her puzzle, she’d told him, offer him mastery over the whole world.
We were not quite ready, it seems, for mastery of the whole world. As we walked back home, hand in hand, the howling winds hushed themselves calm at our bidding. The sun leapt high into a suddenness of blue sky; erupted unseasonably through clouds now heavy with melting snow. It should have been winter still, but tree buds all around us were bursting into leaf; wildflowers were springing up in the warmth of the puddled footsteps we left behind us.
Were you there when the world burned? Did you see the footage of drought in the tropics; did you read of the desert floods? The tornadoes and the wildfires, the rending earthquakes, the scalding volcanoes and broiling skies? Were you there when Sydney drowned, when New York sank, our many-towered mythical new land-beneath-the-waves? Did you hear the cries of snow crabs in the acid-laced ocean
s; did you see the last polar bear’s skin blister as he died?
The Devil’s ugly mirror had cracked from side to side. What we thought beautiful was broken; what we believed good was evil. Snow Queen taught us to see again; Snow Queen froze the shatterings in our hearts and made us whole.
My name was Gerda, once, and this was Kay. Come with us to Snow Queen. Together, we will save the world. Snow Queen will set the world to rights; Snow Queen will set the world to ice.
We came again, then, looking for Snow Queen; we came to her crystal-walled palace to ask for help. Over scorched mountains and across the burning taiga we walked; through eldritch new forests fashioned from horns of dead reindeer and the burned-out skeletons of brown bear. We found her sitting on the sodden remnants of the last glacier; she was weeping miniature icicles onto the soft snowy fur of the last, dead, polar bear. I saw then that she was beautiful – skin like ivory, smooth as a narwhal tusk; teeth that glistened like precious pearls.
We came to her; we sat down by her side and dried her too-warm tears. And that is when the ice in us began. Snow Queen took us by the hand; Snow Queen took us by the heart. We grew cold skin over our warm, grew hard over our soft, grew icy shell over flesh and brittling bone. We were cold at first, and it hurt; ice bites. But then we felt the fire it bestows with its lengthening touch. I was born on the waxing side of midsummer, hair the colour of midday sun and eyes the colour of cornflowers. Now, it is only my lips that are blue, and my hair is silvered like Arctic moon in the long, quiet polar night. When the men come looking for us now, I make sure to show them the whites of my eyes.
Snow Queen has remade me in her own image. Snow Queen has made me lovely in her regarding.
Come; walk alongside us to Snow Queen’s palace, through the snowflakes which swirl around us like falling feathers. For we are snow angels, now; we are the clear blue fire which burns at the heart of the hardening ice. We were doomed and we were damned; we were dying till Snow Queen took us, and together we restored the ice. It is ice now that will preserve us; it is ice that will keep us whole.
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